Читать книгу The Home Place - J. Drew Lanham - Страница 11
ОглавлениеThe supernatural is the natural not yet understood.
Elbert Hubbard
EVOLUTION. IT’S HOW WE ADAPT TO WHAT THE WORLD throws at us. We’ve netted physical dividends—bigger brains and opposable thumbs—from years of change. Technology, on the other hand, is how we master the world, but it often masters us in return. We’re an aspirational species, never giving up on enhancing the richness and reach of our lives. That effort drives the course of history: revolutions, wars, elections, assassinations, and innovations.
We have come to walk upright and we have discovered fire—or at least how to use it. That is who we are as a species: not just aspirational but at a unique edge between evolution and technology. We adapt, we master; we are part of nature, we overcome it; we are shaped by history, we make it. And any one of our stories can thus be told twice, looking at the forces outside us and those within. So it is with Daddy’s mother: my grandmother Mamatha. She was a woman who straddled nine decades and all of the history and social evolution that came along with them. I was a witness to three decades of her life but, through her eyes, was privileged enough to see much more than that.
In my lifelong obsession with flight, I’ve had occasion to consider both evolution and technology. Through the aeons birds have gained feathers and wings. That most have also become airborne over millions of years is truly miraculous.
Humans, of course, did not evolve to join them. For the relatively short time we’ve shared the earth with birds, we’ve looked skyward and wondered about—maybe wished for—flight. But we couldn’t solve the mysteries of lift and propulsion. Then, a little over a century ago, we made some of the fastest progressions from dreaming to doing that mankind has ever witnessed. In the span of a few decades, the dreams of taking flight became a reality.
Mamatha was born Ethel Jennings in 1896—one generation removed from slavery. She entered life on the edge between two centuries, in a nation that was expanding rapidly as a world power. Technology had already conquered much of the continent via rail and steam engine. Automobiles were replacing horses and voices were streaming in crackling tones along telephone cables. It must’ve been a heady time, with all the connectivity broadening horizons in some ways and making the world smaller in others.
For some flying things it was also the worst of times. By the 1890s the same technologies that allowed people to move faster and further and tell others where they’d been and were going led to the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Word of mouth—expedited and expanded by a growing phone system, or a few dots and dashes tapped on a telegraph message—about where the dwindling flocks had congregated made it easy for greedy shooters to slaughter the last of a species that had once darkened the skies. Other endangered birds suffered, too. Carolina parakeets, noisy native parrots that found comfort in big cypress bottoms and around cocklebur-infested farmsteads, were also disappearing. Unabated logging of swamps pushed the green-and-gold masses of sociable birds to the brink. Steam shovels drained the water away and the sawyers did the rest—cutting and bucking and running wood out on rails to build the nation. The parakeets soon had no place to go. In just a few short years humans would take the empty spaces the birds had left behind in the skies.
It’s 1903 now, and Ethel is a little girl, amazed and maybe unbelieving when word washes down through church folk and the rumor mill that some crazy white men in North Carolina are flying like birds—but in a machine made of wood and cloth! I’m sure there were those who didn’t like it, who saw the sky as a place God made for feathered things, not man. This flying thing was an affront to God—sinful arrogance—and surely would not last. Those people would have been wrong, of course. Godly or not, humankind was off the ground.
Fourteen years later, in 1918, Ethel is hanging the wash out to dry in the warm sun, wondering if her husband-to-be, Joseph Samuel Lanham—“Daddy Joe”—will come home from the war alive. She knows from newspapers—and letters from France—that men with designs on destroying one another are conquering the air with deadly effect. She reads and hopes for the best. An odd puttering sound overhead interrupts Ethel’s work and drowns out the copycat song of a mockingbird. A biplane growls and crawls below the clouds. She shades her eyes against the midday sun with tired hands and waves. The unseen pilot waggles the plane’s wings in a salute from heaven. Not long afterward, Joseph comes home from France alive, but not whole.
Less than a decade later and flight is no longer a novelty to Ethel or Joseph. Charles Lindbergh flew an airplane across an ocean she’s never seen. The world celebrated the achievement but to Ethel it seemed simply another thing done by white men with too much time on their hands. At home there were three girls to raise, a farm to help keep and, in a little more than a year, another mouth—a son’s—to feed.
“Time flies” goes the saying, and Ethel is forty-eight and wondering if an even bigger war will ever end. The Nazis claim racial superiority and work hard to rid Europe of anyone not fitting their designs. The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Joseph and Ethel hear about black aviators—trained down in Alabama—who are taking the fight to the Germans. Joseph knows of the famous black college in Tuskegee and even follows the farming prescriptions of a professor there named George Washington Carver, who advises plowing on the contour and planting cover crops to save the soil. The black airmen have endured hatred, but are proving themselves in airplanes that can fly faster than any bird ever imagined. They surpass the records of many of their white counterparts. Ethel and Joseph talk frequently about their hopes for better times and imagine that achievements like the soldiers’ flying and fighting and the Tuskegee professor’s farming genius will help set things right once and for all.
As the demands of war call for more wood, large swaths of bottomland forest disappear for the sake of Uncle Sam. Ivory-billed woodpeckers hold on until the last, but the “Lord God” birds finally disappear as another world war fades into promises of “never again.”
Just a few years later, however, Joseph and his wife are sending their drafted only son into conflict. President Truman calls it a “police action” but people are dying by the thousands over a line drawn in the Asian dirt and something called “communism.” The parents fret again over a war threatening to destroy something they love.
The only Lanham son skirts by the conflict, though, serving out a lucky deferment to Europe. After a stint in Germany, he returns to Edgefield to find his father ailing. There’s an uneasiness boiling up across the nation, too. A quiet seamstress sits down on a bus in Alabama and a man named Martin Luther King Jr. seems intent on making things happen for colored folk as quickly as the supersonic jets arc across the sky, leaving long trails of white and sound in their wake. A birdwatcher named Rachel Carson writes a book warning that our sins against nature—polluting land, water, and air with chemicals—will create silent springs and disaster for all living things. There’s talk in the newspapers about man-made machines circling the earth.
Joseph struggles to see the 1960s come in and doesn’t get to share in Dr. King’s dreams for equality. The veteran has done his part, though, training his people to lead, learn, and teach their way to better lives. My grandfather dies maybe hearing more saber rattling—of missiles on Cuba that fly faster than any airplane he’s ever known. This man, who once crouched in a trench and saw leather-helmeted men in open-air cockpits dogfighting over muddy battlefields in planes that moved barely faster than an automobile, might have mused sadly in his last days over a potential destruction that no one will see or hear coming.
Ethel is almost seven decades removed from the little girl’s disbelief that men were flying, and on some days the air over her gray-haired head seems more filled with the sound of airplanes than birdsong. Her husband has been dead eight years but there’s another Joseph with her now, a little namesake grandson only four years old. On a humid July night in 1969—only a little more than a year since the shocking death of Dr. King—there’s another war going on and young people protesting everywhere, for and against everything. The people seem restless. There’s a buzz about white men doing something in the sky again and Mamatha stops reading her Bible to turn on her small television. There in grainy black and white, a man in a strange suit walks on the moon. She ponders what her husband would’ve thought; she asks what little Joseph thinks. She thanks God, grateful for living to see humanity somehow get closer to the heavens. She wonders aloud in that prayer, asks Jesus for just a little measure of such progress in the lives of a people who still can’t find happiness because of the color of their skin.
In her ninety-six years Mamatha was a witness to the extremes of good and bad that humanity visits on itself. She watched war and peace cycle like the seasons. She saw night-riding Klansmen terrorizing to oppress a people and a tired Birmingham seamstress sitting down to help those same people stand up. She believed in the promise of a crucified Messiah who would return to save us all from sin and had faith in a man named King to deliver a different sort of salvation. She buried her only husband and somehow outlived her only son. Maybe it takes a bit of magic to get through almost a century of that kind of life. I can imagine that for all the miracles of flight she lived through, on some days a soaring hawk or a singing thrush was more than enough to measure her life by.
As Mamatha watched flight advance from feathers to fantasy over nearly a century, she remained steadfast in certain beliefs. As amazing as those technologies must have seemed to her, they were something tangible, requiring no faith beyond the witnessing. There were phenomena, though, that she set store in and lived by, which defied science and technology.
To say my grandmother was a witch might be a bit of a stretch. But she was at the very least a conjurer with a foot in two dimensions—this world and the spirit one. Why else would anyone have nightly conversations with the dead, live steeped in superstition, and use an array of concocted potions, herbal remedies, and incantations to treat illness as readily as anyone else would use over-the-counter drugs?
A hat tossed on the bed, dirt swept out the door past dusk, or a careless step over an abandoned broom were high crimes in Mamatha’s house. Beyond the bad luck were far worse things. Lying on the floor was forbidden lest someone step over you and stunt your growth. A broom swept across your feet could mean an early death. An owl hooting in the yard or a bird trapped inside the house warned of death to come. A “blood moon” meant end times were approaching. Spilled salt, broken mirrors, and things that went bump in the night were all a part of her daily routine, her dos and don’ts—the supernatural accepted as normal. The superstitions that controlled so much of Mamatha’s existence weren’t in the least confounded by her staunchly Christian faith. She never confused the two.
When I eventually left the Home Place, I entered the modern world still believing that ill-placed hats and road-crossing black cats could determine whether things went my way.
My grandmother was eighty-four when I left for Clemson University. She died twelve years later, but she had always seemed old to me, with her constant complaints of aches and pains. I can’t remember her ever standing fully upright. She ambled along with a shuffling gait, swaying slightly from side to side and stooped over like some spell-spinning witch from a fairy tale. Her joints were stiffened with arthritis. Even though she regularly lubed up her knees, shoulders, and elbows with strong-smelling balms and liniments, she never got anywhere fast. Maybe the difficulties came from working in the fields long ago. Chopping rows of cotton and too many hours bent over a boiling cauldron full of lye soap and dirty clothes had taken their toll.
Mamatha’s gently furrowed face reflected a history that spanned most of the twentieth century—all of its jubilation, pain, fear, wars, and “rumors of wars,” as she liked to say. She had lived through them all.
When Daddy Joe was drafted, he served in the American Expeditionary Forces “over there,” with one of the few black American units to see combat in that war. Although black men have served heroically in every American conflict since the Revolution, there always seems to be something more to prove. Daddy Joe was up to the task and true to the heroes’ legacy, somehow surviving the terrors of trench warfare; going “over the top” into machine gun fire, artillery barrages, and gas attacks; and living daily in fear and filth with rats, disease, and the threat of horrific wounding or death. When the 371st Regiment, Company C, went to Europe, the US Army assigned them to the French; blacks, they thought, didn’t have the mettle to fight alongside white Americans. But the 371st distinguished themselves in combat, killing, capturing, and conquering Germans in some of the most vicious battles of the war. In the Verdun they earned a unit award of the Croix de Guerre with Palm. The unit won not only medals but respect as men from their French commanders.
Daddy Joe came home with wounds to his body, scars in his memory—and a newfound respect for life, motivating a legacy of more peaceful pursuits. Mamatha married Daddy Joe in 1919, not long after he returned to a nation where black men were harassed and hanged for simply wearing their uniforms in public. And so Daddy Joe left the war behind and turned his attention to family and farming.
I’m sure Ethel saw her new husband’s pain, listened to his stories of the horrors of war, and maybe assured him—and herself—that times would get better. Mamatha often told me stories about Daddy Joe and the war, pulling out old photo albums and letters. There were other artifacts of his service around, too—the eerie gas mask, and a rusting soup-bowl-like helmet that had sheltered him from shot and shrapnel. But I was always most struck by a couple of colorized photographs of a proud, dark-skinned man in a doughboy uniform. He was lean and fit in his olive-green woolen jacket and pants, his overseas cap cocked to the side and the leggings they called puttees wrapped neatly like bandages up to his knees. Handsomely bookish in round, wire-rimmed glasses, Daddy Joe probably posed for the photo before the realities of life in combat took hold. I marveled at the courage it must have taken—to simply be a black man in Edgefield at a time when its political leaders were sanctioning terror for “negroes” who dared step outside the lines, and then to dutifully fight for a home country that despised him for his black skin. It was brave, beyond brave, heroic.
Daddy Joe used to wax on and on to Mamatha about his time in Paris, where his color was celebrated and rights weren’t restricted by race. It must’ve been a heady thing for a black man to walk those streets with no one paying attention to him, no one calling him nigger or boy. Mamatha said he’d even tried to convince her that they should move back there. I often wondered what would have become of me, of us, of the Home Place had Daddy Joe decided to become “Monsieur Joseph”—a man not limited by color or by America’s dim view of it. In the end, though, there was the pull of kin and familiarity. Maybe there was also something he missed about working the soil and watching things grow. He was better suited to nurturing life.
Mamatha was a gifted worrier and probably fretted over Daddy Joe’s fragile health. There were also stresses at home, children, crops, and cattle to tend to. Daddy Joe and Mamatha bore three children, a trio of girls: Louise, Pearl, and Ruby. Near the end of their first decade together, in the autumn of 1928, they welcomed their fourth child and only son, James Hoover. The little boy was a particular treasure, the sole hope that the Lanham name would continue. Almost exactly one year later, the Great Depression followed Hoover into the world.
Daddy Joe went on to teach and farm. He plowed and planted; herded, harrowed, and harvested. He became the principal of a school and trained a “who’s who” of the future leaders of the black community in Edgefield. He was respected by everyone and stood tall as a dependable man who did his best by his family, community, and country. I wish I’d had the honor of meeting him, but he died before I was born.
Most of what I know about Daddy Joe came through Mamatha’s stories of the flesh-and-bone man she called her husband for forty-two years. But I also came to know him in another way. His ghost roamed the Home Place. My grandmother communed with him—and other dead people—on an almost nightly basis, mostly on the quiet edges of the day, in the “witching” hours when things are still. Sometimes Daddy Joe tried to reclaim his place in their wedding bed, she said, stretching out beside her “icy cold as steel.” At other times a subtle shadow passing through the moonlight, or something mysteriously falling in another room, alerted her to ghostly wanderings. Whatever forms the visitations took, they were was scary as hell and I spent nights buried under a protective fortress of covers with only my mouth and nose exposed as breathing snorkels. Even in the sweat-wrenching swelter of a midsummer’s night, with nothing to cool the room except a window fan, I’d burrow under layers of bed linens thinking that they’d somehow keep the haints at bay.
One night, as Mamatha began one of her conversations, I finally mustered the nerve to poke my head from underneath the quilts. Sure enough, there was something standing in the bedroom doorway. Faceless and backlit by the tiny night-light in the next room, it stretched its arms across the doorway as if to brace itself between two dimensions. I opened my eyes wide to make sure it wasn’t a dream. Mamatha confirmed my fears when she addressed the thing by name: “Joseph? Joseph? What you want, Joseph?” I watched and listened, terrified, until it vanished into the darkness.
Mamatha talked about the visit matter-of-factly over biscuits and bacon the next morning, like she always did—the meetings were completely ordinary for her. I wonder now how much of the activity she solicited. There weren’t any Ouija boards or special incantations I ever heard, but I’m not sure Mamatha ever denied the visitors passage into her world, either. For years stories of ghosts and spirits were simply a part of nightly routines and family gatherings. Almost everyone had seen, heard, or felt something. Ghost horses and mystical mules galloped invisibly around houses. Children saw death angels and died soon after. The appearance of glowing green orbs and encounters with things that bumped and thumped in the night were expected. Even Daddy, typically a stoic tower of reason and rationality, told stories of inexplicable phenomena that gave me second thoughts about walking around anywhere on the Home Place after dark.
Daybreak was a welcome relief from the spooky socializing. Not that the magic stopped with the light of day—it simply changed form to something less frightening. Mamatha, like many other older people, depended on an assortment of drugs to quell various ailments. She took a familiar cocktail of pills, to keep her high blood pressure in check, her heart rhythm regular, and her back from aching. But Mamatha supplemented the standard stuff with remedies no store sold. She preferred out of the ground to over the counter.
A bounty of innocuous-looking plants grew right outside the back door and provided free and often effective alternatives to what the doctors prescribed. Things most would call weeds—mullein with its soft, wooly leaves; pokeweed, which grew head high and had purple berries; and feathery-looking dog fennel—all of it had a higher purpose in Mamatha’s world. Mullein tea and pokeweed, properly prepared, were both general tonics for whatever ailed a body. The pungent green plumes of the fennel, crushed and rubbed on insect stings, eased pain and swelling quickly. Mamatha removed unsightly moles by tying them off with cow’s-tail hair tourniquets and quieted coughs with a warm shot of whiskey and honey. A teaspoon of sugar did help the medicine go down—but even when sugar preceded a dose of turpentine to clear congestion, there was little to feel delighted about. I was often plagued with painful tongue ulcers that Mamatha diagnosed as lie bumps. She prescribed truth as the best cure, but beyond that she would either painfully snatch them off with her fingernails or paint my tongue with nasty-tasting tinctures that hurt as much as the malady itself. She boiled roots to make salves for my fungal infections and believed that ardent prayer could heal anything.
Being a growing, feral boy, my demand for calories was constant. What with all the running, jumping, climbing, exploring, wood chopping, hay stacking, and fence mending that might fill a single day, I needed as much fuel as I could get. I never met a cookie, pie, cake, candy bar, or slab of gravy-covered meat I wouldn’t eat. In truth I was a greedy kid, putting away as much as Mamatha would feed me and then scarfing down more for good measure.
But a half dozen butter-soaked biscuits swimming in molasses, accompanied by enough bacon, grits, and cheesy scrambled eggs to feed three people, can cause problems. Sometimes things bubbled and boiled inside me and became painful beyond what my physiology or anything from a bottle might cure.
Mamatha’s solution wasn’t pink and couldn’t be delivered by the teaspoon. Instead she turned to a different prescription—one filled from somewhere “out there.” The treatment began with a series of circles drawn on my bare belly, spiraling outward from my navel. With the abdominal art completed, Mamatha started tracing lines in the air to make two or three imaginary crosses. As my paunch rumbled she muttered words that I never understood. After the incantations, she drew an invisible string gently upward from my belly button, until the pain was gone. That magic never failed.
When I’m in an old field full of things most others simply bypass as weeds, I see healing. I can’t help grabbing a piece of dog fennel just to smell its pungent perfume. A mess of poke salad is better than any pot of gourmet greens, and a piece of cornbread alongside brings back vivid memories of times with Mamatha. I tell whoever will listen of the curative qualities of the botanical apothecary that grows all around us. Some relatives used to say that Mamatha’s cures and incantations came from ancestors who brought healing traditions from the Motherland or learned them as slaves. Other relatives claimed they were born of some American Indian connection. I call it a mystery: I’m not sure where her magic came from and probably never will be.
I grew up understanding that the mysterious things I experienced didn’t all need to be explained. Not knowing everything was OK. But since I last fell under any of my grandmother’s spells, I’ve been trained extensively. Some might even say I’ve been overtrained, brainwashed to think critically about the natural world. As a scientist, I was taught that the unexplained is to be pursued relentlessly and hell-bent on publishing. My training suggests that if mysteries can’t be unraveled, then perhaps what we see isn’t “real”; if the results aren’t publishable, then the observed isn’t believable.
Mamatha’s alchemy wouldn’t have passed the muster of peer review—but she wouldn’t have cared. In the midst of amazing advancements that saw flight evolve from fantasy to commonplace, she believed unshakably that some things existed beyond explanation. But her magic wasn’t just about the metaphysical. It was most evident in her ability to turn bad to good, to see life through death and hope through despair—and to see the Home Place through history, becoming a refuge for my family.
