Читать книгу I Dwell in Possibility - Toni McNaron - Страница 15
ОглавлениеOne house, a hedge, and an unpaved alley from where I grew up was the “colored section” of town, popularly known as the “quarters” or “nigger town.” The former term recalled the plantation days of slavery, while the latter reflected more contemporary race hatred. The world across that alley fascinated me. When I was three and four, I would sit by my bedroom window and look over at unpainted wooden houses where people lived who were supposed to be different from me. Occasionally, cruising policemen yelled at them, “Get your ass inside, nigger”; after a judicious time lapse, the figures returned to their porches and resumed their activities.
There were three houses up the slant alley. The one nearest the top had once been whitewashed, and traces of peeling green trim persisted. All were built of weathered boards with spaces between, offering no protection against heat, rain, cold, or dust. The family in the first house had a beat-up jalopy that mostly did not run. When they wanted to use it, they would push it into the alley, then try to start it. If the engine failed to turn over, they quickly pushed the car back into their packed dirt yard before the garbage truck filled with white people’s trash came or before some white teenaged boy decided to gun his motor all the way up that alley, raising so much dust that it drifted across the vacant lot to my window sills.
Behind “my” three houses (I thought of them as somehow special to me) lay miles of equally poor dwellings in which many hundred blacks eked out whatever existence they could. The neighborhood stretched up a gradual hill so that from my watch-window I could just barely make out houses and an occasional church tower way off in the distance. Within its boundaries, that part of town contained several classes of blacks. The absolute poorest lived nearest us—an odd phenomenon—while middle-class people had better houses further within the tangle of short streets that made up the center of the section. These houses had brick foundations with clapboard siding from about half way up. Window boxes graced virtually every house, as did old rusty gliders painted fresh every other spring. In every yard grew brilliant flowers—waist-high zinnias in reds, oranges, and yellows; fertile roses that looked like they should be wearing blue ribbons; the tallest black-eyed susans I had ever seen. I learned about these distinctions as I rode with my father to take Hettie, our housekeeper, and her successor, Josephine, home when they worked past dark.
When I was ready for junior high school, I had to get to the other side of Fairfield. To walk there the proper way, through white neighborhoods and shopping areas, took about half an hour. But there was a shorter route: once on the street below our house, I could cut ten minutes by going down a little side street that took me over the imaginary line from between white and black Fairfield. I would walk right through the black section, past a tiny store where I could stop for a few jawbreakers or Tootsie Roll Pops on the way home. I was usually the only white child in the place, and the man behind the counter always grinned as he asked, “How you today, Miss?” Along the counter behind which he stood were big jars filled with all kinds of hard candies, “penny” candies that cost two or three cents in white stores. Once I asked my parents why the A & P lied about its candy and the black man’s store told the truth. I got no answer but was scolded yet again for refusing to take the “long” (read white) route to school. One of the things I liked about this route was the absence of other white schoolchildren, since in their presence I felt awkward and isolated. In the black neighborhood, I felt more at ease partly because black women on their porches often spoke to me as I went along, ignorant of the pressure I created for them and their children.
The entire South of my childhood was unreconstructed. Blacks were not allowed into white neighborhoods except to get to the houses where they might work. Though Fairfield had a larger population of Negroes (as we called blacks then if we were being polite) than whites, this numerical majority did not matter at all, since every remotely powerful office was held by white men. There were no hotels in Birmingham where blacks could stay except for Gaston Motor Court, owned by one of the few black attorneys in Birmingham but still located miles out of town. Though blacks were allowed to spend money in downtown stores, I never saw them except in department stores my mother said were “common,” visited by us only when we needed some specific item unavailable any where else. The only exception was Loveman, Joseph, and Loeb, a major department store where blacks did shop regularly.
Once when I was small, my mother and I were in Loveman’s looking for some cotton mesh gloves. I never liked these trips downtown, and, on this occasion, I manufactured a major thirst that meant I needed to leave my mother at the counter to find a drinking fountain. I found two fountains, one lower than the other. Since I still could barely reach the regular ones, I used the one nearer my level. As I drank, I felt myself yanked away with a force that almost cost me my footing. Mamie dragged me to one side, whispering loudly, “Can’t you read that this one is for coloreds?” I had not seen the clearly painted black letters on the cream wall above the porcelain basin, COLORED. Beside it, above the fountain that was too high for me, I saw an equally clear sign reading WHITE.
“Is the water different in the fountains?” I innocently asked. Of course not,” my mother whispered in a tone that made me think I might be demented. “Then why can’t I use the one that’s easier for me to get water from?” We had never talked about race relations in our home and so whatever was going on eluded my childishly literal mind. “Just do as I ask, please, honey. Now come on back and try on these nice beige gloves I’ve found for you.”
In the next weeks, I noticed other things: when Daddy took Hettie home, she rode in the back seat, leaving him alone in the front. If children from across the alley ran carelessly into the paved street, their mothers called in voices that sounded like Mamie’s when she was afraid I had fallen and hurt myself badly. We kept the dishes and glasses used by Hettie and the yard man, Charlie, in different places from our own. I felt hurt and angry about the car and dishes, since I adored Hettie and Charlie and couldn’t comprehend why they were being treated differently. Occasionally at Loveman’s I sneaked a quick drink from the forbidden fountains, but my motive was to disobey my mother.
Even though we lived close to Fairfield’s black section, no one ever talked about “them,” and I was told by my family not to pay any attention to the things I might see or hear from “across the alley.” But I needed time away from all the beautiful objects waiting to be knocked to the floor, and I needed very early to disobey. So I began to travel the short physical distance past the last white house, slip through the hedge, and arrive at alien ground—the alley. Though I spent play time in that unpaved area between what I knew were entirely different worlds, I seldom went into the yard of a black person’s house. Once or twice I ventured into a field near the three ramshackle houses to play softball with a group of blacks and a few whites who did not live on my block.
I played in the alley often. Two or three other white children not yet in school who lived on my block also played there, along with nine or ten black boys and girls. A black boy, older than the rest, taught me to play marbles, and I was good. We dug out little cup holes in the clay and drew boundaries with a stick; then everyone put the same number of marbles inside the circle as ante. Then one by one we used our special shooter to try and knock marbles into holes. Every marble we got to go into a hole was a keeper. If we lost all our players and only had a shooter, it was legal to put it inside the circle, matched by five to ten regular marbles of anyone who wanted to risk that big a loss. I always risked, winning some stunning shooters called rollerpackers. The risk answered some deep impulse that was being systematically repressed in the rest of my life.
To be a proper southern girl, I needed to learn prudence at all costs, since one false move might reveal some unacceptable tendency. At my first birthday party, for instance, we played the games popular among white children of the time: drop the clothespin in the milk bottle, pin the tail on the donkey, drop the handkerchief, blindman’s buff, and how-many-little-words-can-you-make-from-this-big-word. Mamie had bought wonderful prizes to be given the winners—brightly colored tops, packages of metal jacks, wooden paddles with tiny red rubber balls attached by long rubber strings, bags of cat’s eye marbles complete with a shooter. I won all the games, but my mother made me give the prizes to my guests, saying, “You wouldn’t want your little friends to think you’re selfish or greedy, would you?” What I wanted was fairness, but I saw that being polite might well exclude that possibility.
By the fifth grade of my all-white school, I comprehended that life among my so-called white peers was far more hazardous and cruel than it had been in the alley. None of us who played there minded whether we lost or won on a given day; it was exciting just to make holes, draw circles, and risk. Consequently, when I saw white boys playing marbles using pretty much the same strategy I had learned, I asked to play with them. They let me but giggled behind their hands at some private joke. When I won, consistently and heavily, their giggles turned into ugly snarls. They talked about me in ways that caused girls to avoid me, especially in the restroom. The back of my neck stung and turned red in spite of my willpower, but I went ahead and used the toilet when what I wanted most was to run out of the bathroom, out of the school, out of my world. But I refused to play marbles less well than I knew how, so the process of exclusion and derision continued.
As it did, I gradually formed distinctly negative attitudes toward white boys. I did not like how mean and nasty they could be to the black children across the alley from me. They routinely dropped terrified cats and kittens off high back porches, laughing uproariously when they landed with thuds I could hear from two houses away. And I very much hated them when they rubbed my nose in pink buttercup flowers until I sneezed and coughed my way into my house. Without knowing it, I was coming to associate white boys with bullies who went after white girls and all blacks.
Given these strained relations with my white classmates, I still puzzle over why that black boy taught me to play marbles so well and over why he and other black boys did not seem to mind when I won their marbles. Surely it is facile to say they won mine too and so it evened out. Did they already feel like such total losers in the world around them that a few marbles more or less couldn’t matter? Did the black boy have a fantasy that I would do just what I did and so teach me well in order to cause me pain? Did he do it to get back at the white boys who routinely shot BB guns into his front yard, scaring him and his sisters back into their house? Did he, like I, sense without words some connection between us deeper than color and gender? Or were we just having fun, was it just a game?
I refer to my alley associates as “that black boy” or “a black girl” because we never told names, white or black, though we played together for several years. In fact we hardly used words at all, which was another blessing about the alley. Inside my house, language was everything, and everyone knew lots more of it than I did, no matter how hard I tried to catch up. I now believe that we maintained that amazing anonymity and silence as protection. My mother often asked me who I was with “out there in all that red clay dust.” Because I knew nobody’s name, I could answer truthfully, “I don’t know, they’re just some kids—we have fun and I like them.” Perhaps their mothers asked similar questions. But somebody could have gotten into lots of trouble if the grownups had traced our gang. Our silence had its painful edge, since it acknowledged the impossibility of any of our becoming friends.
When I was about to enter the first grade, my mother took me aside and tried to tell me something about race relations in the South. Her success was only slightly greater than when she tried years later to tell me about menstruation by saying, to calm my fears at blood coming out of me, “Oh, honey, be glad, now you can have babies.” All I heard that afternoon when I was seven was that I was forbidden to play in the alley. That was on a Sunday, the usual day for long talkings-to by my mother. On Monday, I started school and hated it instantly.
On the first day of first grade, everyone’s mother brought her reluctant child inside a hot, stuffy old brick building, into a strange room full of small desks and large blackboards. Presiding over it all was a woman I would come to see as kindly enough, but my initial encounter with Miss Leslie left me angry and confused. It seems that part of our “lessons” was to be the acquisition of manners—of which I already had more than enough as far as I was concerned. But Miss Leslie felt it her social duty to show her little girls and boys how to set a table properly and how to sit by a papier maché fireplace and engage in chat, that essential southern practice.
In an attempt to involve us in setting up these ersatz spaces, she asked the class to bring various items from home: cushions for the little straight chairs we were to chat in; paper place mats for the little table where we were to have tea; vases for flowers or other decorations. Then she looked at the fireplace area, turned to us with a deep smile, and said: “Now the last thing we need may be hard to find, since not everyone will have one in their home. But we lack a little hearth broom.” I was confused about what she wanted, since she pronounced hearth “herth.” Guessing what she meant, since we did have a red straw broom by our fireplace that I used regularly to sweep up ashes or stray coal pieces, I raised my hand eagerly. “I can bring a hearth broom from home—we have one.” I pronounced the word as it should be.
“Well, thank you, my dear, I’m sure you can, but first you must learn to pronounce it correctly—“herth,” not “harth”—come along now, I’m sure you can say that.”
Proper pronunciation was sacred in our household. I knew that h-e-a-r-t-h did not rhyme with e-a-r-t-h, even though they might look alike if you took away the “h.” My confidence in the correctness of my way of saying it urged me on to what was probably stupid bravery. I looked Miss Leslie in the eye and said, “Oh, no ma’am, it’s “harth,” not “herth.”
My mother whispered in my unbelieving ear, “Honey, just say what the teacher asks you to here and keep saying it right at home. And say you’re sorry, like a good girl. Go on, now.” This from the same person who drilled correctness into me, even refusing to let me use street slang in order to blend in with the other children on my block. My anger flared as I turned on my mother and spat out, “You tell her you’re sorry if you are—I’m not sorry—I’m right and I don’t understand why you want me to lie.”
Deciding not to push the issue further just then, Miss Leslie went ahead with her plans for next day, saying only, “Why don’t you bring along your little broom and we’ll put it by this nice fireplace and you can show us all how you sweep the ashes.” When the long half-day finally ended, my mother went up to the teacher’s desk and spoke in hushed tones. I have no idea what she said, but I was disappointed in her for seeming to collude with someone who could not even pronounce a simple word correctly.
We got out at noon, and by two o’clock I was back in my play clothes, sitting in the alley with my black playmates. After a few days, I noticed that the handful of other white children who occasionally played there were gone. Other parents may have conducted similar awkward, muddled conversations about no longer playing in the clay strip between worlds. No matter how muddled the message, the others obeyed. I was slow to grasp that my entry into that dull and hypocritical space where first grade happened was my formal exposure to southern racial and sexual politics. In that school room, no such Never Never land as my alley could exist. There, everything was black or white, and I was definitely white.
As a child, I came into contact with two black women, both of whom worked for my family as domestic servants: Hettie Holmes and Josephine Zeak. Mamie took an interest in Hettie’s welfare, giving her old clothes and food to take home to Mr. Holmes. As a child who loved to choose for myself, I wondered if Hettie might not prefer money to go downtown and buy something new.
On several occasions, Mamie sent Daddy to the local jail on Sunday mornings to bail Hettie out. Hettie, my mother told me, drank whiskey on the weekend and fought with her husband, who drank whiskey all week. Their weapons were knives, and Hettie came to work more than once with new cut marks on her neck and upper arms, though never on her powerful and beautiful face. I imagined Mr. Holmes agreed with me about her face. Once, when I raged against him for hurting her, she said laughingly: “Oh, sugar, you should see him, he looks a whole lot worse.” They stayed married all the time I knew her.
Hettie was short, dark skinned, and pudgy, wore faded house-dresses, and cleaned our house in bare feet. But to me at three and five, she seemed mysterious, warm, and free spirited. She dipped Red Devil snuff from little flat aluminum cans. Wanting to do everything she did, one morning I asked her to let me have some snuff. “No, child, this’ll make you some sick.” I insisted, putting Hettie into an ancient black-white tug in which a child of five can order a grown woman to do her bidding. I won, of course, and took a small pinch of the rich brown smelly stuff. Sticking it carefully between my gum and lower lip, I tried hard to copy my model. In about three minutes, I felt lightheaded, then nauseated for the rest of the morning. After that I was content to watch my hero fill her own lower lip until it stuck out bravely.
Hettie Holmes cooked things my mother did not know how to fix. Her corn bread—crisp and delicate all at once—tasted so good I ate it without butter or jelly. Her version of pork chops and onions had a succulence and pungency that spoiled me for all future offerings of that popular southern dish. Hettie could serve peas and beans that still tasted of peas and beans, unlike my mother’s, which had no particular taste because they were disguised in a thick French sauce.
My mother prepared haute cuisine when I wanted greasy vegetables from a frying pan. The frying pan urge obsessed me for months. Hettie made our lunch and served it in the dining room where we always ate. Then she had her own food at a table in the kitchen, carefully placed so Mamie could see and talk with her. Mamie enjoyed Hettie’s company but could not conceive in 1943 of their eating in the same physical space. Hettie took the cast-iron pan from which our food had just been served, set it on a dish towel on her table, and ate directly from it. When she had eaten all she could with a fork, she took a piece of bread and sopped up remaining traces of gravy or “pot licker.” I was punished severely for using my bread that way.
Whenever Mamie went to town to shop or attend her many clubs (garden, book, church auxiliary, forensic, library), I lunched out of that frying pan, sitting proudly at the kitchen table. Hettie, on the other hand, watched and listened nervously for Mamie’s possible untimely return. At least once, we were almost caught. I was in the middle of pork chops and onions, peas, and corn bread, when Mamie rang the door bell at the front screen door. While Hettie kept my mother at bay with some story about her hands being in dishwater, I dumped my food onto a china plate and ran for the dining room. When I first saw Lillian Smith’s title, Strange Fruit, I recalled those stolen childhood lunches at which I could relax about whether I was using the correct implement or putting my glass back at the right angle in relation to my knife and plate.
In Alabama, torrential downpours can drop inches of rain in a very short time. We lived on the plateau of a high hillside that had been terraced for housing. Houses across the street had many cement steps going from the street up to their front porches, while our front entrance was on the street level. When it rained hard, the water surged down those stone steps into our yard before it ran down the hill toward our back alley. I was scared of those sheets of water. If a storm began on an afternoon when Hettie was keeping me, she stopped whatever she was doing to stand beside me at the living room window. I was fixed in amazement at the deluge of clay-colored water washing down, making creases in all the lawns, noisy even through our closed windows, bringing small objects with it. Standing behind me, her hand resting reassuringly on my back, Hettie would talk in her low, husky voice: “God’s making soup out of rain for his people and what you see washing down the steps is his pots boiling over, like mine do in the kitchen if I go off and forget them.” She told me the trees were not going to blow over but were yawning to wake up and feel the wind blow through them. She told me lightning was a message from the Lord telling us to work harder and look especially to our housekeeping. She told me thunder was Jesus in his private bowling alley, knocking over ten golden pins, having fun for a change.
Hettie Holmes stopped working for us when I was about nine, and I never heard of her again. When I asked why she was not coming to work, I received no answer. I was angry and hurt to have so central a person removed from my daily life without a word of explanation. Maybe she became more alcoholic and could not work a steady job; maybe Daddy stopped being willing to bail her out of jail; maybe she cooked up one mess too many of greasy magic peas and corn bread for Mamie’s ego. Maybe she got tired of being grateful to Mamie for handouts. Or maybe she secretly resented being bailed out of jail by my father. I made up lots of maybes. But none of them took away my ache or filled the void I felt when Hettie vanished. She is surely long dead but I think of her sometimes when it storms or when I eat black-eyed peas that never quite taste right.
Shortly after Hettie Holmes stopped working for us, we heard about a young black woman reputed to be good at cleaning and ironing. She arrived one day in 1947 and stayed until we sold the house in 1964 after Mamie died. Josephine Zeak was her name, and I liked her right away. I had never known a person whose name began with “z.” Josephine was tall and thin with cocoa brown skin and shiny straightened black hair. Her nose was Western, her cheek bones were statuesque African. She wore stockings and spoke softly. Her dresses had belts. She used a napkin when she ate her lunch and read magazines while her food digested. It was a major source of irritation to my mother and sister that Josephine would not hop up from lunch to scrub the kitchen floor or at least wash the lunch dishes. She insisted on half an hour between her last mouthful and any resumption of work, so that her food could digest properly. I remember Mamie getting up from her lunch, returning to her knees to finish polishing a part of the floor between the living and dining rooms that got waxed once a week and was hazardous to walk on. While she did that, Josephine waited for her hamburger patty to settle, reading to my mother from Life magazine about some movie actor they both liked. She refused to wash curtains, wax floors, or iron with starch, leaving those odious tasks for my mother.
When Josephine arrived, I thought myself old enough to take some responsibility in training her. Dusting and vacuuming were my specialities, so I “taught” her to do those things. She was canny enough to mask her feelings, never letting on that she already knew how to do such chores all too well. In her early thirties when I met her, she had been cleaning houses since she was a teenager. Whereas Hettie Holmes had come every day unless she was too hung over or in jail, Josephine stipulated which three days a week she could come and what her hours would be. Because Mamie had never dealt with a black person who was not completely deferential, she was speechless. All she could do was complain to Betty about Josephine’s “insolence” and how that was probably tied to her being light skinned. Neither of them considered firing or confronting her.
Sometimes Josephine and I cleaned the bedrooms together so she would have time to iron in the afternoons. Those were good times for me because I went into the basement where the ironing board stayed and talked to Josephine. I learned about her two daughters and soon met Joann, who was only three or four months older than I. Our talks about school subjects and dating seemed stiff to me. Joann was dating and I was not, so I felt inferior when that topic came up. But when we talked about anything else, she hung back, trying to show what her mother undoubtedly would have taught her was appropriate deference. We graduated from high school the same year, and that next fall she married a soldier named Sport and moved to Georgia, while I went to the white state university. One rainy afternoon in the basement Josephine shared a dream with me: she was determined to help her girls advance themselves, so they would not have to clean houses.
Sometimes I read to Josephine while she ironed, and then we discussed what I had read. As I grew older, I realized how unfair it was for anyone so intelligent to have to clean white ladies’ houses in order to make money. Many years after she came to work for us, I asked her about all this, and she said, “I once thought of being something, but then I married and had the babies and it did not seem very practical to try. It was easy to get work cleaning houses. White ladies liked me to do that but didn’t particularly want me to do other things.”
Since my exodus from the South in 1961, my contact with Josephine has been mostly through our monthly letters. Hers are full of the weather, her health, her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, the white ladies she has worked for, her hopes that I am well and happy. When I went to Wisconsin to graduate school and her older daughter went to Alaska with her army husband, Josephine said she felt lonely and less useful. But on one occasion, she was more helpful to me than either of us understood at the time. I was in the process of writing my Ph.D. dissertation. My mother and sister had just spent the summer with me in Madison, Wisconsin, and I could see that Mamie was not well and that Betty was discontented. That fall, just months before my mother died of a heart attack, Josephine called me long distance (a huge cost to her) to say she was worried about “Miss Mamie.” Under strenuous questioning, she revealed that Betty was pushing harder than usual to leave Holly Court. My sister had wanted to move across town to a better neighborhood for years. My mother flatly refused—perhaps that was the only time she refused my sister. She owned her house; it was her only security; she liked having Betty and her husband live with her. To reverse that arrangement would mean a loss of power. As Josephine talked with me, she cried, saying, “Oh, Toni, I’m scared for Miss Mamie.” I sat right down and wrote my mother immediately, supporting her wish to stay where she felt more secure. Josephine had taken a great risk to speak so directly to me.
Though I have never told Josephine in so many words that I am a lesbian, she has known about several women with whom I have lived. She has accepted this part of me as easily as she did my telling her at ten how to vacuum. She sends greetings to my present lover, remembers her name, is happy that I am not living alone. Each time I have moved, she has written to say, “Wish I could come help clean so your space will be fit to live in.” Statements like this one are followed by, “Smile,” written in parentheses. Her sense of humor continues to touch me as does her determination to grow old gracefully. A few years ago she moved away from her husband, Mr. Zeak (she never called him anything else in front of me). She wrote me that things had not been so good between them, and she had decided to live more peacefully in her old age. Now she rents an apartment in the same building as her sister. Her income gets smaller every year since housecleaning has become too strenuous. Though she worked hard for over fifty years, she has no pension and virtually no Social Security. Her daughters help her out financially, and my sister and I send her money occasionally, which she calls a “token.” When I see the word, I feel that no amount we ever send can make up for the years of cheap labor she gave us. Her meaning for the word is that my sister or I have sent her another sign of how much we value and care for her.
On a trip south in 1974, I looked forward most of all to seeing Josephine. She invited me to her house for lunch, and I accepted gladly. The psychosomatic laryngitis I had developed shortly after my uncle had greeted me with, “God made them niggers black, you know,” magically vanished as I crossed Josephine’s threshold. Her space was safe space, a place where I could speak without fear of offending. The decorations in her house were a strange blend of simple furniture and linoleum on the floors and exquisite ornaments from our house on Holly Court, given to her first by Mamie and then by Betty after Mamie’s death.
We were to have lunch in the kitchen so I stood and talked with her while she fixed things. She had remembered my favorite lunch: Campbell’s tomato soup and a hamburger made of ground round steak on bread with mayonnaise and catsup. I cried while Josephine stirred my soup; no one else that trip seemed to focus on me at all, preferring to make me into who or what they expected. Maybe that was part of why I always loved the women who worked for us so fiercely and was so devastated when they vanished: they gave me sympathy, kindness, and affectionate acceptance without being able to demand anything in return.
When I noticed that Josephine was cooking only one hamburger patty, I asked why. “Oh, I ate my lunch before you came, so I could listen better to all you have to say.” Then I noticed only one place setting at the table. “Oh, I’ll just stand here by the stove, in case you want something more; then when you finish, we can go into the living room and have a nice talk.” I felt wounded for both of us and insisted that she sit with me while I ate.
I decided to ask her about being black in Fairfield, Alabama, and she decided to tell me. She spoke with tears in her eyes about Dr. King and his vision. She spoke with fear in her eyes about young blacks, especially men, out of jobs, restless, eager to act violently toward anyone in their way. She admitted that it had made her angry to be treated badly by white ladies and hurt her not to be able to give her children more of what she wished for them. I told her I was in favor of total integration. She replied, “Oh, child, I’m too old and grew up a long time ago; if we go that far, it’s just more hurt and blood for us here.” Her worst terror was that, as some blacks rebelled, all would be punished. So she preferred moderation, a slower pace. From my position of white safety, I told her the pace was killingly slow now and that I wanted change within my lifetime.
After a couple of hours, Josephine began noticeably to fidget. When I asked, she admitted, “I’m a little worried about how long you’ve been here. My neighbors are sure to have seen the car when it drove up; they’ll know it held a white lady.” I had stayed longer than any errand could have possibly taken and so must not be an employer. Recently a “nice colored lady” from her church had been slapped around by young black boys because she had been seen being too friendly with some white person at a grocery store on Fairfield’s main street. Josephine was frightened and yet sad to have to wish me gone. I asked her to come outside and let me take a picture of her, which she did. I could get her to do this, against her better judgment, because the basic power imbalance between us was still present. Having hugged in her kitchen, I was careful not to appear too close or to touch her. It felt entirely too familiar to me, holding in spontaneous affection for a woman I love.
For many years, Josephine sent me a homemade pound cake at Christmas. That meant laying in eggs, sugar, flour, butter, vanilla, ingredients alone at a cost of about eight dollars. Josephine made five dollars a day, cleaning houses. To make my cake, she took a day off, losing her much-needed money, in order to sift, mash, and beat by hand. Then she went to elaborate lengths to wrap my cake so it would hold its freshness through the U.S. mail. It came in a cardboard box, mailed first class, marked fragile, handle with care—expensive. Inside the big box was a bakery box secured into the heavier one by layers of grocery store brown bags. These would have cost her as well, since stores gave free extra bags only to whites. Inside the boxes lay the cake, made in a doughnut hole pan, even more delicate than if it were solid. The cake was wrapped first in waxed paper, then aluminum foil, then paper toweling. Each material was folded with utmost attention to closing out any air that could dry the texture. Wads of paper towels were gently stuffed into the center, so the form arrived intact. Tissue paper wrapped the bakery box, holding it firmly yet softly in its container. Every year when it came, I cried: all that time and love and sacrifice for me. I was possessive about my cake, unwilling to share it even with lovers. Several years ago, I gave up sugar but could not bring myself to tell Josephine for a long time afterward. I liked feeling that taken care of. I still miss my package.
Hettie and Josephine filled that peculiarly southern role of black mothers to a white child, mothers marked by the cruel inequities of a racist culture. I took advantage of them even while I adored them and would fight to defend them if neighbor children called them “nigger.” My mother had severely punished me the day I came in from playing with friends on the block and asked if our yard man was a “shiftless old nigger.” “Never let me hear you call any of the colored people who work here by that common, white-trash word, do you hear me?” I heard her and never did it again, since my mother had gone on to say, once her fury had abated, that it would hurt their feelings badly to hear me say that word. Though I often took spiteful pleasure in disobeying my mother, about this subject I lived up to her demand. I did that because I loved Hettie and Josephine more than almost anybody in my life and because they loved me back through the dense barriers of race. But their love had to filter through an ingrained and justified fear and hatred of my whiteness. They surely made distinctions between me and the faceless white boys who shot up their front yards with BB guns. For all I know, they defended me against names used within their own world for the racist bigots who lounged on the street corners of town. But the trap of racism held us, so I have to live with knowing that my love for them was mixed with my liking having power over someone in my world, and their love for me was interlaced with ambiguity and maintained at perhaps too high a price to their own sense of selfhood.
A black man named Charlie Teague mowed our lawn once a week and helped my mother in her large garden. He was very big and dark and full of an infectious laugh that hid his worries from whites. While he cut the grass or weeded, he sang or talked to himself. His monologues were hard to follow, since the whole left side of his face was full of Brown Mule chewing tobacco. After my disaster with snuff, I stood in awe of him: how did Charlie stay upright with all that raw tobacco lodged in his mouth? Every five minutes of so, he shot out a long, straight stream of juice that arced perfectly through the hot air to land with a mighty splat on the sidewalk or in the gutter or the dust.
I felt proud when Charlie deigned to talk to me instead of himself. He would stop work, wipe sweat off his face, and listen to my latest story. During the 1940s, like most children, I had a helmet and machine gun. I also carried an old World War I medal my father had given me, and a lot of hostility that emerged when I played soldier. Charlie indulged my fantasies by calling me Sergeant, or, when he felt especially playful, Sarge. He would pretend to take orders from me about mowing or weeding, answering me with a mock salute and a “Yessir, Sarge, whatever you say.”
One July day, Charlie was working in our side yard, overgrown with high weeds because my mother had recently been in the hospital to see if a lump in her breast was malignant. He was using a big sickle that had once been fire engine red and was almost as tall as I. Deciding that I wanted to swing that sickle, I asked Charlie for it. When he demurred, pleading that it was too heavy for me, I commanded him as a white army sergeant to let me use that tool. He obeyed as a black hired man.
Feeling cocky, I swung the big blade out to the right. That part went fine, but then the sickle fell back toward me, grazing my right big toe. A large slice of me went with it, stuck to the grassy blade, and my toe began to bleed. Afraid it would not stop, I held my toe under the yard hose, since cold water had often stopped my nicks and cuts from bleeding. This had no effect except to make little pools of reddish water in the dust. Charlie was scared speechless and did not even bother to say “I told you so.” What difference would that make to my hysterical mother when she found out that he let me swing the blade?
After a long time, my blood slowed enough for me to walk a few steps in my sandals before having to mop my toe. I sneaked into the house and ran for my room to put on socks to hide the wound. Lunch was ready, and Mamie expected me to take Charlie’s tray out to him as I usually did. He ate what we did, even if he had special dishes that stayed in the basement. His tea was served in an old Blue Plate mayonnaise quart jar full of ice cubes and a lemon slice. Once I asked why Charlie’s dishes were kept in our basement when Hettie Holmes’s special plates were just stacked on a separate shelf in the kitchen. Whatever Mamie said, the message was that since Charlie was a man, he did dirtier things than Hettie when he was at home or on the streets.
Eager not to arouse any suspicion by my delay, I hurriedly pulled on the darkest blue and red socks I owned, strapped on my sandals and walked to the kitchen to get the tray. By now my toe was throbbing, but I refused to limp or show any signs of pain. When I took the tray out to Charlie, he was still wearing a look of terror, but I smiled innocently and told him just to call if he wanted more corn or iced tea. Back inside, my socks soaked up the blood, and I got through lunch. When I took them off, later, blood had clotted so thickly that the right one had to be gently peeled away. I never told on Charlie, and Charlie never told on me. Occasionally one of us would make a veiled reference to “the blade” or “that big toe” and fall into gales of laughter.
Every fall I saved enough of my allowance to let me buy Charlie a Christmas present: several plugs of Brown Mule and a quart of Mogen David red wine, his favorite thing to drink. Mamie gave him old shirts and pants of my father’s plus some food she made. Charlie always showed delight over his presents, laughing more than usual, breaking off an extra big chew of tobacco since he felt flush with his supply from me, talking loudly about “what wonderful white folks ya’ll are.”
Like other black people in my life, at some point Charlie simply vanished. By that time, I had stopped asking where they went or why they no longer came to our house, but I never learned to stop missing them.
In 1950, while American soldiers were killing Asians in Korea, I entered a high school full of white boys who rode through the black section of town at night and on weekends, shooting it up or throwing glass bottles into streets, onto lawns, against sides of houses. All that seemed very far away to me as I struggled vainly to keep my starched Peter Pan collars straight, my bobby socks rolled to just the right length, and my lipstick on past second period math. I had trouble making friends my own age and often felt lonely. I have almost no clear memories of those years.
But I do remember sitting on my bed for hours, looking out my burglar-barred windows at the alley, the three houses down its slope, and further off, the expanse of dwellings that made up the black neighborhood. In my yearning for something I could not have named, I romanticized the people who lived there even as I continued to benefit from my automatically privileged position. We were all caught in the web of southern racism and sexism. Those blacks who lived in solid brick houses on paved streets in the center of their community near churches and food markets were imprisoned by their color. Once out of their neat yards filled with tall red-orange callas and prize-quality roses, they were as vulnerable as their poorest fellows living in wooden shanties along dirt roads full of potholes. Similarly, though hardly with the same possibilities of permanence, when I ventured away from my house and yard into the larger world of white teenage activities, I felt like an exposed failure, no matter how many A’s or honors I accumulated.
One night during this time stands vividly in my memory. I awoke to an eerie glow, sat up in bed, and raised my shade. Columns of flame deep inside the black section frightened me enough to cause me to wake my parents. We heard faint sounds of one or two fire engines though the flames ranged over blocks, burning out of control. (Blacks depended on the city of Fairfield for public services, so I suspect one or two engines was all they ever got.) I sat on the edge of my bed crying until almost daylight, long after Mamie and Daddy had gone back to bed and encouraged me to do the same. The flames finally subsided, replaced by ominous clouds of black and then ugly grey smoke. To me, it seemed as though that smoke came from the people, not the fire. Years later when I saw pictures of columns of smoke from the ovens of the Holocaust, I would flash back to that night in Alabama.
Though I searched the white newspaper for several days, I found no word about the big fire. There was lots of news about the local domino club’s victory over a neighboring team, majorettes from Fairfield High who attended a conference of other majorettes, the latest discount on chicken at the Piggly Wiggly—nothing about what must have been the worst fire in my town’s history. I wanted to go see where it had been, but my parents refused to take me near the place. When Josephine came to work the next day, I asked her about it, but she brushed me off, saying, “Some folks say white boys from the high school lit a Coke bottle filled with gasoline-coated rags and threw it into some lady’s yard, but I’m sure it was just old newspapers stacked in a building.” I remembered the stories about boys at school who routinely invaded the black world, looking for idle amusement, and I knew who started the fire. Breaking my silence about that fire now, forty years later, I feel a ferocity coupled with that sense of helplessness that was to wash over me more often the older I got.
