All the Days and Nights (35 page)

Antique jewelry too can be picked up at auction places. Still, it is disagreeable to lose things that have come down in the family. It isn’t something one would choose to have happen
.

There are lots of things one would not choose to have happen that do happen
, said the fire irons.

With any unpleasantness
, said the orange plastic Design Research kitchen wall clock,
it is better to take the long view
.

Very sensible of them to fall asleep the minute their heads hit the pillow
, said the full-length mirror in the master bedroom.
Instead of turning and tossing and going over in their minds the things they have lost, that are gone forever
.

They have each other,
a small bottle of Elizabeth Arden perfume spray said.
They will forget about what happened this evening. Or, if they remember, it will he something they have ceased to have much feeling about, a story they tell sometimes at dinner parties, when the subject of robberies comes up. He will tell how they walked home from the Follansbees’ on Christmas night and found the front door ajar, and she will tell about the spoon and the silver tray the thieves didn’t take, and he will tell how he stood on the stairs watching while she tried on all her favorite evening dresses
.

I
F
you were to draw a diagonal line down the state of Illinois from Chicago to St. Louis, the halfway point would be somewhere in Logan County. The county seat is Lincoln, which prides itself on being the only place named for the Great Emancipator before he became President. Until the elm blight reduced it in a few months to nakedness, it was a pretty late-Victorian and turn-of-the-century town of twelve thousand inhabitants. It had coal mines but no factories of any size. “Downtown” was, and still is, the courthouse square and stores that after a block or two in every direction give way to grass and houses. Which in turn give way to dark-green or yellowing fields that stretch all the way to the edge of the sky.

When Illinois was admitted into the Union there was not a single white man living within the confines of what is now the county line. That flat farmland was prairie grass, the hunting ground of the Kickapoo Indians. By 1833, under coercion, the chiefs of all the Illinois Indians had signed treaties ceding their territories to the United States. The treaties stipulated that they were to move their people west of the Mississippi River. In my childhood — that is to say, shortly before the First World War — arrowheads were turned up occasionally during spring plowing.

The town of Lincoln was laid out in 1853, and for more than a decade only white people lived there. The first Negroes were brought from the South by soldiers returning from the Civil War. They were carried into town rolled in a blanket so they would not be seen. They stayed indoors during the daytime and waited until dark for a breath of fresh air.

Muddy water doesn’t always clear overnight. In the running conversation
that went on above my head, from time to time a voice no longer identifiable would say, “So long as they know their place.” A colored man who tried to attend the service at one of the Protestant churches was politely turned away at the door.

The men cleaned out stables and chicken houses, kept furnaces going in the wintertime, mowed lawns and raked leaves and did odd jobs. The women took in washing or cooked for some white family and now and then carried home a bundle of clothes that had become shabby from wear or that the children of the family had outgrown. I have been told by someone of the older generation that on summer evenings they would sit on their porches and sing, and that the white people would drive their carriages down the street where these houses were in order to hear them.

I am aware that “blacks” is now the acceptable form, but when I was a little boy the polite form was “colored people”; it was how they spoke of themselves. In speaking of things that happened long ago, to be insensitive to the language of the period is to be, in effect, an unreliable witness.

In 1953, Lincoln celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its founding with a pageant and a parade that outdid all other parades within living memory. The
Evening Courier
brought out a special edition largely devoted to old photographs and sketches of local figures, past and present, and the recollections of elderly people. A committee came up with a list of the ten most distinguished men that the town had produced. One was a Negro, William Holmes Dyer. He was then sixty-seven years old and living in Kansas City, and the head surgeon for all the Negro employees of the Santa Fe line. He was invited to attend the celebration, and did. There was a grand historical pageant with a cast of four hundred, and the Ten Most Distinguished Men figured in it. Nine of them were stand-ins with false chin whiskers, stovepipe hats, frock coats, and trousers that fastened under the instep. Dr. Dyer stood among them dressed in a dark-blue business suit, and four nights running accepted the honor that was due him.

Two years later, he was invited back again for a banquet of the Lincoln College Alumni Association, where he was given a citation for outstanding accomplishment in the field of medicine. While he was in town he called on the president of the college, who was a childhood friend of mine. “What did you talk about?” I asked, many years later, regretting the fact that so far as I knew I had never laid eyes on William Dyer. My friend couldn’t remember. It was too long ago. “What was he like?” I
persisted, and my friend, thinking carefully, said, “Except for the color of his skin he could have been your uncle. Or mine.”

I
HAVE
been looking at an old photograph of six boys playing soldier. They are somewhere between ten and twelve years old. There are trees behind them and grass; it is somebody’s backyard. Judging by their clothes (high-buttoned double-breasted jackets, trousers cut off at the knee, long black stockings, high-button shoes), the photograph was taken around 1900. One soldier has little flowers in his buttonhole. He and four of the others are standing at attention with their swords resting on their right shoulders. They can’t have been real swords, but neither are they made of wood. The sixth soldier is partly turned but still facing the camera. As soon as the bulb is pressed he will lead the attack on Missionary Ridge. I assume they are soldiers in the Union Army, but who knows? Boys have a romantic love of lost causes. They must have had to stand unblinking for several minutes while the photographer busied himself under his black cloth. One of them, though I do not know which one, is Hugh Davis, whose mother was my Grandmother Blinn’s sister. And one is Billie Dyer. His paternal grandmother was the child of a Cherokee Indian and a white woman who came from North Carolina in the covered-wagon days.

Billie Dyer’s grandfather, Aaron Dyer, was born a slave in Richmond, Virginia, and given his freedom when he turned twenty-one. He made his way north to Springfield, Illinois, because it was a station of the Underground Railroad. It is thirty miles to the southwest of Lincoln, and the state capital. In Springfield, the feeling against slavery was strong; a runaway slave would be hidden sometimes for weeks until the owner who had traced him that far gave up and went home. Then Aaron Dyer would hitch up the horse and wagon he had been provided with, and at night the fugitive, covered with gunnysacks or an old horse blanket, would be driven along some winding wagon trail that led through the prairie. Clop, clop, clopty clop. Past farm buildings that were all dark and ominous. Fording shallow streams and crossing bridges with loose wooden floorboards that rumbled. Arousing the comment of owls. Sometimes Aaron Dyer sang softly to himself. Uppermost in his mind, who can doubt, was the thought of a hand pulling back those gunnysacks to see what was under them.

As for the fugitive concealed under the gunnysacks in the back of Aaron
Dyer’s wagon, whose heart beat wildly at the sound of a dog barking half a mile away, what he (or she) was escaping from couldn’t have been better conveyed than in these complacent paragraphs from the Vicksburg, Mississippi,
Sun
of May 21, 1856:

On Decoration Day I saw, marching at the head of the parade, two or three frail old men who had fought in the war that freed them.

Two families lived in our house before my father bought it, in the early nineteen-hundreds. It had been there long enough for shade trees to grow around and over it. The ceilings were high, after the fashion of late-Victorian houses, and the downstairs rooms could not be closed off. My father complained, with feeling, about: the coal bill. Like all old houses, it gave off sounds. The stairs creaked when there was no one on them, the fireplace chimneys sighed when the wind was from the east, and the sound, coming through the living-room floor, of coal being shoveled meant that Alfred Dyer was minding the furnace. Sometimes I went into the pantry and opened the cellar door and listened. The cellar stairs had no railing and the half-light was filtered through cobwebs and asbestos-covered heating pipes, and I never went down there. Sitting in the window seat in the library I would look out and see Mr. Dyer coming up the driveway to the cellar door. If he saw me playing outside he would say “Evening,” in a voice much lower than any white man’s. His walk was slow, as if he were dragging an invisible heaviness after him. It did not occur to me that the heaviness was simply that he was old and tired. Or
even that he might have other, more presentable clothes than the shapeless sweater and baggy trousers I saw him in. I was not much better informed about the grown people around me than a dog or a cat would have been. I know now that he was born in Springfield, and could remember soldiers tramping the streets there with orders to shoot anybody who appeared to rejoice in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. I have been told that for many years he took care of my Grandfather Blinn’s horses and drove the family carriage. The horses and carriage were sold when my Uncle Ted persuaded my grandfather to buy a motorcar, and Mr. Dyer went to work for the lumber company.

Whoever it was that tried to worship where he wasn’t wanted, it was not Alfred Dyer. He was for decades the superintendent of the African Methodist Episcopal Sunday school and led the choir. He knew the Bible so well, his daughter said, that on hearing any scriptural quotation he could instantly tell where it came from. As he was shaking the grates and setting the damper of our furnace, it seems likely that the Three Holy Children, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, were more present to the eye of his mind than the little boy listening at the head of the cellar stairs.

After our house there were two more, and then Ninth Street dipped downhill, and at the intersection with Elm Street the brick pavement ended and the neighborhood took on an altogether different character. The houses after the intersection were not shacks, but they were not a great deal more. Grass did not grow in their yards, only weeds. There was usually a certain amount of flotsam and jetsam, whatever somebody more well-to-do didn’t want and had found a way to get rid of. The Dyers’ house was just around the corner on Elm Street. It was shaped like a shoebox and covered with green roofing paper. Elm Street was the dividing line between the two worlds. On either side of this line there were families who had trouble making both ends meet, but those who lived below the intersection didn’t bother to conceal it.

As I sorted out the conversation of the grown people in my effort to get a clearer idea of the way things were, I could not help picking up how they felt, along with how they said they felt. While they agreed it was quite remarkable that Alfred Dyer’s son William had got through medical school, at the same time they appeared to feel that in becoming a doctor he had imitated the ways of white people, as darkies were inclined to do, and done something that was not really necessary or called for, since there were, after all, plenty of white doctors. Apart from the doctors, the only things I can think of that the white people of Lincoln were at that
time willing to share with the colored people were the drinking water and the cemetery.

B
ILLIE
Dyer’s mother was born in Sedalia, Missouri, the legal property of the wife of a general in the Union Army. Her father and mother ran away and were caught and returned, and the general put her father on the block and he was sold to someone in the South and never heard of again. When her children asked what the place where she was born was like, she told them she couldn’t remember. And that nobody could come and take her away because the slaves were freed, all of them, a long time ago, and there would never be slaves again.

For things that are not known — at least not anymore — and that there is now no way of finding out about, one has to fall back on imagination. This is not the same thing as the truth, but neither is it necessarily a falsehood. Why not begin with the white lady? When he took the clean washing in his express wagon and knocked on her back door, she called him by his brother’s name. She couldn’t tell them apart. He didn’t let on he wasn’t Clarence.

The smell of laundry soap was the smell of home. With steam on the inside of the windows you couldn’t always see out.