In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (22 page)

My aunts had liked to brag about their healthy bodies, their strong muscles, the amount they could cook and eat and work, and their refusal ever to back down from an equal fight out of fear. Unlike many women who were told throughout their adolescence they must marry, I was never told by my mother or any one of her sisters it was something I need even think about. It is because of them that I know women can do anything, and that one's sexuality is not affected by one's work.

“Well,” says Faye, “they haven't done anything independent for thirty years. They wanted to sit down in fine houses like white women in the movies. They wanted husbands around to ‘'protect' them. (Though ‘protecting' them has driven most of their husbands, including my daddy, nuts.) Now they just want grandchildren, like everybody else.”

I say nothing. I am thinking of the aunts I wished to be like: I still see them standing in overgrown fields shooting hawks, killing snakes, not knowing what it meant to be afraid of mice.

Joe Harris

Faye has stopped the car in a quiet suburban neighborhood. We walk up the driveway to the door of a modest brick house surrounded by trees. A large German shepherd greets Faye by bounding forward and attempting to lick her face. This is the home of Joe Harris, a very old and close friend, whom I have not seen for two years. I am eager to talk to him about his return from Boston to live in the South, since living in the South is something he once swore never to do. Joe comes to the door and lets us in, restraining the dog, Uhuru, by holding his collar. “
Sit, Uhuru!
” he says sharply, pulling out kitchen chairs for us. His wife, Mabel, is at the stove, cooking something that does not smell ethnic—when I am with relatives or old friends I become hungry for specific kinds of food: fried chicken, pork chops, chitterlings, greens, cornbread—I am disappointed that none of these seems to be cooking.

Joe is nearly six feet tall and his muscular body is showing signs of flab. He has nut-brown skin, an aquiline nose, and straightened black hair that curls over his shoulders in the manner of Errol Flynn.

“I
hated
Boston,” he tells me. “Black people in Boston have so little unity they won't even get together for a riot.”

He asks his wife to hand him a beer. She is black-skinned, curvaceous, and silent.

“Mabel doesn't agree with me,” Joe says, sipping his beer, “but that's okay. I love it here. I love the climate, everything. In Boston I was always sick. Had to stay off work all the time because of colds, my tonsils, the flu. Here it doesn't get that cold. In my job as manager of a night club I don't have to be out in all kinds of weather changing tires the way I had to do in Boston. Changing tires was the only kind of job somebody with my education could get.”

I know Joe as well as I know my own brothers. We grew up near each other, attended the same school. He was one of the smartest students ever to attend the local schools in Eatonton, Georgia, our hometown. According to his IQ test results he was gifted. But he could not be disciplined. He was eventually expelled from school in the eleventh grade for slapping a teacher and threatening to slap our school principal.

“If I had a college education,” he says, “I could really do well here.” He thinks back to our high-school days: “I couldn't take school because when I wore my hair long, like an Afro, in 1954 and '55, the teachers bugged me about it. And I couldn't stand Mr. McGlockton [our principal] because he wasn't a man. He let the white folks in town run him. And through him, us. They wouldn't even call him ‘Mr.' or ‘Dr.'; they called him ‘Professor.'”

I had liked Mr. McGlockton. It was true, I said to Joe now, that he was humiliated by whites in town who hated to see any black person with an education or a position of importance, but he had been a kind, gentle man who always made time to talk to the students. I assumed he was
better
than the people who humiliated him, not worse.

This rather generous rationalization (as he sees it) does not impress Joe Harris, who wanted a hero, and got, he thinks, a coward.

“Except,” he says sadly, drinking his beer, “those crackers would never have called him ‘Mr.' back then, no matter what. That being the case, I should have stuck it out in school, gone off to college somewhere, become a lawyer, and come back home to kick asses. But it's too late now.”

His two sons come in. They are bright-eyed, curious eight-and nine-year-olds. “Where've you two little niggers been?” asks Joe.

Hearing this, I remember why I have not seen Joe in such a long time. It is because he calls people nigger. Once, in fact, he called my daughter that. We argued, bitterly. I felt I could never forgive him.

“I've cut down a lot,” he says apologetically, “on my use of that word. You know, before you mentioned it to me that time, I didn't realize anybody'd be offended by it.”

“Not simply offended,” I say, “
hurt.
Whenever I hear a black person I love using that word I feel as if I'm being killed.”

Faye has been listening intently. “I still use ‘nigger' a lot,” she says, “and I just assumed there was nothing negative about it any more. After all, Red Foxx uses it on national television all the time.”

“I've told Joe not to call our kids that,” says Joe's wife, Mabel. “I keep telling him that just because they're ‘niggers' to white people they shouldn't be ‘niggers' to him, too.”

“I'm preparing them,” says Joe.

“You are preparing them to
be
‘niggers'?” I ask.

He makes a gesture that means I do not understand.

Faye continues: “But then something happened that made me know I
had
been meaning negative things about the person I called ‘nigger,' no matter how many positive adjectives I put in front of it. I met a young man, younger than me—I
do
think there's a lot to be said for the younger generation—who was so wise and so fine, I mean, where his head was, and his tenderness toward me and his respect for all black people, that I just had to tell my best friend about him, so I called her and I said, ‘Girl, let me tell you about this fine nig—' and I just couldn't finish. I couldn't call him that. Because no matter how I prettied it up,
he just wasn't a nigger.
”

“I hate Red Foxx's show anyway,” says Mabel, finally sitting down, ‘not just for his stupid nigger and Puerto Rican jokes, but for how he treats ‘Aunt Esther.'”

(Aunt Esther is a character on Red Foxx's “Sanford and Son.” She is tall, angular, and black, and is called “gorilla” with stunning regularity.)

“Everybody's laughing at Aunt Esther,” says Mabel, “but they know she looks just like them or some of their relatives. We forget white people have been calling us ‘gorillas' for years. They probably think they're right, now that they see us on TV doing it to ourselves.”

I am reminded that on a recent American Airlines flight from San Francisco to New York I watched an NFL football short starring a famous black running back. The opening shot was of several monkeys dressed in scarves and raincoats, waving large pocketbooks, jumping up and down, “cheering” in the stands. After some footage showing the famous star doing his famous running, the closing shot was of his wife and two other black women, dressed almost identically to the monkeys, jumping up and down cheering the famous star, their pocketbooks in the air. The persons who made this film were making a visual derogatory statement; one I could not immediately protest, except to
ache
to rip the screen out of the plane, at thirty-five thousand feet. When I arrived in New York, at Kennedy Airport, I learned La Guardia Airport had been bombed. And I thought: Where there are insults to the dignity of people, acts of retaliatory violence endanger the lives of all of us. Each of us pays in fear and anxiety—if not in actual loss of life—and it is a high price.

Joe Harris talks about his garden, his trees, his unlittered quiet street. “I can go for days, even weeks,” he says happily, “without seeing a white person. I buy gas for my car from a black man. I shop, and I see only black faces. Black night clubs here are owned by black people,
and they're nice,
nothing flashy or tacky, like in Boston. Liquor stores are owned by black people. I bought my house from a black realtor. .. All I get from white folks is my electricity and my telephone.

“In Boston a poor man can work his ass off, and never own anything but dirt and roaches.”

“And the children's education?”

“Well”—he frowns—“that's about the same here as in Boston. When they integrate the schools in this country what they integrate is teachers. In my children's classes all the children are black, the teachers white. Our oldest boy is just as rebellious as I was. He has a hard time accepting discipline from a white teacher.”

While Joe has graciously gone out to buy me a barbecue sandwich, I ask Mabel why she isn't as satisfied with life in the South as Joe.

“Things
are
nicer here,” she says, “but I don't make friends easily. All my friends are in Boston. Of course,” she adds, “you have to live where you
can
live. And if leaving people you care about
hurts,
you're just expected to suffer.”

And I think, Yes, two hundred years ago you might have tried to escape to Canada, no matter what the slaves who'd already settled there wrote you of the murderous cold.

Taylor Reese

I have asked Taylor Reese to come by Joe's house so I can ask him how it feels to be a success.

“I don't know
how
it feels,” he says.

He is the realtor from whom Joe Harris bought his house. He is also from our hometown. Rumor had it several years ago that he was becoming rich selling real estate in and around Atlanta. Living lavishly. Getting fat.

“Nobody's buying houses much in this recession,” he says, “it's been rough just keeping the business open.”

He has brought his young son with him, and I am immediately attracted to the child, who, at four years old, reminds me of his father years ago. The same deep-brown skin, the same laughing hazel eyes.

I say: “You could have been my child.”

He says: “Uh-
uh!
”

I fell in love with Taylor Reese when I was six years old. When I was fourteen and he sixteen we began going steady. Later we became engaged. Our relationship lasted for more than six years, throughout high school and well into my freshman year at college. The last time I saw Taylor was in 1965. I was in Atlanta on my way farther south to work for a summer in the Movement; he was married and about to become a father. He was not very political then, and I found it hard to relate to him.

Now I discover he
is
political, but I don't want to talk about it. Or about selling houses, success, or the recession. I want to know if he is happy. I want to know if he is the same person I used to love. That he
is
still good-looking, though not as thin, I can see, and his after shave, as I tell him, is delicious.

“I dream about you,” I say.

He smiles, whispers (because Joe and Mabel are in the next room), “We always have fantasies about making love with our old lovers.”

I smile back, though that is not what I meant.

“You were my best friend for nearly seven years; we went through things together only best friends go through. I've always wanted to tell you how good I thought you were….”

“Oh, yeah? Good at what?”

“Not
at
anything in particular …”

He pretends to be crestfallen. We laugh.

“But just good. I mean, you were loyal, you were gentle, you were thoughtful, loving.
Good.
The older I get, the more I can appreciate that. The more shameful it seems that people who once loved each other are urged to forget it. I want to know all about you. I would like to know your children. I want to know your wife. I want to know all that you've become.”

Looking at him, father, husband, businessman,
grown-up,
I remember things I never, now, think about. Our junior-senior prom, our Saturday-night dates,
every single Saturday night for all those years.
How, slowly, we grew apart, attached ourselves to other people, without trying to maintain what had been a great friendship.

I do not tell him this, but my dreams about him are rarely erotic. He is simply, occasionally,
in
my dreams; perpetually slim, perpetually seventeen. Whether I am picking daisies or facing a firing squad.

“You remain mysterious to me,” I tell him. “Because I knew you so well, and now I don't know you at all.” Perhaps it is the writer in me that is frustrated, hating loose ends of such personal significance.

“I haven't changed,” he says, and I am moved by the casual tenderness with which he caresses the cheek of his son, who stands behind him clinging to one leg. That gesture of nurturing affection, I recognize.

Jackson, Mississippi, January 17, 1976

I have a friend who hates neighborhoods. I hope I will always live in one. When my husband and I moved to Jackson to live in 1967 we were often afraid our house would be attacked. (Our interracial marriage was considered dangerous as well as illegal in Mississippi, though a U.S. Supreme Court ruling three months before we arrived struck down the statute forbidding it. And my husband, as “yet another Jew lawyer from New York,” was welcomed only by the black community he served.) We bought a dog and a rifle, but we depended on our neighbors. If they saw a car full of strange white people cruising our street they called us, or stood on their porches until the car disappeared. When I drive past our old house on Rockdale Street I feel as if I'm coming home.

“I got your room all ready for you, soon as you called,” Lorene says. Lorene and her family live in the house next door to where we used to live. She works as a nurse's aide at a local hospital. Her husband, Thomas, used to own a small neighborhood grocery store, but now it is not clear what he does. I suspect he is out of work, but he is not the kind of person to offer that particular information. Thomas and Lorene remind me of people I knew growing up in the country: completely accessible and dependable, generous beyond all understanding, so black and yet so unconscious of blackness as an ideology that to visit them is to take a mental rest.