Outlaw (2 page)

EACH OF our stories begins long before any event that suddenly and often irrevocably catapults us onto a new path.

My story began with a dream.

But really it began with my father, who guided my understanding of the world, and with my mother, who influenced my every waking moment. I will write here only what will give you a general context for my life before I was ripped from the bosom of one world and thrust into another, all because of that simple, recurring dream.

My mother, Ellen Carter, was a proper British woman from London who met my father in New York, married him a year later, then moved to Atlanta in 1933. She soon gave birth to my older sister, Patrice, then to me, Julian, and finally to Martha. We lived in Georgia with all the Southern belles, but Mother brought us up as proper English. We were referred to as “the Brits” by many in our social circle. My accent was far more British than Southern drawl, and I preferred hot tea to mint juleps on summer afternoons.

Our estate consisted of a mansion and four smaller homes, and to hear Mother talk, you would think she was the queen, our estate her country, and we her subjects. Anyone not part of our family was a foreigner who did not belong on her soil for more time than it took to have tea or play a game of croquet, and she saw no harm in making her opinion known.

Her eccentricity grew as she aged and eventually gave way to a disposition that might be considered senile. Her choice of words made foreigners cringe, but we knew her heart was golden.

She got it in her mind that the servants, all of whom were colored, were slaves, and she had no problem saying so to their faces. “Slave Regina, what have you done with my slippers?” Or, “Where are the rest of the slaves, Jacob?”

Our servants were with us for many years, and Mother was thoughtful of them on all occasions, particularly at Christmas. She was the first to bandage up their scratches and send anyone with the smallest cough to the doctor.

And yet my mother was distant. Her own mother and father had shipped her off to boarding school for a proper education and were barely present in her life. I suppose she was only doing what she knew. I often thought she was more present for the servants than for me.

If my mother was distant, my father, Richard, was almost entirely absent. And when he drank, he was downright obstinate—which was most of the time he was home. We learned early to stay clear of him to avoid a smack or a verbal lashing.

Furthermore, he was a racist. His great-great-grandfather had been one of the wealthiest plantation owners in Georgia. The family no longer farmed cotton, having traded cotton farms in the South for oil fields in Texas, but Father still hadn’t shed the bigotry that ran thick in his blood. He could talk the proper line and work up some kind words for Martin Luther King if required, but his veneer vanished after a couple of drinks.

Nevertheless, as is the case with many children, I grew up under his spell—a daughter desperate to be accepted and loved without achieving either. As I grew older, I swore that my own children would receive my full love and attention. Like many young girls, I dreamed of an idyllic marriage to a loving man who would shelter me in a beautiful mansion surrounded by lush green lawns and a white picket fence. There, in bliss, we would sing around the fireplace with our children, because singing had always been my most treasured escape when things became difficult.

We would have picnics with our children, tell them delightful stories, and tuck them into bed to dream beautiful dreams. How I looked forward to finding this man with whom I would birth wonder and love.

Despite my father’s apparent self-confidence, he secretly depended on my mother for his security. When she became sick with pneumonia and died, part of my father died with her. We all mourned her loss, but Father came unglued. He barricaded himself in his room for nearly a week. When he finally came out, he emerged with a new vision for his life.

During that week of solitude, weeping for his loss, Father fell under the deepest conviction that he had to have a grandson. He called together his three daughters—Patrice, Martha, and me—and begged us to consider him in his last days. He would soon follow our mother to the grave, he said, he could feel it in his bones.

He instructed each of us to marry swiftly, keep our maiden name, and produce a son to whom all the wealth and prestige of the family could pass. After all, Father had no brothers.

Perhaps it was his way of making good. Having been dealt such a blow, he wanted a second chance at love, and for him that meant having a son, which he could only have through one of his daughters now. My only true value to him seemed to be my potential to give him a son.

“Keep our maiden name?” Patrice objected. She was already married and had moved to Houston, where her husband, Henry Cartwright, managed Father’s oil wells. “I’m already married. Besides, I was under the distinct impression that you wanted me to keep an eye on Henry, not raise a family.”

“And you
should
keep an eye on that parasite, before he sucks me dry!” Father rasped, pointing a crooked finger at her. “But you have to change your name back to Carter. Give me a son. A good-looking boy who has the Carter blood in him. It’s the least you can do after all I’ve sacrificed for you.”

Having made his plea with Patrice, Father turned his desperate eyes on me. I was twenty-four at the time and had no lasting love interest.

“Please, Julian, have mercy on your father and give me a grandson. I’m dying, for heaven’s sake.”

“I’m not even married,” I protested.

“But you could be! Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “We have to find you a man. Someone with looks and brains, not like the dolt Patrice got.”

We all knew there was at least some truth in his words.

“And you, dear,” Father said, turning to Martha, who was only nineteen. “You’re the spitting image of your mother. You have to bear me a grandson. Soon. Before I die. Promise me.” His eyes begged us all. “Promise me this one dying request.”

“I don’t think you’ll die anytime soon,” I said.

“I’m half-dead already! Promise me this one thing. It’s all I will ask.”

For a moment no one spoke; he had us all under his spell. I had been very particular about whom I would eventually marry, looking as I was for the perfect man, you see? But it struck me then that my expectations had failed to bring me any satisfaction.

And I had always dreamed of having a son or a daughter who might finally correct what was wrong with my life. Perhaps I should honor my father. Really, any fine man could make a good husband or give me a beautiful child.

“I promise,” I said.

He fixed his look on me. “That you’ll quit being so picky and find a man.”

“I’m sure—”

“That you’ll keep my name,” he pressed.

“Maybe I could—”

“And give me a baby boy. A grandson. To carry on my name and my legacy.”

The idea began to blossom in my mind.

“Yes, Father.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

He threw himself at me and hugged me tight, thanking me as if I had just given him his only reason to live. And I had, I think.

But I knew that marrying wasn’t like snapping fingers.

“If I can,” I said.

“I’ll help you, my dear little songbird.”

He never called me his songbird, even though he said that I was the one who’d inherited Mother’s beautiful voice. She and I often sang duets at the First Baptist Church, where we attended Sunday morning services.

I married Neil Roberts a year later, when I was twenty-five.

He died when I was twenty-six.

If I had known Neil’s true nature I never would have allowed myself to be impressed by his charming smile when my father invited him to our estate as a potential suitor. Many said that I was a fool for marrying him, but he gave me Stephen, and for that alone I am eternally grateful.

I can’t remember exactly when I began to dislike my husband—perhaps when he began refusing to come out of his room, cowering under deep depression less than four months after we married. He was a tortured soul. I suffered as well, but not as deeply as he did. Despite his mistreatment of me, I had compassion for his misery.

He often sank to the bottom of emotion’s darkest well, particularly when he drank too much. At times he would stare at the horizon for hours on end, as if he were hardly more than a corpse. At other times he ignored me for days, refusing to acknowledge me even when I spoke to him.

On one occasion, when I spilled flaming oil on the stove and nearly burned down the house, he refused to acknowledge my cries for help, and I became so frustrated that I threw a frying pan at him. It struck his shoulder, but he hardly gave me a glance.

Honestly, I don’t know how he became this way—he wouldn’t speak about it. Even worse, I don’t know how he managed to hide his true character from me until after we were married. He was a master of the shift, as I called it. Put him with men discussing an oil deal in South America, and he could shift into smooth talk on the fly. But at home he had few words for me, even on the best of days.

At times I wondered if my father had paid my husband to court me, marry me, and offer his seed for a son. Once that job was done there would have been nothing left of the arrangement to interest Neil. Father would never confess to such a thing, naturally, and I never wanted to burden him with the question.

Within six months of our wedding, I woke up realizing that I despised my marriage. Despite my family’s disapproval of divorce, I think I might have left Neil in the first year if I hadn’t learned that I was with child.

The change in me was nothing short of a radical conversion. As soon as I grasped the notion that a baby with fingers and toes and a tiny nose was growing inside my womb, I became obsessed with love for the child. Nothing else really mattered to me, only the life that moved in my belly. I dreamed only of my healthy baby cooing up at me with round eyes, suckling at my swollen breasts before falling into sweet sleep.

The day Stephen came into the world, a part of me found heaven.

And it was on that same night, while I was still in the hospital, that I first had the dream that would change the course of my life forever—the same dream that landed me on the white sailboat in the middle of the raging sea.

I wasn’t one who normally remembered her dreams, but the next morning the details of the jungle I’d seen while sleeping were still so vivid that I forgot I was in a hospital.

In the dream I was looking down at a large valley filled with a tangle of trees and vines the thickness of my forearms running all the way to the ground. Flocks of red-and-blue parrots took flight and flapped over an endless swamp at the valley’s far end. The landscape was both savage and idyllic at once.

As I watched, thinking what an enchanting place this was, a single sweet high tone began to reach out to me, wooing me. A presence seemed to have taken notice of my own and was calling in an unbroken, haunting note.

I looked around, wondering where the song could be coming from, but I could see no one. The singular, evocative tone grew in volume, and birds from all corners of the jungle took flight, not away from but toward the sound.

And then I too took flight, as one sometimes does in dreams, sailing above the trees, up the valley. A low tone joined the higher one then, a deeper note that seemed to reach into my bones. I wasn’t afraid—on the contrary, I found the sound exceedingly comforting. It seemed to wrap itself around my whole body and pull me forward.

And then I was rushing, faster and faster, headed directly for a barren hill. It was there on that hill that I saw the form of a human. I couldn’t make out if the person was clothed or naked, man or woman, but I knew that the song was coming from him or her, and in my mind’s eye the singer was majestic. An exotic creature from another world called out to me in a voice that was unearthly, both high and low at once.

Come to me
, it sang without words.
Find me. Join me. Save me…

Before I could see the singer’s face, the dream faded, taking the song, the jungle, and the figure with it. I awoke with eyes wide open.

The images and sounds of that dream lingered for half an hour before I forgot about it in favor of holding my newborn baby.

But the dream returned a week later. And then again, several days after that. Every few days the dream would return to me, a haunting call that beckoned and gave me peace despite the plea to be saved, all of which I felt more than heard. My initial interpretation of this dream was that it was somehow my own son calling to me—after all, it had first come to me the very night of his birth. Stephen needed his mother to show him the way to a garden called Eden. Together we would always be safe, full of life, love, and beauty.

I fussed obsessively over my baby, ignoring the suggestions from more experienced mothers that I not jump at his every sound.
Let him cry on occasion rather than grab him from his crib to nurse him
, they would say.
For heaven’s sake, smack his hand when he touches things he shouldn’t
.

But I was ruined for my son. I simply couldn’t let Stephen cry, and I could
never
smack his hand, because then he would surely cry even more and I could not bear his suffering. I could, in fact, do nothing but spoil him. He was life to me.

Heaven on earth.

He was my Eden.

And he was life to my father, who poured his love into Stephen with an abandon that completely bypassed me.

Stephen was the most adorable bundle of joy a woman could dare wish for. I know mothers often say this about their babies, even if they are quite homely, but Stephen really was a perfect doll. Everyone said so. He could easily have been featured on television to sell baby food. Mothers would surely flock to buy whatever they saw him eating, subconsciously hoping that their own babies might look as healthy and precious as my little Stephen. He had a full head of dark hair and pale blue eyes, taking after me. And he was contentedly chubby, because I gave him all the milk he could possibly drink.