The Undertaker's Daughter (29 page)

The sky began to darken, and I was certain that as soon as the sun lowered and disappeared, I would be beaten.

I’d witnessed boys as they fought on the playground at school, red faced and angry, their clothes a mess and their faces wet from what usually ended in tears. This was not like that. We were junior high students and I thought my playground days were well behind me, buried in the ashes. I don’t know what kind of courage possessed the other girls on that evening. They acted with an unfettered disregard for any consequences. Cowed by the withering glare of Nanette’s good eye, I dismissed the thought of running
and was on the verge of begging when my savior came walking toward us—the school’s janitor. He had just begun to lock up the buildings for the evening. He was tall, huge, a wonderful, imposing figure of a man. To me, he represented a crepuscular miracle. He walked deliberately toward us and quickly took in the scene before him.

“You girls go on home now. Leave her alone.”

I stood next to him, unable to move until I saw the outline of their dresses disappear toward the Bottom, the opposite direction of the funeral home. The miracle man and I didn’t exchange words until then.

I offered him my hand, which was swallowed whole by his big, black hand. “Thank you.”

“Run along now. And don’t worry, they won’t bother you again.”

I didn’t begin shaking until I continued the walk home. The calm that I’d forced upon myself during the time of fear and panic readily gave way now. During the endless walk of two and a half blocks, I decided not to say anything to anyone. I didn’t know how to explain why the young group would risk attacking a white girl. I was unsure how much of this warning of violence I had brought upon myself. I was so obsessed with what white people might do if they found out about me that it never crossed my mind that the vast majority of black people might agree that crossing the color line was wrong and somehow sinful and, evidently, crazy-making. The janitor was right; they never bothered me again. He must have known that the situation was a time bomb and warned the girls. A gang of black schoolgirls had never beaten up a white girl in Jubilee. Nor had a black man ever touched a white man in violence. Sometimes the things that almost happened were more important than the things that did.

Every day I monitored Belle’s reaction to me. If the posse of girls who surrounded me talked about me in their homes, then I feared she would hear about it and tell my mother. I anxiously looked for a sign, but found none. She never spoke of it. But Belle, too, was steeped in the only kind of world she’d ever known. Jemma provided proof of that.

I no longer came home during the school lunch break, but Jemma did, and as Belle always had for me, she now prepared lunch for Jemma.

“Please, Belle, I don’t want to sit here by myself. Eat lunch with me.”

“Now you knows I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can. Did anyone tell you that you couldn’t?”

“No. That’s just the way it be, though.”

This would go on day after day, neither tired of the back-and-forth, the yin and yang of lunchtime. But Jemma persisted and coaxed Belle into sitting at the table with her while she ate, though Belle still ate the sandwich she brought from home on her own after Jemma went back to school. It took years, but finally, one day, Belle made two ham sandwiches. She sat them both on the kitchen table, pulled up a chair, and Jemma and Belle had lunch together.

“Thank you,” Jemma said. “You are my family.”

An opportunity arose one day when I was at Belle’s house. My mother remained in the car while I went in to collect pies she needed for a church social. As I waited for Belle to take the sugary goodness out of the oven, I toyed with the idea of seeking her advice. I sat on Belle’s sofa while the aroma of the cooling pecan pies filled the house. Of course she’d baked three extra and brought me a piece of one of them, still warm and oozing. I had just filled my mouth with the first bite when there was a knock on her screen door.

“Miss Belle? Miss Belle? Is you home?” Buttermilk Betty
cupped her eyes to fight the glare of the sun behind her and pressed her nose up to the door. Her tight, green cardigan swelled with her ample bosom; the top button was missing and she spilled out. Her hips stretched the bright red fabric of a worn and slightly tatty A-line skirt. But what really caught my eye were her purple, pom-pom house slippers.

“What you want, Buttermilk? I’s busy right now. I got comp’ny and I gots baking to do.”

Belle slipped the little lock into place on her screen door and was not too subtle about it.

“I won’t takes up much of your time. I’m a little short on the rent this month, I gots to get up ’bout fifteen dollars.”

“I don’t have no fifteen dollars for you. You crazy?”

“But, Miss Belle, you’s always got money.”

With that Belle clapped as if she were trying to make thunder. “I has no money . . . no money for you.” Clap, clap. “Here you go round ’bout spending your welfare check on Lawd knows what”—clap, clap—“comes round here aksing for money.” Clap, clap. “You better be gettin’ to work like me! I works for my money. I pays my taxes and my ten percent to Jesus.” Clap, clap. “Now get on out of here.”

Belle said to me, “There you goes,” as she stood at the door and watched Buttermilk Betty shuffle down the street in her purple house slippers. “That right there. That be a prime example of a bad black person. And don’t you ever let any black person ever tells you there ain’t no bad black people. They is. They is lazy, and some is drunks, jest like white people.”

I desperately wanted to ask Belle if she’d heard any rumors about me. But any thought I might have entertained about speaking
to her evaporated with her display of temper. Perhaps she would be angry at me as well. I realized how much I cared about what she thought of me. I couldn’t risk losing her friendship. This woman had, day by day, been a solid, dependable, and caring person in my life for over ten years. I would have done anything to keep her good opinion of me.

 CHAPTER 11 

T
homas was drafted in 1970. The notice arrived the moment he graduated from college. My mother moved through the house like a nervous ghost. For once in his life, when his only son’s future was at stake, my father became proactive. He rushed around seeking advice about how to keep Thomas out of Vietnam. My parents held late-night discussions in somber tones. When we tried to listen at the door, Jemma and I were ordered to keep quiet and stay out of the way. We were nervous, too; the idea seemed so foreign that we couldn’t imagine Thomas in a uniform, with a gun, killing another human being—and that led to the terrifying thought that someone in a foreign jungle might get to him first. Suddenly my father had a fire under him. His memories of the war empowered him with a strong conviction that Thomas should be spared a similar ordeal. He changed visibly, his face pale and drawn.

Adamant that Thomas should not enter military service, my father pressed him to consider the National Guard. The sergeant in charge of enlistments for our local troops gave them the bad news: there were no openings in Jubilee. He directed them to another town, where Thomas, without fanfare or fuss, was able to enlist.

After weeks of his initial basic training we were allowed to visit him. We packed up the station wagon with a huge picnic basket full of Thomas’s favorite homemade foods: pimento-cheese sandwiches, fried chicken, potato salad, coleslaw, freshly sliced garden tomatoes, and a couple of thermoses of iced tea.

Emily, his girlfriend, rode with us in a two-hour drive fraught with our inauthentic cheeriness, the air laced with the odors of the picnic basket and the atmosphere charged with apprehension over how Thomas had fared. Evelyn didn’t make the journey; I don’t recall what excuse she made.

We drove into a dismal, barren area where it seemed only an army-training base could have been built. We parked under shade trees near the base and tried to make Thomas feel better.

Usually, my brother’s idea of a push-up was pushing his tie in place. Thomas looked like a complete stranger in olive-green khakis. He’d always leaned toward my father’s sense of style and, like him, was well groomed, never wore denim, and was rather fond of suits. But the figure walking toward us was barely recognizable. His thick-lensed, black glasses had reappeared after his years of wearing contacts, and his hair was so short the white of his scalp shone like an ostrich egg.

He was miserable. We were appalled that he’d cut his arms in a training exercise. He described how he was made to crawl on the ground using his forearms to move forward as he held his rifle
up. His arms pressed into broken glass while his drill sergeant barked at him to keep moving.

My mother filled his plate with food over and over, and no one else was allowed to eat until he couldn’t stuff another bite into his mouth. She fussed and fiddled and seemed not to know what to do with herself. He remained calm amid all this attention. Meanwhile, I asked questions on behalf of us all. Where did he sleep? How often did he have to cut his hair? What was the food like—didn’t they feed him in there? Jemma was clingy and couldn’t understand why we couldn’t see him whenever we wanted. We had to pry her off Thomas to give him some time alone with Emily. Not very discreetly, we turned our backs and walked away while he and Emily stood alone under a tree holding hands. In high school Emily had been a beauty queen, a drum majorette, Miss Congeniality, an accomplished musician, and all this without an ounce of self-consciousness. She was in college now, a sorority girl studying for her master’s in education. Tall, thin, and blond, she possessed the manners and grace of a Tennessee Williams character having a good day, and we loved her. So did Thomas, he adored her. They would be married as soon as he returned from his visit to hell.

My mother was weepy on the way home. I’d never seen her show much emotion, other than anger. My father was hugely relieved. He knew that this discomfort, this five-month interruption of Thomas’s plans and the inconvenience of a commitment for a few years on weekends with the guard, was a minor sacrifice. He’d kept his son safe. His family would not have to think about the possibility of his body’s never being returned to us, left to decompose in some godforsaken jungle. Nor would the undertaker once again receive a knock on the door to find a serviceman holding a box of bones, as he had received his brother.

O
ne day, when I was still of an age to tag along with my father, we made a run to the cemetery to drop off a flower arrangement at a recently dug grave. On this cloudy autumn day the cool wind blew gritty, red-tinged leaves across the manicured patches of lawn. Brown leaves fallen from the hickory and red-buckeye trees crackled under my shoes as I traipsed around the cemetery, oblivious of my surroundings.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t walk on the graves. Step over them or walk around them,” he said softly. “Walk behind the tombstones.”

I quickly stepped around as if my feet had been planted on hot bricks. “Why?”

“Out of respect.”

I stood still, in the middle of the cemetery, which until that moment had been a familiar, pleasant few acres of land, a backdrop, and my father’s outdoor office. This place shouted at me with its broken angels, clasped hands, cracked doves of peace, and engraved laurel wreaths. It insisted that I wander from name to name and become aware of its one-hundred-year-old habitants. What shrouds did they wear? What old-fashioned clothing were they buried in? Was there jewelry in their coffins? Who had they been? But now was the time to face another reality, one that I had perhaps subconsciously ignored. I took a deep breath and exhaled the question.