Lishie was waiting at the kitchen table when I came in. “I thought you would’ve beat me home.” She smiled.
“I brought you home some beans.”
“Sgi, sweetheart. There’s a pan of cornbread on the stove if you’re hungry.”
“No, thanks, I still need to start packing for the week.”
“Well, okay. If you’re sure. I’ll make you some sandwiches to take with you. I put your momma’s old suitcase on your bed, too. You should use it. The lining still smells like her.” Lishie was tearing up, whether over Momma or me I couldn’t tell. Sometimes I think Lishie may have missed her daughter-in-law more than her own son. I would not have been surprised by either motivation for the tears. Lishie had two emotions: sternness and complete, utter compassion. There was no moderation.
I wouldn’t know if the suitcase smelled like my mother or not. I wish I knew. I only even knew what she looked like based on what features folks said I had of hers, what some of her cousins looked like, and one faded black-and-white photograph, taken by one of the ever-present ethnographers or anthropologists or archeologists passing through, of her holding me, my hair still wet and face still swollen from birth.
“You spoil me, Lishie. You know I won’t starve between here and Asheville.”
“Well, you need to be ready to work when you get there. Show them you’re good help.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I kissed the top of her silver head. “I’ll make you proud.”
“You always do.”
I walked to the back room Lishie had divided with a flannel sheet curtain on my tenth birthday so I could have my “privacy.” Though I’d built a doorframe and hung a door two years later, we left the curtain out of sentimentality. I took the newspaper from my back pocket and laid it on my pillow. I could hear Lishie slide her chair away from the table, change into her nightgown on the other side of the curtain, and pad into the living room as I folded my clothes into my mother’s woven sweetgrass suitcase. This was Lishie’s nightly routine. I knew she was opening her Bible to read in her rocking chair until she fell asleep. I pulled the quilt, one of many Lishie has stitched over the years, from the foot of my bed and took it in to her.
“Thank you, dear.”
“Thought you might get cold. Bud said it’s blackberry winter.”
She looked up from the scripture and smiled. “Shhhiii …” She shook her head and we both laughed softly.
Returning to my packing, I was unsure of what I would need but knew that I would return in a few days to get anything left behind. I didn’t have a heck of a lot of choices of what to take anyway. I closed the suitcase just before 9:00, went to my dresser, and pulled the folded yellow sheet of paper from the drawer with the Preacherman’s handwriting scribbled across it.
Essie Stamper
Pick up 5 a.m. on Monday, May 18th
Soco Road—2nd left past trading post
I folded the paper again and put it in the pocket of the shirt I planned to wear the day we left. Something about the girl’s name written on the paper made me want to keep it close. I sat the suitcase by my door and tidied the room as best I could. Hearing Lishie begin her soft snoring, I padded out to the living room again and helped her to her bedroom.
“You mind if I read a little bit before bed?” I asked as I pulled the top quilt over her. Lishie was a sound sleeper, so she never really minded my reading at night by the lantern.
“Of course not, darlin’. I’m sure you’re a little anxious. Just make sure you don’t stay up too late. I don’t want you noddin’ off on the road tomorrow. It’s a long trip.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I changed into my nightclothes, dug out the newspaper article, and slid into my bed. The bedframe creaked its nightly distress signal. Out of courtesy, I kept the oil lamp turned so low I could barely make out the words on the paper.
I wasn’t sure this was the same article where Bud had gotten his information, but it did tell of the foreign diplomats, foreign nationals, and US citizens who had been moved to “remote locations” in the United States to be held under surveillance. It was odd to think of these mountains as prime surveillance real estate. The newspaper identified Indian reservations out west as sites to hold Japanese Americans. I shook my head. You see, not much has changed. Axis in the country’s finest resorts. American citizens scratching around on land only fit for America’s forgotten stepchildren. I wondered how close I’d get to the prisoners. Should I be afraid? Are they afraid?
Our local paper had taken to picking up trailers from other publications across the country. Apparently, San Francisco had woes I’d never understand.
The women might have something to say about this, however, as the departure of the Japanese has sent them into a spin which looks, Mr. Roosevelt, like a cost-of-living spiral. Anyhow, they’re going round and round in a battle to get household help, never before equaled in intensity. It looks like total war on the distaff side.
According to the article, the real tragedy of Japanese internment was not a loss of freedom or a pseudo-criminalization of innocent human beings on the grounds of name, language, color, or great-grandmother’s country of origin. It was that white women of upper-class San Francisco might not have someone to fold their skivvies. They may have to sweep their own floors. And, most horrifically, they had turned to stealing servants from their nearest and dearest friends.
The bidding for household help hasn’t been equaled since Simon Legree went out of business. Fine friendships are falling apart like a tired cemetery bouquet, as women lure price[les]s human jewels from women.
Oh, these poor women. Certainly the death of former servants is nothing compared to broken pinky promises and the end to afternoon gossip sessions. It was sickening! Did no one else see it? Now some might think that I was just sympathizing with my distant Bering Strait–linked relatives (a suspect theory). I sympathized, sure. But I sympathized as a human being, one whose ancestors knew what it was like to be forced onto a reservation.
Empathy is fossilized in our bones.
I thought about Tsa Tsi’s great-uncle and if I would sneak food to an internment camp if the government chose Cherokee, North Carolina, as its next prison site. Would they just throw me in with the rest of the “others” who fit into the wrong box? No one would miss me if I didn’t show up to work. For once in their lives, those Japanese Americans must have wished they were just Japanese in America, like the diplomats and nationals that I’d be serving at the inn. Being American had somehow made being Japanese harder. Citizenship by choice complicated an identity assumed at birth.
Funny how things get twisted when people are in a hurry. I guess Bud was right sometimes.
He was right, too, that there is value in work. Even if that work only serves those who aren’t aware of your existence. Would the next few months ahead of me help me understand the San Francisco situation far better than I really wanted? I laughed a little thinking that I might be considered some woman’s “human jewel.” Hopefully all of my orders would be coming from the inn’s remaining skeleton staff manager. He, of course, was the one who had placed the ad and responded to my letter of interest. No matter where I was, the US military would expect me to fall into their tight, neat lines. And that’d be okay for the summer. The truth is I didn’t know what to expect, and no amount of reading newspapers was really helping with that. I could be thankful the unknown was just over the mountain and not in some foreign country, like where all my cousins had been sent. Lishie would say that I should give thanks for whatever little morsel I could find.
I closed my eyes. Whatever morsel. I had a paying job. Maybe even one that would pay enough for the first semester of college if I decided to actually go. I had a good excuse not to spend all summer at Bud’s feet, listening to his quarrelsome ranting in the muggy heat. I wouldn’t waste my life never seeing what life could be like away from Cherokee. And probably most importantly, I had the girl, Essie, to look forward to. A couple of hours alone with a beautiful girl would
certainly be more than a morsel’s worth.
Chapter Four
The rattling gearshift seemed to rise between us, expanding into a border separating our two worlds. She smelled of lavender and honeysuckle, a scent that defied all boundaries and invaded my awareness. So I revved the engine, forgetting what my uncle had taught me: “Clutch is clutch, dammit!”
Despite my nervousness around her, we had practically grown up together, caught in the slow churn of the Qualla Boundary, tiny Cherokee, North Carolina, hours away from Asheville, the nearest city anyone could call such. We were products of “the reservation,” pronounced low and quickly by us—rezervashun. Broken into at least five whispered syllables when spoken by visitors or neighbors across the mountain—thuh-rez-her-vay-shuuun.
We were “cousins of cousins’ cousins, or something like that,” Lishie often recalled. A classification less about tree branches and more about confined timeless existence.
Of course, I instinctively knew who she was. I was fairly certain I knew who she would become. Watching her was like watching a summer storm’s lightning charge, the flash that illuminates the sky. She was the bolt that strikes fast across the horizon, downward toward its target, an unsuspecting lone tree whose roots are no longer its security, but rather become the very circuit for which the charge swells. The energy’s force overcomes everything idle and ordinary. And you know it from the moment the air vibrates with warning thunder. Her future, everything that would come after her nineteen-year-old reality, was too powerful for most of us to follow.
I knew this the first day I saw her, over a decade prior to our trip. She was a child of maybe seven or eight playing in the cool shallows of the Oconaluftee River, downstream from where I fished for speckled trout and dug ruddy crayfish from beneath mossy rocks. Her goldenrod skirt was hiked up to just above her scarred knees, and dark strands of hair fell ragged along the slopes of her downward-peering face. She, too, was searching for fish, but not to snare as I had set out to do. While I was dedicated to their capture, she was more concerned with studying the free movement of the fish that maneuvered past her stick-thin legs. Out of a patient stillness, she darted after a quick-moving knotty head, marveling at its agile speed, then snatched it from the water, only to release it immediately. Within minutes by the river, I had slipped on the filmy rocks and busted my ass. I was soaked. Though she took far fewer precautions, she never fell. She never even seemed to come unbalanced.
However, judging from the way she introduced herself on the sagging porch of her father’s cabin all these years later, she remembered nothing of me. And judging from the past fifteen minutes of this car ride from Cherokee to Asheville, she did not care to.
The sum of her words amounted to “Hello. Pleased to meet you. I’m Essie Stamper. Thank you very kindly for the ride.”
I’d done my best to conceal my excitement when the request came from Preacherman to help Essie arrive safely at her summer job at the Grove Park Inn. I wanted credit for a burden borne, and to earn that I had to at least appear as if I were actually burdened. I figured it could help to pardon me from a few Sunday or Wednesday nights’ church services. Despite my resolve, it was still difficult to shoo away the grin as I loaded her suitcases into the car’s trunk. I felt something intimate about preparing for a trip together, even if others had arranged most of the preparation.
Preacherman told me that Essie was just working at the inn for the summer to earn money for college. “One smart cookie,” he offered one day after church. “If you keep your mouth shut and ears open, you might just learn a thing or two.”
I hoped that Preacherman did not provide Essie with an overview of my own background, which would include a failed attempt at Oak Ridge Junior College (an institution I’d only been accepted into as recognition of my father’s World War I service and been able to afford with federal relief aid dollars), and the last year of my nineteen-year-old existence working odd jobs in Cherokee. I coveted this opportunity to introduce myself on my own terms, to present the Cowney detached from family binds or awkward tales of my fumbling youth. Though I was unsure if she had any impression of me at all, I wanted desperately to craft one for her. I wanted us to be immediate confidants, as if we shared years of inside jokes, had nicknames for each other, could speak without vocalizing words. I wanted to assume that Lishie’s recollection of being distant cousins was merely the ramblings of an aging grandmother insistent that the whole damn reservation was related. I wanted to speak to her like I am speaking to you now. I wanted her to have never heard anyone else’s opinion of me save, perhaps, my mother’s and Jesus Christ’s.
Some apparent nervousness pinched the tint from her lips. We were well into our two-hour drive and she hadn’t uttered more than her initial introduction. She clutched her black purse on her lap and left her ankles uncrossed, though seemingly fused together.
The silence pressed deep into my chest. I waited for a change in her demeanor as if I was checking the ripening of a Cherokee purple, unsure of the perfect time to pry it from the vine when it peaks—before it spoils.
Oh well, I rationalized. No better way than to just jump in.
I leaned over and gave her a sideways glance. “There’s rumors about this place, you know.” I shrugged. “Heard it’s built on graves.”
The car’s vibration unnerved my voice.
She feigned interest. “Oh. Whose?”
At least maybe she wanted to pass the time as much as I did. Optimism grew. “I don’t know. People’s, I guess.”
“No. Which people? Indian? White? Your great-aunt Sally?” Essie sighed as if exhausted with her own questions.
“Cherokee,” I gushed. Grateful I had an answer. “That’s what they say.”
“They do, huh?” From the corner of my eye I saw her slip out a smile too glassy for me to grasp.
“Yeah. Lots of people. Heard it’s built on graves.”
The smile disappeared as quickly as it had come. “Of course it is. White folks with money tend to find moving dead Indians easy.”
“Ah, they’re not all bad,” I offered, thinking she might like to hear me acting diplomatic.
“That’s true. But they sure don’t like to be reminded of us.”
I felt a warm, wet embarrassment wash over me because of how confidently she spoke when I was always grasping just to stay in the conversation. I had pissed away my opportunity. Preacherman was right. Anyone could tell by the way she cut her dark, Greta Garbo eyes toward me that Essie was smart or mean or both. I knew I had better figure out which one as quickly as possible or the rest of the ride would be miserable. More troublesome, there would be no second ride, and I could not imagine an existence without at least the possibility of seeing how fully Essie’s long, perfectly curved body would fill out the baby blue maid’s uniform at the inn. These daydreams did not help my execution of words.
“Anyway. Makes sense given some of the rumors about that place at night.”
“Oh, you have friends there?”
“No. People just tell you things when you say you are going to a place like that.” The truth was, if I didn’t have friends in Cherokee, which I didn’t, then I sure as hell didn’t have any in Asheville.
“What kind of things do they say?”
At least she was listening.
Essie stared out the window at the blurred crimsons, gingers, auburns, and verdant greens of the budding trees, a Monet masterpiece appearing through the Model T’s passenger window.
“You’ve heard the stories, right?”
She still did not turn. “What stories?”
“Of those people staying at the inn. Of why they’re there and why the owners can’t keep no help longer than a few weeks.” This would get her.
Essie turned her face toward me, but did not commit her body to the same engagement. “Any,” she responded. It wasn’t a question and she noted my confusion. “Any. They can’t keep any help.” Her tone was sharp.
“Yeah, that’s what I sa
id. Anyway, you’ve heard rumors of those death camps? These are the types of people who run those places. Higher-ups. You think they just left all that behind when they got captured? It’s like a blood thirst.” My hands gripped the steering wheel as if I was driving a tank myself.
“So you’re telling me they’re some sort of German vampires?” She had a way of twisting my words to make me sound fool-ignorant.
I loosened my grip. “Never mind.” I looked into my rearview mirror so she’d know I was too busy to be chided.
“No … I’m sorry, Cowney.”
She remembered my name.
“Go on. Tell me what you think. I need to get as much background as I can if I am going to work there.”
I was beginning to see that this was typical for Essie. That she was somehow cold without wanting to be, just needing to be. My early impressions of her could have been wrong. Maybe all those years ago she wasn’t scowling down at the river but shielding the summer sun from her eyes so that she could better locate the fish. Walking into town alone, speaking to no one, was not chosen isolation. Maybe she was concentrating on the shopping list streaming through her head or, like me, she feared straying too far from explicit instructions, leading to an inevitable whipping, maybe even beating. For me it was the difference in who sent me—Lishie or my uncle Bud. For Essie, maybe there was no option.
Regardless of how I justified her coolness, I wanted to believe that I had something to do with her warming. I wanted to believe that years ago I had distracted the fish in the river so that they all swam her way. I wanted to believe that my shying away from the beautiful girl in the trading post allowed her to complete her purchase with accuracy. I was her space to breathe, her freedom to warm in the margin I left for sunlight.
“Well, there’s been children come in to work with their folks, but you never see them leave. Staff can’t report it ’cause they’re not supposed to have kids around anyway.” I took my eyes from the road so as to better gauge her reaction.
Even As We Breathe Page 3