Digging in the front yard meant someone was going to die.
* * *
Two weeks later Suzette passed over peacefully, in her sleep.
Eighty-five had been a long, respectable life, and Philomene hoped Suzette was someplace now that offered more than the indignities she had borne in this one.
If Emily was the bloom in Philomene’s garden and Elisabeth the root that reached down deep enough to anchor itself and search for nourishment, Suzette had been the soil itself, buffeted by winds, withstanding storms, baked by the sun. Philomene met her mother’s death with grim acceptance.
Death would be knocking on her own door soon enough, and she would have to let him in.
She wasn’t ready.
46
J oseph Billes may not have been allowed to leave the inheritance that he intended, but he left a legacy that assured T.O.’s privilege among Negro and colored alike. T.O. himself, along with his brother and sisters, and his mother, for that matter, could have passed for white anywhere in the country, anywhere except for this part of Louisiana. His background dictated that he marry an as-yet-unnamed but clearly defined wife who would bring more of the same to the table. White skin, light eyes, straight hair, Catholic upbringing. And fertile, so the next generation could put even more distance between themselves and Negroes and come closer to white. It was even possible for him to marry white the way his uncle Nick encouraged him to do.
Generations had been sacrificed for his look. The thought filled T.O. with such despair that sometimes he didn’t know how he could go on. He spent hours locked in his own mind, playing with ways he could live out his life without this constant coil of hopeless entrapment.
He thought about moving away from Louisiana and passing, like his uncle Eugene, but was sure he couldn’t make it on his own. Deep down he didn’t think he could carry it off. Everyone would know he was an impostor.
When he looked in a mirror, it was a haunted man who looked back at him; an incomplete man with flat eyes and a crippled soul, inadequate in every way that mattered. A man who stood by and did nothing to prevent his own father from being murdered. A man who couldn’t live up to his responsibilities to those he should be able to protect, accepting crumbs instead of finding a way to win the inheritance that belonged to his family.
T.O. despised the man in the mirror, and with an uncharacteristic clarity knew what he needed to do to break the chain. He didn’t have the courage or the stamina to go up against Morat again. That was all over. The one thing he could do was to strengthen the blood of his own children. How many times had his mother told him blood was everything? She meant white blood, but he didn’t believe in that anymore. He would find a mother for his children who was everything he was not. Strong. Determined. Capable. Unafraid. And not brought up with the same attitudes that in the end would keep the wheel going in the same direction. That meant a woman who had no pretensions toward being colored Creole. A Negro woman. This would be the boldest act of courage he had undertaken in the thirty years he had been on this earth, because it would run contrary to his mother’s wishes. He looked again into the mirror.
It would stop with him, and something new would begin again.
* * *
“Maman, this is Eva Brew,” T.O. said nervously in English. Eva was the first girl he had ever brought home, and he counted on Emily’s relief to give him an extra measure of forgiveness in his choice. He was thirty, and Eva was nineteen.
T.O. hardened himself, conscious of the half beat too long while Emily digested Eva. Nappy hair parted down the center and pulled back tightly in two coiled braids, accentuating the pretty roundness of her face, her ginger-colored skin, her broad nose, and the freshly starched, ironed, and serviceable gingham dress free of frills. He had expected his mother’s unspoken disapproval, but he had not anticipated the clear, level gaze that Eva gave Emily in return, no fluttering hands or averted eyes.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle Eva. Voulez-vous du café?” Emily offered.
“Maman, English, please,” T.O. rushed to say. “I told you Eva doesn’t speak French.”
Emily smiled charmingly at Eva, and T.O. noted it was her polite, “because you are a guest in my house and I was brought up properly, I choose to extend you this courtesy” smile she reserved for company. “Welcome to Cornfine Bayou, Mademoiselle Eva,” Emily said. “May I offer you coffee?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Eva said. “Would you like any help?”
“No, no.” Emily kept her eyes on the girl. “Josephine will bring it.”
Eva looked around appreciatively. “You keep a lovely home here, ma’am.”
“Thank you.” Emily sat and motioned for Eva to do the same. “I understand you live in Colfax. Which church do you attend up there?”
“Pilgrim Rest Baptist, ma’am. I go every Sunday.”
“Well, here’s Josephine with the coffee at last. Shall we pour?”
T.O. thought Eva held up to the rest of the afternoon very well.
* * *
The courtship was short. In 1911 T.O. Billes married Eva Brew and moved her into the house on Cornfine Bayou.
* * *
In the winter of 1912 T.O. approached his grandmother’s room with a feeling of dread. Philomene battled pneumonia and today had called for him by name. It was too much like the summons before Mémère Elisabeth died.
Geneva (Eva) Brew.
She was small against the whiteness of the pillows, but even weakened she still emitted a potent life force he felt from across the room. Philomene took both his hands in hers, rubbing them gently as she talked. The hands sliding over his own were dry and rough to the touch, but a strange warmth began to generate between them, as if they were building a fire together.
“T.O., I’ve never told you about the gift I had when I was young, because I thought it had left me for good.” Philomene’s eyes were bright, almost fever bright, T.O. thought, but unclouded. “I used to be able to see the future. Now it seems to have come back, at least a little, and it concerns you.”
T.O. was soothed by the calm certainty in her voice and the heat of her hands.
“I see a woman standing in front of a large room, people as far as the eye can see, young and old, black and white, men and women. She talks, and they listen with their whole minds. There’s respect in that room, and the woman in the front comes from us, from you. I tell you this, T.O., so you know that you and yours are going to be all right. Don’t waste what came before. Add to it.”
T.O. didn’t know what to say. He held her hand in his until she fell asleep.
Philomene died later that night. Emily insisted on a family celebration, and then, just as it had been with Joseph, Philomene’s name dropped from his mother’s everyday speaking as well.
* * *
Grandmother Phelman died Nov 1912.
--Cousin Gurtie Fredieu, written family history, 1975
* * *
On a pleasant evening the following spring, Emily, Mary, T.O., and Eva lingered around the kitchen table after supper. Joe had left the house to go courting, and Josephine had gone off to bed early with a headache. While the dishes soaked in the sink, Emily brought out a fresh gallon of home-brewed muscadine wine. She filled a glass tumbler for each of them, and Mary retrieved the black and white bones for dominoes.
“Do you know how to play, Eva?” T.O. asked, careful in his tone. Since her belly had gone big with their first child, she was less predictable in how she reacted to him.
“I’ll be fine,” Eva replied. “No need to know French to play dominoes.”
It took T.O. by surprise how fast with numbers Eva was. She held all of her bones in one hand close to her bosom, propped up over her smooth, round stomach, carefully watching every play on the table with intense concentration. She won the first game with apparent ease, beaming with delight.
T.O. felt a nice, rosy glow. His wife was happy, he was happy, all seemed right with the world.
“Very lucky,” Emily said,
mixing up the bones for a rematch.
Eva won the second game as well.
“You need to try a little of my wine,” Emily said, nodding toward Eva’s untouched tumbler. “Loosen you up a bit.”
“I do fine without it, Miss Emily,” Eva said. “I’m surprised you can hold so much liquor, you’re such a little woman.”
Emily motioned for Mary to pour more into T.O.’s glass as well as her own.
“I never have been able to hit one hundred pounds.” Emily turned to T.O. and switched to French. “That time, weighing myself on the cotton scales? Ninety-nine. If I had known I was so close, I wouldn’t have spit out my tobacco.”
It was an old family joke, and they all laughed. Except Eva.
Eva noisily scraped her chair back from the table, took her tumbler full of wine, and poured it out in the sink, then began to wash the dishes they’d set to soak earlier.
“Maman, let’s talk in English,” T.O. interrupted, casting a nervous eye over to Eva.
Emily ignored him and continued on in her silken voice, the strong rise and fall of her Creole patois dominating the room.
T.O. knew that Eva wouldn’t think of disrespecting his mother by talking back to her, but the time was fast approaching when he would have to take a stand between these two women, his mother and his wife, before they ground him to dust between them.
“We need to find a place of our own to rent,” Eva said.
Their first year of marriage had been a constant battle of wills between Eva and Emily, although harsh words were never spoken directly.
“But there’s plenty of room for us here,” T.O. protested. “And help with the baby. We don’t have enough for our own place.”
Eva wore a stubborn scowl, with her lips pursed tight and not open to challenge. “We are both young and strong. It may not be considered proper in your family, but there is nothing wrong in taking in other people’s washing and ironing, as long as they pay me for it. And I can take care of Joseph Lee myself.”
“I know you and Maman don’t always see everything the same way, but—”
“T.O., we have another child on the way. I appreciate what your mama has done for us, but I’m raising our children my own way. They will be Baptist, and they will not speak French.”
* * *
The years passed, T.O. taking odd jobs and Eva in charge of the family and their small farm outside Colfax. By the time Eva’s childbearing years wound down, they had five children. There were four boys, Joseph Lee, Theodore, Henry Earl, and I.V., and the youngest, an untamed girl named Willie Dee. Strict and full of direction, Eva brooked no interference from anyone in raising them to be morally strong, neat, clean, and respectful.
* * *
T.O.’s family still spent occasional Sunday afternoons on Cornfine Bayou. After Eva and the children walked the two and one-half miles back from church in Colfax, T.O. hitched the mule and they all drove to Aloha. The young ones loved to visit the farm back in the country with their grandma ’Tite, a spirited old woman who always had an inexhaustible supply of thick striped canes of sweet peppermint candy.
L–R. Henry Earl, Joseph, I.V., Theo Billes.
Willie Dee Billes.
47
C OLFAX , L OUISIANA —1936
D eep in thought, Emily unscrewed the lid from the top of the Red Rooster tin, slowing her pace as she walked to make sure she didn’t drop the last of her snuff. Her grip wasn’t as steady as it used to be. It was twenty-nine years and four months to the day since her Joseph was taken, and even after all the time without him, lately she missed him with a ferocity that unnerved her. She felt an urgent need to talk to Philomene about her unsettling longings, but Emily had had to do without her mother’s council and comfort for twenty-four years.
She took the time to pinch together the final bits of moist dark-brown tobacco that remained in the tin, expertly transferring the stringy blend between her inside bottom lip and gum in one fluid motion. A familiar rush hit as the thick, syrupy liquid rose in her mouth. She spat just once, forcefully, into the fallen pine needles and dirt under her feet, a short, accurate shot. One more spit before getting on the bus, and she would be fine until she got all the way to Colfax. Everyone knew that Emily Fredieu could hold her juice.
Yesterday a mud dauber’s nest had fallen from the roof of the house, a powerful and unlucky sign. And then Josephine, in a rare fit of pique over a stuck jar lid that refused to budge, had declared, “If I knew then what I know now, I would have married the darkest man I could find and had a house full of babies of my own.” Out of nowhere. As if the fact that neither daughter ever married were her fault. Emily had decided at that moment to come to town today.
Josephine Billes.
It wasn’t often anymore that Emily could be persuaded to leave the home place for any reason, even to keep the graves clean, but she had been feeling lately that if she didn’t keep moving, God might think she was done and come to collect her early. Besides, wandering through a store would almost be like breathing in Joseph once again. Between the strength of the omen and her assorted pains, she had been able to sleep only fitfully last night and had been up long before the rooster’s first crow this morning. She wondered whether this was how her mother, Philomene, had felt at this age. Or her mémère Suzette. Or even the dark old woman Elisabeth. The women in her family all had a grip on living they didn’t let go easily, no matter the limitations.
The three-mile walk through the Louisiana piney woods out to the road to catch the bus to Colfax seemed longer than she remembered, demanding more than her knees wanted to brace, more than her heart wanted to sponsor. She could have sent either Josephine or Mary to do the erranding when she saw they were getting low on Red Rooster or waited until Sunday when the relations came to call. They were all willing to do for her if she asked.
Trading her country time for town time put Emily in a reflective mood. Josephine’s outburst yesterday notwithstanding, they got on well in the country, she and her daughters, growing most of what they needed to eat, using the muscadine grapes to make their own wine to drink, keeping the farm, having supplies they couldn’t grow or make themselves brought in. Joe Jr. had died in World War I, but T.O. frequently brought his children to visit. Despite being off in the backcountry, they seldom wanted for weekly visitors, family of one sort or another from the white side and the colored side both. Going to town usually meant something new and pretty to see, even if Colfax seemed to be shrinking instead of growing. When the sawmill pulled out, the town had gotten a bit of a hangdog temperament to it, as if it knew its best days were behind.
A black squirrel jumped from one tree to the next not far ahead of her, his mouth swollen with nuts. How she still loved her woods, even after all these years, even after most of the virgin pine had been plundered and the sun was free to burn through. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have other places to compare it with, like most of the untraveled country folks around these parts. She had been sent all the way to New Orleans when she was a girl and had learned to read and write in both English and French. She had tasted the city, the real city. Not many in her circle made that claim.
Emily reached the road that could take her to Natchitoches or Montgomery to the north or Colfax to the south. Years ago gangs of men had carved out the ugly thoroughfare, wide and asphalted. It was convenient, no doubt about that. The world had been a smaller place before these things they called progress reached them, steamboats instead of railroads, horses instead of automobiles, but the improvements tended to be hard-edged and drab, one of the worst possible sins in Emily’s book.
She slowed her step and looked in first one direction and then the other. There was no traffic, no other person out walking. The bus line conformed to some sort of schedule, but she knew the bus would show up in its own good time, and all she had to do was wave it down however far she had managed to get along the road. She turned south on the hot asphalt, kept a steady pace until she finally heard the rattle of the bus behin
d her coming along Highway 71.
As always happened when she knew she would be judged by strangers’ eyes, she wished she were taller and more imposing. She was almost five feet, missing the mark by less than an inch. And she still hadn’t managed to tip the scales beyond one hundred pounds. Her waist had thickened with the passage of time, but even without her corset she could have invited an admiring arm around it if she had ever so decided. Her hair was pulled back and up, severely, and arranged in a topknot to keep it off her neck in the heat, but if left free it still hinted at the saucy brown color of her youth. It could reach almost to her waist. Sometimes she washed it just to see her old glory turn dark in her hands again while it was wet, before it dried and turned back to grayish white.
She wished she had on one of her serviceable long-billed bonnets, but she wouldn’t wear them to town anymore since her granddaughter had told her they weren’t fashionable. She wore a smaller bonnet, not as good to keep the sun off, but a pretty little thing. Her feet had spread from a lifetime of work and narrow shoes, but when she bought store-made shoes, she still needed the smallest possible adult size. And seventy-five years old or no seventy-five, she knew the touch of beauty was still with her. The unflawed clear white skin with almost no wrinkles, the sharp but delicate features, the French nose, the beautiful long straight hair with only the insinuation of the natural curl that might start minds thinking about the possibility of café au lait.
The dingy silver country bus distinguished itself from the dust swirls that preceded it, and Emily lifted up her hand in a wave. The driver stopped. It had been over five years since she’d last taken the bus, and it seemed more crowded than she remembered, whites in front, colored in back. She looked carefully at the passengers as she climbed the steps, including the bus driver, and when she didn’t see anyone she recognized, she took her place in front and settled in for the ride, grateful to be off her feet. They were all strangers around her, outsiders who would probably never think to stop at Colfax, passing by on their way to some bigger town. Those who carried on conversation did so in English. It was an annoyance, but switching away from the easy Creole French in her head was one of the prices to pay to go to town.
Cane River Page 38