by C. E. Morgan
“Henrietta, this isn’t selfishness—”
“Please don’t go.”
“—it’s survival.”
“Stay,” Henrietta whispered.
Her mother’s eyes bored into her. “Can you even remember the good times?”
Henrietta’s mind fumbled for the right answer.
“See?” came her mother’s strained but triumphant whisper. “Neither can I.”
* * *
“Henrietta!”
“Henrietta!”
He found her slumping down the stairs from the attic, where she’d spent hours curled on an old linen-draped divan, surrounded by the boxed and labeled artifacts of her ancestors’ lives. They stank of mothballs and of lives extinguished.
His grip on her shoulders stopped her short. “Henrietta, have you been in the attic? I’ve been looking everywhere.”
She tried to look him in the face, but it was too much to bear. There was a strange, fresh exuberance there, something overly bright, a mania impelled by grief. It was like a door swinging open wildly on one hinge.
“Mom went away?” was all she could choke out. Downstairs, as if in affirmation, the tall clock chimed for two.
Now, Henrietta, see how you are swept against your father, the air crushed from your lungs? Head torqued to the side, you are confronted with a yellow wall and two portraits of men who bear your noble nose, the fine cut of your cheekbones, your eternal eyes. Every corner of the house is filled with the purpose of your father’s life. Which is … you … or a horse.
“Please make Mom stay,” Henrietta blurted.
“I can’t.” She felt his exhalation on the top of her head.
“Why not?”
It took him an eon to reply. “I take responsibility for this, Henrietta,” and once again with both hands to her shoulders, he drew back to peer into her wrenched face. “In so many respects, I chose poorly. I was so … It reminds me of something my father once said—a damaged beauty is the only kind of beauty capable of gratitude. But when I met your mother, I was too young and easily impressed by her … conformation to really understand the truth in what my father said. To be honest, I probably didn’t believe him.” He laughed wryly. “If I’d been wise like Boone … do you remember me telling you how Boone chose Rebecca?”
Now it was Henrietta who pulled away; she didn’t want a story, a history, a textbook.
Henry hooked a finger under the strong bone of her jaw and raised her chin. “When he decided to court her, he took her out to an orchard, where they could sit in the grass and get to know each other. While they sat there talking, Boone started to toss his knife into the ground, blade first. But this wasn’t just absent-minded fiddling. He was testing Rebecca to see how she would react. Again and again, he drove the knife into the ground closer and closer until it was in the fabric of her skirt and almost slicing her thigh. Rebecca saw what he was doing, but she didn’t run, she didn’t tell him to stop, she never even said a word. And that’s how Boone knew he had found the right woman. A woman who doesn’t flinch is one in a million.”
Henrietta stared straight at the pearl buttons on his shirt, bewildered and barely listening. I am a hybrid seed. A parent form has disappeared from the record. She tried to translate this into a configuration another person would understand. “I want my whole entire family,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
“You and I are family,” Henry said with too much force. “Blood and treasure. Listen to me, Henrietta. I created this world with my own two hands, and I am going to leave it all to you—the acreage, the buildings, the horses, everything. It’s lying in trust for you, because you are my real family. And when you have children, all of this will be theirs in turn. Everything you need is already in this house.” That old music again, his dark, fathomless pupils a spinning record, playing the old refrain, playing It.
“Tell me your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s name,” he said, staring into her eyes.
“Daddy—”
“Tell me.”
“Samuel Forge.”
“Samuel Henry Forge and Edward Cooper Forge and Richmond Cooper Forge and William Iver Forge and Moses Cooper Forge and Jacob Ellison Forge and your grandfather, John Henry Forge, and me, Henry Forge. And now you. You. You—”
“I know,” she said to interrupt him, her mouth trembling. “But I’m a girl.”
“Well, then you won’t be like any other girl,” he said, his voice suddenly sharp. “I won’t let you.”
* * *
She needed a girl to stand behind her in the looking glass, to part her reddish hair down the middle and scrape it over her ears into a bun coiled through with black ribbon and covered with a square of black lace; to ease her grieving limbs into white cotton drawers and a long chemise; to snap her stockings into garters and cinch up a corset until it was too tight for her to draw breath, much less cry; to secure the caging crinoline; to tug over her head a dress of flat black, strangling at the neck but with sleeves like church bells; to slip her feet into black boots so she could totter here and there, tapping out unspoken grief on the plank floors in the long-lost code of broken women; but she didn’t have twenty yards of black Parisian cotton or a veil or a colored girl, and, alas, people would say this wasn’t a death, just a divorce, but they were all mistaken, because it was a difference of degree, not of kind. The pain was almost the same. And because she didn’t have that girl to rail against, to beat about the head and shoulders, because there was no one weaker, she flung her black bonnet against the walls of her mind and clattered about like a drunkard and wailed at the vaporous absent bitches hate sonofabitchspoilevilrottenfuckfuckniggers, because there was no one else around smaller and weaker than she was—
For example:
Class, what is the capital of Kentucky?
Frankfort.
And who works hardest for Kentucky’s economy?
Horses.
And who built our world-famous limestone fences?
Niggers.
Mrs. Garrett, after her face righted itself, spun Henrietta out of the classroom like a top, spun her round so quick she felt bile rising in her throat, standing there unsteady in the nauseating green hallway—green as a swimming pool—her head swooning back against the cool tiles as her teacher towered over her, leaning in so close that Henrietta could smell the tuna from lunch on her breath as she said, “There is only one appropriate word for a black person that begins with an n, and it has one g, not two. Young lady, do you understand what I’m saying?”
“A river in Africa?” the girl said.
Mrs. Garrett just stared at her for a moment with an anger so righteous and consuming, it was almost erotic, peering first into one pupil and then the other, as if trying to discover which eye was the source of this evil. She said, “First of all, the walls were built by Irish stonemasons. Second of all, if I had one black student, I’d be marching you back in there to apologize. But seeing as there are none, I’m sending you home straightaway, because I’ve had enough of your attitude. Believe me when I say that I’ll be speaking with your parents.”
“Incorrect usage,” Henrietta said.
“Excuse me, what did you say?”
“You used the plural instead of the singular. I’ll be speaking to your parents, Mrs. Garrett.” She was spun forthwith to the principal’s office, where her singular was called on the telephone, and then spun again out to the broad concrete steps of the school, where she rested dazed and relieved, like a prisoner suddenly released from years of hard, useless detail. She preferred to sit out here alone. Almost as soon as her mother had left, she’d decided that she would no longer tolerate humans, especially the barely bipedal variety by which she was surrounded: their relentless chatter, the strong smell of their bodies, their dumb games. She classified them far, far down in the family of tailless primates. School had long been a matter of sitting blandly for the duration, eyes locked on the proceedings with your mind flatlined, maybe rereading your
textbooks for typos and collation errors. She’d begun to spend her time in the bathroom, picking at her nails or counting the holes in the pegboard ceiling there. She’d gone so frequently and stayed so long that Mrs. Garrett had finally called the farm with a concern that she needed to be examined. She was sent to a urologist at the University of Kentucky who, after numerous tests and return visits, was the first to simply ask why she went to the bathroom so often, to which she replied, “To be by myself.”
“Right, but you’re peeing a lot,” he said.
“No.”
“You’re not urinating?”
“No.”
“You’re going to the bathroom to be alone, but not to urinate?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus!” he’d snapped, and dropped his clipboard down on the examining table beside her, then rubbed his eyes for a long while without bothering to take his glasses off. “This is why I’m not a pediatrician,” he said through his hands. “I don’t speak childese.”
“Me neither,” she said. He took his hands away from his eyes and looked at her in consternation, and then, fifteen minutes later, her father was driving her home along Richmond Road, saying, “I don’t understand what just happened here,” and Henrietta said, “I don’t want to talk anymore.”
Now she sat very still on the school steps, motionless as a dial casting time’s shadow. She was waiting for her remaining parent, her immediate genetic antecedent, the Forge who had forged her, but it was old Barlow who showed up in one of the rattling farm trucks—a white 250 with a toolbox in the bed, shedding farm chaff in a swarm as it braked before her. Barlow reached over and popped open the passenger door, his wizened face etched with concern.
“You sick, honeypie? Your daddy sent me up to fetch you.”
Henrietta just shook her head and crawled up beside him as he lit a cigarette and pulled out of the school’s drive. They were silent as they passed the glassed storefronts of Paris, the antebellum homes with American flags snapping smartly from porch roofs. Through the glass of the windshield, through the bitter brown lacework of the trees, the sun meted out an autumnal afternoon, weakening even as they watched.
She turned to Barlow. “Who built the stone fences?”
“Boy, um … the Irish, maybe? I think I heard that before.”
“Are you Irish?” she said.
“I don’t really know, darlin’, I’m just a country mutt.”
As they passed the courthouse, on the other side of the road, the familiar sight of three old black men on rickety metal chairs. They sat there every day shaded by their Kangol caps, cigars and folded newspapers in hand, paling of white hair on their cheeks. One glanced at her briefly as she passed, but in another instant, the dark round of his face was gone.
She turned a speculative and careful eye on Barlow. “Did you know n-i-g-g-e-r is a bad word?” she asked.
“You ever hear me say it?” said Barlow.
“No.”
“There you go. Guess I knew it then.”
“Yeah, but who decided that?” she pressed.
“God did…,” he said, flipping his cigarette butt out his open window. “God hath made of one blood all peoples of the earth.”
“There are four different kinds of blood,” she said. “It’s a medical fact.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that.”
She expected no further response, and she didn’t get one. Barlow just nodded with a considering face and drove easily beside her. He was a man who had stayed married forty years and raised four bullheaded boys by holding tight the gunnels and steadying the boat. He was content with his holdings and not inclined to fight.
They drove for a time behind a truck loaded with tawny, bundled tobacco, the cured and withered leaves making small, abrupt motions in the breeze like yellow hands waving. The flatbed turned into the low redbrick tobacco warehouse on East Main, where Henrietta could see, stacked and heaped in golden sheaves, the harvest prepared for auction. The dead plants were even more beautiful than plants in the field—crisp, sculptural, turned by curing to the brown of baked bread. For the first time in weeks, something stirred in her as she gazed at what had to be tobacco’s heaven.
“Why don’t we grow any tobacco?” she asked.
“Kinda slow out of the starting gate,” was Barlow’s dry reply as he rooted around in his breast pocket for another cigarette. As always, he got the small smile he was aiming for. But then Henrietta shifted wearily and Barlow turned to her and said, “You wanna tell old Barlow what happened at school today?” but she just shook her head, staring out the window.
As they pulled into their own drive, she said, “I hate school.” She stomped once on her book bag, where it lay in a heap on the floorboard of the truck, and she crossed her arms. Acid tears smarted her eyes.
Barlow cocked his head and said, “I liked it so much I stayed all the way to the eighth grade. Come on.” He eased out of the truck, careful on his feet, which were arthritic, a far cry from the day he first went to work on a farm as a spry ten-year-old boy Friday. But Henrietta remained where she was, watching him with a sullen expression. Barlow circled around to her side of the truck, unlatched her door, and drew it wide.
“Come on, honeypie,” he said.
“Carry me,” she said sullenly, laying her head back in a faint manner on the headrest.
“Huh—do what?” An eyebrow cocked with amusement.
“Carry me.”
“You’re too heavy—why, you’re practically a grown woman!” He laughed.
“I’m nine.”
“Well.”
“Carry me.” She pulled herself up by the plastic ceiling handle and stood balancing on her toes on the side of the runner, her face turned down to his, because he wasn’t very tall. “Come on,” she whined softly, and he made a mock roll of his eyes and shook his head, but said, “Fetch your satchel then.” She yanked it up in one hand, and Barlow gripped her under her skinny knees and shoulders and raised her up. She was lighter than a newborn foal. Henrietta wrapped her arms around his neck and laid her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. The expression of spoiled petulance on her face settled into something like sadness. She jostled against his chest with each step, and her book bag struck him lightly on the back a few times before she let it drop to the ground behind him. He didn’t notice. He just said, “You are one funny valentine.”
* * *
Of course Henry fielded the phone call, and of course it flung him into a rage, and of course his daughter came home with a hangdog droop and eyes like dull brads. What rage it aroused in him! This was his child—his child—the fruit of his loins, the hope of his age, the apple of his eye, and his own. She’d never been as much child as other children were, already possessed of a natural disregard. There was something aristocratic about her, and since her mother’s departure, she’d become even chillier and less soft. She broke the mold, and Henry knew it. She didn’t like the commonality of school, she didn’t like to mix. Her spirit didn’t rhyme with the spirit of lesser animals.
Hadn’t his own education, prior to his tutoring, been a waste? Even at Sewanee, he’d had to fight for the relevance of his education to his true life as a horseman. Formal education had always seemed a war of attrition designed to starve him of his own history and bring his culture to its knees. But the farm was a whole round world, and Henrietta was a product of that world—she’d one day take ownership of it. It was his bounden duty to reverse the effects of her miseducation.
He placed a hand on each slumping shoulder and said, “Look at me, Henrietta.” He noted the wrinkle of worry between her red brows, the lashes made by tears into little black spikes. He said, “Were they very hard on you today?”
She nodded once.
“Tell me who built our fences,” he said.
“What?”
“You heard me. Who built the stone fences?”
“The … Irish?”
“No, goddammit, our slaves. The impolite
, inconvenient truth, but there it is.”
“I said a bad word.”
“You got a bad education! Consider yourself withdrawn.”
She reared back. “What?”
“Henrietta, you’ve suffered the misfortune of being born into an age of political correctness, when a polite lie is the truth, and the truth is anathema. The simple reality is what no one dares to say: Blacks are inferior and it’s always been that way. It’s a genetic reality. People police words to avoid grappling with reality.”
“Daddy, I don’t think—”
“Henrietta, listen to me. Consider this your first
Lesson
Is a horse a blank slate? Is each animal sprung from the forehead of Zeus? Is a foal a patented invention? No, the horse is a house we build from the finest materials of the previous generations. How can we accomplish this with any reliability? Because biology is destiny, that’s why. Gold from gold, and brass from brass. Secretariat wasn’t born from a hack and a knacker; he was from Bold Ruler out of Somethingroyal, winning horses from long and respectable lines. Secretariat never had the option to be slow. Speed and stamina are heritable. The animal bred true.
Oh, I can see the objection in your eyes that a horse isn’t a human. Fine. But the human is just as subject to his biology by fate. Now, I’m not going to bore you with the histories of the polygenists and craniometrists, but I will tell you that Morton’s skulls are a fact; the White brain is bigger than the Black brain. This should appeal to your little scientific mind. Just as musical skill and athletic prowess are inheritable, so is intelligence. How could it be otherwise? The average African IQ is 70; the average White is 100. And that’s a fact even the Marxists can’t avoid! You can find exceptions, but the exceptions don’t disprove the rule. And how did racial difference develop in the first place? Think about it, Henrietta. The human populations that headed north contended with difficult weather and living conditions that demanded the development of higher intelligence and organized societies in order to survive. Those left near the equator could get away with investing no attention in their innumerable children, and ignoring social development. The laxity of the elements created a species of indolence, and what no one will say out loud is that Blacks were decreed different by nature. The ascendance of certain races is, in fact, proof of the wisdom of nature. You don’t have to be a madman to acknowledge the obvious.