The Summer We Got Saved

by Pat Cunningham Devoto

  But she wanted him to go on. “We know the place he was buried with all the others,” she said.

  “I showed you the grave my father said he thought he was buried in with all the others.” He picked up his book and opened it to his marked place, thumbing a few pages back to reenter the narrative. “My grandmother always liked to pretend that somehow he got out alive and went to live in Texas.”

  “But we know most likely he didn’t,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, and picked up his ice cream as he began reading.

  She got up off the ottoman and turned to leave. “Now, your Aunt Eugenia, she just forgets. Nothing against her for forgetting, but you won’t, will you?”

  “No, sir. I never would!”

  Back out on the front porch, Eugenia had them all to herself, absent the objections of Mr. Ben and the worry over what Val might think.

  “Negroes have lived too long riding in the back of life’s bus. It’s time we did something about it.”

  “What do you want, Genia, for us to set the whole place on fire? Burn it down and start over? We’re going as fast as we can, and still maintain some kind of sanity,” Charles said.

  And Tom, completely serious, “There aren’t even any buses here in Bainbridge for them to sit in the front of.”

  Charles glanced at Mary and looked to the ceiling.

  Eugenia persisted. “Now, about the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”

  There was silence as each one waited for someone else to do the defending. Finally Miss Hattie spoke up. “That’s a group for colored people, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sending them money. I think we should all send them money.”

  Tom rose halfway up off the glider. “Wait a minute. Are you kidding?”

  “Oh my Lord.” Miss Hattie’s face paled.

  Tab’s mother snickered, then pursed her lips. “Sorry, Genia. I’m not laughing at you, just the thought. Wait till Bainbridge hears this: ‘Hometown girl leads SCLC.’”

  “Eugenia, are you trying to get us all run out of town?” Charles said. “Look, sweetheart, there are limits. We’re doing the best we can, given the circumstances.”

  “Run out of town?” Miss Hattie almost shouted. “Is it that bad? I knew it was a colored group, but is it that bad? What is it full of anarchists, or Communists or something?”

  “It’s not that bad, Mother,” Charles said.

  “What would the summer be like without some cockamamy idea from Eugenia?” Uncle Tom said, and lowered the sports section over his head, preparing for a short snooze.

  “What’s cockamamy?” Tab let the screen door swing shut and walked over to pick up her bowl of melted ice cream.

  From under the sports section, “Your aunt—wants us to take the pledge to disown all our friends and family, burn down the place our fathers and grandfathers sweat blood over. Seems they’re all Simon-pure out in California.”

  “I’ll never disown my family that died for me,” Tab said. “Why would I ever do that?”

  “Tab, nobody that I personally know died for you,” her mother said then, with a quick nod to Miss Hattie, “except for your uncle Arland—in the last war. I know she didn’t mean to be impolite, Eugenia.”

  “Yes they did. Yes they did.” Tab pointed her spoon in Aunt Eugenia’s direction, seeing the swirling smoke, hearing the rounds of howitzers thunder across the fields of Shiloh. “They died. It was a day like today. There was smoke so thick, you couldn’t see in front of you.” She turned to Tina for help. “You know it’s right, Tina.”

  “Egads, Tab. Will you sit down?”

  “No! There was blood everywhere. He was hit in the throat and couldn’t even talk. I won’t forget, even if Yankee Aunt Eugenia does.”

  “Tab.” Her father jerked up out of his chair. “Apologize this instant to your aunt and then go to the kitchen until we’re ready to go home.”

  “Yes, sir.” Tab ran over to the front screen door and pulled it open hard. “I’m sorry, Aunt Eugenia. Please accept my apology.” She swirled and was gone.

  Charles sat back down. “Sorry, Genia. Obviously, Dad has been at his stories again.”

  “Well, they’re true,” Tom said from beneath the newspaper. “Train up a child in the way he should go, or in this case, she should go.” They could all feel him smiling under the pages of the Bainbridge Times.

  This, of course, made it quite obvious to Eugenia that she had arrived for her summer visit just in time.

  CHAPTER 7

  Tuskegee

  REVEREND EARL HAD TURNED on the car radio to get the latest news. “See if anything’s going on we need to know about,” he said. Maudie leaned her head back against the front seat and began to doze.

  Upon entering Tuskegee’s polio clinic, she had been given over to another world. Before this, Maudie had lived most of her life in the outdoors, was used to earth smells and season changes and being surrounded by children and dogs and dirt. At the polio clinic, everything was a pale green and sterile and green again: the walls, the upstairs wards, the downstairs offices, the therapy pool in the basement. Her eyes couldn’t seem to find any variables.

  She had always lived with great swings in color. Huge gray-black thunderclouds rolling up the blue-green of the Tennessee River and, in the fall, shuffling through the woods, ankle-deep in red and yellow and more floating down as she walked. She had always lived in a world that let fly with emotion—yelling at her brothers for some wrongdoing, being hugged by her mother for some right.

  When she entered Tuskegee, she had been on the plump side, a residue of years of corn bread and fried chicken, pigs feet and grits, all seasoned with large portions of lard. She had made most of the meals for her little brothers and had free reign over their woodstove and icebox. Mealtime had been when she had decided that she, and therefore they, felt hungry. On summer mornings, she and her brothers would see their mother off to work and then sit on the front porch of their cabin—situated on one of the dirt roads leading out of Bainbridge—eating cold biscuits and last night’s fried chicken, throwing the leftovers to the dogs, who were coming out from under the porch and stretching for a day’s run with them.

  She had had a friend, a white girl who lived on a paved road near her house. Tab was a few years younger. The summer before she got polio, she and Tab and the brothers had roamed the woods and river together. Once, they had fished the big river and almost been run down by a huge barge. Even as a child she had been, for the most part, free to live as she pleased. Everyone in Bainbridge had known her, chubby and boisterous, bossing the brothers down the street, daring anyone to take advantage of her—of them.

  And then suddenly, her role as caretaker was gone. She couldn’t even care for herself.

  She had been at Tuskegee for several months when she graduated to a wheelchair. One day, she had rolled into the ward and seen all the nurses singing “Happy Birthday” to little Yolanda and holding a cake. Yolanda had seemed pleased and surprised by the sight of the cake, but its presence must have reminded her, and all of them, that she had been in Tuskegee a long, long time.

  “A—whole year?” she said when they had finished singing. “Didn’t—know that. What—that make—Miss Betty?” Nurse Betty ignored the question. She had brought presents: a new toothbrush and a picture postcard of Mississippi. She took tape out of her nurse’s pocket and began taping the postcard to the side of Yolanda’s mirror. “This is the picture of a town square over in Mississippi. See the magnolias in bloom? I know it must remind you of your home.”

  “Didn’t live in no town—lived in—the country.—How many years?”

  Nurse Betty looked over to Nurse Charlotte. “We have been amazed to have you with us—what is it now, Charlotte, over two years?”

  “Around that,” Charlotte said. “I’m not sure how many. Now look at this toothbrush we got for you. It has Donald Duck on the handle.”

  Yolanda gazed at the picture postcard. “Don’t remember—besides—me and
Maudie—when we leave—we gonna have—a house—in California—where the stars stay.”

  “You’ve been telling her that, have you? That someday she’ll leave here?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Got it all planned.” Maudie put her hands behind her head and stared back at Nurse Betty. “Going out to where Doris Day and all them people stay.”

  Yolanda said the first piece of cake after hers should go to Maudie. Nurse Charlotte fed Yolanda a small piece of her cake, but she had trouble swallowing after the first bite. She said she would rather have a drink of Coke instead. After she had a few sips, Nurse Charlotte left to help the other children. Yolanda turned to watch Maudie eating. “You knowed—?”

  “Course I knowed it was your birthday.” Maudie scraped icing off the plate and called to a nurse for another piece. “Course I knowed. What’s you think, Yolanda? Miss Charlotte done told me. Everybody been talking ’bout it.” Maudie finished her second piece and set the plate on her bedside table. “Got me a surprise for you, too.”

  It was late in the evening when Maudie wheeled back into their room, coming to a stop between Macy and Yolanda. There was a noticeable lump in her lap, covered over by her pajama top. “Have to wait ’til all them other peoples gone to give you mine.” Her hands patted her lap. “It’s that good-looking.”

  “Told you—Macy—she’d get—me—a present.”

  Slowly, she lifted up her pajama top. It lay there in her lap, two gold-braided ropes the thickness of her fingers. She raised them slowly, giving high drama to the viewing. Equally gaudy gold tassels were attached to the ends of the braids. “Something I done picked up for you last week at the store, since I knowed your birthday was coming up.”

  Yolanda was at first breathless, letting the iron lung take up the slack. Then she was teary at the sight of such stunning beauty. “Got it at the five-and-dime. Done wheeled all the way into Tuskegee to get it,” she said with only the slightest hesitation.

  “Say she done—wheeled all the way—”

  “I—hear her,” Macy said.

  “Never mind that, y’all. Wait till Macy see how you look with ’em on.” Maudie came closer and pulled up out of her chair, using Yolanda’s lung for support. She began tying the gold braids in her hair, draping the abundant excess artfully over her pillow, letting the tassels come to rest to give the impression of dangling earrings.

  “Course now there’s one thing.” She sat back down to view her handiwork, wheeling around to get a good look through the mirror, noticing that Yolanda seemed thinner in the face. “Can’t wear these ’cept when nobody but us is around. They is a rule Nurse Betty done told me ’bout. No fancy hair ribbons on the iron lung people. Other peoples might get jealous. In the day, I’ll keep ’em under my mattress, outta the way.”

  Yolanda hadn’t heard a word, so enchanted was she with the gorgeous gold braid-laden person in the mirror.

  And after that night, Yolanda would not be denied. “We best pals—like sisters—ain’t we—Maudie?”

  Maudie had glanced at the little bucktoothed smile and turned to look out the window. “What’s you ’spect, Yolanda? I ain’t hardly broke out with friends, lying in this here corner of the room. Can’t even hardly see nobody else. Guess you’ll have to do.” Maudie flattened out her pillow and turned so she could get a better look at the smile. “Well now, listen here, Yolanda. If we sisters, why don’t you get on out of here and go get me a Coca-Cola?”

  Yolanda got so tickled, she couldn’t even pass it on to Macy. And Macy kept saying, “What—so funny.—What—she say?”

  Maudie watched Yolanda laughing when the barrel allowed it, remembering the night she had first seen her, too embarrassed to look at a detached head. Now the barrel, the head, the swishing sounds were all Yolanda.

  Maudie turned to watch Reverend Earl’s profile forward of the darkening scenery rushing past behind him. When she had imagined herself involved in voter registration, she had hoped for Atlanta or Birmingham, leading a new life in the big city. The drawback was that before you were eligible to take part in a voter project, you had to attend a voter workshop up in the mountains of Tennessee.

  It was an obstacle she was determined to overcome, because by this time she had been in and out of the polio clinic for most of four years, enduring weeks of searing hot packs and then months of grueling physical therapy, all in a futile attempt to bring both of her legs back to life. One had responded; the other could not hold its own.

  After a time, she had been allowed to go home and visit her mother and brothers on weekends. The first visit to the little house her mother had rented in Tuskegee had been a disaster. It was full of unknowns; steep steps, and thresholds she tripped over. She didn’t know the town, didn’t know the neighbors. Her mother was working all day as a maid, and her little brothers had gone on with their lives without her. She was seventeen, almost grown. If she didn’t get away soon, she might never leave, might be stuck there for the rest of her life, trapped in some sit-down job at a mill or, worse, sitting on the porch of her mother’s house.

  At first, the church had been lukewarm about letting her go up to the Highlander Folk School, but she had pestered and pestered. Finally, the day had come and six of them from Tuskegee had boarded an old church bus, rumbling along the flatlands and then gradually rising up into the ranges of larger hills that were the beginnings of the Appalachian Mountains.

  She really hadn’t cared about the experience of living with coloreds and whites all mixed together, but it was prerequisite to running a voter-registration citizenship school, so she had pretended great enthusiasm. After two days at Highlander, she had learned her way around and had begun to make friends with her three bunk mates. She had been surprised that she didn’t like the other colored girl, who was always whining about something, but that she had liked the two white girls. She had met Reverend Earl at Highlander. He had been there at the same time. He had spied her on her first day and kept an eye out for her the rest of the time, especially after he had found out that she was born up in his part of Alabama, in Bainbridge, and that she had spent a summer with her aunt up near Crossroads, his community. He hadn’t talked to any others, probably because nobody else had wanted to come to this backwater county. It wasn’t even in the town of Bainbridge, but more like fifteen miles outside of Bainbridge. Nobody cared what happened out here. She knew she was being thrown to the dregs of the movement. Reverend Earl’s voice faded back in to her consciousness.

  “And I know you got more education than most—all them classes you took down at Tuskegee.”

  “Yes, sir. I did,” she said. They were coming up on Crossroads—not a town, just a place for country people to get gas and food.

  “We’ll be there directly,” he said, “if you’re a mind to do any combing and primping.”

  She recognized some few changes: a new advertisement for Camels stuck in the window of the grocery store, a new pump at the gas station, a billboard built on creosote poles carrying a paint-splattered picture of Martin Luther King sitting together with some white people.

  When she was eleven, Maudie and her younger brothers had spent the summer in the country with their aunt Carrie. Then, Crossroads had consisted of a general store, a gas station, and the drive-in movie. The drive-in had been the only form of entertainment anywhere around, and it was only open on weekends. That summer, she had talked the manager into letting her go out among the white folks’ cars and wash windshields for ten cents each before the movie started. At first, it had worked beautifully. She had made good money, and after she finished and the movie started, she and her brothers were allowed to watch the feature film from back behind the last row of white cars, sitting on the split-rail fence that separated the white cars from the colored ones. She could vaguely remember the round-faced fat girl who went from car to car, cajoling people into having their windshields washed. “You ain’t gonna wanta make out the whole time. You gonna wanta watch the movie for a minute or two. Well, ain’t ya?” The whi
te boy sitting on the driver’s side would begin to protest, but she would interrupt. “Don’t have that windshield clear, that girl gonna think you up to no good.” It worked every time. The boys would begin to dig in their pockets. They all knew ten cents was a cheap price to pay for the veneer of good intentions.

  Remembering now, she could feel the light on her face flickering off the big screen as she sat on the fence eating popcorn and drinking Coca-Cola with her little brothers.

  Now in the fading light of the sunset, she looked out at the image in the car’s side mirror. A thin-faced girl with dark watching eyes stared back at her. There was no trace of that other person, the fat, happy one, twisting and shaping life to her satisfaction. She thought not one remnant of that person remained.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Rutland Place

  EIGHTEEN TWENTY, isn’t that how long it’s been in the family? Didn’t we steal it from the Cherokees about that time, or was it the Creeks?”

  “The original government land sale, Eugenia, is up on the wall in the office, as you well know.” Eugenia always felt obliged to go out to the plantation at least once every visit. She had decided to do it early this time and get it over with. They were all in the car, their father driving, Eugenia beside him in the front seat, Tab and Tina in the back. Uncle Val had flown back to California the day before. He had to teach the summer session. Eugenia had decided to stay on for a while. No one knew for how long. It would have been impolite to ask. And on this visit, she had seemed to make sure that both the girls were invited along on her every outing.

  “She’s trying to convert us to being strange, like she is.”

  “She’s trying to be polite, else she wouldn’t invite you along.”