by Lewis Shiner
She noticed him the first time he came into the room. He’d been in the Army, she found out later, making him older and more experienced than most of the other men there. He was handsome, not in a movie star way, but in a way that had to do with crinkled eyes and a strong nose that wasn’t ashamed of itself, with a mouth that slipped into a smile every time it wasn’t doing anything else. He was tall and carried a strength in him that was more than muscular.
He danced the way he did everything else. What he wanted wasn’t complicated, and he was completely clear about communicating it. She loved dancing with him because she never had to think. One move followed the next inevitably. It was what she had always imagined it would be like to dance with her father, if her father had danced.
She found herself telling her father about him before Robert had even asked for a date. Her father particularly liked the idea that he was studying to be a highway engineer.
“This Interstate Highway business of Eisenhower’s,” her father said. “It’s going to completely change this country. Once this gets started, it can’t ever stop. The more highways we get, the more we’ll need. Highways will decide what towns prosper and what towns die, the way the railroads used to. They’ll decide where people live and work, not the other way around. This man Cooper is getting in on the ground floor. That’s a smart place to be.”
Robert had impressed her father without even meeting him. That made Ruth take note. For the next dance she bought a new dress, tight, black, and low-cut, unlike anything she had ever worn before. Her hands trembled at the sight of herself in the mirror. When Robert saw her, his mouth opened and no words came out. That night he came to her for dance after dance, and afterwards he walked her to her dorm and invited her to dinner the following night.
A month later Robert was still wavering, so Ruth brought him home to the farm. Her father was eager to meet him, not put off that Robert’s family had been in service. This was America, where a man was what he made of himself. Some of the Vanderbilts’ breeding had rubbed off on Robert, and his courtly manner charmed Ruth’s mother and put her father on his best behavior. Even Greg got drawn in, asking question after question about Germany.
After Ruth showed Robert to her old room and left him with a lingering kiss, she went downstairs to ask her father what he thought. He nodded once, closing his eyes, and that was good enough for Ruth. She did what she had to do to make sure Robert wouldn’t slip away. And if it was a sin, she was doubly damned for the thrill she took in it.
*
No one knew how much money Wilmer Bynum had. He didn’t trust banks, and Ruth heard stories about her father having bags of cash squirreled away all across Johnston County. He never spent much himself, and he made all his investments through third parties.
Like Randy Fogg.
The weekend after she’d brought Robert home she was back at the farm without him. Her father was celebrating the ACC tournament with a barbeque, though Duke had failed to make the finals. Fogg was there, partaking a bit too heavily of the white lightning that made its way around the party in unlabeled Mason jars.
Toward sundown Ruth had been sitting on the swings, talking to two Duke players, when Fogg wandered by, sweating and unsteady. The players soon excused themselves, stranding her with him.
“I don’t know that I ever properly thanked you for introducing me to your father,” Fogg said. He sat heavily in the swing next to hers. “It is truly an honor to know him.”
“Glad I was able to help,” Ruth said, staring straight ahead at a flock of starlings, noisily swarming from one tree to another and back again.
“And I’m grateful I’ve been able to help him in one or two small ways myself.”
“Is that so?”
“Just this afternoon I became the owner of a hundred acres of land near the Raleigh airport. In name only, of course. And last year I bought a piece of a car dealership and the year before that I started a young engineer in his own business. Your daddy has trusted me with a sizable amount of money, no doubt about it.”
That was how her father worked. He put nothing on paper and left everything to his memory and character judgment. Character being a virtue subject to many different definitions. Her father’s character, if you believed the same people who talked about bags of cash, did not balk at harlotry. Many of the women were supposed to be Negroes, and her father’s business associates had the run of them.
“I think maybe my father would not appreciate your discussing his business in public,” Ruth said.
“This isn’t public,” Fogg said. “And he can’t object to my letting his favorite little girl know what a fine man he is.”
“And by extension what a fine, trustworthy man you are yourself?”
“Why, I would never say that.”
“Neither would I,” Ruth said with a big, bright smile that blinded him to the cut. “Shall we return to the party, Mr. Fogg?”
That Sunday evening, before leaving for Raleigh, she found her father in his study. “Daddy? Is it true you bought part of an engineering company?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Your friend Randy Fogg was in his cups and trying to impress me.”
“Was he, now. Did he say or do anything improper?”
Her father hadn’t moved, but she suddenly had his acute attention. She was tempted to make up a story and see what might result; though Fogg had done nothing, his desire was plain enough. She would never lie to her father, though, and he had told her many times that Fogg was part of his plans, that he would be carrying the good fight to Washington someday.
“No, Daddy. He was just bragging.”
“Well, I’ll soon cure him of that.”
“You didn’t say if it was true or not.”
“And if it is?”
“Robert’s going to graduate in May.”
Her father laughed. “I wish I’d had a son with your instincts. Don’t worry about Robert. He’ll have his part in this.”
“Is he going to be one of your angels, Daddy?”
“I don’t really see him as angel material, honey. But he too will serve.”
*
Greg Vaughan was 11 that year, five foot ten and 120 pounds. Ruth couldn’t tease a smile out of him. He was at the age of taking himself too seriously, and his feelings for her had clearly become more complicated. He had affected a thrift-store version of her father’s style of dress: worn blue jeans, western shirts with pearl snaps, pointy-toed cowboy boots. If he had friends, he never mentioned them and she never saw them.
Her father’s loves were Greg’s. He had memorized the entire history of Duke basketball, including players’ names and statistics. He had a basketball goal on a wooden post near the swing set, and sometimes she would hear him there for hours at a time on weekends, the ball pinging against the hard-packed dirt and banging against the backboard.
Her father had also given him his own acre of land to tend, and Greg had planted it in tobacco, cotton, and peanuts, a miniature of the Bynum farm. He knew more about farming than the NC State agriculture students she’d met at Meredith mixers. If her father had let him, he would have quit school and farmed full-time.
And Wilmer Bynum’s enemies were Greg’s enemies. Greg talked not just about “the niggers,” but used the rest of the vocabulary that went with it: “northern agitators,” “pinko liberals,” “communist miscegenation conspiracy.” His wholeheartedness was not deterred by the fact that he could barely get his mouth around half the words.
It was the part of her father that she was least comfortable with. It didn’t fit well with the man she knew to be strong, loving, and generous. Still, as the world came to a boil in the late 1950s, that side of him increasingly began to dominate.
The Northern courts had banned segregation in 1954; the decision had made little difference at first. A few Negroes tried to get their children into white schools, and there had been a sit-in at the Royal Ice Cream parlor in Durham in 1957 where the participa
nts had quietly been taken away to jail.
Then in February of 1960, four Negroes in Greensboro insisted on being served at a Woolworth’s, and within a few months the lunch counters at dime stores in Raleigh and Durham were having to close. There were picket lines, lawsuits, sit-ins, and demonstrations. The television was full of angry people shouting and throwing things.
Ruth, not entirely sure where she stood on integration, did not see how such behavior made things better for anyone.
“We worked hard for everything we’ve got,” Ruth’s father said. “Certain elements think they should have everything for nothing. Well, that’s not the way this country works.” He was never angry, never impatient, just smiled and went to work.
With his friends and supporters, he got the job done. If a boycott forced a department store to hire a black salesclerk, two months later that salesclerk would be in the basement cleaning toilets. If demonstrators forced a lunch counter to seat Negroes, those Negroes would arrive a week later to find all the seats taken out.
For Greg it was not enough. Those who made trouble should answer for it, he told Ruth, fists tight in front of him, so skinny he could barely stand up to a strong breeze. Ruth respected his inflated sense of dignity too much to laugh at him the way some of the men did, calling him “Cassius Clay” after the Negro Olympic boxer and braggart, which never failed to put Greg into a rage.
Ruth worried that unless he found a way to let off steam, he was going to get into serious trouble. She tried to encourage his dreams of playing basketball for Duke, sometimes sitting on the swings and watching him practice. Though she was not a sports fan herself, she could see that he needed to play with other boys instead of practicing alone. When she tried to talk to him about it, Greg insisted that he didn’t need anyone. Ruth could not make him see otherwise; he was a very hard, very angry little boy.
*
As for her own life, Ruth could not imagine a better one. Two hundred people came to her wedding: politicians, sports figures, church deacons. She also brought in members of Raleigh and Durham society that she had met either on the dance floor or at the bridge table. Only the absence of her sisters cast a shadow, and that was a small one.
When the want ad appeared for an engineer for Mitch Antree’s company, Ruth showed Robert the paper. She waited out his insistence that he needed to work for the state and let him realize for himself the potential benefits. And she made sure he applied, all without him seeing her father’s hand in it. With that good job in his pocket, they moved into a perfect little house in Durham with grass and trees and a garden and a country club down the street.
The first hint of the trouble that lay ahead came when Robert went to work in Hayti. When he told her of the plans to clear the slum, she remembered a conversation she hadn’t thought of in years, that she’d been too young to understand properly at the time.
She’d been in junior high, playing with one of the dogs by the tractor shed, when she’d heard voices inside. It was her father and another man, a man she didn’t know except that he was rich and from Durham and on some Council or Committee or something like that. The man was saying, “—ever actually been there? They dress up in suits and ties and drive new model cars. They got their own businesses and go to the picture show and eat ice cream. It’s like watching that chimpanzee on the Today show, all dressed up, you know what I mean? It ain’t natural somehow.”
“We’ve had our eye on Hayti for some time,” her father said.
“No offense, but I think it’s time you had more than your eye on it. Right there in the shadow of downtown. People coming in on the train have to look out on their little jungle main street.”
Her father seemed to be thinking over his next words carefully. “You will not have to worry about Hayti much longer.”
“What exactly do you mean, not worry about it? Could you be a little more specific? Because I have other people to answer to, you understand.”
Her father was silent an even longer time, and then he said, “We will wipe out the businesses. We will level the buildings. We will flatten the houses and trees, we will plow it under and we will sow the earth with salt.” His voice was calm and quiet in a way Ruth had learned not to provoke. “Do you think that will be good enough for the people you answer to?”
“Yes, sir,” the man said. There was nervous laughter in his voice. “I would say that was more than good enough. Yes, sir.”
Ruth had already begun to move away, and broke into a run as soon as she thought it was safe. She did not want her father to find her eavesdropping when he was in that kind of mood. At the time she didn’t know what Hayti was, only knew she never wanted to go there, never wanted to pass close by. A wrath was going to descend there like it did on Sodom and Gomorrah, and she hoped she would be far away when it happened.
Now Robert was the reluctant hand of that wrath. She knew it didn’t sit well on him, and she wished she could ease his mind. It wasn’t like there was another way for this to turn out. Durham needed the highway so people could get to the new business park. The city would die without it. The highway was going to displace somebody, anywhere you put it. It only made sense that it was poor people that had to move. It would cost a hundred times more to buy up rich people’s houses.
They told Robert a new, better Hayti would rise from the ruins, and he wanted to believe it. Ruth let him, and never said a word about her father’s prophecy. Between the word of Mitch Antree and the word of Wilmer Bynum, she knew which would prevail.
*
Though the number of Ruth’s mother’s years would eventually prove to be two more than her allotted threescore and ten, she came from a time when that was a rarity. People didn’t expect all of their children to grow to adulthood, and adulthood itself was precarious, what with farm accidents, poor nutrition, and epidemics like the Spanish Flu that killed both her own parents in 1919.
She raised Ruth with the attitude that adulthood was a brass ring to grab as soon as you had the chance and hold onto for dear life. Once you had it, all the emotional upheavals, the games and preening, late nights and jealousies of youth were no more appealing than the strained prunes you ate as a baby.
Robert, however, seemed unready to put aside childish things. He still preferred the Lindy Hop to the foxtrot, even at the cost of his dignity. He wanted to listen to his jazz records rather than adult music. And he would rather sleep in on Sunday than go to church.
Even so, Ruth was devastated when she found out he was having an affair.
They’d been married little more than three years. They’d had their ups and downs like all couples did; sadly, Robert’s reaction to any sort of trouble was to run away, stay out all night dancing like a college boy, and leave his sweaty, perfume-tainted clothes for her to wash.
Of all the possibilities he must surely have had, he had chosen Cindy Berkshire, as close to a harlot as Willowhaven Country Club had to offer. She didn’t have Ruth’s looks, manners, or bearing. All she had, apparently, was a willingness to satisfy Robert’s physical appetites, which were far greater than Ruth had ever bargained for.
Bad enough for Ruth to walk into the club and hear the silence fall like a blanket over the dining room. Bad enough that she had to endure Cindy Berkshire’s feigned friendship, a brazen attempt to cover her sin. Bad enough that she would come home from church and Sunday dinner with her parents to find him listless and red-eyed from his indulgence.
No, what really stung was the pain of betrayal. Robert was her reason for living, the only man other than her father that she had ever truly loved.
Through that fall and winter and spring, Ruth gained a new appreciation for her mother’s strength. Men were, as her father had always said, part angel and part animal. What Ruth now saw was that women were merely human, and they were the ones left to clean up after the animal and the angel both.
*
It was hard to describe 1966 and 1967 to anyone who wasn’t there. It was like a nightmare she’d had as a
child, where she would find herself on stage in an absurd and complex play whose script she had never seen. Once she thought she’d seen and heard everything, some new audacity would spring up where she least expected it. Men with hair to their waists, women in see-through blouses. Negroes with berets and guns making obscene threats. Music that was no more than howling and screaming, sexual jokes on TV, magazines glorifying illegal drugs. Riots in ghettos all summer long, body counts from Southeast Asia climbing ever higher, antiwar and civil rights protests in every city in the country.
Her father showed the strain as well. “It’s war,” he said on a Sunday morning in June of 1967. He threw the newspaper he’d been reading in the middle of the dining room table, barely missing a platter of poached eggs. “Loving, can you believe it? Loving v. Virginia.”
“Daddy, what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the Northern Supreme Court saying that interracial marriage—miscegenation—is perfectly fine. That not Virginia, or North Carolina, or anybody can pass a law against it.” He didn’t usually talk about such matters with her, let alone at table. He seemed too exhausted to contain himself, worn down by a world careening out of control.
“You’d think,” he said, “that they would be able to see the obvious. The more they hand over to them, the more they want. Johnson gives them the Civil Rights Act, and they disrupt the Democratic Convention. So he gives them the Voting Rights Act and the very next day, in gratitude, they burn down half of Los Angeles. So he gives them Affirmative Action, and they start the Black Panthers. Now they’ve as much as said that any black man can do anything he wants to any white woman, and we’re just supposed to stand to one side and watch.”
“Daddy, I can’t believe they said that.”
“You don’t think so?” His voice had quieted below the level where it was safe to talk to him, so Ruth didn’t answer. “You wait. You wait and see what happens next.”
He pushed his chair back and went around the corner to his study. The door clicked shut in the otherwise perfect silence.