I took my EZ-on-the-Eyes notebook out of my pocketbook and flipped past the list of clothes I’d wanted to buy and the books I’d wanted to read and the boys I’d wanted to like me (I’d have to add Davis) until I found a blank sheet, and handed the notebook over.
Mother scribbled. “What’s this say?”
“Let me see,” Nattie said, grabbing it first. She scanned the words. “Gibberish.”
I peered over her shoulder. Mother had written: Th KKK cn hld mtngs hr fr prptty.
“The Ku Klux Klan can hold meetings here for . . . pretty? For property?” I said. I’d heard more about the Klan—and what Mr. Hank called its riffraff ways, against not only Negroes but Jews and homosexuals—than I’d ever heard in the North.
“Perpetuity,” Mother said. “The Klan considers the mountain sacred ground. But that’s not my point at the moment. My point is: Leave out the vowels and you’ll write fast as a fox.”
“You know what else has no vowels?” Nattie said. “The Torah.”
I remembered that—the rabbi taught us that the Hebrew letters were the word’s body and the vowels were its soul. The reader had to add the vowels, the soul, to breathe life into every word.
“You always teach me something new.” Mother gave Nattie’s braid a tug.
As Mother started taking her vowel-less notes, I found myself twisting around in my chair to check the Stn Mntn summit for any inkling of crosses. Some of the trees tapered at the top in a way that made me think of pointy hoods, and I wondered if Davis, Mr. Naturalist, would know the species. I tried to imagine the summit dotted with actual white hoods poking up like bleached thorns.
I rubbed my arms, feeling those thorns poking right up through my skin.
A string quartet struck up something string-y, and a line of bridesmaids in sky-blue dresses walked down the aisle partnered with guys in gray suits. Later, one of the bridesmaids, who had on enough hair spray to asphyxiate the bridal party, told me the bride’s dress had seventy-seven buttons.
The musicians started up the wedding march, and the bride entered on the arm of her father. Her dress was an organza (not organdy) tea-length number with a sweetheart neckline and a short-sleeved organza jacket with a dramatic collar. Said another way: swthrt nck wth orgnz jckt.
The bride looked twenty, tops—about the same age as Sara, though there was no evidence Sara was of the marrying mind. Still, the back of Seventeen and Mademoiselle were filled with ads for china and silver patterns—Fontaine had been asking which ones I liked; “A girl should know her own taste,” she’d said—and it gave me a fizzy feeling in my throat to see this organza girl and think she could be Sara or, someday, me.
“Who gives this bride in marriage?” the minister asked.
“Her father does,” the man said. He placed a delicate kiss atop the bride’s veil.
I reached out for Nattie’s hand, and I saw she was holding her breath something fierce, her cheeks puffed out, her eyes fluttery.
“You want to take a walk?” I whispered, and she exhaled. “Or should we wait until they kiss—the bride and the boy?”
“Kiss?” she said. “Ew, let’s go now.”
Mother gave us permission with a nod.
We didn’t have the right shoes for an actual walk, so we headed under the low canopy of a tree that might have been a willow. I held back a branch, delicate and swoopy, so Nattie could cross under, and we stood together amid leaves and tall grasses that left little bits of dew on our dresses.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Look at that.” Nattie pointed to a small brass plaque nailed into the tree, listing the mountain’s height and such. “No one would ever see that hiding here.”
I picked a leaf from the tree and started shredding it into skinny green matchsticks. “Why do you hold your breath?”
She shrugged, copying the wording of the plaque exactly on one of her index cards: “The carvings on Stone Mountain are three times as big as Mount Rushmore. On a clear day, you can see more than forty-five miles from the top of the mountain.”
“Don’t stop breathing, okay?” I said.
“That’s what happened to Dad.” Her fingers were inky. “He stopped breathing.”
My eyes instantly welled up. “He did.”
She nodded, slowly at first and then sort of frantically.
We stood together in the shelter of the willow, or whatever it was, watching the leaves sway, hiding us, then not-hiding us, then hiding us.
By the time we wound our way back to the roses, the ceremony was over, and the bride and groom were smiling for photos. The bride’s gown had collected twigs in its hem.
Mother was still scribbling. “Let’s see what you girls got,” she said, and we handed over our notes. She scanned quickly, a pencil behind her ear keeping company with a pearl earring that must have been Fontaine’s. “Good, good.”
“Dad won’t be here to walk any of us to our weddings.” Nattie held on to her braid.
Maybe Mother teared up, or maybe the sun was in her eyes. “I’ll be there.” She said it right away. “I’ll walk each of you down every single aisle we find.”
Nattie leaned into Mother the way Frooshka leaned into me.
Mother looped one arm around Nattie and scribbled away with the other. “That’s the other reason I wanted you to see this place.”
“Because you needed to cry?” Nattie asked.
“I cry every day, Natalie. No, I wanted you to see the beauty side by side with ugliness. If one of these nights you see a flicker on this mountain—not that you could really see it from Atlanta, but putting that aside for the moment—you need to know that along with organdy and happiness, there’s a hatred we can’t look away from. Two years ago, thirty-five hundred Knights of the Ku Klux Klan stood on this mountain, lit three large crosses, and declared that being white—not Negro, not Jewish—made you as solid as Stone Mountain.”
That sent a chill straight down my throat. “Can we go to the top?” I asked, shading my eyes and looking up. “Is there a trail?”
Mother put down her notebook. “There used to be, on the other side. I’d sometimes climb here with girlfriends on a sunny afternoon.”
“Did it seem strange?” I asked. “To hike among the half-carved Confederates?”
“We didn’t give it a second thought. But we’re not exactly dressed for an expedition today.”
You’d think I would have cared about that, but what I cared about was seeing the spot where the hate happened.
Back in the parking lot, we dropped our pocketbooks in the Savoy and found a wooden sign carved with yellow letters for the Walk-Up Trail—one mile to the summit.
We climbed single file—Nattie, then me, then Mother. The ascent was gentle to start, skipping over smooth stones, but the trail soon turned heart-thumpy. The ground was strewn with rocks, with tall grasses, their roots forced up through the stone, and with little yellow daisies that were impossible not to love. It was hard to keep our footing, Nattie in her slick-soled Mary Janes, and Mother and me in low-heeled pumps. I tried to imagine hauling a pine cross and a jug of kerosene up this path. I tried to imagine hating someone enough to strike a match.
Nattie hummed a ditty over and over and over, and Mother was silent for what must’ve been twenty minutes.
At the top, there were giant depressions in the stone, little ponds filled with water, filled with life, filled with shrimp—of all things to be filled with. The rest of the summit was moonlike. There were no signs of burnings. Maybe the ash had floated off the mountain into the ether of constellations.
Maybe, but I couldn’t really tell because it was foggy at the top. We stayed a few minutes, then reversed ourselves, silently sliding back to the security of the Savoy.
In the car, we took off our shoes; Mother drove back stocking-footed.
She filed the story f
rom home, banging away on her Underwood portable typewriter, the carriage dinging every time she got to the end of a line, announcing her progress. My seventy-seven-buttons detail led off the piece, and Mother worked in Nattie’s best fact—about how very far you could see from the top of the mountain. Even though that day the promised view was nowhere in sight.
10
Lemonade with Communist Overtones
Just before four that same day, I headed to the main house and pulled Fontaine’s trick—knocking and walking right in—ready to learn the fine art of writing a regret.
“Hey there, sugar—in here,” Fontaine called from the garden room. She was straightening a pile of stationery at her writing desk, its leather surface the color of an avocado. While the guesthouse was light and white and spongy with carpet, the main house was shade and shadow and hardwood. “Sit,” she commanded, and I thought of Frooshka, who was in the backyard with Mr. Hank. “The point of a regret is to make the hostess sad you are unable to attend—so sad she’ll keep you on the list for next time.”
“I don’t need to say the reason, right?” I had checked the pink booklet.
“Nope. It’s always—always—about next time. Keep that in mind.” Fontaine tapped her forehead.
I hadn’t told Fontaine why I needed to decline the Eleets’ next T&E meeting, but I assumed she knew—knew about Mother and the rabbi and his cause. Fontaine had a way of knowing things without anything being said. There was a lot of unsaidness in the air. Maybe it had something to do with the air-conditioning, which was groaning in the late-day heat. Maybe the air chiller, as Fontaine called it, took all the hot air molecules and made them more agreeable, rounding the hard edges off the truth.
I pulled a petite wooden chair alongside Fontaine. In the center of her desk, next to a cup of fountain pens, she had a stack of thick note cards with a leaf motif. I ran my finger over the leaf, feeling its ridges.
“That’s engraved, as proper stationery should be,” Fontaine said. “Use your best cursive and don’t crowd your letters together.”
I took a fountain pen in hand and wrote:
Dear Mrs. Eleet,
Thank you for your invitation for Tea and Etiquette on the tenth.
Fontaine took the card out of my hands and ripped it down the middle. “No one likes a girl with bad handwriting. And never start with ‘thank you.’ Totally unoriginal, and we both know you are an original, Ruthie.”
I tried again, concentrating on the down stroke of each letter, imagining Fontaine was my third-grade teacher who’d made me stay inside from recess one day and write an entire page of capital Q’s. I would use no capital Q here, that was for sure.
Dear Mrs. Eleet,
How kind of you to invite me for Tea and Etiquette on the tenth.
Fontaine tucked my second attempt away. “Why don’t you try to work in the word ‘generous’—everyone likes to be thought of as generous. And create some enthusiasm.”
I took a third card, lamenting that Fontaine seemed to have an endless supply.
Dear Mrs. Eleet,
How I wish I could attend the etiquette dinner on Thursday. I am certain it will be a delightful evening of conversation and education, and I only hope you can forgive my absence. I thank you for your generosity.
“Lovely,” Fontaine said. “And by the by, Millie may be the T and E chair, but real southern tradition is passed down generation to generation. We have five generations in the ground here. There’s nothing Millie Eleet can teach that I can’t tell you better myself. As a for-instance, if you’re wondering about the placement of an oyster fork, it goes to the right of the spoons.”
“I’ve never had an oyster,” I said. I didn’t add: Oysters aren’t kosher. Though Dad had been known to order a BLT once in a blue moon.
“You will. No doubt you will have an oyster, and soon. Millie Eleet can help with that kind of minutia. But opening your world like an oyster? That’s my job.” Fontaine smiled so genuinely. “And I relish it.”
I picked at a thread on my skirt. “I learned velvet has a season, and this is not it.”
“Clear as a bell. Here’s a less obvious one: Don’t serve pink lemonade. It has communist overtones.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Only a very little bit.” Fontaine smiled. “Let’s have a nip of Dubonnet. It’s not a bad thing to learn to sip in the privacy of your own home.” She went to a side table, where two small glasses were already set out. “Or mine.”
“Did someone tell you about the Southern Comf—”
“Of course. Whatever your question, the answer is of course. Of course someone told me.”
We both laughed, and the Teletype rang out—three dings, not a big story—like it was in on the joke. She poured us each a thimbleful of liquor from a deep-green bottle.
“To you, dear Ruth.” Fontaine downed the drink in a long sip and poured another.
“And to you, Fontaine,” I said, taking a minuscule swallow.
Fontaine was three thimbles in when she said, “You’re a Landry, even though you’re masquerading as a Robb. Your father, the bighearted Arthur Robb, was a good man—yes, he was. I’m sorry he’s gone, but I’m happy you’re here.” She clinked her empty glass into my full one.
And I felt both, side by side—sorry to be here and happy to be here.
“We will meet again for Dubonnet and Landry family lessons. In the meantime, you walk your note over to Mrs. E. Off you go. And take that dog of yours.”
Frooshka was sprawled out poolside. The whole scene—the pair of chaises, the pitcher of (not-pink) lemonade, the striped umbrella—was perfection, as if it had been lifted from a photo of a vacation the Robb family had never actually taken.
Mr. Hank sat in the shade, his glasses pushed down his nose, a stack of Teletype bulletins at his side, his cane at his feet.
“How’d Stone Mountain strike you?” he asked. Before I could answer, he said, “Scratch that. Let me ask you—how many Negroes did you go to school with in New York?”
“I was going to say strange—for Stone Mountain. But for Negroes—a few.” Our school integrated before I started kindergarten, long before it was law.
“Don’t think the South has a monopoly on racism.”
“I don’t.” But a clang in my chest made me think maybe I did.
“Still, no two ways around it, it’s worse here.” He lit up a cigar. I half gagged.
“The Supreme Court ruling a few years back to desegregate—Brown versus Board of Ed in ’54? People called it a day of mourning.”
“Not Mother and Dad—they went to a party to celebrate.”
He blew out a puff of smoke. “I wrote an editorial praising the decision. Got invited to a few less golf games, not that I’m a fan of golf. The kicker was a good one.”
“The kicker? Are we talking football now?”
Mr. Hank laughed, but in a not-mean way. “At a paper, the kicker is the last line of a piece—the one that kicks the reader in the teeth. The one they’ll remember.”
“Oh.” I thought not for the first time that Dad, with his word-li-ness, would have made a great reporter. “Do you remember it, your kicker?”
“Course. I spent an hour on it.” He cleared his throat and recited: “ ‘There’s a new math in town—separate is no longer equal, and we must right our wrongs, rumor by rumor, school by school.’ ”
“That’s good—the ‘rumor by rumor.’ ”
“I thought so. But you know how our neighbors here responded? Our neighbors who favor ‘gradualism’—gradually bringing the races together over God knows how many years? Our neighbors . . .” He brandished his cigar in the direction of the magnolias. I followed the lit end and saw nothing but loveliness—the flowers, the pool, the sky. “They built a pernicious academy—a private academy—that didn’t have to follow the federal law.”<
br />
“You mean Covenant?”
He nodded. “It’s not the only one, but—”
“Then why send us there?”
The smell of Mr. Hank’s cigar mixed with something too ripe in the garden. It settled into a sour taste in my throat.
“It’s hard to argue with Fontaine.” He swung his cigar this way and that. “And the truth is, we’re a long way from integration. You know, the University of Georgia, our own UGA, doesn’t accept Negro students? I hear there’s a plan afoot to offer scholarships to send them out of state.”
“Fontaine says there are Jews at Covenant, but I haven’t met any.” I wasn’t going out of my way, of course.
He shrugged. “The whole integration climate inflames the Klan. There was a time the Klan had local politicians and businessmen as members—not that I agreed with them then either, not that I’d ever agree with a white Christian supremacist organization. But now? Now it’s riffraff and more riffraff. Couple months ago, a Klansman in Marietta announced he couldn’t decide if he wanted to blow up a Negro house or kill a Jew.”
I snapped a leash on Frooshka, not feeling so great about going to a school built solely for segregation. I ruffled Froo’s crazy-curly hair, not so very different from mine. “The poodle—the Jew-dle—and I will be back.”
“That right there,” Mr. Hank said, finally stubbing out his cigar, “is a damn fine kicker.”
The heat radiated up around Frooshka and me as we strolled to the Eleets’. I was in my knock-around clothes—an old bandana-print skirt an inch (or two) too short, a white blouse tied at the waist, and tennies. There was no one else out and about, just the distant sound of a lawn mower as we turned the corner to West Paces and then Arden.
I was about to slip the don’t-start-with-thank-you note in the mailbox when Gracie yelled “Say hey” from the columned porch.
Froo dragged me up the steps, and I saw Gracie wasn’t alone. Sprawled on the wicker chairs were Davis and Buck in red Covenant T-shirts and shorts.
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