by Rhonda Riley
Addie’s hands made me look at the world anew, to study surfaces and textures I might otherwise have ignored. This was not simply a lover’s envy of objects touched by the loved one. My eyes lingered on after her touch, curious as to what she had just understood. I saw in her a lack of inhibition, a possible way of being that I could never have learned in my Baptist family. As she touched the world, her hands seemed to be inviting me to do the same. She, who had so recently needed my help crossing the floor, now gave the world back to me in subtle and profound ways.
A Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin said that “the self is the gift of the other.” It seems to me most true now. The genes I carry, the clothes I wear, the food I eat all have come through the hands of others. Even these words I write now, my vocabulary, are not only mine. They are an agreement, a social contract between the two of us.
I did not see this when I was a young woman. I was so sure, even as I held my hands out to Addie and took all she gave, that I was self-made, an individual before all else. And there she was, so unlike any of us, the only truly unique person I have known, pulling her identity straight from the flesh of others.
She seemed eager to absorb everything around her. She read voraciously, her arms loaded with books when we came back from the library. I preferred stories, my favorite that year was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. We read it out loud to each other at night. But her curiosity roamed beyond novels: biographies, science, history, even fairy tales. Her focus settled for a while on religion. She worked her way through the Clarion library’s slender religion section.
I’d made her promise not to ask anyone else about church or Jesus, so she leveled all of her Sunday questions at me: If God is omnipotent and good, why is there suffering? If there is only one God, why did we worship the Holy Trinity?
I gave her everything I had, repeating what the preachers had told me about life and sin until everything I’d been taught sounded strange even to me. More and more, I saw my people as an outsider would. Church was becoming an obligation, something I did only to belong, which, of course, was exactly what it had been for her all along. I’d never truly believed, but I’d always felt that one day I might. Addie’s questions seemed to preclude that possibility for me. I wasn’t going to see the light or be saved.
Her questions often popped up on Sunday walks from the farm to join my family in church. One Sunday, during our trek into Clarion, her questions about God were particularly exasperating. I literally threw my hands up in the air. “Addie, I don’t know where God came from. Or if He really exists. But evil people exist. And we all die. We need some way to explain. Otherwise, it makes no sense. And some people would go crazy if they didn’t have God or Jesus. Or, for that matter, sin.” The next question crossed her face and I added, “No, I won’t go crazy. But this is where I live. This is what people think.”
The church bulletin that day requested our dimes and dollars for a new campaign to save the poor souls of New Guinea. Addie tapped the photo of smiling native children, then whispered, “If they’re already good, happy people when the missionaries get there, how do the missionaries convince them that they’re sinful and need Jesus to save them?”
I had no response.
Addie leaned her head toward me as we slipped into our pew. “Do you think I need to be saved?”
“No!” I whispered and grasped her arm. “No.” A hot anger bolted up my chest.
A bitter sadness gnawed at me all through the sermon. The preacher’s focus was original sin and God cursing Eve with the sorrow of childbearing. Each time I glanced at Addie, I remembered her arrival. No hair, no breasts. Not like me. Not like us. Just that gaze. Wide-open, intelligent, and curious. Unsullied by guilt or sin.
On our walk home, she issued a declaration rather than a query. “They’re wrong. Childbearing is not a sorrow like the Bible says or a curse like the preacher claims. I’ve seen how your momma looks at you sometimes—how other mothers look at their children. It’s not a curse. Not a sorrow.”
I nodded my agreement and began to cry. I don’t know who I cried for—the cursed mothers or all the innocent children taught they are sinful wretches.
That evening, Addie took my hand and led me outside. She made me lie down at the edge of the fields recently shorn of their hay and alfalfa. A single oak branch stretched out over us. Beyond it, the sky was clear deep cobalt and spread with endless points of light. Hobo lay down at our feet.
Addie stretched out beside me. “Nobody agrees or really knows. The Catholics and Jews believe, just like the Baptists and the Methodists, but they don’t know anything for sure, either. They all—you all—seem to need to believe in something. You have to have a story.”
I didn’t like it when she talked like that, setting herself apart. I thought of how tenuous her presence was and how she might slip away as inexplicably as she had appeared.
“I’ve been reading about the Milky Way, too.” She swept her arm in an arc over our heads, then patted the ground between us. “This is all we really know.” Her voice resonated with urgency and calm. “It is a mystery, but it’s beautiful, Evelyn. And it is all we need. All we are.” She held up a fistful of dirt and let it fall between her fingers.
A breeze passed over, filled with the cool promise of rain.
I knew she spoke the truth. She brushed her dirty fingers over my lips, transferring the primal grit to my tongue.
She may have become like me physically, but I was, in my own curious way, becoming like her.
There was one other thing I couldn’t begin to explain to Addie: “Whites only.” Clarion was completely segregated in 1948. Except for the women who came into town to work as maids and the men who picked up the mill workers’ kitchen slops for hog feed, the only time Addie and I were around black people was at Pearl Freedman’s barbeque shack. Hers was the only business in town that served both black and white people. Her barbeque ribs and pulled pork were the best in the county. Her place near downtown, corrugated tin on top and three sides, was dark and hot year round and filled with a distinct blend of sweat, spices, and wood smoke. If the wind blew right, folks would be salivating in the post office as they bought stamps.
When Joe and I were kids, Momma often sent us over to Pearl’s to pick up dinner. I loved the tart, hot ribs, but Pearl scared me. She stood over six feet tall with arms like hams and breasts larger than my head. Pearl was very dark-skinned, and in the dimness of her shack, her features were difficult to pin down.
She’d flash a big smile at us as she handed over the warm ribs wrapped in wax paper and then folded into sheets of newspaper, and boom, “You enjoy, now. I hope Lily Mae sends you back real soon.” Her accent wasn’t the same as the other black people. Some said she was Gullah and a “conjure” woman. She’d take our money and retrieve the change from a cloth bag stored deep in her cleavage, dropping the warm, moist coins into our small, open palms.
Pearl’s only child, Peg, was close to my age, a tall girl but, unlike her momma, slender in the waist and hips. She hunched her shoulders forward and slunk everywhere, like a cat that had been kicked and was trying to avoid the next foot.
One Saturday, Addie and I were downtown, a quiet still time in the middle of a hot summer afternoon. We’d picked out a yellow gingham at Ina’s shop for kitchen curtains. While Addie paid, I stepped outside. Peg walked by, clutching a shopping bag to her chest.
“Good morning,” I said.
Peg smiled, almost too fast to see, and then returned her gaze to the sidewalk. I remembered her grin from when we were little girls, each peeking out from behind our momma’s skirts. She had not been shy then. Her gaze was direct, her smile quick and wide.
Addie joined me and we headed toward home. The street was empty except for us and Peg about half a block ahead. Addie watched her carefully.
“If she had been the one to find me, I would look like her,” she said.
My skin prickled in the heat, and a wave of dizziness rolled over me. What would it be
like to be able to say that about anyone you passed on the street? I looked at Addie and tried to imagine her different, my features gone from her and Peg’s emerging from the muddy new surface of her.
A car pulled up suddenly at the next intersection, John Thompson at the wheel. John’s family lived outside of town in a little house surrounded by bored hound dogs and dying cars. He hated “Yankees and niggers,” as though it was the only occupation a man needed, the kind of vehement racism that allowed the rest of us to feel noble in our more genteel and subtle racism.
The hood of his car stopped directly in front of Peg, cutting off her path. His hand darted out, grabbing at Peg, who flinched, wrenching her arm out of his grasp, then scurried around the back of his car and continued rapidly down the street.
John turned right, following her. “I’m gonna come get me some more of that dark meat, girl. You watch out,” he called. He sped up to the red light and braked with a short screech. She sidled on, her shoulders bunched forward, her head low.
“Hold this.” Addie handed me the bag of curtain cloth, then jogged ahead to John’s car. She slapped the top of it to get his attention. Before John could turn to her, she bent over and whispered something in his ear. Just as the light changed to green, his head jerked to the side and his shoulder came up as if he had been tickled. He floored it then, and his daddy’s old Ford sped across the intersection and straight into a telephone pole in the middle of the next block.
Ahead of us, Peg looked from Addie to the car, her eyes wide. Addie and I rushed to the car. His hand dangled out the window. His head hung over the steering wheel and rested against the bloody, smashed windshield. A single line of blood rolled out of his left ear and down his neck. Then the streets filled with people.
After the ambulance had taken John away, I asked Addie what she had said to him. “I told him I didn’t like what he said.”
Later, at home, as we chopped cabbage to make sauerkraut, I asked, “Did you know that he would do that?”
“No. I just wanted him to leave her alone.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t trying to make him do anything. I didn’t mean for him to get hurt, but I don’t regret trying to keep him from her. He’s not a decent man.”
“Did you use your other voice when you spoke to him?”
“Not the way I do with you at night. Not the lower voice I use to calm Darling. But what I said to him came from the same place.” She pressed her fist to her breastbone. Then she scooped the cabbage shreds up and dropped them into the wide measuring bowl.
The next time we went to Pearl’s for barbeque, she waved our money away. “My Peg says you were a help to her. Today, your ribs are on the house—Pearl’s house.” Peg stepped out from a dark corner of the shack and smiled shyly.
Addie’s hand disappeared in Pearl’s grip. “Thank you, ma’am. We’ll relish our supper.” Then Peg delicately shook her hand.
After that, when we passed Peg on the street, she would say, “Hey, Miss Addie.”
“Hey, Miss Peg,” Addie would respond.
From the day of his accident, John Thompson was deaf in his left ear, and never again held a job. He spent the rest of his life harmlessly wandering around town collecting bottles for the penny deposit. I never heard of him harming or insulting anyone after his accident. The old men who hung around downtown, outside the drugstore, let him sit in on their conversations and laugh at their jokes.
Because everyone knows everyone else in a small town, there can be an appreciable acceptance for human idiosyncrasies, for the accidents of the body and heart. Privacy was limited in Clarion and most of us assumed we would live and die close to where we were born. By our mid-twenties, we knew a great deal about each other. Knowledge accumulated over decades of church bulletins, brief exchanges on the street, and casual observation. Faces filled with health and hope or fell into the stupor of love or work or misfortune. We watched each other grow older, our gaits and wardrobes reflecting both age and fortune. And we knew that we were known by others as we knew them. All of this made for a kind of quiet personal tolerance—but only for the accidents and stupidities that we or our children might fall prey to. Acceptance of those who were clearly different was another thing entirely. Race mattered more than anything. Racism is the laziest hatred. The quickest, most peripheral glance is all it takes to categorize.
Other than what happened with John Thompson, Addie and I lived on the farm without incident. By the end of our second harvest together, I had been on the farm over four years. She quieted my restlessness. I no longer imagined myself wandering off into the woods. She drew me into the world of Clarion. Certainly, I would not have gone to Freddie and Marge’s on Sunday evenings without her.
So we lived our daily lives, each being who we were, identical and vastly different. Working together during the day and tangled in each other at night. I felt sinful, but uncertain which was the greater of my sins—lying about Addie or lying with her.
Secrecy might seem to be the ultimate privacy, but in truth it is the antithesis of privacy. A social solitude. Secrets are only necessary when others are present. I was more alone in my secrecy than I had ever been in my actual solitude.
Despite the tensions of secrecy, the time with Addie had a kind of peace to it, an exciting tranquility, like stillness of the first snow—clear, fresh, and new. Only later would I realize how fortunate I was to have that time between being the daughter of my parents and becoming the parent of my daughters.
Still, from the moment I bundled the seemingly formless Addie and carried her in from the cold, I had sensed a tidal wave in the distance, something large approaching, just outside my peripheral vision, impossible to really see but coming nonetheless, large and unstoppable. All I could do was wait, hoping I would hear the far-off rumble of it as it came into sight, hoping that, by then, I would know how to swim or surrender.
My brother, Joe, married his sweetheart, Mary, in the spring of 1949. They had known each other most of their lives—probably knew each other a little too well late that winter of ’48–’49. Their engagement was suspiciously short. At the wedding, Mary cradled a large bouquet of yellow roses at her waist. Joe seemed stunned and not nearly old enough to be doing what he was doing, but happy.
Everyone teased me for letting my little brother beat me to the altar. I reminded folks that he was barely a younger brother, more like a delayed twin, the two of us being born in the same year, me in the first weeks of it, him in the last. That was one race I didn’t mind losing.
Yet the boys were interested—in both of us—and most often approached us in pairs, walking us home from Momma’s or church or inviting us on double dates. But there was no one in particular that either one of us wanted to keep seeing. The men who fought in the war were either shell-shocked or they had an unsettling urgency about them. The boys who had been too young to go to war or had not made it to the action, seemed naive, more boy than man.
All of them took Addie’s direct gaze as an invitation. But they were like house cats stalking a wild turkey, confident and focused at first, then shying away as they got closer and saw that she was not the jay or wren their instincts and abilities were prepared for.
Once some mill-village boys borrowed an old car and drove me and Addie west for a picnic, a rare midday Sunday excursion outside the county and Addie’s first time in the mountains. I saw one of the boys kiss Addie. The heat of jealousy bolted up my gut through my chest and coiled there painfully for the day. That was all that happened, as far as I knew, and Addie seemed no different. New mountain landscape seemed to impress her much more than the kiss did.
Months later, Baby Bud, the first grandchild in the family, arrived only seven months after Joe and Mary’s wedding. Babies often came early then and were, without the benefit of medical intervention, miraculously healthy and well-formed in their premature state.
Thanksgiving dinner at Momma’s house was Baby Bud’s big debut. When I passed through on my way to the bathroom, I found Mary sitt
ing on the bed, her back to the door as she nursed Bud.
“Come here, Evelyn.” She patted the bed. Little Bud had just finished feeding, his eyes rolled back, and his full lips parted, showing the small nursing blister. Mary was still exposed, her big pink nipple flattened and wet.
“Look at him. It’s like there’s a sleeping potion in my milk,” she whispered. “He does this every time, passes right out. Here, hold him. You’re the only one who hasn’t yet. Go on, he won’t bite.”
He felt surprisingly light and warm in my hands. He sighed and squirmed. I felt the strength of his tiny body and, when he yawned, smelled his milky breath. Mary got herself back into her blouse. I stared at Bud, lifting his little fist with my finger, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“You want one,” Addie whispered so close I could feel her breath on my cheek.
She was right. I did want one. Like all girls then, I assumed I would have children one day. I naturally imagined myself married and with kids. It was not something I’d ever questioned. I had never felt the physical urge to have a baby, the way I had felt an urge toward Cole, toward the land I lived on, or toward Addie herself. But I felt it then, holding Bud, touching that perfect soft skin and breathing in the moist sweetness of him.
“You’ll need a man first,” Mary said. “Both of you.”
“We’ll get one then,” Addie whispered back, sitting down beside us.
Mary pulled Bud’s little sprouts of hair up into a peak with her fingers. “Better get two. You two can’t share everything.”
Little Bud wiggled again, pulled himself into a ball, turned red, and audibly shit. I felt the force of it in my hand and half-expected that he had gone through his diaper, the gown, and the blankets. Mary looked at my face and laughed. Bud woke. Calm and wide-eyed, he stared up at us.
For days after, Addie was quiet and subdued, often taking long rides alone. She spent a Sunday afternoon at Cole’s house learning how to drive. Then she somehow talked his momma into letting her borrow the family’s old Ford truck the next weekend. She told me she was going “up into the mountains” as if she was doing more than changing geography. And she was going alone. She packed an old pup tent borrowed from Joe and two days’ worth of food. When I saw her fold the tent and put it in the back of the truck, anxiety snaked through my gut. I waited until she came back outside with blankets, the same ones I had first wrapped her in two years before.