I have heard some of the old folks say that the Wickhams didn’t whip their slaves as badly as some of the owners and overseers on surrounding plantations did theirs. But I’ve heard others say they were just as mean, that it was always six on one hand and half a dozen on the other. I remember my granny telling stories about Wickham and the other white bosses chasing and molesting or raping the black women and girls. And how her mother stood up to them. And how my great-great-great-, great-great-, and great-grandmothers stood up to them and tricked them to avoid being raped. Sometimes they called out to one of the other slaves, as if they needed help with something, when the bosses grabbed them. Or they acted like they were “crazy,” and made jokes about poisoning them. The bosses were afraid of “crazy” slave women.
When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, the Wickhams kept most of the slaves on as domestics or field hands. They kept the kingdom we had built and gave us nothing. They were never sorry. They never believed they had done anything wrong. To us, that was the essence of whiteness. The freed slaves moved across the border of the plantation, out of bondage, to “Canaan’s Hill,” and bought small acres of land and settled. My great-great-great-granddaddy gave it that name. You’ve heard this story. Some fled North and some stayed on. As far as freedom went, they had the freedom to leave, penniless, broken, uneducated, and alone. Or to stay and keep working on the plantation.
I grew up watching the descendants of the slave owners pass by daily on the road that led out of the plantation, going to and from town. Sometimes they would wave at us. We’d wave back. Hi, slave owners. The road was hard dirt and bald in spots that glistened in the sun like foreheads. There were dips and potholes in spots. When it was dry, the dust from car tires followed cars like trains of smoke. The dust got on everything. The shrubs along the road. On our skin. On hard surfaces of wood and glass in the house. Down our throats. The road was like a tunnel below archways of tall trees. Fields of soybeans or corn ran along one side, most of the way from Route 54 to our house. Woods ran along the other side, and then a neighbor’s house, woods, and fields.
I walked by run-down slave quarters. I heard stories all the time about slavery. It was just yesterday. My daddy’s daddy worked in Wickham’s dairy. My daddy’s mama worked in the big house. She gathered eggs. Churned butter. Made biscuits. Cleaned floors. Did laundry. She cooked in a big iron skillet. My granny’s mama worked in the big house. Her husband worked in the fields. I heard stories about my cousins and uncles and aunts and grandmothers and grandfathers and things that happened on the plantation. I saw their spirits all the time. Walking in the yard. Sitting under the elm tree. Sometimes I would go and sit with them, to feel their quietness. It was like falling into a soft blanket. Into the space where no one blinked, no one breathed.
When I was five, I would fall sometimes when I felt lashes sting my back. I’d be chasing a ball my brother threw or running in high grass, for a moment starting to feel happy, to believe in happiness. But suddenly a lash would cut me across my back. I would lie facedown in grass or dirt, in a yard I didn’t recognize, screaming. Daddy or someone else would take me into the house and lay me in the bed. I felt safe in Daddy’s arms at times like that. I could feel his love in the way his palm curved under me and almost levitated me. People sometimes carry love in their palms. Sometimes they carry anger. Mama and Granny would boil water in an old blackened iron kettle, pour it into a basin, and dip a washcloth in, wring it out, and gently wash over the welts that had mysteriously appeared on my back. Still, today, I am comforted by the sound of water dripping from a washcloth as someone wrings it out. I often stand at the sink, wringing.
Not long after I was born, my daddy built a house across the yard from Granny’s, and we moved out of the trailer. Our house was a make-do affair, patched up as crises demanded. My daddy built it as best he could with the little bit of wood that he could accumulate. Some two-by-fours and a lot of plywood. His brother, Uncle Matt, helped some with the roof. Both of them were good carpenters, but they had limited resources. The house was added to when the seams were about to burst. The roof of our house often leaked, and the siding was torn. Nothing was finished or straight. We had fans in the sticky hot summers and an old wood stove in the cold winters. Ours was not so different than other little houses of poor people you would see if you drove through the rural South in the 1950s, or even now, in many places.
My family included my mama and daddy and six kids—my older brother Richard, (three years older than me), my younger brother Levi (two years younger than me), my sister Thelma (a year younger than me), and Jean (five years younger than me). In the beginning, the kids shared one room and two beds. Later on there was one room for the boys and another for the girls. The sixth child, Angie, was born fourteen years after Jean. By then my daddy and my older brother were gone. Daddy had left shortly after Mama became pregnant with Angie. He was busy having other families, who he stayed with until the kids were preteens and then left them and started up again with another woman.
For all of its shortcomings, our house may as well have been a mansion. It sat near Providence Road, once known as Hickory Hill Road, atop Canaan’s Hill, where a bloody Civil War battle was rumored to have occurred and where one of the many headless horsemen who haunted the countryside was supposed to still ride on full-moon nights, searching for his head. Our house was pulled in four directions. It was pulled up the road, which led to the town, commerce, “progress,” impending integration, technology, and the rest of the world. It was pulled down the road, which led back to slavery and the heart of the plantation. And it was pulled across the road, in both directions, to cousins and more cousins, the souls of ancestors, to different sets of paternal and maternal longings. You might say we sat at the crossroads, waiting for the devil to come, struggling to know what we would do with our souls when the critical moment came.
Daddy used to tell us stories about the devil and the crossroads. Often on Saturday morning in the summertime he would take us bright and early into the woods to pick blackberries. It was earlier than the sun wanted to rise, when there was still dew covering the grass and leaves, and giant black-and-yellow-striped spiders sat in the center of large dew-beaded webs. We’d bring buckets of berries back, hands painted purple, and Mama would fry them up and put them over waffles, alongside salt fish or bacon or sausage from the smokehouse.
“If you want to learn how to play the guitar,” Daddy would say when we’d walk by this particular juncture heading toward the Wickham big house, “just come to the crossroads at sunrise. The devil will meet you here. And he’ll offer to buy your soul. If you sell it to him, he’ll give you the gift, and you’ll be able to make that guitar cry and sing. Now, sometimes he won’t take no for an answer, and he’ll follow you, promising you all sorts of things. Money, nice clothes, women. If that happens, they say, you should keep repeating, ‘What in the name of the Lord God do you want?’ They say evil can’t stand to hear the name of the Lord. He’ll have to leave you alone then.”
But it wasn’t just a story. It was a warning that everything comes with a price. It meant that those who had things (mainly white people) had traded in their souls. It meant the only road off the plantation was to bargain with the devil. As I was to learn later, the devil couldn’t care less about how many times you call on the name of the Lord.
My granny’s house sat farther back from the road and was not as fractured as my family’s. It was an older two-story house, built in the days following the end of slavery, and it was the nicest house built on Canaan’s Hill. Among other things, we were a family of artisans, and it was taken for granted that we would just know how to do basic things like carpentry. After all, we were the labor that built the “master’s” houses and the other buildings on the plantation, that did most of the ironwork, the stonework and masonry, and the landscaping. We held generous visions of houses and yards.
Granny’s house had a good-size living room with a sofa, chairs, tables, and corner stan
ds with glass ornaments. It had a large bedroom downstairs, also with vintage furniture. It had a big kitchen and a formal dining room with a well preserved, oak China press, and an oak table and chairs with barley-twist-style legs. It had tongue-and-groove wood floors. It had a bathroom, but without running water, and two bedrooms upstairs. Our granddaddy’s musket sat in a corner of the dining room, and a sheathed military sword sat in another. One of my favorite places in Granny’s house was the large pantry under the stairs. Stocked with jars of canned foods, it was always cool and smelled like pinewood and peaches, and white potatoes, onions, furniture oil, and canned grape jelly and plums.
The jars of jam sang and talked to me. They mesmerized me with the colors of their light. I spent hours with the pantry door closed, listening to them, watching them, being soothed. One of my favorite things to do was to watch flecks of dust floating in streaks of light or sunshine. They seemed so magical and so hypnotic. Sometimes I would close my eyelashes just a little and make everything rainbows. In the pantry, light came through the cracks in the door. The door was made of vertical rows of boards, painted light yellow on the outside, like washed-out mustard, like saffron or daffodils mixed with cream.
With the light on, I could lose myself for hours to the flecks of dust or rainbows on my eyelashes. Or I could reach up and tug on the string that turned the light off, curl up on the floor, and lose myself in just listening. To the floor creak. To water laughing in a pipe. To the jars singing.
A large arbor encased in wisteria vines the size of anacondas hovered over the pathway leading to the front porch, which ran the length of Granny’s house. There were benches built in on either side beneath the arbor, and sometimes we sat or played there. The wisteria sprouted long, fuzzy green pods that were fascinating to touch and play with. Sometimes spirits could also be seen playing there. Mainly though they gathered in Granny’s house.
In Granny’s house I learned the footsteps of spirits, their pulses, their heat. How they come and go between dimensions. How to be possessed by them. How to feel their joy and sorrow. How they travel through light. I learned by watching them walk to and fro in dispossessed dimensions.
As children, we were frightened by the footsteps, hot spots, and occasional objects moving without visible explanation. At first I ran in fear. The sound of dimensions colliding, one erupting into another, was terrifying. Sometimes there was an awful smell when spirits came, although it was often sweet. It smelled like the earth at the roots of morning glory. But it was mixed with something like the sickening pollen that sumac spewed, or the nauseating, dense steam of boiled roots of sassafras. As I grew older, I grew more accustomed to the spirits, less afraid. I spent a lot of time in Granny’s house, which was a gateway between centuries, a vortex for moving back and forth between worlds. It was not quite in the nineteenth century but not quite in the twentieth either.
Besides the spirits, there were also the unexplainable lights. We saw them with our other eyes, looking away. We felt them with the hairs on our skin. No one knew what to call them or what they were about. I remember hearing words like “guardians.” Like “angels.” I was drawn to the sudden doors out of which they came and through which they disappeared. I was struck by how the openings and closings of those doors changed time, stripped it of any weight. When the lights moved toward the portals, glowed brightly, and disappeared, I followed them. Sometimes I sensed them leaving, even if I wasn’t in the room. I was led by aromas of burnt rosewood and the oil people used to tan leather with. I stood at the doorways, sometimes for hours, peering in. Sometimes, inserting a foot, a finger. Listening to a faint whirring sound. Feeling a wind on my skin as if I was standing at the end of a tunnel, a hallway. Listening to nothing.
One of the treats of childhood was spending the night at Granny’s house. Granny was born on April 20, 1898. She was old when I was a child. But she wasn’t old to me. Sometimes I thought of Granny as my best friend. Before we were born, she lived in her house with her husband (Walter, “Unc Wa Wa”), her sister (Marie, “Aun ’Ree”), her children (Grandma Arlene and Douglass), her grandchildren, and other people whose names I don’t remember. But Douglass died as a young man from TB, Wa Wa died, Aun ’Ree married and moved into Ashland, Grandma Arlene left and went to New York to find better and to be in the city life, and only Mama was left. Then Mama got married and built a house across the yard.
So, well before we came, Granny had lived alone. She made her own meals, did her own laundry, cleaned, kept her own flowerbeds and vegetables, climbed ladders and picked fruit from trees, baked the rolls for church communion, and occasionally did ironing or other work for white people. I remember her “putting down” rolls on Saturday evenings. Kneading the sweet-smelling dough and molding perfect, rounded rolls on baking pans, her hands and fingers coated in dough and oil and sifted flour. She was transfixed as she worked. She would cover them with light dish towels overnight while they rose, like living things, and put them into the oven first thing Sunday morning.
I remember Granny humming as she made dinner. Boiled rice and chicken feet. Biscuits and gravy. The tin saucepan and the iron skillet she cooked in. The clicking of the knob on the old white porcelain gas stove. The slight hissing, and then the whoosh of blue flames. Sometimes I got lost in the blue flames. Just watching them, I would forget everything else. I was always forgetting everything else. Granny would squeeze my shoulder gently to bring me back. Or she would start talking to me until gradually I could refocus and hear her. Then she would go back to cooking and start singing an old spiritual or hymn. At the end of a line she would take a deep breath, inhale the words back into her mouth, and then exhale them for the next line. Granny’s breath was my heartbeat.
I felt special those nights, apart from the busyness and brightness of my family’s house.
I remember sometimes lying awake in bed while Granny hummed and did things in the kitchen. Sometimes I fell asleep before she came to bed. I remember sometimes in the night trying not to be afraid as invisible footsteps approached, stopped, and were silent for what seemed like long periods while Granny talked to them. But they never left with footsteps. They simply turned and vanished into the dark. Sometimes I heard the sounds of someone sitting in a chair or coming down the stairs. Sometimes I thought I smelled them, the strange scent of moldy and foreign times and places. The sweat of slavery. The burnt stench of gunpowder from the Civil War. Pig musk. Hickory.
Images of Granny’s reactions remain, burned into me, like sodium burned into a photograph. Especially if it was Walter, the great-granddaddy we never knew. He once held my older brother, Richard, in his arms, but he was gone by the time I got here. I never touched him. He died of lung disease. We saw a sepia-colored photo of him, in an army uniform, and another photo of him and Granny when they were very young. He was tall and handsome, and everyone said he was very kind. When he came, Granny would whisper inaudibly, her eyes fixed on something that I could feel but could not see. Her face reminded me of times when a joy would erupt from her as she sat and hummed, rocking on the porch or in the living room, clapping her hands suddenly and vibrating with something like electricity. Granny would say “Gone on to sleep” when she realized that I had been watching, peering from beneath covers I had pulled over my head, entranced by the curve of the rocker, by the squeaking song it kept singing.
Growing Up with the Spirits
Can’t live by bread alone.
Both my mama and granny “saw things,” and I inherited their gift. The gift was handed down on my mother’s side. In the DNA, I guess. It helped us survive in slavery. To know things. To know what we needed to know but were never told. It helped us learn to read, to read all things. To know when someone would be sold, when someone else would be coming. To know what people wanted before they started talking. Before they even got to our house. To know yesterday, when the thought first lighted on them, like a sparrow on a branch. To visit those far away and never leave home. Mama and Granny often shared their dre
ams, especially dreams about things to come. The evenings were filled with talk about such dreams.
“Lord, I dreamt about cousin so and so last night,” Granny would say. “Looks like she was wearing a red dress and was walking in a wedding. I was trying to get in speech of her, but every time I got close, she was somewhere else. I caught up with her finally, and she had these terrible bags under her eyes. Lord, Jean, looked like they were black, just as black as soot. Like someone who hadn’t been sleeping, or had been cryin’. And then she said, ‘Clara, it’s such a beautiful wedding, isn’t it? Now, at last I can rest.’” I seldom knew the people they were talking about, but I listened closely. I listened for some intangible essence of those people whose faces I would probably never see.
Sometimes they would describe people and tell stories about them. “They’re just coming to check on us,” they would say, or “I think so and so was trying to bring us a message.” Maybe they were just missing us. Maybe they were stranded on islands of loneliness. The stories I heard were filled with insights about human nature, with laughter and warmth. The sounds of Granny and Mama telling those stories opened invisible windows and doors, and winds blew through the windows from other dimensions, bringing strange, sweet, and musky scents and making my skin tingle. Bodies without bodies walked through the doors, touching things, stirring the air and the dust.
Sometimes after having dreams, Mama and Granny would plan a trip to visit the person in the dream, and they would take me along. I never really wanted to go and stand by the side of elderly people, being a part of their aging, illnesses, or dying. Their houses smelled funny, and I felt so out of place. I would have to be afloat because there was nothing I could touch. Old dark wood. Smelly linoleum that touched me through my shoes and spewed mold into my lungs and dampness in the space around my bones. Soiled curtains that tinted the little light that came through with phlegm. To help, I’d carry a favorite rock or a piece of bark in my pocket. The whole time I was away from home I would never let go of it. I’d be rubbing it and squeezing it, and I would be more with my bark than with the people. Why me? I would wonder. The rocks and bark would answer, moving in my fingers like little secret children.
The Secret Life of a Black Aspie Page 3