Gabe, who tells me at curbside check-in that he may try for an accounting position at Fingerhut, a company that sells women’s clothing patterns throughout the Midwest. Gabe, who I wish I could tell, before he departs this less than clean Nissan, that Tommy, he never leaves the house to do errands without his laptop, not anymore. Gabe, who makes me think:
Why are we put here if not to live in torment?
Who makes me wonder: How can our gods bear to watch us do it?
God, up there in the Sunroom, the Universe Room. God, up there on the Bridge. God, just a kid in wayfarer sandals who likes it dirty. A horny kid in front of a blurry screen, aiming His viewfinder down at us ants.
Gabe, who makes me want to cry out to whoever’s in charge, like Isaiah did or something, with a voice lifted up to every mountain rough place, across every fertile valley and desert highway, every scarred, uneven plain, to the east and to the west, to starboard, port and aft, up and down this barren concourse of strangers.
And consider: every ticketed passenger dragging a secret suitcase, each daughter of Egypt and son of Israel traveling first-class, business, or otherwise. Calling all of them by name: every lifestyle enthusiast and compulsive masturbator.
I am Begging. Please.
Mon dieu. Dios mío.
To the Chief of Operations. The One who has measured the waters and marked off the heavens, supposedly, with the hollow of His fucking hand.
Won’t somebody, somewhere. Someone human, anywhere?
Won’t some person who is not already married or dying ever love this naked Gabe?
Carolyn Ferrell
From Wanda Farrelly-Johnson. Are We God’s Children of Ham? And Other Dilemmas of Black Historical Research (Pilot, N.C.: Lizard Ladies Press, 1983):
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my professors, Dr. Diana Aminata-Peterson and Dr. Buford Bhagdatis, both of the Amistad Center for Race Relations at Tulane University, for their unwavering, unflagging, and unmitigated support of my dissertation-turned-memoir, Are We God’s Children of Ham? And Other Dilemmas of Black Historical Research, the book currently enfolded in your hands. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Burton Foss of the University of North Carolina for answering my queries in a timely and polite fashion. I am also most grateful to the children of Mrs. Evelyn Sweetbriar Hill, who gave me complete access to her papers. Miss Greenie Washington of Lizard Lick, North Carolina, was a guiding light at the edge of night. Thanks on High to my best friend, Ms. Lenore Chaney Williams, granddaughter of Marion Chaney.
Support for this book also came from the National Endowment for African American Scholarship, the Elizabeth City Council on Negro Adoptions, AIR CANADA, Simon Fraser University, and the North Carolina Union of Firefighters and Community Outreach, Raleigh.
A NOTE TO MY TREASURED READER
We Black People need to preserve ourselves, we need to preserve our own history. As it stands now, We Black People are in such demise—of the mind, of the spirit, of our legacy to future generations. We are fading from memory like dust in the wind. If the Black Race doesn’t save itself from obliteration, who will?
I, as your researcher and trusted scribe, am here to make a change.
I AM HERE TO SET THE RECORDS STRAIGHT.
Photograph 1, UNC-Chapel Hill, Special Collections;
Catalogue Listing 336A-48K,
Rural Wedding, North Carolina, ca. 1914.
Here he sits on the curb outside the Zebulon County Courthouse, his face a delirium of joy. Her face is a puzzle. She stands behind her future groom and in front of the white deputy who looks as stiff as a playing-card king. The sun overhead is a stark white ball; even in this worn print, you can almost feel the egg-white heat rising from the paper.
Grover Devine, last of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. You never knew him. Before today you’d never even heard his name. He waited on this curb outside the Zebulon County Courthouse for two whole hours while Dolly Mae Washington, weeping in the anteroom, wondered if she’d made a grave error. At ten forty-five in the morning, as the sun ascended through the clouds, she came out with her face creased, her hips wider than a panhandle. She was his.
From girlhood on, Dolly Mae had been saving herself for the footsteps of happiness to come treading toward earth, for that loud slap-tapping to make its way straight to her bedroom, where she would be waiting beneath the quilt. She was well into her thirty-fifth year. The married women in Lizard Lick no longer invited her to dinner for fear their husbands might admire her threadbare longing.
Now she and Grover were man and wife. Legal, in the Zebulon County Courthouse, July of 1914. Now you know.
Neither Grover nor Dolly Mae moved from their spot on the curb for quite some time; look deeply into the photograph and you’ll see that the white deputy’s face is palpable rage. He’d waited, hoping she would change her mind. The world was changing despite the white deputy’s prayers. He was a devout Witness, prepared for the end of the world to tromp down (any moment now, according to the Elders), and yet he couldn’t stand the despicable freedoms and desires between whites and Negroes that seemed to have slipped in behind everyone’s back. The white deputy despised the judge, whom he considered little more than a fool for abiding animals in his courthouse. Why, the deputy wondered, had God closed his eyes to the world? At his feet, discarded sheets of the Zebulon Intelligencer shuffled along the curb in the faint wind. All these freedoms and desires. The white deputy tried to will Dolly Mae and Grover into oblivion but could not help glancing at the stark headline: IS THIS WAR?
After their honeymoon Grover Devine planned on carrying his bride to the coast, where she would find work alongside him at the fisheries near Kitty Hawk. He’d wanted a clean break from home, where for years he’d done women’s work alongside his foster mother in the Elizabeth City Negro Orphanage, of which she was chief matron. Hands raw as dirt: until now his life had been composed of laundering, starching, bluing, wringing, boiling, chopping, threading, fastening. Cooking stews in cauldrons as large as the moon. Singing lullabies that left his voice as hoarse as a bullfrog’s. Grover Devine had recently turned eighteen and desired a clean break. He was needing to love with his hands.
Grover sometimes walked the streets of Elizabeth City at night and watched the women lingering by the edge of the Pasquotank River. Laundresses, cooks, lovers, dreamers. All he did was watch, nightly; and then he watched in the daylight; and then, there she was: Dolly Mae, arm in arm with a certain Mrs. Marion Chaney, a heartily married family friend who had been entrusted to watch Dolly Mae during her week there. The pair were hurrying toward Lena’s, a fabric shop on the edge of the river, laughing like sisters. It was then that Grover knew.
He knew. Dolly Mae was visibly older, yet her curves were still new and untangled, waiting for his hands. He followed them into Lena’s.
You know how this will end. Exactly nine days later Grover came to Lizard Lick to get Dolly Mae. He climbed through the window of her daddy’s house, then stole a large machete to cut their way out of the tangle that led to the pasture gate. When they reached this gate (the Washington land stretched for acres), Grover realized he was so happy it actually hurt him to move his feet. His hands were fine, though, and he used them to cup water from a cow pond and serve it to Dolly Mae. He used them to tell her stories about his life as they walked along the dawning road. With his hands he fed her the petals of goatweed, which staved off hunger, and the shavings of a goldenseal root, which had the power to clean out memory.
He had learned such things from the days when he and his foster mother were on the run from the law, forced to spend whole nights in the ruinate. They once lived for three months in a cave along the Virginia coast. To his mind, they’d behaved like animals, him and her, all in the name of freedom.
Grover and Dolly Mae arrived in Zebulon to be married as the birds of morning creaked into song. The streets were already bustling. Folks looked at them but neither looked up from their feet. The courthouse was, as usual in th
is kind of hamlet, dead in the center of town, so you didn’t have to really look to see where you were going.
At the first intersection in the main road (slaughterhouse, schoolhouse, deputy’s, tailor) Dolly Mae tugged at Grover’s sleeve and begged him to be more specific: why did he never want to see his foster mother again? What crime of the heart had she committed, what offense so great that her son would turn his back on her forever?
—Dolly Mae. Never mind her. You the only one now.
—But to leave her forever. Won’t she want to see our children?
—Won’t be none.
—No children?
—Not a one.
—How we going to live without family? Who will care for us?
—The moon will care for us. It’ll be our cheese. The stars our milk. The black night will cover us like babies.
These riddles were among the first of many hints that this man was not all she’d dreamed him to be. They stood in front of the courthouse and again studied their feet.
—But ain’t your mama waiting for us in Elizabeth City?
—She my foster mama. And no. You the only one.
—Grover. Grover.
Her eyes sat perfectly still on her face, oval and brown-black, like little bird’s eggs.
You might find this interesting. Two hours before this photo was taken, the white deputy had told them they could not be legally married in the Zebulon County Courthouse. Grover prepared to strike—he was not against the idea of licking this white man—when all of a sudden the old judge trudged out from the building, declaring he would perform the ceremony. The white deputy then had some more words, to which the old judge replied,—Why you acting like you the boss round here, Hill? Ain’t nobody died and made you boss.
It was just past eight-thirty in the morning. Dolly Mae wore a flowered crape made from the material she’d purchased at Lena’s Fabric Shop with Mrs. Marion Chaney. The dress looked as if it were about to fly away in the wind-still air.
The old judge asked,—You still want to do this? It’s against the law. You all could just say you married, like you always done from the beginning.
—We ain’t like that no more, Grover replied, wiping the tears from Dolly Mae’s face.
—They animals, every last one of them, the white deputy muttered.
—We ain’t that way no more, Grover said, turning to face him.—We left that way behind.
The white deputy looked at his feet.—What any of them know of starting new? They all go at it like cats.
—Now, Hill.
—Always humping. The world gone to hell in a handbasket from them animals.
—Now, Hill.
The white deputy murmured,—That make you a nigger-lover, Judge.
—Let us go, said the judge, leading the pair indoors.—I’ll deal with you later, Hill.
To be exact, this took place on July 5, start of the driest summer season Zebulon County had known in over half a century. Grover Devine and Dolly Mae Washington exchanged vows in whispered rushes—the first colored couple to become man and wife in this courthouse. The groom then waited on the curb while the bride retreated to the anteroom to weep. His childish promises from late the night before rang in her ears as she watched the cockroaches climb the wall:
—We look up and see clouds like feather beds.
—Sky like a bowl of grits.
—Moon like a great big old piece of cheese.
She emerged, and when Grover finally rose from that curb to take Dolly Mae by the arm, he carried her back through the woods, this time to Cow River, to the cabin where they would begin their love. Once more he became talkative, letting out more details about his life, sometimes in wild, unwieldy gulps. Fires and bare escapes. Life from weeds, food from dirt and stones. Ghosts trailing in broad daylight.
Dolly Mae listened. And every now and then her eyes began to crack. But still she kept on at his side.
As you know, terror was brewing in Europe at this time, so much so that the residents of every minuscule Carolinian corner found ways to buy, read, and interpret newspapers. They knew that the assassination in Sarajevo wasn’t a colored man’s affair, and yet. Things could get worse. Things always got worse for colored folks when they were just busy minding their own business, trying to catch up to yesterday.
On her wedding night, as her husband fell into dreams, Dolly Mae slipped out the cabin door. No shoes, not even her flowered crape. She threw on Grover’s trousers and overcoat. In another age she could have been a romantic heroine scantily clad, fleeing a walled castle. But now she was simply Dolly Mae Washington Devine. Moonlight was her guide as she retraced her steps back to Zebulon.
You never knew her. Now you do.
By dawn she’d arrived—burnt feet, toes screwed by nails, face sharpened by lust. Dolly Mae gripped her sides as if she could already feel life taking root on her stomach’s floor. Oh why in heavens, she was thinking, why did he have to tell me all that?
From the jailhouse window, the white deputy saw her leaping onto a boxcar of the Norfolk Southern but—as you can surmise—didn’t move a muscle to stop her.
From Farrelly-Johnson, Are We God’s Children of Ham?:
CHAPTER ONE
“Mama, Were There Really Slaves in This World?”
[…] all the photographs saved from the incinerator in the Vancouver nursing home were in good to poor condition. They had originally been stored in a woodshed in North Carolina, which explains the insect and water damage.
The woodshed sat on the property of a Mr. Major Dean Washington on Route 1 in Lizard Lick. Major Dean lived there with his wife, Essie, and five children: Greenie, Mary, Bess, Furletta, and Dolly Mae. According to folk documentation (Dunbar, 1938), Major Dean had toiled for years gathering pictures, taking notes, and listening to endless talk stories but feared that the “university people” would come and abscond with the whole collection, every last daguerreotype, every bill of sale and fugitive slave notice, every birth certificate and marriage license, including those artifacts leading up to the First World War (Wallace and Marcus, 1971). He had in his possession, among the greatest treasures, many photographs belonging to Miss Jerlean Fanfaria Devine and her foster son, Grover (Buxom, 1942). In 1981 a posthumous citation for honorable citizenry was bestowed upon Major Dean Washington by the Zebulon County Sheriff’s Office.
Just before the Great War ended (on Armistice Day in 1918) Major Dean Washington died of a drug overdose. Shortly thereafter Essie Washington demanded a thousand dollars for herself in restitution from the University at Chapel Hill—she claimed they brought on his sorrows—before she accidentally caught herself in a wringer and met her untimely end.
January 1919, the Chapel Hill students came and took nearly everything.
But not everything. Some pieces were rescued from the woodshed just minutes before those university people came. They were taken by Miss Dolly Mae Washington—who’d returned to Lizard Lick after a long absence—and then carried back with her to Elizabeth City. In her lifetime she carried those photographs across the country, to Richmond, Cleveland, the Bronx, Boise, Charleston, Tuskegee, Seattle, and finally Vancouver, British Columbia, where she was remanded into a nursing home (Wallace and Marcus, 1971). The photographs were later placed in the hands of an acquaintance of Dolly Mae’s, a Mrs. Marion Chaney of Zebulon, North Carolina.
In 1977 Mrs. Marion gave them to her granddaughter, Ms. Lenore Chaney Williams, who in turn contacted the author of this book, and thereby saved a corner of the Black World for posterity.
From Look Who’s Talking
A Publication of the Vancouver Plains Rest Home
CHRISTMAS, 1977
“As told to,” recorded by Mrs. W. Wilford Milkman, resident secretary and piano player, aged 102
And Grover pulling me over the threshold to Marvella’s cabin on the Cow River.
Day was so inland hot, but nothing we ain’t suffered before. Flies and wasps stirring the little bit of air, floor aching
hot. Could any two people on the planet be less prepared to care for each other? Hell.
There he is, watching me. Maybe sorry for all the things he told me.
He touch my shoulder. He touch it with his hand. Water, he said. Please make me water to wash, Dolly Mae.
Night we eat us a dinner of corn bread hard as stone. I’m a goddamn bride, why I’m eating this crap? Should be in Elizabeth City, eating crown roast. Marvella Dunbar—gossip as long as the day—had brang us the corn bread—homemade, oh Lord!—on account of us being nudie-weds.
The tallow candles on the table burnt to a pool. I know this man will soon be wanting me.
The bed under the cobwebs—mattress filled with straw. On the way to getting married in Zebulon he had told me things and I was afraid.
Now I know he’ll be wanting me. Now I real afraid.
So I say, I could throw together a pie. Don’t think about how or where I’m a get the ingredients.
He say, Ain’t no need. He reach for my elbow.
And then.
Then and then.
Hours we laying together, fits and starts, blood bursting. Grover say he gone butter my skin to cool the burn. The burn of love. But first I got to stop crying, even if they are tears of joy.
And then. More.
And then.
Middle of the night I hear Grover talking. I open my eyes and see a lady there, plain as day. A specter.
Get on out I ain’t marry you, is what my husband answering even though his eyes are closed in sleep.
Specter say, You’ll never leave.
Long slave dress, buttons so high up the neck you wonder how they breathed. Sort of like the kind my good friend Marion used to wear, God rest her soul she died not two weeks ago. Back then she wore a bustle looking like a camel’s hump. Why the hell we need so much ass in those days?
This Is Not Chick Lit Page 5