Photograph 5, UNC-Chapel Hill, 45467 STEREO;
Catalogue Listing 336A-55M,
Negress and Police Officer, ca. September 1914.
This double image is of Miss Jerlean Fanfaria Devine, head matron of the Elizabeth City Negro Orphanage, and Cyrus Farrelly, formerly of Bronx County, New York. Look at it through the stereoscope and you see her as she always was, proud and tall. You also notice that he got her by the wrists, silver handcuffs.
It is clear as day to me, though, that they in love.
From Foss, Civil War Legacy:
MARION CHANEY, ELIZABETH CITY, 1977
Won’t no orphans ever died in the Elizabeth City ’cause won’t ever a fire set. Dolly Mae took over the orphanage until 1966. I believe she seen her husband in dreams.
Photograph 6, UNC-Chapel Hill, Special Collections;
Catalogue Listing 336A-999-UPS,
Negro Home, Cow River, North Carolina, 1915.
They could not live out their lives in Elizabeth City because they were complete outcasts. You never knew this. Jerlean and Cyrus moved to Lizard Lick and bathed, ate, and drank from the Cow River. Here they stand side by side with that close-up faraway glance you see in all these photograph faces. The weeping willows behind them are still there to this day.
It was said that in 1916 the white deputy came out to Cow River to make things bad for them. Before he knew it, the white deputy fell under a spell and was thereafter made to chop the wood, milk the cow, launder the clothes, clear the land. Folks said he carved a cradle from birch at the birth of their baby girl, Juanita, who came into this world when her mother was nearing her sixties.
Eventually the white deputy went away and married a woman in Shoeheel. She birthed him a daughter named Evelyn Sweetbriar, and a year later stabbed him in the heart.
Cyrus Farrelly died in 1924. Miss Jerlean was moved to a nursing home in Social Plains but escaped a few months later. She has not been seen since.
Of course you know this is all pure myth. The white deputy would surely have killed Miss Jerlean and Cyrus Farrelly had he found them together.
Folks claim so many things. But you know that all they ever want is the truth.
From Foss, Civil War Legacy:
MARION CHANEY, ELIZABETH CITY, 1977
She was holding that very photograph, and the next thing she say to me was,—Them Chapel Hill folks was wrong! Think they know everything! How you going to have a Negro wedding with an Irishman at your side?
She laughed. I took her hand in mines. 1976. A lifetime. Why didn’t I try to love her the way I should have?
[…] she whispers,—Kill these things later, will you? Kill them. They don’t mean nothing to nobody.
So I take the photographs, the regular ones, the daguerreotypes, tintypes, stereoscopic, and fragments. I take them to my hotel, the Vancouver Sheraton, real down pillows, where my granddaughter Lenore’s waiting on me.
I can’t kill those photographs. Lord forgive me.
A few days go by, and Dolly Mae asking me did I do what I was supposed to do?
No.
Do it.
So I take the pictures back to the nursing home but I keep them in the trunk of the rental car. My granddaughter Lenore weary of my crying—she regret she agreed to come along.
Then Dolly Mae ask me again. Did I get rid of them pictures?
Three times, the Lord says. My dear Dolly Mae. I never did appreciate you running with that boy. I never did appreciate your talk of the woman’s body in the pages of a book. But I am tired of lying. I ask my granddaughter Lenore what should I do.
She says,—Let me make a call.
But I can’t wait no longer, and after another day, I take those pictures and get ready to toss them into the nursing home incinerator, just like Dolly Mae tell me to.
I stand before the fire. Janitor off somewhere drunk.
I stand before the fire.
Who needs to live in the past, I ask myself, my voice an echo of hers. Life is all about waiting for those footsteps of happiness to get to you in the first place.
Suddenly this lady comes running up to me. Right down there at the nursing home incinerator. Hair all whichaways, an afro. She ask me,—Are you Miss Marion?
When I say yes, she take the pictures out my hand, commences crying and laughing at the same time.
She say,—Forgive me. My name is Wanda Johnson.
Photograph 7, UNC-Chapel Hill, Special Collections;
Catalogue Listing 336A-99J,
Male Attendant with Baby at Elizabeth City
Negro Orphanage, ca. 1914.
Here he’s holding me close to his heart, tucked away from the sun in his arm. His jacket is tattered, his toes are bursting at the seams of his boots. There are other children about, smiling, trying to hold his hand; but it is as if they all know that this day will be his last in Elizabeth City. You can make out a face in one of the upper windows. She is staring at him, waiting, planning. They later told me I was his favorite charge.
I survived Miss Jerlean as a baby. I survived Miss Dolly Mae as a young girl. Years of hate and love in the confines of the Elizabeth City Negro Orphanage. When I had you, I felt I was an orphan no more.
My child, have you ever felt the same about me?
From Hill, The War Bride:
He came around looking for her in the river towns. He was no longer human—grizzled hair, misshapen limbs, dirt covering his hide from head to toe. People believed they were looking at a Half-Man-Half-Beast. They didn’t realize they were looking at a suitor who had been so much in love it hurt his feet to walk.
He found her in Elizabeth City. He begged her to follow him to Kitty Hawk. They had not laid eyes upon each other in over fifty years. She would only go but so far, despite the love she felt bursting her seams.
At Kitty Hawk he climbed a tree as large as a mountain. In the darkness she heard his voice for the last time.
The moon is our cheese!
The stars is our milk!
Do you love me, Dolly Mae?
A huge wind swept down and took him out of the tree, and the poor man sailed into the blackness, on his way to the Promised Land.
One could almost hear the stars tinkling in the branches. The Negress crossed herself. Her husband was going back home, and she had stupidly stayed behind. She asked her beating heart: Why was forgiveness always a necessity? Why did we always have to be good?
Wasn’t love in heaven the same beautiful squalor it was on earth?
From Farrelly-Johnson, Are We God’s Children of Ham?:
CHAPTER EIGHT
Heard It Through the Grapevine, or:
Is There Hope for the Black Race as a Whole?
This would have to have been around 1979 or so. One of the Chapel Hill students knocked on the rusted screen door of Greenie Washington, the last of the Washington family in Lizard Lick. The student had discovered that Greenie’s sister, a Miss Dolly Mae Devine, had actually been the first to open a women’s health clinic in North Carolina in 1946. In addition, Dolly Mae Devine had been honored in 1950 by Architectural Digest for having saved one of Elizabeth City’s finest old edifices—the old Negro Orphanage on West Main—from the wrecking ball.
It was something of a story. The student—herself from Lizard Lick, where nothing interesting ever seemed to happen—felt like writing her thesis on it. Would Miss Greenie please help?
Greenie Washington rubbed her balding head and told the student,—Save your breath, girl. Tall tales and local yarns. Ain’t none of us yet lived a real life on paper.
Curtis Sittenfeld
When I started out volunteering on Monday nights at New Day House, it was just me, Karen, and a rotating cast of eight or ten kids who, with their sticky marker-covered hands and mysteriously damp clothes, would greet us by lunging into our arms and leading us into the basement playroom. Karen was a tall, thin black woman in her late thirties who had a loud laugh and worked as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill. She once told me that
she was the oldest of five sisters raised on a farm outside Columbia, South Carolina, and I think this upbringing contributed to her laid-back attitude as a volunteer. Karen and I had basically the same philosophy toward the kids, which was, We’ll try to entertain you, but we’re not going to give in to your every whim, and if you’re annoying us, we’ll say so, and if you’re the type to sit by yourself, chewing on a plastic frog in the corner, we’ll let you hang out and chew as long as it doesn’t look like you’re about to cause yourself bodily harm. For over ten months, before I did the thing I shouldn’t have done, Karen and the kids and I existed in a kind of raucous harmony. It was the beginning of June when the third volunteer showed up.
As I punched in the code that unlocked the front door, I could see a white woman sitting on the bench in the entry hall, and I knew immediately she was the new volunteer. Because of how she was dressed, she clearly wasn’t one of the mothers, and because of how uncomfortable and out of place she looked, she clearly wasn’t a shelter employee. Once inside, I saw that she had bad skin, which she’d covered in a pale concealer so it was uniform in tone but still bumpy and greasy, and shoulder-length wavy brown hair that was rough in that way that means you’re too old to wear it long. She was probably about Karen’s age.
When we made eye contact, she smiled in an eager, nervous, closed-lipped way, and I offered a closed-lipped smile in return. I sat on the other end of the bench, as far from her as possible. From the dining room, I could hear the clink and clatter of silverware and dishes, and a baby wailing. The families ate dinner at five-thirty, and we came at six, to give the mothers a break. That was the point of volunteers.
At five before six, Na’Shell and Tasaundra sprinted into the hall and hurled themselves onto my lap. Just behind them was Tasaundra’s younger brother, Dewey, who was two and walked in a staggering way. Behind him was another boy who had been there for the first time the week before, whose name I couldn’t remember—he looked about four and had tiny gold studs in either ear. He stood by the pay phone near the doorway between the dining room and the entry hall, watching us, and I waved and said, “Hey there.”
“I’m braiding your hair,” Tasaundra announced. She had already wedged herself behind me and was easing the rubber band out of my ponytail, and Na’Shell said, “Can I braid your hair, too? Miss Volunteer, I want to do your hair.” Both of them were five. Once, early on, Tasaundra had asked me, “Can you do this?” and jumped three times. I had jumped just as she had, at which point she’d grinned, pointed at me with her index finger, and said, “Your boobies is bouncin’.” Then she and Na’Shell had shrieked with laughter.
The woman on the other side of the bench said, “Oh!”
I turned.
“I heard them call you—you must be—I’m just starting—” She giggled a little.
“I’m Frances,” I said.
“Elsa.” She stuck out her hand, but I motioned with my chin down to my own right hand, which Na’Shell was gripping. The truth is that if my hand hadn’t been occupied, I still wouldn’t have wanted to shake Elsa’s. I had a thing then about touching certain people, about dirtiness, and I didn’t like Elsa’s hair and skin. Strangely, being groped by the kids didn’t bother me because there was a purity to their dirtiness; they were so young. But if, say, I was on a crowded elevator and a woman in a tank top was standing next to me and the top of her arm was pressed to the top of mine—if, especially, it was skin on skin instead of skin on clothes—I would feel so trapped and accosted that I’d want to cry.
“They sure like you, don’t they?” Elsa said, and she giggled again.
“Did you guys hear that?” I said. “You sure like me, right?”
Na’Shell squealed noncommittally. Elsa would figure out soon enough how generous the children were with their affection and also how quickly they’d turn on you, deciding you had let them down or hurt their feelings. None of it really meant that much. You tried to show them a good time for two hours once a week and not to become attached because they left without warning. One Monday, a kid was there, and the next, he wasn’t—his mom had found a place for them to live, with her sister or her mother or her ex-boyfriend or as part of some new program where her own place was subsidized. The longest the families ever stayed at the shelter was six months, but most of them were gone far sooner.
Mikhail and Orlean walked through the doorway from the dining room. At nine and ten, they were the oldest; boys older than twelve weren’t allowed in the shelter because in the past, they’d gotten involved with some of the younger mothers. “Can we go downstairs now?” Mikhail asked. His two front teeth pointed in opposite directions, so that two sides of a triangle formed in the space where they weren’t. In idle moments, he had a habit of twisting his tongue sideways and poking it through the triangle.
I looked at my watch. “It’s not quite six.”
“But there’s two of yous.”
If we had been in the basement, I’d have said, “Two of you.” But I never corrected their grammar upstairs, where the mothers might overhear. I turned to Elsa. “The rule is that two volunteers have to be present before we go downstairs. You’ve been through the training, right?”
“I’m ready to dive in headfirst.” She actually extended her arms in front of her head.
I walked to the threshold of the dining room, where the air smelled like steamed vegetables and fish. Scattered around the tables were a few mothers and a few babies—the babies weren’t allowed down in the playroom—and about five more children I recognized. “We’re going downstairs,” I called. “So if you guys want to come—”
“Miss Volunteer!” cried out Derek, and he stood as if to run toward me before his mother pulled him back by one strap of his overalls.
“Boy, you need to finish your dinner,” she snapped, and Derek burst into tears. Derek was my favorite; he was three years old and had beautiful long eyelashes and glittering alert eyes and pale brown skin—his mother was white, so I assumed his father was black—and when Derek laughed, his smile was enormous and his laughter was noisy and hoarse. He was the only one I had ever fantasized about taking home with me, setting up a cot for him and feeding him milk and animal crackers and buying him hardcover books with bright illustrations of mountaintop castles or sailboats on the ocean at night. Never mind that I had student loans to pay off and was living with a roommate, and never mind that Derek already had a mother and that, in fact, she was one of the more intimidating figures at the shelter. She probably weighed three hundred pounds and often wore sweatpants through which you could see the cellulite on her buttocks and the back of her thighs; she pulled her hair back in a ponytail that looked painfully tight; her teeth were yellowing; her expression was unvaryingly sour. It seemed to me nothing short of miraculous that she had been the one to give birth to Derek.
Seeing him cry, I wanted simultaneously to apologize to his mother and to pull him away from her and up into my arms, to feel his little calves clamped around my waist, his head pressed between my shoulder and jaw. But I merely ducked back into the entry hall.
Downstairs, I asked loudly, “Who wants to draw?”
Several of the kids shouted, “Me!”
“And who wants to play farm animals?” I asked.
Several of the same ones shouted, “Me!”
“I suppose I can be a cow,” Elsa said. “Moo!”
She looked at me expectantly, and I understood that I was supposed to laugh. “It’s not acting like farm animals,” I said. “It’s playing with them.” I gestured toward the shelf where the bin of plastic figures was stored. “Either you could do the farm animals with them, and I could do the drawing, or the other way around.”
She walked to the shelf and lifted the bin. “Look at all these fabulous creatures!” she exclaimed. “Oh my goodness! There’s a horse, and a chicken, and a pig. Will anyone help me play with these, or do I have to play all alone?”
Tasaundra and Na’Shell hurried over. “I’m the baby sheep,” T
asaundra said. “Miss Volunteer, do I get to be the baby sheep?”
“You was the baby sheep before,” Na’Shell said.
“But I called it.”
“But you already was the baby sheep.”
“Na’Shell, be the baby chicks,” I said while I pulled the markers from the drawer beneath the sink. “There are two baby chicks.”
“Then I want to be the baby chicks!” Tasaundra yelled.
I passed paper to Mikhail and Orlean and Dewey and to the boy whose name I hadn’t been able to remember upstairs but remembered now: it was Meshaun. The paper came from the shelter’s administrative office, with graphs on the back, or letters requesting funding, or information about welfare studies from 1994. Everything the kids played with was somehow second-rate—the markers were dried out, the coloring books were already colored in, the wooden puzzles were gnawed on and had pieces missing. When the boys made paper airplanes, you could see the graphs or the typed words where the wings folded up.
“And what have we here?” I heard Elsa say. “If this is a panda bear, we’re living on a very unusual farm indeed. And an alligator? My heavens—perhaps the farm has a little bayou in the back.”
I didn’t look at her, because if I did, I feared she’d make some conspiratorial gesture at me, like winking. I wanted to say to her, “Shut up and play with the kids.”
This was when Karen arrived, holding Derek’s hand. “Sorry I’m late.” Seeing Elsa, she added, “I’m Karen.”
Elsa stood and extended her arm, and unlike me, Karen shook her hand. “I’m Elsa, and I’m finding that this is quite the exotic farm here at New Day House.”
“Hey, Derek,” I said. “Want to come make a picture?”
As I lifted him onto my lap, he reached for the black marker and said, “I’m a draw me a sword.” I loved Derek’s husky voice, how surprising it was in a child.
The drawing and farm animals lasted for about ten minutes. Then they built a walled town out of blocks, then Orlean knocked it over and Na’Shell began crying, then we played “Mother, may I?” until they all started cheating, and then they started chasing each other around the playroom shouting and Mikhail flicked the lights on and off, which he or someone else always did whenever things became unbearably exciting. Just before eight, during cleanup, Karen and I decided that Na’Shell had behaved the best and therefore could turn off the lights for the night. Karen and Elsa headed into the hall with the other kids, and I washed my hands while Na’Shell stood by the sink, watching me. She motioned to the inside of her elbow. “Why you do it all the way up here?”
This Is Not Chick Lit Page 7