Tomb of the Unknown Racist

by Blanche Mccrary Boyd

  Nineteen fifty-seven proved to be an unwise year to try to imitate plantation life. Our mother, permanently enthralled by the version of history presented in Gone with the Wind, had hoped to remodel Blacklock into an evocation of Tara. We acquired horses, but the architect made a mistake and built the stables too close to the house, so when the breeze blew in from the west, we often smelled shit. During the Civil War the original house had burned down, and during Reconstruction a white country frame with wide porches and a wonderful view of the ruined rice paddies had been raised on the old foundations. Our mother hired workmen to knock down an inside wall, and she fashioned a large, sweeping room with blond waxed floors, like a ballroom. She had our father’s portrait painted and hung over the fireplace.

  But the Supreme Court had recently declared segregation illegal, and trouble was already burbling outside our big white gates. In our former neighborhood, the only African Americans had been maids and workmen, but at Blacklock the nearest whites lived four miles away. The cattle that ornamented our pasture soon began to disappear, one by one.

  Royce, who was five years old, did not find Blacklock at all troubling. Instead, he turned wild, like our housecat that disappeared into the woods, reappearing occasionally, filthy and snarling and happy. Royce was dirty like the cat, and he followed the old caretaker, John Tillman, everywhere. Together they dug up a Confederate buckle in the pasture and discovered four arrowheads near the mouth of the river.

  The first winter we lived at Blacklock, our father was killed in an automobile accident. Our mother, widowed at thirty-six, now had horses that bit us, a stable that stank, vanishing cattle, and a son who kept addressing the ancient caretaker as Mr. Tillman, even though she had told him repeatedly to call the old man John. She ordered floodlights installed on the lawn and began sleeping with a loaded pistol under her pillow. “These nigras will steal us blind,” she said. “They’re acting like those rustlers in cowboy movies.”

  Royce loved the blacksnakes that he captured with John Tillman, and he sometimes wrapped them luxuriantly around his arms or even his neck. He and John killed the dangerous kinds, the water moccasins and rattlers, and Royce nailed their skins to boards that he left beside the front door. He treasured his collection of their rattles, but I lay awake at night tormented by images of dark faces crawling through our windows to murder us. This fear of black people was new, and I missed my father with an anguish like a hole torn through me, because maybe he could have helped me understand why the Freedom Riders and civil rights marchers on TV seemed like heroes, not like troublemakers or cattle thieves or outside agitators, the way we were being instructed. I began to glimpse that I had been born on the wrong side of a dreadful historical conflict.

  •

  After Ed Blake and I finished dinner, we sat in armchairs outside on his porch in the near dark. Amber light streamed dimly through the window behind us. I was drinking coffee, and Blake was on his third beer. “So let me understand this. The man who was driving the car when your father was killed was actually Joe Magnus’s father?”

  “Yes. His name was Skip Magnus. He stayed on with the business as chief foreman.”

  I described Skip Magnus, a hard-bodied man swarthy with years of outdoor work. After the accident, perhaps out of guilt, he had briefly aspired to become a father figure for Royce, but Skip was not the model of maleness Momma had envisioned for her only son. She quickly enrolled Royce and my sister, Marie, in expensive private schools in Charleston, while I chose to drive many miles the other way to attend a poor white public school because that was what I thought my father would have wanted. Marie was an indifferent student, but Royce turned out to be bright and talented and ambitious. In high school, he played golf, wrote poetry, edited the literary magazine, and earned perfect scores on several national tests. Yet each summer, over our mother’s fierce objections, he insisted on working as a field laborer for Skip. Skip’s only son, Joe, a year older than Royce, also worked in the field. He and Royce became constant summertime companions.

  I said Joe Magnus had been a husky young man with an odd, monkeyish face. He and Royce had enjoyed their unusual friendship and got into several bar fights with men who challenged my brother’s long hair. Royce introduced Joe to the Rolling Stones and to smoking marijuana, Joe introduced Royce to getting blind drunk, and together they went to every venue where a black band called the Hot Nuts played.

  On the morning Skip planned to have the workers hold Royce down and cut his hair, Joe forewarned him. Royce had sawed off the handle of our mother’s broom and hidden it in the waistband of his pants. In the altercation that followed, Royce swung the handle and caught Skip Magnus on his temple. After two days of a brain bleed, Skip Magnus died.

  “And that’s just the stripped-down version,” I said, sipping my lukewarm coffee.

  “It just sounds so damn complicated,” Ed Blake said.

  I shrugged. “Most real stories are.”

  “So, was the accident that killed your father Skip Magnus’s fault?”

  “Of course not. A drunk driver hit them. But I don’t know if that mattered so much to Skip, the guilt he felt.”

  “And did your brother intend to kill Skip Magnus?”

  “Again, of course not. Royce wasn’t even arrested. He was seventeen, and it was clearly self-defense. All of the men gave statements to that effect. But Joe didn’t get to join the Marines the way he’d always talked about because he had to get his mother and sisters situated, and when his draft number came up, he just went straight into the army. Royce cut his hair so short he looked like a Mormon missionary. This isn’t in the FBI file? I’m telling you things you don’t know?”

  “It’s just an amazingly different version,” Blake said. “The official story is that the sons, Joe Magnus and Royce Burns, were bonded by the murders of their fathers. It adds to their myth, how dangerous they were.”

  “They were supposed to have killed my father when they were five and six years old?”

  “Well, the story runs more like this: Skip killed your father on purpose, and then the sons conspired to kill Skip.”

  “And then Royce got married and went off to college while Magnus went to Vietnam to train as his future racist ally?”

  “The truth is always a bigger mess than its outlines, Ellen.”

  “Yes, and I’ve learned that melodrama is something to be avoided, but that idea’s not doing me much good at the moment.”

  “No,” he said, “I guess it’s not.”

  “The rest of the story you’re probably more familiar with. Royce tried to construct a stable life for himself. Momma gave him Blacklock as a wedding present, and he moved out there for a while, but it didn’t work.”

  “How did Santane enter his life?”

  “That wasn’t her real name. He named her that. I think they met at a Buddhist temple in San Francisco.”

  There was a silence, and then Blake said, “It was BATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, that originally encouraged your brother to go visit the Silent Brotherhood with Joe Magnus. Apparently they convinced Royce that it would be patriotic and that he might be able to pull Joe Magnus back from the brink. Next thing BATF knew, your brother and Magnus were thick into the Brotherhood together. So the government was at least partially responsible for the whole situation, and there was a lot of infighting about who was at fault.”

  “So that’s why they declared my brother dead? To cover their fucking asses? Who needs outside enemies when we’ve got our own government?” I put my coffee cup onto the table, spilling it, and for the first time since Ruby had reappeared in my life, feared I might cry. I stood up. “Listen, I need to go back to my hotel now. I want to visit Ruby early in the morning.”

  “Tell me more about the old black man, John Tillman. And about his wife, Ruby.” There was something personal, something needing in his voice, or maybe I was imagining it.

  “Oh, Christ, read the fucking novel again. It’s all in there.” My voice had
thickened with tears, and I hoped he wouldn’t realize it, but he stood up, stepped close, and stared right down at me.

  I stood too but kept my eyes fixed on the pine table, which was fake rustic like everything else he owned. When he reached for me, I stepped wordlessly into his chest. His scent was Old Spice, like our father’s. He said, “And you’re feeling all this right now because?”

  “Because I loved the Tillmans too, goddamn it, and once upon a time I even loved my fucking brother.”

  And that is how I ended up in bed with Ed Blake the first time, a mistake in a situation already knotty with conflict. Less than an hour later, when I was pulling my jeans back on—I hadn’t even taken off my shirt—I said, “This was so stupid. I hope it’s not part of some government plot.”

  “Just weakness,” he said, lying naked across his bed, a lodgepole pine affair with a striped wool blanket. His arm was covering his eyes, and his thick penis lay curled against his leg. “Just being a weak, careless man.”

  “Listen, I’ve ended up in bed with lots of people. Don’t take it too personally.”

  He uncovered his eyes and gave me a long look. “You’re way too smart to believe that.”

  5

  The next morning, when I returned to the reservation, I threaded my way wordlessly through press cars and FBI agents as well as the Nogalu police, who allowed me to pass into Lightman’s sister’s house without incident.

  For most of the morning Ruby and I sat silently side by side on the sofa in the dim living room. Several toy trucks and coloring books that I assumed belonged to Loretta’s children lay scattered across the floor. A rumbling air conditioner blocked the light from one window, and the other was heavily curtained. The house smelled like cats and chili. Three old women, indistinguishable to my eye except for Lightman’s mother, walked in and out of the room, eavesdropping. She glared at me but twice offered us lemonade. Although Ruby refused it, I drank mine down greedily. The next day I would try to remember to bring a supply of Cokes.

  While the waiting hung thickly around us, I began to tell Ruby about her namesake. I wasn’t sure how much she could hear, but I thought the sound of my voice might soothe her. Everyone likes my voice. It makes people trust me who probably shouldn’t.

  “Ruby and John Tillman were the caretakers on the plantation where your father and I grew up. They spoke a mixture of English and a West African language. Ruby was our housekeeper, and she was really nice to us. When your daddy was little, he followed John Tillman around like a puppy. It was John who taught him to fish and hunt and speak Gullah, and who taught him to handle snakes.”

  Ruby looked at me wild-eyed, and I realized she was listening. “Rattlers?”

  “No, blacksnakes. Your dad loved blacksnakes.”

  “For practice?”

  “I don’t think so. He and John killed the rattlers. Your dad kept a collection of their tails in his room.”

  “He still has it,” Ruby said.

  “Ruby, why do you keep speaking as if Royce is alive? Do you have any real knowledge about that?”

  She turned her face away, and I waited almost a full minute before I said, “Your dad had large, graceful hands. Maybe you remember them? Even when we were children, people noticed his hands.” I extended my own hands directly in front of her, so she would have to look at them. “Yours and mine aren’t the same. His hands had this special quality.”

  She began to mumble something that sounded like chanting. The murmur of voices from the kitchen went instantly silent, and she stopped.

  “Ruby, what are you saying? Are you praying?”

  She leaned in close to me, sudden fury in her face. “How did you know Rommel?”

  I drew back. “I saw him when he was a puppy,” I said uncertainly. “I had gone home for Christmas.”

  Then Ruby began to talk, her voice mumbling like a child’s. They had been living in the mountains, and Santane kept a garden with squash, tomatoes, and green beans. There were chickens in a shed, and Ruby wanted to get the eggs by herself, but she was afraid of being pecked, so Santane let her wear Daddy’s work gloves. A key was hidden in the cuff that opened Daddy’s office, and that was where Ruby found the pictures of him wearing a suit and tie. His hair was short, and the woman beside him was holding Rommel like a baby. But how could that be? Because Rommel slept beside her on the floor every night, and he waited for her to get off the school bus every day, and he never bothered the chickens. But when Daddy learned she had gone into his office, he burned those pictures in the kitchen sink. Santane tried to stop him because she knew too much about burning. Daddy got his rifle and pulled Ruby outside under the big pine tree where Rommel liked to lie down in the cool beds of needles, and he dug a big hole and ordered Rommel to climb down into it. Then he shot Rommel through the head. He told Ruby to quit crying and help him cover Rommel with the dirt, but she wouldn’t do it. Afterward, they went back inside the house and ate egg salad sandwiches with sliced tomatoes.

  Ruby looked right into my eyes now and spoke in a hoarse, grown-up voice. “He covered Rommel’s eyes with his hand. He told me Rommel wouldn’t understand what was happening.”

  From the silence in the kitchen and the women’s faces crowding the doorway, I knew I was not the only one finding significance in this tale. Maybe I should have said Ruby, have you hurt your children? Did you cover their eyes? But I wanted to protect her as well as myself. “Royce got Rommel for a wedding present. So this must have been a second dog, a second Rommel.”

  “He covered Rommel’s eyes with his hand, but Rommel screamed and tried to climb out of the hole.”

  “Avery was the woman in the pictures. Avery was his first wife. Before your mother.”

  “He screamed and tried to get out of the hole.”

  The quietness of the room must have made her realize she was saying something troubling because she retreated to the high, childlike voice. “Daddy explained it to me. That we are all just meat. Meat of the dog, meat of the human. But in the realm of the spirit, we are one.”

  “Ruby, do you remember how old you were when all this happened?”

  “Five? Six?” She seemed to think I was the one who should know the answer.

  “Honey, do you know that at first your father was working for the federal government?”

  “No, he worked for the purification of the white race.”

  “But why did God’s plan involve only the white race? Did he explain that to you?”

  She reached for my hand but dropped it. “He said he was sorry, but it did.”

  “What did that mean about you and your mother?”

  “We were his proof.”

  I stared down at my own hands, palms up, urgently seeking something. “Did you believe him about all of this, Ruby?”

  “He told me I was his biggest sin.”

  “But I know how much he loved you, honey. I saw how he held you when you were a baby.” I wasn’t sure if I was saying this for her or for myself.

  “I thought he loved me more than God.”

  6

  Sometimes, if I want to drink again, a flutter starts inside my chest, as if a small bird is beating upward toward my throat. This wish for a drink is rarely conscious, but my breathing gets shallow and fast, and strange thoughts enter my head, as if the wires of my identity are loosening. I don’t drink when this happens, or at least I haven’t for many years. Instead I go to AA meetings, where my interior chaos gets eased by friendliness and order and the sturdiness of hope. I had already checked through the meeting list for the Gallup vicinity, so I knew there was a 5:30 group called “Attitude Adjustment” every day at a clubhouse on Persimmon Street.

  I told Ruby I had to be somewhere important, and within an hour I was away from Royce’s life and its ghastly consequences and back onto familiar ground. The famous Twelve Steps were unfurled on the wall, the slogans scattered around on placards: THINK THINK THINK, EASY DOES IT, and K.I.S.S., which I’d been told many times meant, especially for me, K
eep It Simple, Stupid. My breathing began to loosen up.

  The meeting had just started. Someone was reading out loud “How It Works,” the first two pages of chapter five of the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, the section my first sponsor made me memorize early in my sobriety. I could barely listen, but I caught this phrase: “Those who do not recover are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves …”

  It wasn’t simply the shock of locating Ruby again or the possibility, increasing with every second, that her young children were now dead, it wasn’t the fact that I was a lesbian who without any forethought had leapt straight into bed with a man for the first time in decades. No, it was the specter of my brother, my brother, my brother.

  In AA, I had found a solution for my anger and self-destructiveness, and I thought I had let go of Royce and the hatreds he promoted, just as I had let go of our molested sister and our loopy mother and our dead father and God knows how many ex-lovers. “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it” is one of the AA promises, and “We will comprehend the word serenity, and we will know peace.” For many years that had seemed true, but from the moment I recognized Ruby on television, the door to the past had blown back open. The racism my brother and I had been taught—how deep did that training go? Was it still lodged in my unconscious? Could it be genetic? How can we know what we have inherited?

  Why one person recovers in AA and another does not has remained mysterious to me, but when I first joined, I just did whatever was suggested. I didn’t have a better idea then, and I still don’t. From the first meeting, I loved the extremism of the program. You don’t drink alcohol at all? Or do any drugs? Not cocaine or LSD or nitrous oxide or even a little marijuana here and there? Occasionally I wondered if AA was my own version of Royce’s radicalism, but, regardless of any ironic analysis, AA saved my life. So, while swells of fury and grief rose inside me, I sat quietly in the Gallup meeting, listening carefully to other people’s words, taking comfort, as always, in the steadiness of the meeting, the even-handed respect. “We come from Yale, we come from jail,” Bill Wilson, the cofounder of AA wrote.