“I come on duty at seven this morning, Miss Burns, and I don’t see nothing amiss. Course I ain’t done all my rounds yet. And I never study with them reporters, I just do like Miss Estelle say.”
“Thank you, and I’m sorry to be making trouble for you.”
“Somebody else make this trouble, Miss Burns.”
It took over an hour for a young policeman to arrive, take a report, and photograph the car, so we missed the morning meeting. “I don’t suppose you’re going to dust it for fingerprints?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “We don’t do that for vandalism, but you will need to contact your insurance company.”
“Let’s just take my car,” Claudia said.
“No, we’d best take the one with the Confederate sticker on it.”
My mother’s vehicle remained undamaged inside the underground garage. Her HERITAGE, NOT HATE bumper sticker was proving to be a piece of luck. But the attack on Nadine meant that it was possible that even my mother’s car wasn’t a safe choice at the moment.
Claudia’s white Ford sedan had Georgia plates, and I didn’t think it could be connected to me yet. I got into the passenger seat, and we drove through the gate.
“Don’t you have your own place out at the Isle of Palms?”
“How exactly would you know that?”
“The point is, if I can find that out, won’t other people know it too? It’s not like you’ve been living in secret in Charleston.”
“Okay, we’d better ride out there. No. Let’s go to Beecher’s first. Jimmy’s going to be so pissed off. No, let’s go to the drive-through window at Hardee’s and get some sausage biscuits.”
We sat in the Hardee’s parking lot drinking coffee while Claudia took her sandwich apart, inspecting it. “What is distinguished about this sandwich? A fried egg, American cheese, and a mysterious piece of flesh.”
“The biscuit. This is part of your Southern education. You get real biscuits like these out West?”
“Yes, Ellen, we have real biscuits in New Mexico. Very good ones, in fact.”
“Well, they don’t have them up North. They don’t even have Hardee’s. I thought you’d be impressed.”
“Listen,” she said, “you’re sounding pretty rattled. Not that I blame you.” When I didn’t reply, she took a bite of her sandwich. “Okay, this is gross.”
“Saturated fat,” I said. “Might even be lard. Biscuits don’t taste this good unless they’re made with lard.”
“All of the Nogalu bread is made with lard. Did you see those big red clay ovens in a lot of the yards at the reservation? Loretta had one, but Ruby didn’t.”
Ruby and Lightman’s mobile home had rested on cinderblocks, and its metal exterior was painted a reddish color to make it blend in with the red dirt and houses of the reservation. Some dwellings in the village were made of dark mud brick, but many were simply painted trailers. Nothing distinguished Ruby’s dwelling, other than the crime scene tape.
The funeral parlor looked placid in the early morning heat. It had been built of red brick in the 1950s. Pious and smug. Morticians are required to be serene and sycophantic—an angry mortician is a contradiction—so maybe I did not seem aggrieved enough this morning. I had taken off my zinc oxide war paint and was wearing white jeans and a white shirt.
Jimmy said the plaques had been done overnight by special order and they would arrive in time for the burial tomorrow, but he was wringing his hands while he spoke. “I don’t understand why you ordered a plaque that says Tomb of the Unknown Racist. Do you really think that might not be Royce’s remains? I think that might have legal implications.”
“It’ll all be okay, Jimmy, I promise.”
“No, it won’t, Ellen. We had a bomb threat during the night, and the building had to be swept for explosives. My father built this building. We can’t have this kind of thing happening here. Visiting hours will have to be canceled.”
“Why wasn’t I called about a bomb threat? Why wasn’t it in the news this morning?”
“I think there’s some kind of agreement about not inflaming the situation you’re creating. It’s not fair for you to use my father’s funeral home to try to stir up racial trouble. Your niece isn’t the only decedent at Beecher’s.”
“So, did you have to evacuate the corpses?”
He looked dismayed. “What an ugly question. No, it wasn’t necessary. Could I please ask you to cancel the visiting hours?”
“Yes, of course. Certainly. We’ll just have to cancel.”
“Thank you.”
“Is Lucia ready for viewing? I mean privately. Just by me. And Claudia here.”
He led us down the hall to a closed double door and followed us in.
8
According to Ruby, Lucia’s skin had begun to darken about three weeks after her birth. Ruby used lighteners to try to keep the baby white, but the creams irritated her daughter’s tender skin, and when Ruby tried them on her own face, one cream itched and the other made her skin look milky and strange. Lucia’s eye color altered more slowly, muddying over the course of two months from dark blue to slate to brown. Ruby studied this transformation while she nursed. Nursing hurt her at first, but after a while it felt good.
“I’m edible,” Ruby would say to Santane, who was not amused. Santane was furious when Ruby came home pregnant, and she did not believe Ruby’s story about being kidnapped.
“You are trash,” Santane said, but Ruby knew she didn’t mean it, because once Santane walked all night carrying her, and when they were staying in the shelter, Santane had held her close. It wasn’t like being at Nod, when her father left her all alone that time and she had been scared in her heart. Maybe Santane did not touch her and cuddle her and praise her the way her father did, but Santane protected her. That proved something, didn’t it?
Ruby knew from the first that Lucia’s hair was never going to be black and strong and straight. Lucia would never stretch her hair back into a braid or a bun the way Ruby could. Lucia’s hair hardly even grew at first, and for weeks she was nearly bald. When it did begin to come in, the filaments were sparse and fluffy and wrinkled.
Ruby didn’t know what to do about this darkening child. For a while, she thought Lucia must be partly Jamaican. She’d known a beautiful Jamaican boy in San Francisco with lovely skin, a thin nose, and precise lips she wanted to kiss. He kept his hair in dreads. When Lucia’s hair got long enough, Ruby hoped to form it into dreads, but soon Lucia’s hair grew into a fuzzy halo, a tawny color, and Ruby loved it spread around her like that.
I learned most of these details many months later, from the nun named Sister Irene, who found out a great deal during what she called her “debriefings” with Ruby, after Ruby had been moved into the general population at the women’s prison near Santa Fe. Nevertheless, staring down at Lucia’s body in the shiny purple-pink coffin, I knew instantly that her hair was wrong.
Jimmy stood obsequiously behind Claudia and me. The photograph I’d given him yesterday had been black-and-white, but the image was clear about her fine wispy halo of hair. Yet in whatever basement room Lucia had been dressed in this white cotton gown, someone had presumed to cornrow her hair.
“I don’t think Lucia’s hair was like that,” Claudia said, clutching in each hand shopping bags from Kmart and Toys “R” Us.
“What did you do?” I said, not yet turning around to look at Jimmy. Oiled lines of hair, some decorated with cowrie shells, radiated across Lucia’s head like the marks around a melon.
“Braiding is a service we offer free to all African American women, men, and children,” Jimmy said. “It is dignified and elegant and quite expensive.” When I didn’t answer, he said, “The child’s hair was badly matted. This kind of braiding dates all the way to the sixteenth century. We have a brochure. I’ll give it to you.”
“I think maybe you just wanted to pee on a hydrant like a dog.”
He drew himself up. His black suit, gray brows, balding head, and gray
tie all rose. He was not a short man, but I was taller, even in my sandals. “That is an outrageous thing to say to me. Coarse and extremely offensive. Beecher’s is not a racist organization. I am concerned about security here, and I will admit that I believe this casket is not appropriate for Lucia. I went to school with your brother, and our families go way back. I took care of your sister myself. I’m just trying to help you.”
Claudia dropped the bags and began to write rapidly again.
I said, “Maybe it’s too late to cancel the visiting hours.”
His anger was obvious now. “I’ve already notified the police that the viewing has been canceled. The police will be here in case there’s any trouble.”
I managed to speak quietly. “So, could you just leave us alone with Lucia for a while?”
He left in a huff, and we were alone in the viewing room. It was large and carpeted and filled with about fifty folding chairs. Nicely padded ones. Discreet sofas and plush armchairs had been arranged around two walls. Near the entrance was a mahogany table with a lamp and a condolence book resting neatly atop a lace runner. Black pens that read BEECHER’S in gold lettering lay beside it.
We dumped the toys onto the soundless beige carpet. “Good job with these.”
“Most of the women who work in these stores have children of their own.”
“Right, so they can decide whether to spend their minimum wage on childcare or figure out some other solution. Extended family, maybe. Neighbors. Older kids taking care of younger ones.”
“You always sound so angry,” Claudia said.
“Not angry, just clear. You bought a stamp-collecting book? Aren’t some of these choices more appropriate for older kids?”
“Well, the ladies in the store got pretty excited. They knew about Lucia and River, and one of them told me quite seriously that although children are allowed to age in heaven, they have to max out about ten or eleven, before puberty makes them crazy.”
“That’s a good piece of news about heaven. Were the women who helped you black or white?”
“One of each, and they seemed like friends.”
Claudia tucked a blond Caucasian angel about ten inches tall on the silky cream polyester beside Lucia’s waxen face. “There weren’t any dark angels,” she said. “I got dark-skinned dolls, but I didn’t get the Native American doll because of its headband and feather. Is putting the white angel by her head too weird?”
Only the top half of the casket was open, and we were quickly filling it. “I think we need to open this bottom half to get the rest of the toys in. Will you do that for me?”
She raised the lower half of the casket lid, and we both stared down. Lucia’s feet were bare. They had painted her tiny toenails with clear gloss. I looked at her hands and realized they had glazed her fingernails too. Below her feet, the coffin was starkly empty, and the polyester fabric was stained and torn. I picked up one of the bags and dumped what was left of its contents into the open space.
“Do you think they glue their mouths shut when they prepare the bodies? I’m glad she has no shoes on. I don’t know whether that’s good taste on Jimmy’s part or if he forgot what he said he’d do. I think the makeup is amazing. She doesn’t even look like she’s wearing makeup. She looks like she’s sleeping. They’ve gotten a lot better at this since they buried my sister. My sister looked good, but she looked very dead.”
“I don’t think he was trying to hurt you with the hair.”
“I know, and what I said was crummy.”
Claudia put down the stuffed bear she was holding and dropped her notebook on the floor. She took both my forearms and tried to make me look at her, but I studied her hands instead. “Nice ring.” A large deep green emerald had been sunk flush into a heavy gold setting.
“My mother’s. Let’s go to the noon meeting. You need an AA meeting.” When I didn’t answer, she said, “I need to go to one too.”
I gazed into her face, which had a Semitic cast. But maybe that was because I knew she was Jewish. Claudia had brown eyes and curly dark brown hair, fuller lips than mine, dentist-whitened teeth. Maybe she looked Greek. If her name was Raptopoulos and I thought she looked Greek, would that be racist? “Claudia, do you think you look Jewish?”
She pulled me firmly away from the coffin. “Ellen, you don’t even know that you’re crying.”
9
I don’t remember much about the meeting, except that Claudia spoke. It was high noon at Old Central, a seedy clubhouse on a side street in the expensive part of downtown, and Claudia talked for several minutes. She told me later that, although I didn’t acknowledge anyone, I showed no signs of hyperventilating and held very still, head bowed.
Old Central meetings are strictly formatted. Anyone who “shares” has to go to the podium in the front of the room and use a microphone. Old Central was where I first got sober, and for a while I assumed all AA meetings were similar to this one. When I began to attend meetings in New York and other cities, I thought their customs were peculiar, and, even after eighteen years of sobriety, I still harbored the secret notion that only Old Central meetings were held correctly. At Old Central you waited to be called upon; someone who raised a hand was signaling serious distress. The first time I went to a meeting in New York City, I’d been bewildered because dozens of hands shot into the air. All these emergencies, I’d thought, how will they get to everyone? In Los Angeles, I’d been amused to discover that some meetings required the use of a kitchen timer to keep participants from talking too long. Applause in these meetings was frequent and frenzied. Charleston, however, is known for its graciousness, and natives are so courteous they rarely even beep their horns in traffic. Claudia, not understanding the urgent meaning of such an action, raised her hand, was recognized, and had to walk to the podium.
“My name is Claudia, and I am an alcoholic and a drug addict.” She sketched in her story: born in Albuquerque, heavy drug user in high school, got away with everything, went to college (didn’t name Brown), failed out, got hospitalized. Meth was her drug of choice, though, of course, she had an alcohol problem too. In high school, she and her boyfriend built a small meth lab that blew up, but she wasn’t there and didn’t get blamed. At college, she snorted Ritalin because lots of kids had prescriptions. “I felt virtuous because I didn’t do heroin.” She only needed one twenty-eight-day stint at rehab before going back and finishing college, but that was five years ago, and now she only had six and a half months sober, because how could someone her age who made good grades in high school and college and even went to graduate school be in such trouble? But life had just seemed so much easier taking speed. On speed, she could drink more without getting sick or blacking out. But she finally hit bottom—she hoped to God she had hit her last bottom—when her mother committed suicide last year. “Something inside me changed. I still skidded around for a couple of months before I came back. But now I just do whatever the program suggests. If I want to take a drink or a drug, I pray to a higher power that sometimes I believe in or else I call another person in the program. And if I have to, I’ll drive to an emergency room and say I’m suicidal, because that’s exactly what it would mean.”
After the meeting, we went by Dockside to check on my mother, who didn’t seem to realize I had been gone, although she did tell Claudia how much she’d missed her. The sitter today was one I didn’t care for, but Momma always enjoyed her because she made bologna sandwiches on white bread and served them with the crusts cut off, along with Pepsi in a glass bottle—Momma’s favorite lunch. I kept the ingredients around so the two of them could eat together while they watched The Young and the Restless.
Next, I called the insurance company and arranged with the guardhouse for an adjuster to examine Nadine this afternoon, but I already knew a cut-and-paste Cadillac wasn’t worth much.
In Claudia’s car, on our way out to my beach house at the Isle of Palms, I said, “You want to tell me about your mother’s suicide?”
Claudia drove
with both hands on the steering wheel, her knuckles tight. “This is some bridge. No, thanks.”
We were crossing the first span of the Silas Pearman, which ran parallel to the Grace. Each bridge had two separate cantilevered spans, anchored by a small island in the middle of the river. “When we go back, we’ll have to travel on that other one over there.”
The other bridge, the Grace, was very steep and so narrow that passing was difficult, even with its two narrow lanes now heading in the same direction. When I was a child, the Grace Bridge stood alone and bore two-way traffic. My mother, like many other people, had refused to drive across it. “Who cares about Mount Pleasant and all those other beaches out there? Folly’s just fine.” Folly was not fine. She had stepped in a hole there when she was a child and nearly drowned, and her father had been hit by a trolley when he went out to Folly to get oysters. He died soon afterward.
Because of being hit by the trolley?
No, back then people just died.
“Listen,” I said. “I’m pissed at Jimmy and a lot of other people, but I do know he’s doing his best. Neither of us knows how to handle this situation. I’ll try to make amends to him later.”
“Where’s all this anger and grief coming from, Ellen? You didn’t know Ruby, and before that you didn’t know the children existed.”
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you. You’re starting to sound a lot like me. The bluntness, the irony. Maybe you’re easily influenced.”
“My mother hung herself in her garage. I was the one who found her. You’re not a bad model.”
“That’s unspeakable, Claudia. I don’t know how you stood it.”
“It was very, very bad, but it did get me sober. The only people I meet who make any sense to me now are in AA. You’ve got a wild temper, and I don’t envy you that.”
My hexagonal beach cottage was raised on stilts, as are almost all beach houses on the Carolina coast. It was basically just a cabin with one small bedroom partitioned off, leaving a combined living area and kitchen. There was a green plastic carpet like the quack grass on a minigolf course. The wood paneling inside and the balcony outside were what attracted me. Sooner or later I intended to remodel this place, maintaining the trashy beach feel, but the plastic rug was too much.
Tomb of the Unknown Racist Page 14