Tomb of the Unknown Racist

by Blanche Mccrary Boyd

  The young whites came forward first, either out of a sense of entitlement or because they had less to lose. I shook each person’s hand and said, “Welcome, welcome, thank you for coming.”

  Black women began joining the line. Claudia greeted two women wearing Kmart name tags. “Take your name tags off,” she whispered.

  “I’m going inside to stand beside Lucia,” I murmured to Estelle. “I hope you’re going to manage to forgive me for all this.”

  Once inside the hallway I told one of the employees to find Jimmy Beecher and tell him to come greet the visitors standing beside me. “Tell him it will look better for him.”

  I stood by Lucia’s pink-purple coffin, jumbled with toys, alongside Jimmy, who stayed for the first half hour, while several hundred Charlestonians took my hand and thanked me and also Jimmy, then moved silently past Lucia’s body, some weeping, some murmuring about the toys and the coffin. The two men carrying video cameras put them down before they got into line. Three policemen did too. Not all of the white people were young; many were contemporaries of Royce’s and of mine, or even older, and they all said, Good, good for you, what a good thing to do, thank you so much for doing this.

  No press had remained outside, so only a single policeman saw what happened. An elderly black woman in an emerald silk dress ended up lying facedown on the sidewalk while two white men shouted at each other and a small group of black youths formed around them. When the sound of sirens echoed through the viewing room again, a few people went outside to see what was going on. Then we heard shouting, lots of shouting, and people poured out of the room. Claudia left too, of course, and even Estelle, and I was alone with my niece.

  I touched Lucia Burns Godchild, my index finger held lightly on her forehead, which was cool and firm. Then I leaned over and kissed the place I had presumed to touch. “I’m sorry about your hair,” I whispered. “I would not have let them do that without your permission, but it does look good. You’re beautiful, honey.” And I closed the coffin myself.

  12

  Within hours we learned that the woman in the emerald green dress had fainted from the heat. There had been no altercation, and Estelle had arranged for Lucia’s remains to be transported to Bertie’s Home for Funerals, located only a few blocks away, which she said had been burying black Charlestonians for over eighty years. Since the end of state-sanctioned segregation, Bertie’s had also begun burying white people.

  The original Bertie had been Estelle’s great-great-aunt, and Bertie’s Home for Funerals remained in the Manigault family. It was now run by Estelle’s great-grandmother, a cane-thin, sharp-featured woman we all addressed as Miss Manigault, even Estelle, who bore no family resemblance to her.

  “Why don’t I know anything about this?” I asked Estelle.

  “I told you about my great-aunt leading the hospital workers’ strike in 1969, but I didn’t know if you could get over all your racist assumptions at once.”

  It was almost dark. A message on Claudia’s cell had confirmed that my new alarm system was successfully installed, and I could pick up keys tomorrow morning for the two new locks and instructions. All of my windows would now be monitored, there was a video camera in the big room, and the fire alarms, both interior and exterior, were wired directly to the Isle of Palms fire and police departments.

  Ed Blake had called back on Claudia’s cell without leaving a message, and Nadine still lay mauled in the Dockside parking lot, where I had tried to cover her up.

  After we left Bertie’s Home for Funerals, we went directly to my mother’s place and ordered Chinese food. Momma greeted us indifferently, but when she realized that Claudia, Estelle, and I intended to sit at her mahogany table again, she made a grunting sound, which meant that she might be upset. I told her we had ordered General Tso’s chicken and she could have all of it, and I’d gotten those boneless spareribs she liked too, so, for the second time, the prized table was liberated. My mother ate with her face too close to her plate, making snuffling noises.

  “Sit up straight, Momma.”

  She sat back and looked at each of us. “Is it my deal?”

  “What other racist assumptions do I make?” I said to Estelle.

  Estelle turned to Claudia and said, in a Gullah-inflected accent, “Miss Ellen think we all be po’ an’ ignorant down here.”

  “That’s what I think?”

  “Of course that’s what you think, Ellen. Not all of us go north to get educated the way you and I did. My schoolteacher aunts wouldn’t like to hear that.” She picked up a dumpling with her chopsticks, plopped it into her mouth, and said, “Also, you assume I haven’t opened my clinic because I don’t have enough money for it, but I have relatives who would back me if I made a direct case to them.”

  I tried to make a joke of it. “I’m overpaying you for no reason?”

  “I promise that your mother is not overpaying me.”

  Claudia, unruffled by the earlier intensity and chaos, now seemed rattled too. “I’ve got to eat fast. I want to get back to the hotel. I’ve got to call my editor, but I do have a couple of questions.”

  “It’s all in the brochure and the newspaper clippings that Miss Manigault gave you,” Estelle said.

  “I don’t mean about Bertie’s,” Claudia said.

  “You’ve been indispensable, Claudia,” I said. “This wouldn’t have happened the way it did if you hadn’t been here.”

  “That’s more what I mean,” she said. “I suspect I’ve crossed over into what used to be called gonzo journalism. Do you really think this is finished?”

  Before I could reply, my mother’s face rearranged itself in subtle ways. She looked at me for a moment with recognition and grief. “Ellen Larraine, I saw you on the television. How could you say those awful things about your brother?”

  Her old self disappeared before a reply was required, but this was the first time I’d seen genuine pain in my mother since her spaceship landed.

  After Claudia left, Estelle helped Momma get ready for bed while I put away the leftovers and loaded the dishwasher. I felt odd. The floor seemed to be vibrating slightly, and twice I looked to my right, thinking a light flashed behind me. I needed to go to a meeting, but it was too late for that tonight. I would go in the morning.

  Estelle took two packed suitcases with her. “I’m staying away from here for a while. Do you realize it’s possible that I’ve put my own family at risk in this mess? And please do not go to bed with that child. I know your ways. She will not handle it well.”

  “I don’t know if there will be any more trouble, and I sure hope your family isn’t at risk now, Estelle. But I did what I did, and you did what you did, and I am more grateful than I can say. I promise that we’ll put Lucia in the ground quietly tomorrow, with no public notice. Miss Manigault seemed to know exactly what she’s doing.”

  At the front door Estelle hugged me, but I felt her distance through our breasts. “So,” she said, still holding me, “what was the purple coffin for?”

  I stiffened slightly. “Was that a racist thing to do?”

  “Borderline, maybe. I don’t know what white people should be doing.”

  “I wanted it to be pretty. And bold. I wanted it to be childlike.”

  “Here’s what I do know,” she said, pulling away from me. “I am going to drive your Momma to the burial tomorrow because I know she trusts me. After that, you are going to have to find someone else to manage your life for a while.”

  “Thank you from my heart, Estelle,” I said, unsure whether I had permanently damaged our friendship, our relationship—whatever it was.

  13

  The trouble did not come with Lucia’s burial, and it did not come with an attack on my house or car, and it did not come to Bertie’s Home for Funerals or to Carolina Memorial Gardens. It came to my mother and Estelle.

  Estelle was driving Momma back from the uneventful burial in the old Mercedes with the HERITAGE, NOT HATE bumper sticker on it, and Momma was happy be
cause she had liked the graveyard with its neatly mown grass. Their car was three blocks away from Dockside when someone fired a small-caliber bullet at them. The back window on the driver’s side shattered, and the bullet grazed my mother’s forehead just above her left eye. The car’s windshield began to crumble, and tiny fragments landed all over Estelle and Momma like diamonds. My mother was wounded slightly, but head wounds are bleeders and she fainted from fright. Estelle pulled the car to the curb. She was shaking visibly from adrenaline when Claudia and I got there. We’d only been a few blocks behind, and we reached them just after two police cars did. Maybe the shooter hadn’t recognized Momma’s car, or maybe he thought my mother would be easier to terrorize than me. In any case, I went berserk.

  I stood on the street alternately screaming and swearing, then touching my mother’s cheek and whispering. When she awoke and saw all the blood, she fainted again, and I began to howl, literally, which thrust Estelle and Claudia into a preternatural calm. When the ambulances arrived, Estelle told the paramedics that she was a nurse practitioner, she’d been the one driving and she was fine, but they should take me with them now and they would probably have to sedate me. At some point someone gave me a shot.

  Once my mother’s head had been cleansed of blood and a butterfly bandage had been laid across her shallow wound, she didn’t seem to mind keeping on her bloody clothes. She was quite cheerful in the ER, but I was stoned, droopy, furious, and bewildered. “Have I lost my sobriety? Goddamn it, Estelle, did you make me lose my sobriety with that shot? Don’t you dare write anything about this, Claudia. I was baying like a hound in the street, wasn’t I?”

  “This was a medical decision,” Estelle said. “And, no, you have not lost your sobriety. You’ll be fine once you sleep it off.”

  Estelle and Claudia took us both back to Dockside. Estelle cleaned Momma up with a soapy washcloth, then got her into her nightclothes and under the covers. I lay on top of the white bedspread in my boots and bloodied shirt, refusing to move, mumbling over and over, “What have I done?”

  “Please,” Estelle said, “for everyone’s sake, just finally shut up.”

  During the night I awoke dazed, lying facedown on the carpet beside my mother’s bed. Estelle had left the hall lights burning. My head felt stuffed and bursting. Watermelons burst when they are overripe. Something important had happened, and I didn’t know what it was. A groove. Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is. I’m not Mr. Jones, I’m Ellen Burns, and it’s raining. I’m Rain Burns, but Rain was a fugitive and I’m not a fugitive. When my girlfriend shot herself, I gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and tasted the blood.

  I tipped to the right, stumbling around the apartment. Once I fell onto my butt. When I found my mother’s bedroom again, I tried to come back to the correct decade. Momma had a groove on her forehead. My girlfriend’s head was broken, and I touched the red jelly when she died. “Wake up, Momma. Wake up. Wake up.” Maybe I hadn’t spoken, because she didn’t stir. Once, in an AA meeting in California, I met a woman with a groove in the top of her head. She had tried to shoot herself, but the gun decided to point itself upward, so her skull was missing a piece, a channel that showed at the top of her forehead. Jordan had tried to fire into her temple, but the gun pointed itself farther back, so she blew off the base of her skull, where the fundamentals are.

  The blood on my shirt was my mother’s blood, not Jordan’s, and someone had shot at my mother’s car. Holy mother of God, someone had shot at my mother’s car, and she was hurt and it was my fault. I had challenged the white supremacists, and my mother had been shot.

  I lay back down on the carpet.

  “Ellen?” my mother said, turning toward her side and gazing down at me. “What are you doing down there?”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “My head hurts,” she said, touching the butterfly bandages.

  “Mine does too.”

  “Come back up here, honey. Take off that dirty shirt.”

  I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t take off my shirt, but I did manage to crawl around the bed, up the side, and onto the white embossed spread.

  “Get over here closer to me.”

  The expanse of her king-size bed looked too grand, but I got across it.

  She didn’t mention the shirt again.

  Momma slept like a queen, raised on a wedge of pillows because of her acid reflux. I managed to get my head onto the pillows beside her. “I’m sorry, Momma,” I whispered.

  “Oh, I know that,” she said.

  14

  Although Estelle had claimed to abandon us for the time being, she was worried enough about my condition to stop by the condo the next morning before she went to the hospital. “What happened,” she said, watching me struggle down the hall.

  “Nothing.”

  “Is there someone else here who can stay with your mother?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “I’ll call someone. You’re going back to the ER. You’re listing to the right.”

  All day I drowsed, listening to the noise of my breathing, watching my own blood get drawn, staring into the top of the rumbling MRI casket. When I woke up in a hospital bed, it was night, but I felt okay. I sat up warily and got out of bed. The overhead light made me squint. My reflection in the mirror revealed that I was standing up straight. I grimaced, and both sides of my face seemed the same too.

  He was young, this neurologist, with dark brown eyes that seemed to have something veiled behind them. I was glad Estelle stayed beside me. Claudia had been called back to New York.

  “So let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re telling me that part of my brain is now dead?”

  “Well, Ms. Burns, you have had several events we call transient ischemic attacks, or TIAs. And yes, you have actual damage. These are not the kind of events that come from bleeding but from capillaries getting blocked, and as a result, an area of the brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. So you have an infarct, which means you had a small stroke, and, yes, that technically means that a portion of your brain is, well, yes, that very small portion is now dead.”

  “Then why do I feel okay? Did I have some extra brain?”

  I thought it would be hard to make a neurologist laugh, but I did.

  “There are certain redundancies,” he said.

  I snorted while this sweet doctor’s cheeks colored. “That’s really it,” I said. “When I was a kid my mother kept saying I was too smart for my own good.”

  “It’s a result of evolution,” he said, still enjoying himself. “The damage is in a deeply primitive area. Be glad it wasn’t the part that speaks and reads. That one doesn’t carry any spares.”

  “It’s not a personality change,” Estelle said. “She’s been like this ever since I’ve known her.”

  The doctor wanted me to stay in the hospital for at least another night while they ran tests and observed me.

  “Sorry, doc, but I’ve got too much going on. I’m Ruby Redstone’s aunt, and I buried her daughter yesterday. Also, I’ve got to make arrangements for my mother. I tell you what, I’ll quit eating red meat.”

  “I know who you are,” he said.

  “Wow, that makes me feel even better.”

  “I tried to come to the viewing,” he said, “but the line was too long.”

  “You’re from South Carolina?”

  “Columbia.” He grinned, and we said in unison, as if we had been rehearsing, “Sherman burned Columbia.”

  He looked both pleased and alarmed, like someone waiting to sing karaoke. “I think we’ve got a mutual admiration thing going.”

  “Hey,” Estelle said. “What am I, the wallpaper over here?”

  I did not know yet that they were lovers.

  •

  Dr. Daniel Peters and Estelle convinced me to remain in the hospital overnight and then to spend a week at my mother’s condo recuperating while he ran more extensive tests. “You need to get grounded,” Estell
e said. “Before all of this happened, you were almost peaceful. Well, okay, not peaceful. Also, start eating something besides fast food.”

  So, for the next week, I made lunchtime bologna sandwiches with the crusts cut off for my mother and opted for healthier fare for myself. Momma and I watched The Young and the Restless every day, and I caught up on the story. “I remember when this soap first started,” I said. “I was in high school, and we were living out at Blacklock. I loved the theme music, and because I was so restless I thought it was going to be about me.”

  She didn’t answer, just watched her show.

  “You won’t remember this,” I said, “but a few months after Daddy was killed, I was coming down the stairs and I heard the TV say that a nuclear attack had started and the bombing would start in fifteen minutes. I didn’t know it was just a made-up show and not real news, so I tried to figure out how I could get all of us out of the house in fifteen minutes. At school, they had made us get under our desks, so I thought maybe we should get under the dining room table.”

  Momma kept her eyes fixed on the TV or her sandwich, biting it with her too-large teeth. “And once I was driving out to Edisto Island through one of those tunnels of oak trees and there was this gigantic lightning storm, and people were pulling off the road, but they all had out-of-state plates, so I thought they were Yankees who didn’t know about lightning. Then lightning hit a tree right beside me, and it dropped across the road behind me. You can’t imagine the noise of the lightning strike and the tree falling. It fell in slow motion. I saw it in the rearview mirror. I was crying hysterically, and I was afraid to stop and afraid to drive on, and my leg was jumping so bad I had to hold it down with one hand and drive with the other. Then after a while the storm turned to a drizzle and there were just these big fat drops, and it was like nothing had happened. But something had happened, I knew something had happened. I stopped at this little country store, one of those little stores out on the islands, and the lady inside said, ‘Some storm! I hear a tree dropped right in the road.’ I bought a Co-Cola and drove on out to the island where my friends were staying. I kept telling them that something important had happened and I’d almost gotten killed, and all they said was, ‘Why, it hardly rained out here a bit.’”