But before she could make up her mind to find him and confront him with her fury, before she could cuss him out good and call him an ungrateful, no-account bastard just like his father, a truck would have the heartless audacity to skid into her grandchild’s car one rainy night in Springfield and end his life at twenty-seven, taking that opportunity away from her forever. When they told her of his death she cursed her weakness. Begging God for another chance. But instead He gave her something she had never imagined.
Clarissa was the one to finally tell her. “Grandma,” she had said, “Edward’s been living with another man all these years.”
“So?”
“No, Grandma. Like man and wife.”
Maggie had never before been so paralyzed by news. One question answered, only to be replaced by a multitude. Gabriel had come with the body, like an interpreter for the dead. They had been living together in Boston, where Edward worked in a bookstore. He came, head bowed, rheumy-eyed, exhausted. He gave her no explanation; nor had she asked him for any, for he displayed the truth in his vacant and humble glare and had nothing to offer but the penurious tribute of his trembling hands. Which was more than she wanted.
In her world she had been expected to be tearless, patient, comforting to other members of the family; folk were meant to sit back and say, “Lord, ain’t she taking it well. I don’t think I could be so calm if my grandboy had’ve died so young.” Magisterially she had done her duty; she had taken it all in stride. But her world began to hopelessly unravel that summer night at the wake in the Raymond Brown Funeral Home, among the many somber-bright flower arrangements, the fluorescent lights, and the gleaming bronze casket, when Gabriel tried to tell her how sorry he was… How dare he? This pathetic, stumbling, poor trashy white boy, to throw his sinful lust for her grandbaby in her face, as if to bury a grandchild weren’t bad enough. Now this abomination had to be flaunted.—Sorry, indeed! The nerve! Who the hell did he think he was to parade their shame about?
Her anger was burning so intensely that she knew if she didn’t get out she would tear his heart from his chest, his eyes from their sockets, his testicles from their sac. With great haste she took her leave, brushing off the funeral director and her brother’s wives and husband’s brothers— they all probably thinking her overcome with grief rather than anger—and had Clarissa drive her home. When she got to the house she filled a tub with water as hot as she could stand it and a handful of bath oil beads, and slipped in, praying her hatred would mingle with the mist and evaporate, leaving her at least sane.
Next, sleep. Healing sleep, soothing sleep, sleep to make the world go away, sleep like death. Her mama had told her that sleep was the best medicine God ever made. When things get too rough—go to bed. Her family had been known as the family that retreated to bed. Ruined crop? No money? Get some shut-eye. Maybe it’ll be better in the morning. Can’t be worse. Maggie didn’t give a damn where Gabriel was to sleep that night; someone else would deal with it. She didn’t care about all the people who would come to the house after the wake to the Sitting Up, talking, eating, drinking, watching over the still body till sunrise; they could take care of themselves. The people came; but Maggie slept. From deeps under deeps of slumber she sensed her granddaughter stick her head in the door and whisper, asking Maggie if she wanted something to eat. Maggie didn’t stir. She slept. And in her sleep she dreamed.
She dreamed she was Job sitting on his dung heap, dressed in sackcloth and ashes, her body covered with boils, scratching with a stick, sending away Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar and Elihu, who came to counsel her, and above her the sky boiled and churned and the air roared, and she matched it, railing against God, against her life—Why? Why? Why did you kill him, you heartless old fiend? Why make me live to see him die? What earthly purpose could you have in such a wicked deed? You are God, but you are not good. Speak to me, damn it. Why? Why? Why? Hurricanes whipped and thunder ripped through a sky streaked by lightning, and she was lifted up, spinning, spinning, and Edward floated before her in the rushing air and quickly turned around into the comforting arms of Gabriel, winged, who clutched her grandboy to his bosom and soared away, out of the storm. Maggie screamed and the winds grew stronger, and a voice, gentle and sweet, not thunderous as she expected, spoke to her from the whirlwind: Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding… The voice spoke of the myriad creations of the universe, the stupendous glory of the Earth and its inhabitants. But Maggie was not deterred in the face of the maelstrom, saying: Answer me, damn you: Why?, and the winds began to taper off and finally halted, and Maggie was alone, standing on water. A fish, what appeared to be a mackerel, stuck its head through the surface and said: Kind woman, be not aggrieved and put your anger away. Your arrogance has clouded your good mind. Who asked you to love? Who asked you to hate? The fish dipped down with a plip and gradually Maggie too began to slip down into the water, down, down, down, sinking, below depths of reason and love, down into the dark unknown of her own mind, down, down, down.
Maggie MacGowan Williams woke the next morning to the harsh chatter of a bluejay chasing a mocking-bird just outside her window, a racket that caused her to open her eyes quickly to blinding sunlight. Squinting, she looked about the room, seeing the chest of drawers that had once belonged to her mother and her mother’s mother before that, the chairs, the photographs on the wall, the television, the rug thickly soft, the closet door slightly ajar, the bureau, the mirror atop the bureau, and herself in the mirror, all of it bright in the crisp morning light. She saw herself looking, if not refreshed, calmed, and within her the rage had gone, replaced by a numb humility and a plethora of questions. Questions. Questions. Questions.
Inwardly she had felt beatific that day of the funeral, ashamed at her anger of the day before. She greeted folk gently, softly, with a smile,
her tones honey-flavored but solemn, and she reassumed the mantle of one-who-comforts-more-than-needing-comfort.
The immediate family had gathered at Maggie’s house—Edward’s father, Tom, Jr.; Tom, Jr.’s wife, Lucille; the grandbaby, Paul (Edward’s brother); Clarissa. Raymond Brown’s long black limousine took them from the front door of Maggie’s house to the church, where the yard was crammed with people in their greys and navy blues, dark browns, and deep, deep burgundies. In her new humility she mused: When, oh when will we learn that death is not so somber, not something to mourn so much as celebrate? We should wear fire reds, sun oranges, hello greens, ocean-deep blues, and dazzling, welcome-home whites. She herself wore a bright dress of saffron and a blue scarf. She thought Edward would have liked it.
The family lined up and Gabriel approached her. As he stood before her—raven-haired, pink-skinned, abject, eyes bloodshot—she experienced a bevy of conflicting emotions: disgust, grief, anger, tenderness, fear, weariness, pity. Nevertheless she had to be civil, had to make a leap of faith and of understanding. Somehow she felt it had been asked of her. And though there were still so many questions, so much to sort out, for now she would mime patience, pretend to be accepting, feign peace. Time would unravel the rest.
She reached out, taking both his hands into her own, and said, the way she would to an old friend: “How have you been?”
IV
“But now, Miss Maggie…”
She sometimes imagined the good Reverend Barden as a toad-frog or an impotent bull. His rantings and ravings bored her, and his clumsy advances repelled her; and when he tried to impress her with his holiness and his goodness, well… “…that man should know better than to be plowing on a Sunday. Sunday! Why, the Lord said…”
“Reverend, I know what the Lord said. And I’m sure Morton Henry knows what the Lord said. But I am not the Lord, Reverend, and if Morton Henry wants to plow the west field on Sunday afternoon, well, it’s his soul, not mine.”
“But
, Maggie. Miss Maggie. It’s—”
“Well,”—Henrietta Fuchee sat perched to interject her five cents into the debate—“but, Maggie. It’s your land! Now, Reverend, doesn’t it say somewhere in Exodus that a man, or a woman in this case, a woman is responsible for the deeds or misdeeds of someone in his or her employ, especially on her property?”
“But he’s not an emplo—”
“Well,”—Barden scratched his head—“I think I know what you’re talking about, Henrietta. It may be in Deuteronomy…or Leviticus…part of the Mosaic Law, which…”
Maggie cast a quick glance at Gabriel. He seemed to be interested in and entertained by this contest of moral superiority. There was certainly something about his face…but she could not stare. He looked so normal… “Well, I don’t think you should stand for it, Maggie.”
“Henrietta? What do you…? Look, if you want him to stop, you go tell him what the Lord said. I—”
The Right Reverend Hezekiah Barden stood, hiking his pants up to his belly. “Well, I will. A man’s soul is a valuable thing. And I can’t risk your own soul being tainted by the actions of one of your sharecroppers.”
“My soul? Sharecropper—he’s not a sharecropper. He leases that land. I—wait!… Hezekiah!… This doesn’t…”
But Barden had stepped off the patio onto the lawn and was headed toward the field, marching forth like old Nathan on his way to confront King David.
“Wait, Reverend.” Henrietta hopped up, slinging her black pocketbook over her left shoulder. “Well, Maggie?” She peered at Maggie defiantly, as if to ask: Where do you stand?
“Now, Henrietta, I—”
Henrietta pivoted, her moral righteousness jagged and sharp as a shard of glass. “Somebody has to stand up for right!” She tromped off after Barden.
Giggling, Emma picked up the empty glasses. “I don’t think ole Morton Henry gone be too happy to be preached at this afternoon.”
Maggie looked from Emma to Gabriel in bewilderment, at once annoyed and amused. All three began to laugh out loud. As Emma got to the door she turned to Maggie. “Hon, you better go see that they don’t get into no fistfight, don’t you think? You know that Reverend don’t know when to be quiet.” She looked to Gabriel and nodded know-
ingly. “You better go with her, son,” and was gone into the house; her molasses-thick laughter sweetening the air.
Reluctantly Maggie stood, looking at the two figures—Henrietta had caught up with Barden—a tiny cloud of dust rising from their feet. “Come on, Gabe. Looks like we have to go referee.”
Gabriel walked beside her, a broad smile on his face. Maggie thought of her grandson being attracted to this tall white man. She tried to see them together and couldn’t. At that moment she understood that she was being called on to realign her thinking about men and women, and men and men, and even women and women. Together…the way Adam and Eve were meant to be together.
V
Initially she found it difficult to ask the questions she wanted to ask. Almost impossible.
They got along well on Saturday. She took him out to dinner; they went shopping. All the while she tried with all her might to convince herself that she felt comfortable with this white man, with this homosexual, with this man who had slept with her grandboy. Yet he managed to impress her with his easygoing manner and openness and humor.
“Mrs. W.” He had given her a nickname, of all things. No one had given her a nickname since… “Mrs. W., you sure you don’t want to try on some swimsuits?”
She laughed at his kind-hearted jokes, seeing, oddly enough, something about him very like Edward; but then that thought would make her sad and confused.
Finally that night over coffee at the kitchen table she began to ask what they had both gingerly avoided.
“Why didn’t he just tell me?”
“He was afraid, Mrs. W. It’s just that simple.”
“Of what?”
“That you might disown him. That you might stop...well, you know, loving him, I guess.”
“Does your family know?”
“Yes.”
“How do they take it?”
“My mom’s fine. She’s great. Really. She and Edward got along swell. My dad. Well, he’ll be okay for a while, but every now and again we’ll have these talks, you know, about cures and stuff and sometimes it just gets heated. I guess it’ll just take a little more time with him.”
“But don’t you want to be normal?”
“Mrs. W., I am. Normal.”
“I see.”
They went to bed at one-thirty that morning. As Maggie buttoned up her nightgown, Gabriel’s answers whizzed about her brain; but they brought along more damnable questions and Maggie went to bed feeling betrayal and disbelief and revulsion and anger.
In church that next morning with Gabriel, she began to doubt the wisdom of having asked him to come. As he sat beside her in the pew, as the Reverend Barden sermonized on Jezebel and Ahab, as the congregation unsuccessfully tried to disguise their curiosity—(“What is that white boy doing here with Maggie Williams? Who is he? Where he come from?”)—she wanted Gabriel to go ahead and tell her what to think: We’re perverts or You’re wrong-headed, your church has poisoned your mind against your own grandson; if he had come out to you, you would have rejected him. Wouldn’t you? Would she have?
Barden’s sermon droned on and on that morning; the choir sang; after the service people politely and gently shook Gabriel and Maggie’s hands and then stood off to the side, whispering, clearly perplexed.
On the drive back home, as if out of the blue, she asked him: “Is it hard?”
“Ma’am?”
“Being who you are? What you are?”
He looked over at her, and she could not meet his gaze with the same intensity that had gone into her question. “Being gay?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I have no choice.”
“So I understand. But is it hard?”
“Edward and I used to get into arguments about that, Mrs. W.” His tone altered a bit. He spoke more softly, gently, the way a widow speaks of her dead husband. Or, indeed, the way a widower speaks of his dead husband. “He used to say it was harder being black in this country than gay. Gays can always pass for straight; but blacks can’t always pass for white. And most can never pass.”
“And what do you think now?”
“Mrs. W., I think life is hard, you know?” “Yes. I know.”
VI
Death had first introduced itself to Maggie when she was a child. Her grandfather and grandmother both died before she was five; her father died when she was nine; her mother when she was twenty-five; over the years all her brothers except one. Her husband ten years ago. Her first memories of death: watching the women wash a cold body: the look of brown skin darkening, hardening: the corpse laid out on a cooling board, wrapped in a winding-cloth, before interment: fear of ghosts, bodyless souls: troubled sleep. So much had changed in seventy years; now there were embalming, funeral homes, morticians, insurance policies, bronze caskets, a bureaucratic wall between deceased and bereaved. Among the many things she regretted about Edward’s death was not being able to touch his body. It made his death less real. But so much about the world seemed unreal to her these dark, dismal, and gloomy days. Now the flat earth was said to be round and bumblebees were not supposed to fly.
What was supposed to be and what truly was. Maggie learned these things from magazines and television and books; she loved to read. From her first week in that small schoolhouse with Miss Clara Oxendine, she had wanted to be a teacher. School: the scratchy chalkboard, the dusty-smelling textbooks, labyrinthine grammar and spelling and arithmetic, geography, reading out loud, giving confidence to the boy who would never learn to read well, correcting addition and subtraction problems, the taste and the scent of the schoolroom, the heat of the potbellied stove in January. She liked that small world; for her it was large. Yet how could she pay for enough education to become a teac
her? Her mother would smile, encouragingly, when young Maggie would ask her, not looking up from her sewing, and merely say: “We’ll find a way.”
However, when she was fourteen she met a man named Thomas Williams, he sixteen going on thirty-nine. Infatuation replaced her dreams and murmured to her in languages she had never heard before, whispered to her another tale: You will be a merchant’s wife.
Thomas Williams would come a-courting on Sunday evenings for two years, come driving his father’s red Ford truck, stepping out with his biscuit-shined shoes, his one good Sunday suit, his hat cocked at an impertinent angle, and a smile that would make cold butter drip. But his true power lay in his tongue. He would spin yarns and tell tales that would make the oldest storyteller slap his knee and declare: “Hot damn! Can’t that boy lie!” He could talk a possum out of a tree. He spoke to Maggie about his dream of opening his own store, a dry-goods store, and then maybe two or three or four. An audacious dream for a seventeen-year- old black boy, son of a farmer in 1936—and he promised, oh, how he promised, to keep Maggie by his side through it all.
Thinking back, on the other side of time and dreams, where fantasies and wishing had been realized, where she sat rich and alone, Maggie wondered what Thomas Williams could possibly have seen in that plain brown girl. Himself the son of a farmer with his own land, ten sons and two daughters, all married and doing well. There she was, poorer than a skinned rabbit, and not that pretty. Was he looking for a woman who would not flinch at hard work?
Somehow, borrowing from his father, from his brothers, working two, three jobs at the shipyards, in the fields, with Maggie taking in sewing and laundry, cleaning houses, saving, saving, saving, they opened their store; and were married. Days, weeks, years of days, weeks of days, weeks of inventory and cleaning and waiting on people and watching over the dry-goods store, which became a hardware store in the sixties while the one store became two. They were prosperous; they were respected; they owned property. At seventy she now wanted for nothing. Long gone was the dream of a schoolhouse and little children who skinned their knees and the teaching of the ABCs. Some days she imagined she had two lives and she preferred the original dream to the flesh-and-blood reality.
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