One Sunday, Samuel came to visit. Mahala rushed to serve Samuel some of her precious tea in one of the china cups painted with pink flowers. She had harangued Micco for these cups and their saucers, the matching plates and bowls, and the silver place settings that he had to save for each year, one setting at a time. After drinking tea and smiling charmingly at Mahala, Samuel asked Micco outside to talk. He had a matter to discuss. In the dirt yard in front of the cabin, Samuel causally broached the matter of Micco’s African blood.
He knew Micco’s heritage: In the first year after Samuel had come to the farm, the Creek man had confided about his grandfather Coromantee-Panther. It was information Micco never had intended to share, but he’d been so happy for a friend, he’d become giddy with affection and camaraderie. Yet he’d been wise enough to ask Samuel never to tell anyone else. Micco wasn’t entirely foolish; he knew he was giving out dangerous information. Even Mahala didn’t know; Micco had never told her, because he knew that she worshipped white people and despised Negroes. With each child that Mahala had given birth to, Micco had prayed to his wife’s Christian god that none would betray his African line, but the prayer had been answered slant. His twin sons were white-skinned but had wide noses and full lips. His third son had been born with blue eyes, but his skin had turned brown in his fourth year, so that Mahala continually had bathed him in buttermilk and screamed at him to stay out of the sun, though this boy had only laughed at her as he ran outside to play or hunt. With Micco’s daughter, that god kept laughing, for though Lady’s skin remained very pale, her eyes hazel, and most of her brown hair straight, there were tight kinks that grew at her nape. Mahala sometimes wondered if someone had cursed her with the old medicine she’d ridiculed in the past. Why else would her children have these strange features?
As Samuel observed the copse of trees on the horizon, he remarked that it would be such a shame if Micco’s heritage were revealed. He could become a slave. Even Micco’s sons, who had gone to live in Creek villages, could be tracked down and put in chains. But Lady would be the worst, because men in the Louisiana territory would love to use her for their base desires: a Negro girl who looked completely white would be in great demand. However, Samuel always would keep Lady’s secret now that the little girl was his wife. There was no reason to be afraid. He’d only wanted to remind Micco of the trust that lay between them. And remembering the past nectar of friendship, Micco held out hope.
The day that Micco finally understood he’d been deceived by Samuel Pinchard began with a minuscule event. Micco had gone fishing and told his Negro, Pop George, to have four buckets of water waiting when he returned to keep his fish fresh. But upon his return the buckets were still empty. Micco sent for Pop George, who told him Samuel had ordered him to accomplish other tasks. Only then, Samuel had said, could he turn to filling Micco’s buckets, and the white man had slapped Pop George several times to induce obedience. Every time the Negro had finished one task, Samuel had given him another thing to do. Pop George had not had time to fill the buckets. While telling this story, he referred to Samuel as “Master.” When Micco asked why, the Negro told him he had been ordered to do so by the white man.
The grandson of Coromantee-Panther became angry, an emotion he’d never truly felt before. His heart shaded with red, and he raised his hand to strike Pop George, who did not crouch or beg, but simply stood there. The Negro’s face was not impassive, however. Though he was a slave, he looked at Micco with pity. That was when Micco recalled the words of Nila many years before, when she’d told him that white men were not to be trusted. And Pop George—the man Micco had purchased for fifty dollars years before—felt sorry for him, for Micco actually had believed a white man could be an Indian’s friend.
That evening, Micco went to the creek, seeking out his only remaining comrade. Micco needed counsel, but the small man Joe could not be found. And he was not there the next day or in the days to come. Though Joe would return to the farm that had once been a village, he would never show himself to Micco again.
And Micco still hadn’t solved the riddle: which sets of hands he should lean toward.
II
Self-realization is thus coming slowly but surely to another of the world’s great races, and they are to-day girding themselves to fight in the van of progress, not simply for their own rights as men, but for the ideals of the greater world in which they live; the emancipation of women, universal peace, democratic government, the socialization of wealth, and human brotherhood.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, “Evolution of the Negro”
What Is Best
It was the Friday before winter break at Toomer High. Mama knocked on my door, telling me we were going to take a girls’ day. I didn’t have to go to school, and she’d arranged for a substitute to cover her class. We were going to have some fun.
“For real? Can we have pizza?”
“We’ll see. But let’s go out.”
“Where’re we going, Mama?”
“It’s a surprise, baby. Wear something nice, though. Not jeans.”
I wore a plaid kilt and a pink sweater but slipped on my penny loafers. Mama was in heels and a blue wool dress with a matching self-belt. The pearl earrings my father had bought her for their anniversary hung from her lobes. We buckled in and she drove to the toniest part of town, where the streets were cobblestone, and pulled up to a new, L-shaped building. There were four floors and wooden shingles on top.
“Mama, why are we at Coco’s old school?”
“Don’t get upset.” This was what she usually said right before she was about to upset me. “We’re going to talk to the admissions counselor here.”
“No, Mama! Uh-uh!”
“Just keep an open mind, baby. If you don’t want to transfer, you don’t have to. But please be polite, okay? Don’t embarrass me in front of that white man.”
Inside, the school counselor told us to call him by his first name, because at Braithwaite Friends School everyone was on a first-name basis from the students on up to headmaster. Which meant I couldn’t call the counselor anything, because I’d been taught that children shouldn’t address adults by first names. I couldn’t tell him that, though, because that would be correcting an adult, which I was also forbidden to do. This was a no-win situation.
The counselor informed us that I had placed in the ninety-ninth percentile with my reading and writing scores on the state’s secondary school standardized tests. He didn’t say how he’d received my test scores, only that my language skills were quite surprising since I’d lagged over a year behind in science and math. He didn’t want to give me those percentiles, however. That would only discourage me.
“I know that Ailey can catch up,” Mama said. “She’s a very hard worker.”
This charade had gone way too far. I turned to my mother and she looked back at me. Her eyes narrowed, and her lips pursed for a quick moment, before her face was brushed free of emotion again. That’s when I knew: my mother had sat me in the fool’s chair.
The counselor picked up a small stack of folders and straightened them by knocking them on top of the desk. “All right, but we can’t take her for this spring semester. That’s too soon, I hope you understand.”
“I understand,” Mama said.
“But I’ll have a place for her next fall,” he said. “And I have high hopes for your sophomore year, Ailey. Your sister Carol was a superlative student here and fully integrated into school culture.”
The counselor had been smiling in an encouraging way, but when he said “integrated” he paused and blushed. He looked down at his files, as if he’d said something naughty. At the end of the interview, he began filling out the paperwork needed for my enrollment at Braithwaite Friends School.
* * *
My mother wasn’t much into art. She tended to use books as decoration instead: one wall of our living room was taken up by custom shelves. The former owners had installed them, and when the real estate agent had walked my mother through t
he house and she saw those shelves, she’d instantly put down a bid. And then there was a child’s quilt that had been passed down in my mother’s family that hung on my parents’ bedroom wall. Its edges were tattered, and its scattered stars had faded to an anonymous gray, so my mother had framed it and sealed it in glass.
Aunt Diane had given Mama her only official piece of art, a reproduction of a Norman Rockwell painting. A poster, really—though Mama had that framed as well—that depicted a little Black girl named Ruby Bridges on her first day in a segregated school, back in 1960. In the painting, she wore church clothes: A dress with petticoats underneath. Ankle socks and Mary Janes. The faces of the federal marshals escorting her were hidden, but anyone looking at the painting understood why they were bookending her. There was implicit, hushed violence in the brightly colored scene: tomatoes had been thrown at the child, their brutal juice clinging to the bricks. Ruby was in kindergarten, so she couldn’t read the word “nigger” scrawled on the brick wall behind her.
Sometimes, when a bad event was reported on the news, something that a white man had done to a Black person, or when President Reagan used one of his inside terms meant to low-rate Black folks, like “welfare queen” and such, my mother would get to talking about Ruby Bridges. How, even at six years old, she’d been so brave. To hear my mother, the way she wrapped her words in intimacy, you’d think she and Ruby had been best friends.
That afternoon, as my mother and I drove away from Braithwaite Friends School, I fumed in the car, afraid to snap, to tell her what I really thought of her betrayal. Not only that, but the deception involved. My mother didn’t drive straight home. She wheeled around the City to out-of-the-way places and began to talk of Ruby Bridges, the patron saint of integration.
“I know Braithwaite doesn’t have a lot of Black kids. But look how brave Ruby must have been. This’ll be a walk in the park compared to what she went through. It’s 1987. And you don’t transfer until next fall.”
I said nothing.
“And these white kids at Braithwaite? They all come from good families. Wealthy families. They’re nothing like those crackers that used to stand outside Ruby’s school. Coco went to Braithwaite, and see how great that worked out? She’s at Yale!”
I took in a deep breath, as my aunt did when she was trying not to yell at my cousin Veronica, whom we called “demon child” behind my aunt’s back.
“I don’t want to go to school with all those honkies. I don’t care how rich their families are.”
“That’s not nice, Ailey. Your aunt’s a white lady. What would she think if she heard you talk like that?”
“I think Aunt Diane would agree with me. She married Uncle Lawrence, didn’t she? And have you ever seen any of her white friends? Like that lady she loves so much at her counseling job. The one she talks about all the time. Have you ever met a white lady named LaTavia?”
“That’s beside the point, Ailey. The point is, you’re being prejudiced—”
“Oh, my God! I know you did not just say that! Besides Aunt Diane, you can’t stand white people—”
“That’s not true! What about Miss Cordelia from down home? She’s white, and there’s Father Dan at church here—”
“I can’t believe you’re trying to play this off!”
“Ailey Pearl Garfield, are you calling me a liar?”
Oh, damn.
I took another deep breath.
“No, Mama. I’d never. But aren’t you always telling me that besides Aunt Diane, white folks aren’t to be trusted? That all white men do is go after us? And now you want to send me to school with them? Like, what about what happened to Uncle Roscoe—”
“Don’t you dare bring that up!”
For twenty minutes, she said nothing, but when we pulled up to our street, her mouth was trembling. She told me she didn’t know how I could take her dead brother’s name in vain, just because I wanted to win an argument. That was so mean, especially when she only wanted the best for me, the way any mother would.
Inside, I stomped up to my room, though when the smell of chicken hit the hallway, I came down to dinner. The meal was a quiet, tense affair, even with my extra chicken breast and sweet potato pie for dessert. After I finished eating, I left the table without excusing myself and made a production of walking out of the room, my hand to my forehead, like the white girls on television. Then my father knocked on my bedroom door. Come on down. I could bring my book if I wanted, but in his office, he’d set up the board.
I lay on the beat-up leather couch.
“I don’t feel like chess, Daddy. I’m in a very unfortunate mood.”
“I see. Well, we can just sit here. I don’t mind. I enjoy your company.” He put his pipe in his mouth. He liked to suck it after dinner. It had been years since he’d filled it with cherry tobacco, but he liked the taste of the stem. My mother called it his sugar tit.
I kicked the back of the couch. “How can you be so calm when my life is being ruined?! I don’t want to transfer schools!”
He took the pipe out, setting it on his desk. “Darling, come on now. It’s okay.”
“But I want to stay at Toomer! I can’t be at that other school with all those honkies!”
“All right, now. Don’t be upset. Let’s look at this logically.” He closed both his hands into fists, and I sat up on the couch. “Let’s weigh the pros and cons. Let’s say you go to Braithwaite Friends. You can call up Coco. Get her notes and rap about the social situation.”
Daddy offered his thumb to mark the “pro,” and because I wanted him on my side, I withheld vital information, such as nobody said “rap” anymore for “talking.” It was 1987, not 1967.
“Next, ninety-nine percent of Braithwaite’s students attend college. And eighty-seven percent of those students go on to the Ivy League—”
“And one hundred percent of everybody there are pasty-faced honkies. And anyway, Daddy, I don’t know if I want to go to the Ivy League.”
He extended a thumb on the other hand.
“I hear you. The presence of honkies is a big con. But another pro is that you have a fresh start at Braithwaite Friends without worrying about getting beat up. So we’ve got one con and four pros. Let’s turn to Toomer High.”
He put his hands back into fists.
“There are no honkies,” I said. “That should be, like, two fingers.”
“I’ll give you those, then. And you feel very comfortable among other Black students. Let’s give that credit for two more pros.”
Four fingers. My chest felt light. It was going to be okay.
He held out the other fist.
“Now let’s list the cons for Toomer. Your cousin Malcolm is graduating in June and probably headed to Howard, so he can’t look out for you. Con. Last fall, the City public schoolteachers went on strike and have threatened to go on strike again. Con. There’s a crack house three blocks down the street. Con. You got jumped by some unstable lunatic who tried to rip all your hair out of your head. Con. She scratched your beautiful face, too. Con. You got sent to the principal’s office. Con. If I hadn’t pulled out the business card of our family attorney and threatened to sue the school system, you’d have a suspension on your permanent academic record. Con.
“Thus, which school do you think I want my precious child to attend, Braithwaite Friends or Toomer High?”
I looked at his hands and the weight returned to my chest. He’d run out of fingers on the “con” hand.
“This is a complete setup.”
“Ailey, please don’t be mad at your daddy.”
“Too late. And don’t you expect me to play chess anymore. You’re a horrible opponent anyway. Worse than me, and I didn’t think that was possible.”
“You wound me deeply with those statements. And here I thought I was coming up on Bobby Fischer.” He put the empty pipe in his mouth and then took it back out. “Girl, you are just like your mama!”
“I’m ignoring you, Daddy. I might never speak to y
ou again.”
I lay back down, flipping through the book that Nana had given me. It wasn’t a proper romance novel. Nobody ever got busy on a yacht in Greece, but it was good. This was the second time I’d read it, but it had aged well.
“This novel is by a Negro friend of my mother,” Nana had told me. “Miss Jessie Fauset would take tea at our house, whenever she visited the City. She was the assistant to the great W. E. B. Du Bois. Don’t you find that interesting?”
In my head, I gave the characters British accents, like on Masterpiece Theatre. They weren’t like the characters in the book Uncle Root had mailed to me. Back in the late 1930s, he had run into the book’s author at a party in the City, and Miss Zora Neale Hurston had been quite stylish, with a feather in her fedora, and fur trimming her blue duster. Uncle Root and she got to drinking the bug juice she’d brought along, and after a few sips of that, they talked about the best way to fry a catfish—head on or head off—but he had to cut the night short. Aunt Olivia had been shooting Miss Hurston and him dirty looks.
As I read, I forgot I was supposed to be angry, and when my father took his break from making his notes on his patient files, I told him the story. My father told me that Uncle Root had been wise to back away from that situation. No man could sleep soundly lying next to a jealous woman. It just wasn’t possible.
At Sunday dinner, Nana was smug. Private school was what she’d wanted for me all along. Ever since my big sister had attended Toomer High, she’d warned my parents it was not an appropriate place for children from the best families. It had been a lovely institution back when it was the City Preparatory School for Negroes, but those days were long over. She talked past me at the dinner table as if there were an empty seat beside her and told my parents thank goodness they had come to their senses. She pointed a slightly gnarled, coral-painted finger in my direction.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Page 8