“She supposed to have some meat on her, ain’t she?” David asked. “She got that kind of frame.”
“Shole do, and don’t nobody want a bone but a dog.”
I told them, they better stop teasing me, but give me that breast. I didn’t mind getting the big piece of chicken.
* * *
The next morning, the bench dedication was long, with prayers and songs and stories. My mother and David James were on the first row of pews, in the old bourgie section. I sat on the chapel stage, beside Uncle Root. Dr. Oludara wore garb commensurate with her promotion to president of the college, a flowing purple-and-red dress. Around her head, brightly colored satin cloth, the regalia of her heritage.
Dr. Oludara spoke softly, but close to the microphone. Honoring Uncle Root, who’d never let his students forget the task before them. He’d remained at the college for over four decades, and for thirty of those years, he’d taught Freshman Orientation.
“Who remembers this?” She raised her index finger, and there were knowing chuckles from my mother and other, older people in the audience. She cleared her throat, deepening her voice into a high-toned drawl. “‘My children, we are a distinguished race, although some would say otherwise. Our people depend on us. Our white brethren need the Negro, though they are unaware of it, for without the Negro, who would toil in his fields, or let the white man think himself divine? Every God needs an Adam to cast out of the Garden. And without the educated men of his race, the Negro would lose himself in the desert of the unlettered, the surest path to salvation. But without the sacrifices of the Negro woman’”—and here Dr. Oludara smiled broadly—“‘without her struggles, who would my brother be? Unaided, unsupported, brutish—a heathen! My children, the Negro woman is the best our race has to offer. Cherish her. Love her. Never leave her behind.’” She bowed her head a few seconds, in reverence. Then: “Honored guests and alumni, I give you Dr. Jason Freeman Hargrace, class of 1926!”
There was a standing ovation, and the old man extended his hands to me, and I pulled him from his seat. At the podium, Dr. Oludara embraced the two of us, then swept her arm: the podium belonged to Uncle Root.
“I will not make a long speech, as I’m very old and I need to save what little time I have left.” There was laughter. “I wish to thank you, President Oludara, and all the alumni. I am greatly humbled, and I accept this honor in the memories of my beloved mother, Maybelline Freeman, Dr. Terrence Carter Holmes, my professor, colleague, and friend, and my dear wife, Dr. Olivia Ellen Hargrace. And I pass my torch as the tender of the history of this college to my niece who stands beside me on this stage, Ailey Pearl Garfield, Routledge College, class of 1995.”
He nodded his head in thanks as the crowd refused to be silent. For an entire minute, they kept clapping, and he pulled out his handkerchief. He wiped away tears.
At the reception in the faculty dining room, there were several of my old classmates. Though Abdul wasn’t there, Tiffany stood in line with her husband, a Gamma who had graduated in my freshman year; she didn’t wave or even acknowledge that she saw me. Keisha wasn’t there, but Roz was, slender, her hair cut to the shoulders and colored auburn. Like me, she was single. She bragged that she was making too much money as a corporate lawyer to be tied down to somebody and pushing out his babies. She had dismissed Curt Waymon several years before.
After the buffet lunch was served and dishes cleared away, the Gamma brothers circled the old man and serenaded him with their fraternity song. When they broke apart, there was Patrick Lindsay. He was balding, his remaining curls cut low and surrounding a freckled scalp, but that same warmth beamed. He introduced himself to David, then embraced me, his arms hugging around my waist. We stood that way, facing each other, mere inches between us, until David had a coughing fit.
“Girl, you are fine as ever!” Pat said. “The glasses suit you.”
“You’re so sweet.” I touched his face. “You’re looking great yourself.”
He’d wanted his wife to come, but she was breastfeeding, and it made her tired. They both taught at the University of Arkansas in the department of world languages. She was tenure-track, and he was visiting faculty but was hoping for a spousal hire. They’d met at Georgia, where they had been the only two Blacks in their program. He pulled out his billfold to show me her picture: a slender woman garbed in a sleeveless, loose linen dress. Her natural hair was shaved close to her skull. The fat baby in her arms had his mother’s mahogany color and his father’s brown-blond curls.
I leaned over the image, fighting emotion. Roz had told me that he was married, but somehow, I’d imagined him single, preserved in amber. Always available to me, if I ever got myself together.
“She’s, like, a Vogue supermodel. She’s so gorgeous. Look at those cheekbones. And your baby is so adorable! What’s his name?”
“Léopold Aimé Lindsay.”
“After your favorite Negritudes.”
“Aw, girl, you remembered! Yeah, I guess he is kinda cute, even though he took all my hair. And my wife’s a real good woman. The best woman a man could ask for.” He put an arm around my shoulder, and then an arm around David’s shoulder. He closed our circle. Pat directed his words to my escort but kept his eyes on me. “Let me tell you something. This girl, right here? I was in love with this girl! She had my nose so wide open I couldn’t think about nobody else but Ailey Pearl Garfield. Then she stomped my heart in the dirt, and don’t you know, I still don’t know why? For years, I wondered if she’d take me back. Maybe I should call her and beg her, one more time. But then, finally, I had to move on.”
“Oh, brother, I definitely know that feeling,” David said. “It ain’t hardly no fun.”
They laughed at their common misery, and I didn’t know whether to feel flattered or foolish.
Any More White Folks
It had been five years since I’d found the daguerreotypes and the letters of Matthew Thatcher, Adeline Routledge, and Judith Hutchinson in the library of Routledge College, and had learned who these women were, that they’d been enslaved on Wood Place Plantation. When I’d dried my tears, I’d understood something else: only half of the history had been told.
That Judith and Matthew probably had been more than friends was obvious, but the college had concealed that fact, as had everyone going back to Adeline Routledge. When I asked Dr. Oludara, and then Uncle Root, why this was the case, they both told me it had been an open secret among the historians teaching at the school. But no one in the college’s administration had wanted to reveal that Matthew and Judith were lovers: it was too explosive, in racial terms. Too embarrassing and complicated. And so that part of the college’s founding had been buried.
Then I’d let myself be fooled: I became high with the ease of my search. Even before I finished that final semester of my master’s program, I’d already outlined my doctoral dissertation on the two formerly enslaved women who had escaped from Wood Place and ended up in Boston. Dr. Whitcomb had been so proud of me: I’d sailed through my coursework for the doctoral program with perfect grades, and I’d passed my comprehensive exams with distinction that next year. So I was disappointed to find that besides the letters, there wasn’t much else on Adeline and Judith to use for my dissertation. There was so much more material on the Pinchards and Matthew Thatcher—their lives, their land, the people that they’d owned—but I didn’t want to focus only on what I’d found in the possessions of white men. The most interesting thing I’d discovered was of no use to my dissertation, though it was bound to cause a stir in my family: it appeared that Samuel Pinchard’s son Victor had married a Grace Franklin, sibling to the same Franklins from whom Chicasetta’s most odious family was descended. Which made us all distant cousins.
For a year, I was “all but dissertation” for my doctorate on Adeline and Judith and Black women’s education. I continued my research, driving down to Georgia during my winter and fall breaks, and spending time walking through my granny’s farm. I sifted through the ove
rgrown ruins of the plantation house, where I found broken shards of cooking pots, a corncob pipe, and twisted iron. The bricks of the plantation had been made with stiff hog’s hair. The cemetery where my great-grandmother, father, and sister were buried contained the remains of generations of Wood Place enslaved folks. It was segregated, with a grass-covered space separating the two sides where the white Pinchards and the Black folks rested. In the latter space, most of the graves didn’t have stones.
But for months something bothered me, and when I woke one morning, I was embarrassed I hadn’t realized what it was before. It was so simple: somehow the saga of Adeline and Judith was interconnected with the lives of the other slaves at Wood Place. And I had been ignoring the three people who could tell me at least a bit about their stories.
* * *
In July, I drove down for the family reunion in Uncle Root’s town car. My own car finally had died, and he’d given me the long Lincoln to take back to North Carolina, saying it was still a good automobile, and his driving days were over. I waited until after the reunion to begin approaching this new aspect of my dissertation, about the enslaved folks at Wood Place, until the days would settle back into languor. I asked the old man, could I stay with him a few days more?
The morning that I interviewed him, he’d wanted our talk to take place early in the day. He was sharpest before noon. When I came down for the morning, he asked me, how formal did I want him to be for our interview?
“You’re not going to be on public television. I’ll only be recording you on this.”
I showed him my new piece of equipment.
“Look at that tiny little thing! Isn’t technology wonderful? Ailey, this is the first time I’ve ever been recorded. I want to be very professional.”
“As opposed to what? I’ve never even seen you in jeans and a T-shirt.”
“And you never will, as long as my head is hot!”
After I set the recorder on the coffee table, I looked at my legal pad. I’d written down basic questions. Dr. Whitcomb had told me, in his experience, even simple queries would yield great results, especially with elderly subjects. Just remember, don’t try to control their answers. And keep my opinions to myself, if at all possible.
I clicked on the recorder.
“This is Ailey Pearl Garfield. I’m interviewing Dr. Jason Freeman Hargrace, a resident of Chicasetta, Georgia. Today’s date is July 23, 2007. Dr. Hargrace, do you give me permission to record our conversation?”
“I do.”
“Dr. Hargrace, can you tell me when and where you were born?”
“I was born Christmas Day in nineteen hundred and seven on Wood Place Plantation in Chicasetta, Georgia. My mother told me I was six weeks early, but her grandmother insisted the timing was off. I was a very fat baby.”
“And who were your parents?”
“My mother’s name was Maybelline Victorina Freeman. They called her Lil’ May. My father’s name was Thomas John Pinchard Sr. They called him Big Thom. His father was named Victor Pinchard. And Victor’s father was Samuel Pinchard. My father was a white man, and my mother was a Negro. He was twenty-two years older. My mother’s mother was named Sheba Freeman. We never knew the name of my mother’s father, and we didn’t know much about him, other than he was a scoundrel. My maternal great-grandmother was named Eliza Two Freeman, but we called her Meema. She was a slave and so were her parents. They were owned by the parents and grandparents of Big Thom Pinchard.”
“Can you name any of your other ancestors of the Pinchard line?”
“You mean, can I name any more white folks in my bloodline?” He laughed. “I do know that Victor and Eliza Two’s father were half brothers.”
“Really?”
“Ah! The scholar picks up a pen! I see I’ve piqued your interest. Yes, they were half brothers. Samuel, their father, was the owner of Wood Place. The slaves called him ‘Old Massa.’ Whenever Meema talked about him, her mouth would shrink up like a prune.”
He made a sour face.
The next question was sensitive. Though I’d talked through most of my findings with the old man, I hadn’t told him about what might be shocking, at least to him. But how to proceed?
“Dr. Hargrace, may I ask you a question?”
“I thought you were doing that already.”
“Um . . . well . . .”
“Go ahead, Ailey. I have no secrets from you.”
“All right. Were you aware that . . . Big Thom’s father, Victor . . . okay . . . um, were you aware that Victor . . . married a woman with the last name Franklin?”
He tilted his head. Reached for his cup of coffee. “You mean, as in the low-down, murderous Franklins of Chicasetta, Georgia?”
“Um . . . yes, sir. Those Franklins. Victor’s wife was named Grace Bless Franklin. She was Big Thom’s mother.”
“Well, what do you know? I’ll be goddamned! Excuse me, Ailey. I apologize for forgetting my manners. I was not reared to use profanity in front of ladies. Can we erase that part?”
“It’s okay. I’ve heard worse in my life. Said worse, too.”
“You mean, all this time, those Franklins actually owned that land?”
“Not exactly. Initially, they did own an adjoining parcel they’d won in the land lottery. But then they sold that parcel piecemeal through the years. Before the war, Jeremiah Franklin signed the last parcel over to Samuel Pinchard for a couple hundred dollars. Jeremiah was Grace’s brother. I guess that relationship meant Jeremiah felt like he somehow had a right to the land.”
“This is so strange. Isn’t this strange? Come now, Ailey, admit it. Or do I have to make a chicken face?”
“Uncle Root, stop! I’m trying to be serious here! Yes, I must say, I was very surprised to discover that information. So you didn’t know about this?”
“No, I did not.”
“But what about that stuff that Tommy Jr. kept? How come you didn’t look at them . . .” I stopped. I had to remember this conversation was being recorded. We weren’t just sitting up over coffee. “I mean, before your white half brother, Thomas Pinchard Jr., donated the family papers to the Old South Collections, did you have a chance to peruse those documents?”
“I did,” Uncle Root said. “Actually, it was me who kept those three boxes of papers all that time. And a good thing. Otherwise, when the old plantation house burned down in 1934, those papers would have been destroyed.”
“Really? There was another fire on Wood Place?”
“Oh yes. But nobody ever found out who burned it down or why.”
“Is there a reason you chose not to look at the papers?”
“I tried once. But when I started looking through the documents from the very early years, I became enraged. Just because I’m an historian, doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings. And when I began to read, I got so angry, it seemed like I was vibrating! The casual way Samuel Pinchard talking about buying and selling and owning human beings. And some of those were my ancestors. I was afraid I’d do something stupid, like set those papers on fire. That’s why I asked Tommy Jr. to donate them.”
“May I ask, what is your response to learning that you’re related to the Franklins?”
“Honestly, I’m a little confused, and I tend to be a clear thinker. You know, my father used to talk so badly about those Franklins. He did it constantly, sometimes right to their faces. He had absolutely no respect for them. Called them white trash. Said they didn’t have the gumption to make their own way and that’s why they needed to lie about having a right to Wood Place. And here his own mother was a Franklin! No wonder they were so angry. Not that it excuses their behavior. There’s never an excuse for membership in the Klan or for murder.”
“Do you think Meema—Eliza Two Freeman—knew about the Franklins’ relationship to your father’s family?
“If she did, she never spoke about it in front of me. But Meema never spoke about her relationship to Big Thom, either. She never said a thing about his father and hers bei
ng half brothers. My mother is the one who told me. It was a long time before I even knew that Meema originally had been a Pinchard. My mother said the old lady took the last name Freeman right after the Civil War. Meema didn’t say much, but when she did speak, she was a very direct person. A straight shooter, as they say. My mother said Meema was furious when Pearl was born looking just like Big Thom. Said my mother had shamed the family. Pearl even had blond hair as a little girl, before it darkened. There was a real social stigma placed on Negro women engaging in those sorts of relationships; they were seen as consorting with the enemy, but my father didn’t seem to care about stigmas on either side. He even bought her a wedding band, and she wore it until she died. My mother wasn’t demonstrative with him, but he appeared to be very devoted to her.”
“Dr. Hargrace, do you mind telling me one of your earliest memories?”
“I do remember my mother’s funeral quite vividly, because my father tried to throw himself into the coffin!”
“Really?”
“Oh yes! And it was shocking, even for me, and I was a little boy. You know, white people don’t usually carry on at funerals like we Negroes do. Big Thom had been well behaved at the church service. Nobody was going to tell him, it wasn’t seemly for him to be there, back in 1918, and holding the hands of his two Negro children. I tried to pull away from him, but he wouldn’t let me go. And then, when we got to the cemetery out on the farm, he broke down, good-fashion. His face turned red and he started jumping around and flapping his arms. He kept screaming, ‘Don’t leave me, Lil’ May! Don’t leave me, honey!’ I thought he was about to die, too, so I started crying, and then my father ran toward the coffin. It took six grown Negroes to hold him back, right before he fainted. Oh, they talked about that for a while! How a grown white man had acted more colored than anybody else at a Negro homegoing.”
“Do you remember anything else?”
“Nothing special. We lived on the farm and there were animals and a big garden and there were cotton fields. Things like that. And when I was a little boy, they started planting soybeans so the soil wouldn’t give out.”
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Page 74