The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  “And what about your . . . your unique interracial family situation?”

  More of his laughter.

  “Oh, we’re calling it that! Well, my white father kept his promise to my Negro mother and took care of my sister and me. Pearl was eighteen when my mother died, and so she took over raising me. And my father provided the financial support. He bought all our clothes. He kept us in the house on his land that my mother had lived in. Miss Rose still lives in that same house. And he let us keep the beautiful furniture he gave my mother. I have some of it in my own house. Before my sister was born, there wasn’t even a school for Negro children in town. Big Thom paid for the supplies for that school. I guess he called himself being a nice, white man doing that! And after he passed away, my brother, Tommy Jr., paid. My father sent me to Routledge College, and when he died, Tommy Jr. continued to pay for my education all through graduate school. Tommy bought me my first car. He put money in the bank for me. He even came north for my marriage to Olivia, and I lied to her family that he was Negro, though he didn’t look it. At the reception, he took out his NAACP membership card and showed it around. I must say, that blew my mind!”

  “What was your relationship to your brother? Was it close?”

  “Not really, though he was crazy about Pearl. And he seemed to be fine with having Negro siblings. Maybe because he had grown up with my mother. She’d been his nanny for a few years. He didn’t remember his own mother, of course. She had died when he was only a few days old.”

  “And, if you don’t mind, what about your mother? What do you remember about her?”

  “I loved her very much. Very much. She was very affectionate with my sister and me, which helped with our situation. Before my mother died, when she took Pearl and me out, white people stared at us like we were animals in a zoo. Negroes, they pretended there wasn’t any difference, except my mother didn’t have any friends outside of her brothers and their wives and children, and sometimes I had to fight in the schoolyard when the other Negro children would call me names. My mother and Pearl had warned me not to tattle on those children to the teacher, because their parents were sharecroppers on Big Thom’s land. I didn’t want to get their families in trouble. But whites? Every time they saw my mother with my sister and me, they acted like they’d heard the news for the first time. There was a lot of shame. I remember that. So much shame. I was very sad all the time. Until I met Olivia, I used to wish I’d never been born.”

  He cleared his throat several times. I didn’t want to interject. I’d heard so many of the old man’s stories, but I’d never heard this one. Nor had I ever witnessed this unabashed pain. Uncle Root needed to tell me everything. He was six months away from being a century old. If not now, when?

  “Maybe my mother loved my father. I don’t know, but it took me a while to consider that she might have taken up with Big Thom so her family would be taken care of. So they could stay on the land. What she went through, the humiliation in the community, so that her children and her family could be safe in this backwoods town. But as far as I know, she was never with another man. Big Thom and she doted on Pearl and me. She told us not to be embarrassed about the way we looked. My one regret is that my mother couldn’t read or write, but she did love when I read to her. I was a really early reader. I’m not sure who taught me, but I could read very big books. A Tale of Two Cities was her favorite. She didn’t care much for Shakespeare, but the way Dickens turned a phrase for her, she absolutely loved it! When I was little, I tried to teach her to read, many times. It never worked, but she could memorize long passages of Dickens or the Bible—anything—simply by hearing them out loud. She was a very brilliant woman. My sister was like that, too, and she never learned to read and write, either. I know now that Mama and Pearl probably suffered from what we call dyslexia, but back then, nobody knew what that was. The teachers at Red Mound didn’t even know how to address the situation. Mostly, they thought Pearl was incorrigibly stupid. Who knows how many other children never lived up to their potential because of something we hadn’t even discovered? As a Negro man, I am very aware of my blessings. I’m lucky. So are you, Ailey. Do you know that?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”

  “Well, you can tell by looking at me that I could have passed. I could have gone to a school up north, a college with whites, and none of them would have known. I’ve found that only Negroes seem to recognize the little signs that give our race away. But I needed to be with my own and work among them. I’ve never regretted my decision to make my life here, among my people. I’ve been very happy. Very blessed. And I hope I may be allowed a bit of sentimentality when I say, Ailey Pearl, you make me so proud. You make our family proud. And my mother is smiling down at you from Heaven. I feel it.”

  “Dr. Hargrace, thank you so much for your time.”

  “Sugarfoot, it was my absolute pleasure.”

  Mama’s Bible

  I’d planned to conduct my interview with Miss Rose on the same day I spoke with Uncle Root, but I found myself exhausted after talking to the old man. He told me that was to be expected. When we speak about history, we speak about somebody’s life. This wasn’t a television show or a play on a stage. So I called out to the farm and rescheduled my sit-down with Miss Rose for the next day.

  When I drove up, she was sitting on the porch, peeling tomatoes. I leaned in for my kiss. She forgot her hands were wet with tomato juice and put a hand up to my face.

  “I’m going to record you, if that’s all right, Miss Rose. This will be a little formal. I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions. If you get uncomfortable, you just tell me.”

  “All right, baby.”

  There was a little table on the porch where Miss Rose had placed glasses of sweet tea. I moved one of the glasses aside and set up the tape recorder.

  “This is Ailey Pearl Garfield. I’m interviewing Mrs. Miss Rose Collins Driskell, a resident of Chicasetta, Georgia. Today’s date is July 24, 2007. Mrs. Driskell, do you give me permission to record our conversation?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Mrs. Driskell, in what year were you born?”

  “Oh, I ain’t your granny no more?”

  I laughed. So much for my acting in my official capacity as an historian. “You’ll always be my granny!”

  “I’m just teasing you, baby! Now, what you ask me again?”

  “In what year were you born?”

  “All right. Me and Huck was born on December third, nineteen and twenty. I done lived on this farm since that day. Never have lived no place else. Huck ain’t never been no place at all. He don’t like to leave home, but I done been to Atlanta, Milledgeville, and Macon.”

  “Huck would be Henry John Collins Jr. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, that’s my brother’s name. We’se twins.”

  “And who are your parents?

  “My daddy was named Henry John Collins Sr. My mama was named Pearl Thomasina Freeman. You want me to keep going back?”

  “Yes, ma’am, if you would.”

  “My mama’s mama was named Maybelline Victorina Freeman. They called her Lil’ May. And my granddaddy was Thomas John Pinchard Sr. They called him Big Thom. He was a white man. He was fat, too. That’s what they say. Grandma’s mama was named Sheba Freeman. We ain’t never know the name of Lil’ May’s daddy. He run off before somebody could make him do right. Sheba’s mama was named Eliza Two Freeman. We called her Meema. Her husband was named Red. That was Sheba’s daddy. They ain’t have no more kids. Red used to live on the Benjamin Plantation. The Benjamins was Jewish folks. But then, after Red took up with Eliza, he moved to Wood Place. He used to be Red Benjamin, but he changed his name to Freeman, too. Red and Eliza, they was married official by a preacher after the war, but they had done took up before then. I do know that. But he died when he was young. Lockjaw. And Meema, she ain’t never marry again. She didn’t take up with no more mens, neither. Maybe it was ’cause of them scars on
her face. She had these marks, real deep. Like that.” Miss Rose ran her index finger over one cheek and then the other. “She was old when I was born, but she would have been a right pretty lady. Them marks kinda messed with her looks, though. You want to know about Grandma Maybelline’s brothers and sisters and all that?”

  “That’s fine for now, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Driskell. We’ll probably come back to that at another time, though.”

  “All that’s in Mama’s Bible, if you want to see it.”

  “Dear Pearl kept a Bible?” I felt a rumble in my flesh: I’d found more documentation. “I mean, Mrs. Pearl Collins kept a Bible?”

  “Shole did. She had me write down the names that she could remember, before she died.”

  “Oh, excellent! Can I see that later?”

  “You shole can, baby.”

  “Now, can you tell me your earliest memory of your time on Wood Place?”

  “All right, let me see,” she said. “When I was ’bout five years old, I ate too many peaches at preserve time and I got the worst ache in my stomach. Then my bowels got so loose, but my mama say, she ain’t feel sorry for me. She say, it was my own fault ’cause she had done told me to stop eating them peaches, but when her back was turned, there I go. But Meema, she give me something, some kind of tea, and that stopped me going to the outhouse. When Meema died, she was past ninety, and she knowed all kind of things. Like that time you got stung by that wasp in the church outhouse, and I chewed up that tobacco and put it on there and it drawed out the pain. You remember that, baby?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I certainly do remember. It was an efficacious treatment.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means it worked!”

  “I know that’s right! Meema taught me ’bout that tobacco.”

  “How did she learn those things?”

  “She say it was her own grandma. She was a Indian woman.”

  “Really? Do you know the name of Meema’s grandmother?”

  “They called her Aggie, and sometimes, Mama Gee. Ain’t nobody know what her husband’s name was, though. But they say the grandma had long hair, near-abouts to her knees.”

  Though I hadn’t eaten anything that day—I’d been waiting until after this interview was over—my stomach lurched. Sweat broke out on my forehead.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” Miss Rose asked. “You want a drink of water?”

  “Um . . . no. I’m all right. You were saying that Aggie had hair to her knees?”

  “Real, real long. And she frown all the time. Don’t never crack a smile. You sure you okay?”

  “Um . . . no . . . I’m good . . . um . . .”

  Miss Rose waved at a fruit fly. Asked me, did I mind going inside and getting a church fan out of the china cabinet? There was a whole stack of them. I clicked off the recording, grateful for a break. In the front room, I leaned against the china cabinet, breathed through my mouth. In my head, I heard Lydia’s laughter. A familiar voice from my dreams joined her laughter, and I reached for a chair. I called through the screen door, give me another second. I was still looking for the fans.

  When I returned, I turned the recorder back on, asking her, did she remember anything else from her childhood?

  “Lots of things,” Miss Rose said. “I remember a white man done came up here one day. He had some kind of contraption in the back of his car, say he want to sit it on the porch and let folks sing in it. My daddy knew them songs they used to sing in the fields and even before that. Oh, that man had a voice! Just like your uncle Huck. Meema, she ain’t want Daddy to sing, but he say the man seemed all right as far as white people go. He sure was polite, I know that. When he tried to get Meema to sing, she say to that white man, say, ‘I don’t serve the Devil no more. I used to chop down that cotton in my time, yes, sir, but I don’t chop nothing for the Devil, even if he do be a white man. Jesus and the Devil, they coming up the same road, just different sides. I guess they meet up at the crossing. I know that’s blaspheme, but it’s the truth. I knows it, ’cause I done seen it in a dream.’ Everybody on that porch except that white man knew Meema ain’t never chopped no cotton a day in her life, but nobody was gone contradict.”

  “How old were you then, Mrs. Driskell?”

  “Me and Huck, we must have been about thirteen, and my baby sister, Annie Mae, she was little. About six or seven. She was Mama’s surprise baby. Mama had lost some babies, and Uncle Tommy had took her to the doctor in town, and the doctor say, my mama couldn’t have no more kids, but then here Annie Mae came. That was a long time after I ate all them peaches, but I still wouldn’t eat them. I wouldn’t eat peaches for years after that, until one time, Sister Johnson brought the best peach cobbler to church for fourth Sunday. I don’t know what-all she put in that cobbler, but, child, I smelled it and just like that, peaches didn’t make me sick no more. I wished my mama had asked Sister Johnson for that recipe, because I have tried and tried to make that cobbler, but I can’t never get it right.”

  “So, the man came with his contraption that day . . .”

  “Oh! I’m sorry, baby! Yes, the white man, he done came up to the house with his contraption, and when he said he’d heard tell Meema remembered things before Emancipation, I ain’t even know what he was talking about.”

  “He knew she had been enslaved?”

  “That’s what he meant. But at the time, I was thinking, what that white man mean by Emancipation? Grown folks used to talk about slavery and freedom, but they ain’t never use that word. He asked Meema what her last name was back in that time, and I could see she didn’t want to say, but Negroes back then, we was afraid of the government. And this was a white man from the government. Uncle Tommy was alive back then, but still.”

  “This would be Thomas Pinchard Jr?”

  “That was his government name. He was Mama’s brother, but his daddy was related to Meema in some other kind of way, too. We was all related in betwixt and between. Kinda nasty if you ask me, but folks did that kind of thing back then, messing ’round with they cousins.

  “And didn’t nobody want to talk about how white men loved to chase them some Negro ladies. In this town, you can’t go back but so far without finding out colored folks and white people is kin, but Uncle Tommy, he was good white folks. Not like the rest. He loved us, used to visit us on Sunday until the day he died. He give us what you call protection, but even Uncle Tommy couldn’t beat the government. I could see that Meema was scared of that white man with the contraption, and she didn’t scare easy. She told him what her name used to be, before she changed it. When I was a little girl, she was Eliza Two Freeman. All the folks on Wood Place besides us called her Miss Liza. But she was born Eliza Two Pinchard. The white man, he wrote that down and ask her some more questions. He want Meema to go back as far as she could remember.”

  I got a jolt of excitement again: it sounded like the white man had been part of the WPA project, recording the lives of formerly enslaved folks. If so, there would be a written narrative of Meema’s recollections—and if I was really lucky maybe even the voice recordings the interviewer had made. But I still wanted to hear what Miss Rose had to say.

  “What else did she remember?”

  “Like what-all the slaves ate back then. Collards and turnip greens. Sweet potatoes. Pecans when they fell from the tree. Peanuts. Meema called them goobers, but same thing. Blackberries. Streak-o-lean and pig’s feet. Stuff like that. Same food I eat that your mama be fussing at me about. I don’t know what she saying, talking ’bout, don’t eat no pork. What kind of colored folks don’t eat no pork? That’s just foolish talk.”

  “So, the white man and Meema talked . . .”

  “They shole did. She wasn’t giving him no big piece of information, not at first, but that white man’s pen was moving across that paper like lightning, putting down things. He wrote down what-all her master planted: cotton in the big fields, a big vegetable garden for the big house, and that big peach orchard. That orchard burne
d down same time as the big house burned down. What’s there now is what the fire ain’t eat. You think that’s a lot of peach trees now, but that orchard was big.”

  “Is that what the man asked Meema? About the fire?”

  “No, that fire was after that white man. And that won’t the first fire, neither. It was a bunch of them. Looked like somebody always was setting fires on Wood Place, but Meema wouldn’t have told that man, no way. Not unless he asked her direct. She and that white man, they talked awhile about what work she had did in slavery time. She never would tell him she worked up there in the big house. I don’t know why. She told him how the cotton harvest went. What work the women did. What work the men did. He asked her about her family. She stayed quiet a long time. Then she said they was all dead. Her granny, her sister, her mama, her daddy. He tried to get her to tell him more about her family, but she wouldn’t. Every time he would try to get to her talk about them, she’d raise her hand. He left, but that night, she wouldn’t eat supper. She died ’bout a year after that.”

  “Did Meema ever talk about slavery to you, Mrs. Driskell?”

  “She never did. But my mama, she knowed some things. It took a long time for me to find out. I was a grown lady when I found out. I thought it would make me feel better, to know, but that ain’t happen. Mama told me Meema ain’t want to talk about none of that to nobody. It cut her heart to bleeding even thinking about it, but Meema had told the white man the truth. Her daddy had ran off. Her mama lost her mind and died. Her grandma died. Her sister died. Meema and her was twins, like me and Huck. She used to get up in the middle of the night, screaming, ‘Rabbit, Rabbit!’

  “That’s what Meema’s sister was named. I don’t know why somebody want to name her that, but they did. Meema be looking straight ahead, singing and crying. Used to be singing in words didn’t nobody understand.”

  She sighed, moving the church fan. I waited for her to speak again.