The Coach House

by Florence Osmund

  Marie sat at her desk steeped in disbelief, eyes wide, jaw unhinged, and shoulders dropped as low as they could go. What on earth would prompt her to say that? She closed her eyes for a few seconds and shook her head. She couldn’t have been possibly referring to Allison…blue eyed, blond haired Allison! When she looked up, Esther was standing in the doorway.

  “Are you okay?” Esther asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You look like you just saw a ghost or something.”

  “No, I’m fine. What’s up?”

  “I don’t know if you know this or not, but Allison McDonald just walked off the job.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I said Allison McDonald just walked out.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “The only thing I heard was that a customer let her have it, but good, when she didn’t have a certain dress in her size.”

  “What?”

  “Marie, what’s wrong?”

  “So what happened? Oh, the dress. Do you know anything more?”

  “The rumors are flying, but you know how that goes. Marie, are you…”

  “Do me a favor and call Allison at home and get her side of the story.”

  “Sure. And what about…”

  “And please close the door on your way out.”

  Marie propped her elbows up on her desk and put her head in her hands, inhaling large breaths of air and exhaling slowly, her stomach threatening to upheave. She thought I was a Negro.

  Her mind raced back to all the times she had asked her mother about her father and how her mother avoided telling her anything about him. The more she thought about it, the more she thought her mother could have at least told her something about him. Some little tidbit of what he was like, just enough to appease a young girl’s understandable curiosity about who her father was. What was the big deal?

  * * *

  Richard was in Milwaukee for a couple of days, giving Marie time alone, time to think. She went to the mirror for the hundredth time. She thought I was a Negro. The comment gnawed at her. At three in the morning, Marie restlessly headed downstairs to heat up a glass of milk. The light spilling out from beneath Richard’s closed office door caught her attention. Thinking he must have left his desk lamp on before leaving, she went to turn it off. The door was locked. The only doors that had had locks in their house were the bathrooms, at least up until now.

  Marie went to work the next day, but her mind was elsewhere. Midafternoon, she told Esther she wasn’t feeling well, which wasn’t a lie, and was going home early. But she didn’t go home. Instead, she went to the public library, to the social sciences section, where she found several illustrated books on different races.

  She studied the faces of Negroes, East Indians, Latinos, Spaniards, Turks, and even full-blooded Italians. None of them looked like her. Satisfied she had been going down an erroneous path, she casually flipped through the pages of What Really Went On In the Big House, a book that documented southern plantation stories, including ones about the owners who raped young Negro slave girls. Photographs of the children born from these illicit procreations caught her attention.

  Suddenly realizing she hadn’t been breathing, she gasped. The resemblance was unmistakable. Some of the children in the pictures could have been her siblings.

  Marie sat frozen in the library chair without any sense for how long, the book lying open in front of her. She read the captions under the photographs, thinking maybe they were some other children, ones with two white parents. The captions confirmed that wasn’t the case.

  She got up from her chair, and then feeling faint, sat back down again. She remained there until she felt she was in the right frame of mind and physical condition to go home.

  * * *

  Marie had always been curious about who her father was, but never like this. Now she had to know. What if Mrs. Hollingsworth was right? She could still hear her mother’s words. “He was tall, dark, and handsome.” Just how dark was he? And why couldn’t she have told me? Thoughts ran around her head like mice through a maze. Who on earth doesn’t know their own race?

  Then it occurred to her that maybe her mother had told her. She retrieved the hatbox of her mother’s belongings and went through each item again, hoping to find a clue to her father’s identity.

  She cautiously paged through the picture album. One of the photos caught her attention. It was of her mother and several men lined up in front of what appeared to be a bar. Her eyes went straight to the colored man on the end, the one farthest from her mother. Tall, dark, and handsome her mother had said. Like the man in the photo.

  Marie poured herself a glass of wine and picked up the document titled My Shameful Past. She had flipped through it a couple of times before but didn’t think too much about it.

  The first few sentences intrigued her.

  I am a high yellow Negro. A Mulato. It’s takin me to o many years to say them words. Out loud at least. Ive been called a lot worse, so I don know why it’s hard for me to say it. Thare just words, my momma use to say.

  She flipped to the back of the book. The author thanked all the people in his life who didn’t judge him by the color of his skin. He said it was a short list but an important one. He thanked his mother for giving him life and his half-sister Emma for typing the manuscript.

  When she flipped back to the front of the manuscript, a note card fell into her lap.

  I hope this helps you understand what lies ahead.

  It was addressed to no one, and it was unsigned. So someone gave this to her? She made a mental note to look up what high yellow Negro meant. Mulatto, she was fairly sure, meant half Negro, half white, but she would look that one up as well.

  When she heard Richard’s car pull in the driveway, she stashed the book back in the hatbox and put the box back in the closet. For now, this would remain her private issue.

  * * *

  The prolonged ache in the pit of Marie’s stomach nagged her every minute of every day, making it difficult to act normal, whatever that was. These days she just didn’t know. What she faced was life-changing. She couldn’t put it out of her mind. After all, she was reminded of it every time she looked in the mirror.

  It was perplexing to think of herself as anything but white. She didn’t know any Negroes, didn’t go anywhere, or attend anything where Negroes were present. She only knew what she read in the papers, and lately most of that had been about all the tension between Negroes and whites, especially in the South. She recalled reading about race riots happening all over the country in the past several months, even in Chicago, but feeling completely distanced from it, she didn’t think much about them at the time. And she had to admit to herself when she read that President Truman was forming a national civil rights committee to investigate racism, she thought that would take care of things.

  Richard must have sensed something was bothering Marie because he asked her about it more than once. As guilty as she felt not sharing her suspicions with him, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him until she knew for sure, and even then, she didn’t know how she would do it.

  The more the question ate away at her, the more Marie started having doubts about herself. Feeling self-conscious about her looks, she tried different kinds of makeup to change her appearance. She used to like her olive complexion. Now she was embarrassed by it.

  Sitting across from Esther in her office one day, she asked her what nationality she was. “My father is English and my mother was French. How about you?”

  Marie smiled. “Guess.”

  “Well, let’s see. Costa is Italian, I’m pretty sure, and with your complexion and dark eyes, I’d say both parents were Italian. But at least one of them. How’d I do?”

  “You’re good! Well, let’s get back to work. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”

  * * *

  Whenever Richard was out of town, Marie covertly devoted herself to finding out something about her father. She contacted the re
staurant where her mother worked and tried to get information from one of the waitresses she knew who was still there. She told Marie that to the best of her recollection, Sophia had never mentioned any man in her life. Marie asked her if she could recall any special customers who may have come into the restaurant. “That was a long time ago,” the waitress told her.

  Marie called Fred Jefferson, now living with his sister in North Carolina, and asked him about it. “Did she ever mention having anyone special in her life, Fred? Please try to remember. Did she go out much? Do you know where she went besides work?” Fred, whose health and memory were failing according to his sister, offered nothing.

  She visited the bank that had coordinated her college scholarship. After retrieving her file from the back room, the bank officer said he was sorry, but the information was tagged confidential. “Could you contact my benefactor and let him know I am interested in meeting him?”

  “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to do that, Miss.”

  “What if it was an emergency?” she pleaded.

  “I’m afraid I still wouldn’t be able to do that.”

  Birth certificate in hand, Marie went to the hospital where she was born. “Can you please help me?”

  “I’m sorry, but we wouldn’t have anything more in our files than what’s on your birth certificate,” was the response.

  “Can you tell me who paid the hospital bill?”

  The woman looked at Marie’s birth certificate. “Honey, that was over twenty years ago. We don’t keep accounting records that long, and even if by some miracle we did have it, it would be impossible to find.”

  She went to her grade school and asked if she could see her file. “Sorry… we don’t keep records that long.”

  She went to her high school and asked the same thing. “All the archived files are in the basement. You’re welcome to look through them, but I have to tell you, they’re not in very good order, and it’s hot as Hades down there,” the clerk told her.

  “I don’t care. Can you show me where they are?”

  “Follow me. All I can say is it must be darn important to you, ’cause no one in their right mind would want to spend any amount of time down here,” she mumbled as she led Marie down a desolate stairwell and into a hot dirty boiler room with stacks of boxes everywhere. “Good luck.”

  Marie spent the next two hours going through boxes of old records looking for 1942 student files. When she had only a few boxes to go, she found what she was looking for. “Calloway, Cooper, Costa. Found it!” She pulled out her file, sat on one of the dilapidated boxes, and went through every page looking for clues.

  On the registration form, in the Father’s Name box, someone had written a capital “J” but then crossed it out. At the bottom of the form, in a different color ink, someone had written PAID CASH. A copy of her grades revealed no useful information. The only other records in her file were three notes from her mother explaining absences. Marie put her head in her hands and sighed.

  * * *

  In the weeks that followed, Marie buried herself in her work in an effort to alleviate the trepidation. Richard was so engrossed in the Fiefield project he either didn’t suspect anything was wrong anymore or forgot about it.

  Marie tried to keep the dubious issue tucked way in the back of her mind, but when her menstrual period was eleven days late, she panicked. She couldn’t possibly be pregnant; he had used protection every time they had sex. She had heard sometimes they fail, but wouldn’t she have had felt that? She agonized over the potential pregnancy and even more unnerving, what to tell Richard. She practiced different ways to approach the subject with him, but none sounded fitting, even to her. I’m pregnant, honey, and guess what. The baby may be colored.

  Fortunately, she didn’t have to tell him anything when she realized she wasn’t pregnant after all. It was merely a late period.

  Determined there would be no more scares, Marie took advantage of Richard’s next absence to visit a medical clinic in Hammond, Indiana, where she was fitted for a diaphragm, a new controversial method of birth control and, according to the doctor who fitted her, one that couldn’t be detected by a woman’s partner. It pained her to take such an action—holding back the truth from Richard was as bad as lying.

  Meanwhile Marie’s responsibilities at Marshall Field’s seemed to be multiplying daily. The more she took on, the more she was given, resulting in long work hours. At the same time, Richard’s Fiefield project was in full force, and he began spending two to three days in Milwaukee each week.

  “Don’t you miss him when you’re apart so much?” Esther asked her one day.

  “Sure, I do. But you know, I also like the alone time. I like the balance of work, my marriage, and alone time. The only thing I miss is family.”

  “I think it’s interesting that you like your alone time. I hate being alone.”

  On one of Marie’s “alone days,” she pulled out the Bonwit Teller hatbox containing her mother’s things. She opened the photo album and went straight to the picture of her mother and the five men in front of the bar. She looked on the back. April 1924. A little more than a year before she was born. She dug into the box and retrieved the matchbook from the Central Union Club. Same place? Marie studied their faces, especially the colored man on the end.

  She smiled at the last picture in the album, the one of her mother and three other young women in front of a dance hall. Her mother was wearing the very dress that was in the box, the black and white flapper dress with heavy beading on the bodice and three-inch fringe on the hemline. She tried it on in the bedroom. Her mother was smaller than she, so she couldn’t zip it all the way up. Marie looked at her reflection, remembering her mother. God, I wish she was alive.

  Marie slipped out of her clothes, put on her robe, poured herself a glass of wine, and curled up on the sofa to read My Shameful Past. It read like a journal. Winston Patterson’s mother was a slave, his father the white master of the house on a large Virginia plantation. The author recollected childhood incidents in the “big house.”

  One day when I was five or so, somebudys white pappy was playin with the house childens on the side yard when I come round to join em. “Hey dirty little nigger boy. Get back in the basement where you belong,” he yelled at me. Well, I was never told bout stayin in the basement, but I went there anyhow. When Mamma couldn’t find me, well she paniked and before long everones lookin for me, even the white folks. Lord a mercy, Mamma dint let me outa her sight afta that.

  He told about how he couldn’t go to school because of the color of his skin and how a few of the nicer white children living in the big house taught him to read and write, even though it was against the law for them to do so. He listed all the cruel names he had been called over the years—mongrel, half-breed, white nigger, and others. He described what it was like to watch a cross burn on someone’s lawn, the cruel work of the KKK.

  When I was ten, all the slaves were freed. I remember it like it was yestaday. You wudda thot we’d be dancing in the streets. But that wusn’t the case. No one knew what to do or where to go. What was a bunch of colored folk gonna do? So we jes stayd there and kept workin the way we always did. Mamma got paid, but not much.

  He talked about being a teenager and, finally figuring out he was different, that he didn’t belong to either side.

  I am both, but yet neither.

  Marie had to stop reading and think about his poignant words. She didn’t know how anyone could accept being both, but yet neither, let alone deal with all the consequences. But, apparently, this man did.

  He talked about the shame, how it suppressed all his other emotions, especially the positive ones, how he used to hang his head when he walked by white people, embarrassed by his skin color.

  It wasunt til I was a growned man that I figered out the shame I was feelin was inflicted upon me. I had nothing to do with it. But I was the only one who could stop it. And that’s what I did. I stopped the shame. Jus like that.

>   The author’s last words inspired her.

  Ive been asked many times if I wished I was born white or jus a Negro and evry time I say I wouldn’t have it any uther way but to be me, jes like I am. How else could I wrote this book?

  She didn’t put the manuscript down until she reached the end, and when she did, she sobbed with it clutched to her chest. The author’s raw emotion and crude style of writing touched her in a way like no other book ever had. He said he was ten when the slaves were freed. If she correctly remembered what she had learned in her high school history class, the Emancipation Proclamation was in the 1860s, which would make him in his late forties, early fifties when he wrote the manuscript.

  Marie put everything back in the hatbox and slowly sipped her wine.

  He talked about the KKK. The Ku Klux Klan. She hadn’t thought much about them, had never seen one, but she remembered Fred and Flora mentioning they had relatives in St. Louis where there had been many cross burnings by the Klan. She knew their members were white males who promoted white supremacy and that they hid their identity behind white hoods. After reading Patterson’s description of the aftermath of a cross burning, Marie had a whole different perspective of the group’s despicable ways and felt guilty she hadn’t given it more thought in the past. I’m as bad as they are.