Daughters

by Florence Osmund

  “It’s hard to believe…hard to understand.”

  “And it happened all the time…I mean all the time. That’s why the woman who made that remark to you in Marshall Field’s that day said what she did. She was from the South. She’d seen people who looked just like you many times. It was very common practice.”

  “Did that at least end when the slaves were freed?”

  “Not entirely. You have to understand, freedom was a misnomer really. And even after they were so-called free, most Negroes didn’t think freedom was possible in reality anyway. My own people stayed here and worked after they were freed. I was the first to leave.”

  “Do you think we can see where you lived?”

  “Maybe.” Jonathan put the car in gear and proceeded down the road they had come in on, turning onto the first road on the right past the main house. The dirt road was wide enough for only one car. He drove for ten minutes before slowing down.

  “See over there, on the rise?”

  Marie looked in the direction of his gaze to a row of small unpainted houses.

  “There was only one house when I lived there. I’m not sure now which one it was. They all look the same to me.”

  “They look pretty small.”

  “Just one room with a fireplace for cooking and cold nights. There was a small loft upstairs where I slept. And you can’t see it, but there was a rather large front porch where we sat most evenings after dinner. Looks like the outhouse is gone.” His facial expression was placid. “I see the houses still aren’t painted.”

  “Why is that?”

  “When I was living there, we didn’t want the owners of the big house to think we didn’t feel inferior to them, and an unpainted house helped to do that.”

  “Tell me the good memories.”

  “There was a swimming hole on the main property, far enough from the big house so no one could see us there. Felt pretty good on those hot, sticky summer days.”

  “Did you have friends to play with?”

  “A few, but most of the colored kids were working the fields during the day.”

  “How young?”

  “Four, five years old. If they weren’t picking cotton, they were pumping water and bringing it to their daddies or chopping wood or running errands. There were a few kids like me whose parents wouldn’t allow them to work the fields, but never enough for a good game of kickball or anything. Sometimes we could get white kids to join us, but if we were caught playing with them, we would get in big trouble.”

  Jonathan turned the car around and headed toward the main road. “Let’s see if we can find a place to eat dinner and a hotel for the night.”

  They had to drive to Bennettsville before finding a decent restaurant that allowed Negroes to come inside to eat. The patrons were mostly white. Before they left, Jonathan asked the colored waitress if she knew of a hotel where they would be welcomed.

  The waitress glanced at Marie and then gave him a puzzled look before she said, “If she goes in alone, you can go just about anywhere.”

  Marie and Jonathan faced each other and nodded. On the way out, a man’s voice blurted out, “So long, nigger lover.” The laughter was daunting.

  Marie slowed her step, wanting to turn around and say something back, but Jonathan took her arm and guided her out the door instead. “It’s not worth it, believe me.”

  They drove three miles to the edge of town where Jonathan had previously noticed an inn. He parked his car out of view of the inn’s entrance and let Marie go in and make the reservation. When she came back to the car twenty minutes later, she told Jonathan about the back door where she could let him in. So he drove around to the back, parked the car, and waited for her to emerge from the building.

  “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” he said as they climbed up the back stairs to their room.

  The Victorian-style Briden Inn had once been someone’s home, they learned after reading about the history of it in their room. Converted to an inn in 1925, the owners maintained the home’s original lush gardens and dogwood-lined walkways around the property.

  The next day they drove ninety miles to Charlotte, where Jonathan had made arrangements for his driver, Walter, to pick up his car and drive it back to St. Charles. Jonathan and Marie would fly back to Chicago.

  The drive to Charlotte was ninety miles. Jonathan took Marie through Cheraw in South Carolina and Wadesboro, Monroe, and Matthews in North Carolina—all small towns with plenty of dirt-poor Negroes living in crowded, rundown shanties with no running water or electricity. He relayed stories to Marie that had been handed down by his mother and father.

  “Growing up in the South as a colored person was downright humiliating. By the time I was born, it was better, but still not good. My father said when he was growing up, the white folks made them feel even more helpless, ignorant, and dependent. And the rules were much stricter then.”

  “The rules?”

  “The rules about how to act around whites. Social etiquette, they called it. I have a better name for it.”

  “What were some of these rules?”

  “Like when you were walking down the sidewalk and a white person was coming toward you, you had to step to the side and hang your head down. And if you were wearing a hat, you’d best have taken it off. And if you were a man, and the white person was a woman, you’d better not look her in the eye.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. And you were never allowed to eat in the same room as a white person. It didn’t matter if you were the one who prepared their food, you were never allowed to eat within their viewing distance.”

  “So what happened if you broke the rules?”

  “Anything from a tongue lashing to a whipping to a lynching.”

  “You’d get lynched for looking at a woman?”

  “You bet. And then it would be a public lynching and people would come from all over to watch it. They’d even bring their children.”

  “That’s hard to believe. They don’t still do that, do they?”

  “There are still lynchings to this day.”

  “How did they get that way?”

  “Who?”

  “The whites.”

  “Greed, I think. The more subordinate they could keep the Negroes, the less it cost them to keep them working for them.”

  “Didn’t anyone stand up for you? There were no Negro politicians or lawyers back then?”

  “My father used to talk about Booker T. Washington all the time. He was born into slavery himself. In fact, his mother was a slave, and his father was white.”

  Marie recalled the story Doretha Scott had told her about her grandmother. She relayed it to her father. “I remembered learning about him in school when Doretha told me he gave her grandmother’s eulogy. He helped build better schools for Negroes, didn’t he?”

  “That and much more. He was our spokesman in Washington and gained respect from some very influential white people. You should read his book, Up from Slavery. You’d appreciate his writings.”

  When they were a few miles outside of Charlotte, the landscape changed. The homes were bigger and in much better condition. Redbud trees with intense pink flowers lined the streets. Taller buildings lined the horizon.

  They stopped for lunch at the Dunhill Hotel and then waited for Walter in the lobby afterward. Jonathan talked more about influential Negroes who had made a difference during his lifetime, including Thurgood Marshall and his work for the NAACP, and Harvard graduate W. E. B. DuBois.

  Walter dropped them off at the airport before heading back to St. Charles. On the plane, they talked about their trip.

  “Are you glad you went?” Jonathan asked.

  “Yes. I am. But it wasn’t anything like I expected. I knew I would see poor people who lived in rundown homes, but I didn’t expect it to be that bad. And I really didn’t expect to be treated that way…the signs and all. I wasn’t ready for that.”

  “Initially, you said you wanted to f
eel closer to my family—your family, your roots—by seeing where we came from. Do you feel that?”

  Marie thought about his question. “Yes, but not because I went there.”

  “How so?”

  “I feel closer to you and your ancestors because of the stories you told. Thank you for…”

  “You’re going to get an ‘I told you so.’ You know that.”

  Marie laughed. “Okay, so you did tell me that. But I’m glad I went anyway. And I’m so glad I saw Wisteria Belle. You know what’s so amazing to me?”

  “No. What?”

  “You look at that house and you think it’s so beautiful. You picture big gorgeous furniture inside, a huge dining room and lavish bedrooms, with elegant people dressed to the nines. But if you’re not familiar with this way of life, you would have no idea it looks like it does because of hundreds of poorly treated Negroes who have done all the cotton-picking that brought in revenue, and who cleaned the house, raised the white children, and cooked all the meals. It’s just not right.”

  “There are a lot of things that aren’t right in this world, my dear. A lot of things.”

  Marie took off from work the day following her return from South Carolina to reflect on everything she had observed and everything her father had said.

  Surprisingly, she had been thinking a lot about Paul lately. She thought there was a bigger lesson to be learned from her brief relationship with him. It had to be more than merely not letting the lure of a relationship obfuscate what the man was all about and whether his values and beliefs were compatible with hers. She just wasn’t sure what that lesson was yet.

  Lamenting the fact that her primary objective of feeling more connected to the Negro side of her ethnicity had not been entirely accomplished on the trip, she tried to understand why. After all, those were her people. She kept going back to the Shakespeare line Claire had quoted to her when they had first met: “To thine own self be true.” She looked up the quote in its entirety.

  “This above all: To thine own self be true, and it must follow—as the night and the day—thou cans’t not be false to any man.”

  She thought about what it meant to be true to herself and concluded she must first know who she was, and to know who she was meant knowing her goals, values, wants, and needs—not what others expected of her, but what she truly felt in the core of her inner self.

  And then it hit her. Until she was true to herself, she could never succeed in a relationship, no matter who the man was or the values he held. Because if she didn’t know her own goals, values, wants, and needs, she could never determine compatibility with anyone. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Had that also been true about Richard? Before she knew her real ethnicity, she’d thought she had had a good handle on what she wanted out of her marriage, and it worked. But when she discovered who she really was, all that changed. And right around that same time, she realized Richard wasn’t who she thought he was. No wonder it all fell apart.

  That made her think about her inner versus her outer self. Her inner self was not reflected in her outer self, nor could it ever be, but was that important? Though she was certain she couldn’t keep pretending to be something she wasn’t and be alright with herself, she also wasn’t sure that meant ignoring her outer self, how others perceived her. She invited Karen over the following evening.

  “Your hair!”

  “I know. What do you think?”

  “I had forgotten all about your natural hair color. I was so used to it being light brown. I like it.”

  “Me too.” She shared with Karen her thoughts about how she needed to determine exactly who she was in order to be true to herself.

  “So what are your goals?” Karen asked.

  “Aside from the obvious, like being financially secure, healthy, and happy, I want to stop pretending to be something I’m not. I’m not willing to settle for half of my reality. Now that I know the whole of my reality, I want to live it.”

  “Have you figured out how to do that?”

  “No, that’s the problem, I guess.”

  “So what more do you need to get out of life in order to live your ‘whole reality,’ as you put it?”

  Marie stared out the window at the last remnant of the red-orange sunset disappearing behind the tree line across the street, hoping this discussion was not going to lead to an argument. She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “What’s keeping you from being who you really are?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “You’ve said before that you don’t like living a lie. But isn’t it only a lie if you allow others to influence how you think about yourself? I mean, you know who you are. What difference does it make what others think of you?”

  Marie continued to stare out the window and sipped her wine while she mulled over Karen’s words. “In other words, if I live what I believe to be a truthful life, then I’m being true to myself, and that’s all that matters.” She paused to reflect. “Why was I having so much trouble figuring that out?”

  “Sometimes it’s the obvious that’s so hard to see.”

  “Another one of your mother’s sayings?”

  “No, I came up with that all by myself!”

  CHAPTER 19

  Camelot—Then and Now

  The next day Marie called her lawyer, Michael Cavanaugh, and advised him to move ahead with divorce proceedings based on Richard’s felony conviction. Then she called her father to tell him of her decision. Jonathan congratulated her and acknowledged the degree of fortitude it must have taken to proceed with it.

  “Someone I know who knows a lot about guns told me, ‘Your finger has to stay off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.’ I think now I’m finally ready to shoot,” Marie said.

  When she got off the phone with him, she called Karen, who suggested they do something special to celebrate.

  “You know where I’ve always wanted to go?” Karen asked. “Alaska.”

  “Alaska? Like near the North Pole Alaska?”

  “That would be the one.”

  “Why on earth would you want to go there?”

  “Because it’s different.”

  “It’s different, alright.”

  “Ed and I talked about going there someday, and so that’s one place I never wanted to go…after he died, that is. Now I see you making this hard decision to confront Richard with a divorce, and well, if you can do that, I can go to Alaska. Want to go?”

  “I don’t know, Karen. Alaska?”

  “We’ll make it a celebration trip. C’mon! We’ll celebrate our braveries. Is that a word?”

  “Alaska…”

  “Want to know what my mom used to say?”

  “Lay it on me.”

  “She said, ‘Losing something can lead you to positive paths.’”

  “Where on earth did she get all these sayings?”

  “I don’t know ‘cause she didn’t read much.” Karen laughed. “In fact, whenever she picked up a book, the alcohol would kick in before she finished the first page, and she’d be out like a light. I swear, a copy of Life with Father sat on the end table in our living room for four years without her ever getting past page one. I still have that book, vodka stains and all.” Her mother had died of an alcoholic seizure two weeks before Karen’s wedding.

  Marie shook her head. “But Alaska? Why not Hawaii or someplace in Europe?”

  “Because you’ve already been there. You need someplace you’ve never been before, and I need to get past my Ed roadblocks.”

  “I’ve never been to Europe, Karen. Let’s think Paris.”

  “If I ever have the opportunity to go to Paris, no offense, honey, but it won’t be with you.”

  When Karen had an idea stuck in her craw, it would take dynamite to get it out. “Okay. Alaska it is.”

  “Really? You’ll go?”

  “I’ll go.”

  They planned to be in Alaska in the middle of June. Before they left for the tri
p, Karen asked Marie about Barry’s gun shop.

  “I was cleaning out the basement the other day and ran across the gun Ed used to…well, to kill himself. I had forgotten it was even down there. I don’t know what to do with it. Can’t just throw it away. Wonder if Barry would buy it from me.”

  “If not, I’ll bet he may know someone who would.”

  “Would you go with me?”

  “Sure.”

  They drove Karen’s 1949 Ford convertible with the top down, the brightly colored kerchiefs on their heads flapping in the breeze. When the “Stone Guns and Ammo” sign came into view, Marie said, “There it is. On the right.”

  When they entered the shop, Marie couldn’t help but notice Barry stand up a little straighter, tuck in his stomach, and quickly pitch a Playboy magazine under the counter. “Hi! How’s the best shot this side of the Missouri River?” he teased through a dimpled grin.

  She felt a warm flush creep up her neck. “I’m fine. And you?”

  “Couldn’t be better.” He gave Karen an abrupt glance and then focused on Marie. “I don’t get many girls in here. It sure is a nice change of scenery.” Marie hadn’t noticed before how luminous his blue eyes were.

  “Barry, this is my friend, Karen. She has a rifle she wants to sell, and I thought maybe you could help her.” Barry followed the two women to Karen’s car, guiding Marie out the door with his hand in the small of her back. Karen opened the trunk and showed him the gun.

  He picked it up, made sure it wasn’t loaded, and then pulled it up to his cheek to peer through the sight. As she watched Barry handle it, Karen’s expression appeared to reflect the morbid memories associated with the gun.

  “Not bad. I don’t buy used guns myself, but I could keep it here if you want, and if I hear of someone who’s interested in buying it, I could put you in touch with them.” Barry’s gaze fell upon the pair of antique German handcuffs that lay between the spare tire and first aid box. He picked it up gingerly between his thumb and index finger, the way a new father might pick up a dirty diaper. “Come alongs?” He gave Karen a teasing smile. “So…do ya use these much?”