by Dori Sanders
Mae Lee tried to sort out her thoughts, but it was like picking your way through a swamp with quicksand suck holes. You just don’t know what goes on behind closed doors or what reasons somebody might have for wanting a divorce, she decided.
Liddie seemed to pull herself together. She picked up a small package of pork chops. Her sadness was still there though. “I wish so much that things had been different between Church and me. He was a good man in so many ways. Oh, God, I miss him so.”
Mae Lee breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t want her memory of Church Granger tainted.
Liddie looked at Mae Lee’s loaf of bread and laughed. The loaf looked like a wrung-out heavy towel. “I heard that you’re one of the hospital volunteers, Mae Lee,” Liddie said. “You probably don’t have a lot of free time, but please come out to see me sometimes when you get a chance.”
“And you do the same,” Mae Lee urged. “Come by and see me anytime.”
They parted ways. At the end of the aisle, the two women turned and waved a second good-bye. Liddie disappeared behind a mountain of paper towels on sale, and Mae Lee stood staring after her. Poor Liddie, she thought. She’s sleeping under the same quilt of guilt with thousands of other women. She still has husband trouble even after the man is in his grave. Mae Lee shook her head. And to think that all these years she had thought the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was in Liddie Granger’s front yard.
She drew a long, heavy sigh. The wild plums are always sweeter on someone else’s land, she thought.
: 17 :
More than two years had gone by since Mae Lee first began her volunteer work at the hospital. It was spring and she welcomed the warm days.
The ladies in the hospital volunteer group had a program of going on a tour twice each year. They chartered a bus and spent two nights away. The first several times when Mae Lee was asked whether she wanted to go she declined. But then she decided to go along the next time just to see what it was like. The tour this spring was to be along the Carolina and Georgia coast, including Charleston and Savannah, to see the old homes and plantations.
At exactly seven o’clock in the morning, ten minutes before the tour bus was scheduled to leave, Mae Lee climbed aboard and picked out her seat, in the front near the driver. She held her head high. On the outside she was just another passenger. Inside she was Rosa Parks, years earlier down in Alabama. It was a role she never tired of playing.
She watched the passengers board the bus. Most of her fellow hospital volunteers were not really well-to-do women, she thought, but they had the money to go when and where they wanted.
The bus driver, a handsome, clean-shaven young black man, helped the last passenger get her small bag inside the bus. “I work with them two or three days a week,” she explained to the driver after he took his seat at the wheel. She leaned forward so the others couldn’t hear her over the engine. “I do volunteer work at a hospital. I’ve been in their homes, and they’ve been in mine. But the thing this time is, I’ve never been around them in this capacity before. Know what I mean?”
“I catch your drift,” the bus driver said.
The spring was perfect for a bus tour in the Low Country of South Carolina. When the bus reached Charleston, the azaleas were in full bloom and the magnolia tree buds were swelling. The group checked into a Hampton Inn. Mae Lee thought the room rate that the others considered so reasonable was quite costly. They were only going to sleep there. Shortly after they checked in, they boarded the bus again and were off traveling across the Cooper River to view the handsome mansions and gardens and to lunch at one of the many restaurants offering the fresh daily catches brought in by the fishing fleets.
The next morning Mae Lee was up early, anxiously awaiting the trip across the Ashley River to Savannah, Georgia. At least she knew one thing about Savannah. It was not far from there that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a mechanized method of ginning seed from cotton, which was why slaves became so valuable to their owners.
Again Mae Lee was drawn to the graveyards, and the old restored plantation homes. Just walking the grounds of a home outside Savannah that once had teemed with slave servants evoked an indescribable feeling of kinship within her. The thought that maybe her ancestors had walked on the very same soil was overwhelming. With cold chills surging through her body, she walked, her eyes searching for anything that might offer a trace of her roots. She didn’t have to be on the shores of the Atlantic to do that.
She knew what she was looking for, what she hoped to find. For as long as she could remember, she had heard the story that went back to her great-grandfather, a man called Samwasi, a slave who left only a number and a drawing as the clue for his descendants to trace their heritage. Her daddy, Sam, had been named after him. His drawing showed, Mae Lee had been told, the number four and a scythe, perfectly drawn to scale, unmistakably clear. Time and time again, the story went, the slave had drawn this image in the loose dirt at his feet. “He couldn’t read or write,” her daddy had told her. “This is all we know about where our people might be buried.”
In a seemingly forsaken corner at the edge of the woods in one old cemetery, the tour guide pointed out the graves of slaves. After the group moved on, Mae Lee had stood so long staring at the graves that Bethel Petty returned to see if she was all right.
The tour guide didn’t explain the meaning behind the rusting chain links scattered about on a few graves, Mae Lee pointed this out to Bethel Petty. The three links joined together meant that the dead slave was born into slavery, worked and lived as a slave, and died as a slave, Mae Lee explained. She pointed to the scattered links of a broken chain, breathed a sigh of relief, and said softly, “The broken chain shows that this slave had gained her freedom.”
Mae Lee had not been prepared for Bethel Petty’s reaction when she told her that given time, she would no doubt find the number four and a scythe drawn by her great-grandfather somewhere, possibly in or near some graveyard. “A four and a scythe?” Bethel Petty’s eyes narrowed, then opened wide. Her voice was edged with excitement. “Oh, Mae Lee,” the words rushed from her, “it must be Forsyth, Georgia. Forsyth County, Georgia!”
“I never heard of that place,” Mae Lee said.
“It’s the county in Gone with the Wind. It’s right outside of Atlanta.”
Maybe Bethel Petty was right, Mae Lee thought. If she went looking she might be able to find the place. But there must be hundreds of graveyards outside a big city like Atlanta. Besides, slaves weren’t given granite tombstones when they died; the most they could expect would be wooden planks with their names on them, which would have long since disappeared. Still—
“Someday I’d like to go looking,” she said.
“Oh, Mae Lee, wouldn’t it be exciting if you could find something?” Bethel Petty declared. “I’d love to go with you to look for it!” Her eyes beamed with the excitement of a person setting out on a treasure hunt.
Mae Lee turned for a final look. Aside from the few graves with the rusty chains, the graves were unmarked and not well tended. But there were the lilies. According to the tour guide they voluntarily surfaced and bloomed each spring.
She wondered what great sacrifices some of the slaves had to make to save enough money to buy their freedom. She thought about how hard they must have worked, and of where they might have hidden their money. Perhaps she shared a common bond in hiding money; she hoped the habit had been passed down, from her great-grandfather Samwasi. The very idea made her feel her money was securely hidden.
Mae Lee followed along on the tour, hanging on to the tour guide’s every word, never showing any signs of the pain that often brought tears to her eyes behind her sunglasses. It was the thought of the mistreatment, the forced labor, and the breakup of families that hurt most.
She remembered the torn quilt that had been handed down for generations in her daddy’s family. She felt satisfaction because the torn quilt was where it should be, with her baby girl, Amberlee. Her mama, Ver
gie, had given her the quilt when she was fifteen. Amberlee had not known that, yet when she turned fifteen she’d begged her for the quilt. Since none of the others had asked for it, Mae Lee decided it was meant to be hers.
She had explained the strings attached. The quilt must always be kept in the family. It represented families that had been stitched together by women of many generations. If or when the quilt was torn, according to legend, it was because it needed to open up to make room for a piece of another family member’s garment. A custom passed down from the days of slavery, it all started with a slave woman’s prayer that perhaps through a family patchwork quilt the memory of a piece of a garment might serve as a clue to identify and reunite a family broken apart and children sold off at an early age. It had been a mother’s way of stitching a family together. It was the thread of the family heritage that bound them together.
Once her little Amberlee had clipped a picture of a black family from a magazine and put it in her little white cardboard shoebox. Mae Lee could never forget the faces of the family in the picture. The memory was like a movie that played over and over in her mind, a smiling father, mother, and children. So it shouldn’t have surprised her when she discovered the picture of an elderly man, unknown to her, in her daughter’s apartment. But it did hurt somewhat to learn that Amberlee had been passing him off as her paternal grandfather.
“Who is this paternal grandfather of yours, as you call him?” Mae Lee had asked.
“I don’t know who the man is, Mama. I bought the portrait at an auction.”
Mae Lee had studied the equally pained look in her daughter’s face. “And what kind of grandfather is that?”
Her daughter didn’t turn to face her. “It means, Mama, it means,” she stammered, “I’m pretending that he is my daddy’s daddy.”
Mae Lee moved closer to the elegantly framed oval picture. “So mamas don’t count anymore.” She drew a deep breath, then said softly, “He is a handsome grandfather. Very handsome indeed.”
“Mama,” her daughter pleaded, “you do count. You always will. It’s just that there is a lot of interest right now in family history. Some of my friends can trace their roots so far back, it’s, well, a little embarrassing for me to be hardly able to go back to my own father on his side of the family. So I just gave this picture a name and hung it up.”
Yes, Mae Lee reassured herself, it was right that the torn family quilt should end up with Amberlee.
The next two days were very much like the first two. From mansion to mansion, the historical accounts went on and on. But as for the slaves, when there was some rare recorded recognition of their contribution, it had only been for some honor bestowed for serving the master who owned them faithfully and with fidelity until death.
The quarters and cemeteries held her spellbound. Her eyes were always searching, poring over every mark or notch, looking for something, perhaps a few stones piled or shaped into some pattern, that might fit into her mind’s puzzle and offer some fragile link in her family’s broken and scattered chain.
Mae Lee fingered her brochures and looked upon the places they described. Could this be the house, she wondered, where her foreparent had loudly whistled his way from the kitchen through the breezeway while carrying food to the master’s table? Her foreparent, according to stories passed down through generations, who had mastered the art of holding snippets of food under his tongue and in his cheeks and whistling loudly at the same time?
So Mae Lee continued her quiet search.
On the way home Mae Lee gazed at the trees alongside the interstate. They were lovely in the spring, white dogwood trees weaving a pattern into the lush green trees like white lace trimming on a dark green dress. Growing in between here and there was the beautiful bright fuchsia-flowered redbud tree, called the Judas tree. The tree grew weak and crooked. After all, she thought, it represented a crooked man, Judas.
“I bet if I could get this tree home, growing up in my backyard would straighten it out. If you pull this bus over, I’ll hop out and jerk up a few offshoots from those pretty trees,” she hinted hopefully to the driver.
“Probably wouldn’t live.”
“Oh, it would live all right. I’ve got a green thumb.”
The bus driver smiled, but did not break his speed.
Less than a month after Mae Lee returned from what she swore would be the last bus tour she’d ever take just before the spring planting season, her farming plans fell apart. She was worrying over a flat tire on her wheelbarrow when she learned that Hooker Jones had suffered a stroke. His fanning days were over. The doctors didn’t expect a full recovery.
Mae Lee’s efforts to find someone to take over the farm-work were fruitless. For the first time in well over sixty years the land would not be cultivated. It was good farmland. The soil had been kept fertile through careful crop rotation. Mae Lee had learned that from her daddy. Even so, there were no takers for the job. People throughout the South were leaving the farming life.
Mae Lee’s son, Taylor, also tried to find someone to lease the land, without success. “You’ve got to face it, Mama, farming is too much of a losing gamble these days,” Taylor said.
Mae Lee grew quiet. “The farm brought in real good money last year,” she finally said.
“I know, but what about the years before, Mama? You’d do better on the money end to rent out granddaddy’s house until some offer comes along from someone who wants to buy or lease the land,” Taylor said.
Mae Lee eyed her son. “What about Hooker and his wife?”
“Mama, they can’t afford to pay the kind of rent that house will bring.”
“They can afford to pay what I’m going to charge them, because it’s going to be whatever they can give.” Mae Lee stared at her son in disbelief. “Taylor, you weren’t too young to remember all those years they helped pull me through. Hooker and Maycie Jones would finish gathering their crops and then help me with mine. And you think they would accept pay? Not a penny. Why? Because I was a woman with five children to raise. One doesn’t forget people like that, son, one doesn’t forget.”
Taylor thought for a moment, then turned to face his mama. “I’m ashamed of myself, Mama,” he said. “So ashamed.” He kissed his mama and left.
Later, in her kitchen, Mae Lee spooned soup from a big pot into a small bowl. Sometimes she couldn’t remember if she’d added salt or not. She took a taste and made a face. She added a pinch of salt and pepper to the soup and put a pan of biscuits in the oven to bake. She removed a few more pieces of baked chicken legs and breasts off the piled-up platters she was taking to Warren and the Joneses, and rolled out another pan of biscuits, enough for Ellabelle if she cared to eat, and Ellabelle would.
The singing voice of Elvis Presley on the radio made her step back in time. She remembered some remark he’d made about her people. They were called “colored people” then. And as she’d done then and from the day since she’d heard about it, she would refuse even to listen to him sing if she could do anything about it. She reached out to turn off her radio. Then she stopped. Elvis Presley was dead. Died in disgrace, when he was still a young man. And she was alive. The radio stayed on.
“Age sure has a way of causing you to turn around,” she said aloud. “It softens you. When you are young you find it so easy to decide whether you think a person is good or bad. When you are old you think of what made them good or bad and take that into account.”
Ellabelle helped load the food into her car. After they brought the Joneses their food basket, Mae Lee asked Ellabelle to stop her car near her old house. Ellabelle decided to wait in the car when Mae Lee said she wanted to walk to her cousin’s house.
She wanted to walk the old small wagon road along which she’d hurried back and forth so many times. The road was somewhat overgrown, but she wanted to take it anyway. She used a heavy stick to push the bramble and underbrush aside. She paused now and then to listen to the sounds riding the winds. Wind chimes of the morning.
In a small clearing in the woods, the frame of an abandoned and rusting car peeped from under clusters of overgrowth. Its still shiny grill and exposed headlights, adorned with blooming wildflowers and the green flowers on the creeping poison ivy, shone forth like mirrors.
Mae Lee placed her food basket on a tree stump and studied the huge oak tree beside the old car, and for a few moments it seemed she saw her children playing there, heard their happy playful cries: “Doodle bug, doodle bug, come on out . . . your house is on fire. . . .” She could almost hear the sound of her hoe making its musical clinking sounds when she struck small rocks on her cotton row. She could smell the freshly plowed ground, feel the cool soil underneath her bare feet in the freshly plowed furrows. She could hear the gee, haw commands her daddy called out to Maude, his faithful old mule. Turn to the right, turn to the left.
Mae Lee lingered for a final look at the old car—a thing of beauty even in its tangled setting. She’d never seen it before. She wondered how long it had been there. Maybe, she thought, the cussing widow from the curious family down the road had caused the car to run off the road one night and end up there. She remembered how the woman used to dig ditches across the dirt road to force cars to slow down so they wouldn’t run over her chickens. It was said that after she had a few nips of the “special tea” she made she would dig the ditches herself, single-handed, with her hoe.
Maybe one of the widow’s sons, like their daddy before them, had taken too many nips of the “special tea,” started driving like they walked, from ditch to ditch, and run off the road. She hadn’t seen any of them for quite some time. That was not surprising, though. They had always stayed pretty much to themselves. A few months after their mama died, they put a sign in the front yard: “Need a woman to live here.” Worse still, maybe it had been some stranger from far away who had wrecked the car there. The thought of who or what may have been in the car was scary.