by Lorene Cary
“No, I don’t think so,” Rayne said, trying to remember the many facts Selma had tried to tell him his first night back. “But what do I know? The chick at the courthouse tells me that there’s one heir property piece and one piece my great-grandfather bought. I think that maybe Nana borrowed against the land they bought in order to pay taxes on the heir property.”
“Here. I can see that. Look, here’s the settlement: it’s a sale of land by M. T. Broadnax to your relative at the end of the Depression. Wow, how did he swing that? It looks like Pettiford witnessed the signing. I also see that on the deed of sale—oh, this is interesting—the reclamation clause has been crossed out: this was a standard clause that was used when an African-American bought from a white; it allowed what were called the ‘rightful heirs’ ten years’ reclamation.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that in the rare cases when black people bought land from whites, the white heirs were given ten years to demand the land back.”
“And that’s crossed out?”
“Yes, crossed out and initialed. Twice. Your great-grandfather had to have more than ordinary pull to get that.”
“And we get ten days?”
“It’s a total of forty now. We’ve done some very energetic advocacy to make that change. Doesn’t seem like much, but it gives families time to organize.”
“What does Pettiford’s name as witness to the Broadnax sale have to do with his name on the heir property document?”
“Well, you see, I don’t know. One doesn’t explain the other,” she said, “but sometimes a white family would be involved if there was an old kinship tie, or the remnant of a relationship from slavery times, or when people’s lands or water were interconnected. Sometimes you need to tease out these things, but, frankly, sometimes it’s really none of our business.
“More important, especially if she’s borrowed from them, and is strapped for cash, you’ve got to get her some company in handling this.”
“You know, between my great-uncle and I, we have the money she borrowed. I know it’s a lot when you don’t have any coming in, but she knows that we can scrape this together. I don’t get it.”
“If you’re the Little Red Hen for fifty years, Mr. Needham, and someone comes and says, why don’t we plant barley and open a microbrewery, maybe you might not jump at the chance.
“But let me put it this way,” she said, pulling up a mini-blind to look out at Selma and Khalil: “Fifty years ago, as a people, we owned fourteen million acres, Mr. Needham. Now, we own little more than a million. My sense is that you’re telling me that you’d rather sell and be done with it. And then we’ll own even less.”
“We don’t live here, ma’am. I live in Philadelphia.”
“Real estate can be thought of as a commodity or in other ways. The old people had a collective way of thinking about this land.”
“I know, I know. Like when she always says that whenever anybody needs it, it’s here. I mean, that’s how I came to grow up here. But there’s no collective now. It’s just her.”
She smiled. “It might not hurt to talk to some of your other family members. Your great-grandmother may not feel as if they are entitled to have a say, but the law says that they do, and if you’re not united, all her years of work can easily slip away. Probably will.
“Here,” she said, pulling on her jacket, “come out the back door. I’ll walk out with you.”
“She does not want to talk. So you know. Nothin personal.”
“I’ll just pay my respects,” the director said. It was an old-school, back-home exchange, very correct. He didn’t know why he’d tried to talk her out of it. If she didn’t “pay her respects,” Selma would never listen to anything she’d told Rayne.
At the truck, she knocked on the passenger’s window and said in a warm, but professional, voice: “Mrs. Needham?”
Selma started and stared at her. Khalil pushed the button from his driver’s side door console to lower her window.
“Mrs. Needham,” the director said with her pretty bow mouth and enunciation, “your grandson has told me about you, and I just wanted to pay my respects and thank you for all you’ve done. People such as yourself have held our community together. You’re our heroes here at the Center, and I just wanted to come out and meet you myself.”
“Well, that’s very kind of you,” Selma said stiffly. “I really didn’t need to come, but my great-grandson here has a mind of his own. Which you want, really, in a grown man.”
“And he has your interests and your family’s at heart. I can tell you, in my job, I don’t always see that, so I’m so pleased when I meet families like yours.”
Rayne nodded his thanks and opened the driver’s door. “Jump in the back, Lil Man,” he said to Khalil.
“We do family counseling referrals if you need it,” she said.
“Yeah, we need it.”
“No, thank you,” Selma said. She looked straight ahead and rolled up her window as if to deter a panhandler.
CHAPTER 20
They did not speak as Rayne drove out of North Charleston through construction and badly marked detours. At the sight of a KFC, Rayne started to change lanes, saying that he’d buy a bucket of chicken to keep in the house. Selma suggested that they stop instead at Piggly Wiggly, whose fried chicken she preferred; and might she have a piece or two to keep in her fridge? He could also pick up milk, bread, and fruit to have in the house for Khalil, who had not eaten a piece of fruit since they’d been here, and coleslaw to go with the fish tomorrow for Good Friday—if all this running around hadn’t made her too tired to cook; and if the sky didn’t open up and drench them all so that they’d catch their deaths.
Khalil laughed at the name Piggly Wiggly until his sides hurt, so Rayne did not take him inside the store. When Rayne returned, he loaded his three bags into the backseat. Khalil ate an apple and an orange and a handful of grapes. “Now, see? See? Tell Mom.”
Once they were on the road, the cloud cover thickened. It turned grayer and cooler. Sprays of forsythia in the median and on the roadsides stood out in bright, happy relief against the darkening day. Khalil announced that he felt as if he had lived his whole life in a truck, and then promptly fell asleep.
“When you finish reading all your package from those people, I still need to talk business with you.”
Rayne tried to find a tone that would communicate resolve as well as care. “Listen, Nana, I need you to know that if I think I ought to learn more about something, I’m going to do it. It’s no disrespect to you. It’s like when I do a job: the electrician may explain something to me, but I may have to go and study it on my own, or read about it, or ask someone else. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about; it’s that I may need to hear it differently. Or hear it or read it ten or fifteen times till I can fit it into my whole picture.”
“I know that,” she said.
“’Member how when I finished college and you wanted me to go to law school—”
“Unh-hunh. I knew you was gonna say that. Sometimes I wonder why they all dead and I’m still here. I’m just trying to do my best.”
“Me, too.”
“Things I know about, nobody want to hear anymore.”
“That’s not true.”
“I’n’t it? What do I know that you want to learn about from me?”
“I want to learn more about our family.”
“Ask Jones. He can tell you without getting cranky.”
Rayne threw back his head and laughed.
“What’s so funny? I mean it. Every time I start with them people up there in Philadelphia, they just act the fool. Every time. Lord knows, they don’t wanna hear anything I got to tell.
“Here’s something I wanna know,” she said. “You tell me: Why don’t young people get married anymore? Since we all speaking our mind today—” She looked into the backseat to make sure Khalil was sleeping. Then she whispered: “You got the boy call
in you Daddy; now he call me Nana, and I’m fallin in love with him. You and the mother send telephone messages fifty a hundred times a day…”
Rayne’s phone vibrated once, to signify a text message.
“There she is again, probably askin how it went, and did the old lady act up.” Selma leaned sideways, as if talking into the phone on Rayne’s belt. “And the answer is yes, she did. Can she hear that? Or do I have to write the letter with my thumbs?” She held up one hand and thumped her thumb up and down.
Something in the movement seemed wrong to Rayne. “Nana,” he said, “are you wearing your seat belt?”
“No, matter of fac’, I ain’t wearin this damn seat belt. Yesterday, it like to cut off my windpipe. I’m holding it here for pretend to be a good example for the boy.”
Rayne looked down to her left hand, which was indeed holding the buckle next to the latch plate.
“It binds me. Come on, Ray, just drive; don’t worry me about this devilish belt. What is you gonna do? Come round here and latch me in?”
Rayne pulled the truck onto the shoulder, put it into park, got out, and walked around the back to her door. He opened it and adjusted the seat belt housing down to the lower setting. “Try it now,” he said.
The belt, which had angled past her ear, settled across her shoulder and collarbone. Selma humphed as she fastened the lock.
Before he got back into the car, Rayne peered through the long row of tall cypresses that screened a wide lawn, perhaps five hundred feet deep, and a fake Tuscan villa up a long driveway of crushed seashells. Next to the road, a stone wall covered with yellow jessamine perfumed the ditch. This could have been heir property, he thought.
After a mile or so, Selma said: “You could do contracting down here. They buildin. I don’t care how much they bellyache about the economy; every day the Lord sends they build places like you just saw. You could build your own home outta brick or anything you want. You wouldn’t pay a dime in rent. No mortgage. Just taxes. Onlies thing you gotta keep up is the taxes.”
Rayne did not respond, although for the first time he also did not retort the obvious: that he had a life and a business in Philadelphia. After another few miles, he said: “You asked why my generation doesn’t marry. I’m not sure. But most of us haven’t seen a lot of good ones. Good marriages, I mean. We’ve seen a lot of bad ones.”
“You seen me.”
“But, Nana, I never saw you married. That was before my time.”
Her hand, freed from its duty of holding the seat belt, but still cold and stiff, patted his fist on the shift. “We’re goin to church tonight, right?”
“Yep.”
“You want a marriage that will last; you want one that will help you; you wanna drive out the demons and run ’em over the cliff into the sea?”
“Yeah.” He laughed a little. “Sure. All that. That be good. I’ll go for that.”
“So, when you come tonight, pray for it.”
It was a funny phrase coming from Selma, who had always quoted King that God wasn’t Santa Claus. She’d stopped attending the church King had helped build in the twenties with ten dollars and a thousand feet of lumber he’d hauled with his own wagon. They’d used the church for years to do everything they needed to do away from whites’ observation. A Philadelphia recruiter, also a minister and a friend of King’s sister and brother-in-law, used to come talk about jobs in the North. When one of the white town councilmen found out, there was trouble.
It occurred to Rayne that the Philadelphia recruiter dustup might be another clue to King’s land saga. Rayne asked Selma about him.
“Well, the recruiters was stealing away people, so the white folks thought, who otherwise would’ve stayed on the land. So, when they heard this one was comin, I don’t know how, and they let the preacher know they were not particular about him recruitin from church.
“So the preacher wouldn’t let ’im in church; so we had ’im to our place. Railroad wanted them. Some factories did, too. They’d give ’em a free train ticket and a job.”
“Did any whites ever come visit Great-Granddaddy King?”
“No, not directly. But Pettiford warned ’im. He had supported him in the Broadnax sale, ’cause he said that dirty hog operation was ruining his water, too, so the others just dealt with it. But Pettiford warned him to be careful bringing in agitators.” Selma sighed. “I miss that old church.”
The clouds that had been gathering closed out the last bit of sky and dropped a sudden blue-gray rain down around them. Rayne turned on everything: the wipers, headlights, heat, and defrost. The cab felt intimate and safe. Rayne and Selma had earned the moment, it felt like.
“I guess you could say my parents had a good marriage,” she went on. “It was a hard life, but from what I remember and from what Jones tells me, it was a good marriage. Although sometimes I think it was just that they had it so hard, people had cheated them and treated them so bad, that they couldn’t afford to argue. Plus, women really had no choice but to get along. When somebody told my daddy there was a colored man a couple counties up who had a good place, and paid fair—that was King—he just up and came. She came with ’im, what else was she gonna do, and she dragged us, used to be six of us chil’ren.
“And when the influenza came, and my mother went down, the little kids all was sick in the bed with ’er, Daddy made Jones and me sleep outside to try to keep us from catchin it. I’ll never forget, it were rain like this. We was outside, and King’s first wife and baby was sick with it, too, and after he saw to them King took us into the barn and made us up a pallet there.
“And my daddy said to us—they all in there sick, and he left for twenty minutes to come check on us—he said, ‘Say a friend come to you round midnight from a long journey, and you don’t have no food to offer him. So you go to your friend down the road and ask him for bread to feed the traveler. And, naturally, that friend is sleep in bed, and his children are sleep, and he don’t want to get up and bother about it. So he holler down, tell you go away.
“Daddy told us, ‘Now, here’s what Jesus said: He said, “I say unto you, Though he will not rise up and give him, because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence will he rise and give him as many as he need… Ask and it shall be given.”’
“Daddy told for us to pray for mother and the babies, and all I knew was Jonesey went and got an old apple from the horse’s bucket and bit out the worm and all the rot in the middle around the seeds and fed me from his hand, and finally I went to sleep.
“But later, after Daddy died, too, and it was just me and Jones, I remembered what Daddy said. You know what I prayed for? I prayed for King.
“Every night, from the time I was nine years old, and he taught me the times table, I told God that I was asking in the name of Jesus, and that I’d ask every day and every night for the rest of my life.
“On my twelfth birthday, Mr. King Needham sent his son Junior over to give me two chickens of my own to raise.
“And less than five years later, he married me. King Needham married the skinny little Scattergood gal from the shack. He bought me a beautiful dress, and they threw a little party after. And you’d think he’d married the black Queen of Sheba the way he talked to me so gentle and carried me into the house over the threshold in front of all his relations.
“He told me I was smart. He told me I was beautiful.”
Rayne had slowed to just below the speed limit, and drove almost reverently onto their old road, so familiar, and new in light of Selma’s persistent will and love, whose remnants he had felt until now as constraints rather than freedom.
———
Selma walked over the threshold in her mind now, back into their bedroom. Mr. King, as she’d called him all her life, never touched her until the first night. When it came time, he pulled her into him, and kissed her, mouth open and smiling. He kissed his way into her, rumbling low in his chest with delight. Taste good. Then he laid her down on his bed like an offering unto h
imself, that’s what she felt like, and ran his big hands lightly over her tight skin.
Call my name.
Mr. King.
No Mister now, baby.
King? I can’t call you that.
She laughed into the darkness, conscious of her appeal, feeling her breasts shiver under his rough hand with its missing fingers. But when he stood to slough off his clothes and his shoulders blotted out the moonlight, her girlish desire turned to fear.
Maybe I ain’t big enough for you.
You big enough, girl, if you want it.
I’m scared.
If you don’t want it, I could wait.
I been wantin it since I were little.
Don’t tell me that. Oh, Lord.
I dreamed I was lying up in this bed. Ev’ry night, I dreamed it.
Oh, Jesus. Stop sayin that, girl.
I snuck up and looked in the window.
Well, then, you big enough now.
He made love to her twice on their wedding night, as gently as he could, he said, given how long he’d waited and how young and sweet she was. Then he fell asleep. Still tingling and tender, every inch of her awake, she ran her hand along the contour of his huge, pale body, holding her palm just half an inch over his torso to feel his warmth and the coiled-up energy in his chest. One flesh. This was the blessing she’d prayed for.
Her real life had begun.
CHAPTER 21
St. Anthony’s Episcopal Church echoed loudly as heavy metal folding chairs, each equipped with a padded metal kneeler to be used by the person behind, scraped the stone floor. Selma had explained that the Maundy Thursday service included a foot-washing ritual, and Khalil was looking forward to seeing old people take off their shoes and a preacher kneel down and wash their feet: “stinky feet,” he said enough times from the backseat to prompt Rayne to turn around and order that he not speak in church.