The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

  Mother’s command to Daddy jerked me out of my struggle with guilt to focus my attention on him. I could hardly bear what I saw. All of the light had drained from his eyes. Without a word, he picked up his fork and began to eat one mouthful after another, slowly chewing each bite, his movements mechanical, like those of a child with his spirit broken to silent obedience. Looking at him, I knew with painful certainty that much of Daddy had died along with Uncle Frank.

  Daddy would no longer take Uncle Frank to the special hospital where he went when his drinking got especially bad. He would no longer go and bring him home after he had—as Daddy called it—“dried out.” Uncle Frank had been outgoing, boisterous, and profane. Daddy was hesitant, timid, and private. Both men drove a hard bargain in business. Each clung to the other as if an invisible cord joined them from one incomplete heart to the other. Now Daddy was left with half his life source gone. Though it took twenty-two years for him to follow his brother to the grave, those years were lived with chronic depression, the onset and progression of both diabetes and heart disease, the downfall of a once prosperous business, loss of confidence, loss of self. “Only a shell of a man,” he would mutter. “I’m only a shell of a man.”

  He slumped in the wingback chair in the living room, fists crammed hard against his eyes.

  “Pull yourself together, Wyman,” Mother said to him. “Here come the Maxwells.”

  Aunt Bama went to open the door. More people crowded into the house, but no one with whom I felt comfortable. I wandered among them feeling lost and alone. Daddy didn’t get up to greet anyone but sat silently. Aunt Bama pulled a chair over next to him, while he stared at the flowers in the rug.

  A young black man named Sam Butler was killed in the fire along with Uncle Frank. Sam had worked for Daddy and Uncle Frank for as long as I could remember. The firemen found him lying dead at Uncle Frank’s bedroom door, garden hose clutched in his hand. The water was still running.

  Sam’s mother was an old woman who still worked sometimes for Aunt Mary, and babysat for Bubba, Mercer, and me on those rare occasions when Mother and Daddy went out alone to the picture show. We called her Aunt Rossey, as we’d been taught to do. She had gnarled fingers; her hands were often twisted around the worn stick with which she stirred white people’s laundry over the cauldron in her dirt yard, scraps of wood and coal burning under her large black wash pot. Her small, unpainted shack was perched on stacks of brick at its four corners. Her walls were papered with pages of old magazines discarded by her white employers, and calendars advertising the black funeral home, with a different picture of the fair-skinned, blue-eyed Jesus for each month of the year.

  Aunt Rossey lived in the black neighborhood behind the houses of white people on North Broad Street. The black people’s shanties were separated from the white people’s houses by a narrow dirt alley and a tall fence, concealed on the white people’s side by a wall of thick bamboo that was home to starlings and rattlesnakes.

  Sam had died a hero, leaving Aunt Rossey alone to bring in the wood and coal for the fireplace in winter, with nobody to sit at the kitchen table with her, eating turnip greens, black-eyed peas, ham hocks, and corn bread dunked in buttermilk. Sam had died and Uncle Frank had died, but our two families were separated in their grieving by segregation that even then stood thick as the fence and bamboo wall that divided the two neighborhoods. I wondered if Sam would want any white angels to bring him up to heaven. Maybe he would have wanted only black angels. In my imagination I saw a group of black angels making a bed for Sam with intertwined hands and arms. I saw Sam’s head resting on an angel’s chest, his big bare feet dangling, drifting through the clouds.

  Uncle Frank and Aunt Mary’s house was so badly damaged from the fire that his body had to lie in the house of his older son, Ashton, for the calling hours. The open coffin stood against the blank north wall of the living room, wreaths and crosses of funeral flowers on wire frames at its head and foot. The room was dimly lit and simply furnished. It had none of the affluence of Uncle Frank’s living room, with its baby grand piano, plush carpeting, heavy, floor-length drapes, and art deco lamps and end tables. I’d spent many agonized times in Uncle Frank’s living room standing in the middle of the carpet while he commanded me to turn around and around so some relative or other could see how much I’d grown since their last visit. “Look at her!” he’d boom. “Just look at her!”

  But Uncle Frank was dead.

  His daughter Roberta came up from Florida for the funeral. She was wearing a slim black dress and spike-heeled black shoes. When she walked through the door her presence filled the room. The crowd shifted as she made her way to the open casket. Leaning over her father’s corpse, her long hair falling around her face, she carefully drew the stem of a red rosebud through the buttonhole in his coat lapel. Then—with a piercing howl of grief—she threw herself over Uncle Frank’s body and sobbed into his new blue serge suit.

  IV

  1945

  I will never forget the first time I walked up the walkway to the barn-red house on South Hansell Street in Thomasville, Georgia, to see Gem Vaughn Forbes. Peyton had taken art lessons with her when he was a young boy. Now I was hoping that I, too, would become her student. My mother drove me to the nearby town and parked in front of the house while I walked up the front steps, rang the doorbell, and stood, waiting. I was ten years old, a serious child who wanted more than anything to become an artist.

  A face appeared beyond the glass pane of the door. Then the door itself opened and a tall woman with white hair looked down at me. Her posture was upright, regal, her voice formal, restrained. “Yes?”

  She waited.

  “I’m here about painting lessons,” I said.

  “Then you want to talk with Mrs. Forbes. I’m Mrs. Clemons. Go around the side of the house by the porch and through the garden. You’ll find Mrs. Forbes in the barn.”

  I thanked her and walked around the house. I walked through the garden, toward the barn, from which the sound of hammer on nail came ringing and ringing.

  The barn door stood open.

  “Mrs. Forbes?” I asked, looking at the old woman bent over a small bench. Mrs. Forbes looked up, a hammer in her hand, and smiled.

  “My name is Margaret Richter,” I said. “I’m here about taking painting lessons from you.”

  She laid the hammer on the ground beside the bench and walked to where I stood in the splash of sun that spilled through the trees. Like Mrs. Clemons, Mrs. Forbes had white hair. But where Mrs. Clemons was tall, Mrs. Forbes wasn’t much taller than a large child. Smiling as she walked toward me, she was all effervescence and light. Her blue eyes were bright and welcoming. “I’m delighted to meet you. I was just repairing a bench. Come with me to the house.”

  Together we walked through the garden. A fat robin pecked in the coarse grass; a mockingbird called from an ancient oak. “I call my garden Merrie Garden,” she said, the grass bouncing back after each brisk step she took. The name sounded like that of a storybook garden filled with elves and fairies. No one I’d ever known before would have given a garden such a name.

  We climbed the steps to the porch. Wisteria vines twisted themselves around the columns supporting the porch roof. Among the light-filled leaves and heavy masses of lavender blossoms, bees droned and buzzed. “This is a wonderful place to live,” she said with a tone of such deep satisfaction that she could have been the prime creator looking around at her creation and pronouncing it good.

  Mrs. Forbes twisted the knob of one of the French doors. “Come in,” she instructed, opening the door and standing beside it until I entered the room. Then she closed the door and followed me in. Early-afternoon light flooded the room.

  She gestured toward a daybed in one corner. It was covered with a brown throw. Pillows of many different fabrics and colors were piled haphazardly along its back. I walked across the worn Oriental rug and sat down. The bed was so deep that my back didn’t reach the pillows at all. I squirmed awkwardly.
“Make yourself comfortable,” she said, sitting in the straight chair at a small desk. “Pile the pillows behind you.”

  I did. Then I looked around the room. It was very long and narrow. The window at the far end faced Paradise Park. In front of the window stood a formal sofa in a faded rose color, and a table and lamp. In the corner beside the sofa stood an old upright piano. In front of the sofa, the carpet had been worn thin. A pathway separated the formal sofa and the piano from the more casual and larger portion of the room where several chairs, the daybed, and a desk clustered together. The window at that end of the room opened to Merrie Gardens. It was at a small desk beside this window that Mrs. Forbes sat, facing me.

  While Mother waited in the car, Mrs. Forbes and I made arrangements for me to begin art lessons the following Saturday afternoon. I was impressed that her walls were hung with real paintings and not reproductions, like the branch of magnolia on brush-textured cardboard that hung in our living room. I was especially enchanted with a figurine on Mrs. Forbes’s mantelpiece. It was a hand-painted china cart with blossoms on it in soft, warm colors pulled by a little boy with curly blond hair and pink cheeks, his head turned toward me and thrown back in a gesture of gentle and joyful abandon.

  By the time I knew her, Mrs. Forbes had long since given up the kindergarten that she taught in her home for so many years. Now only a few older children came to her for art lessons, and I knew only a couple of those who occasionally joined me. Mostly I remember being there alone with Mrs. Forbes.

  Every Saturday afternoon I sat at the small desk in her sitting room or at one of the tables on her porch and drew and painted a still life of fruits or vegetables that she’d set up for me, or, when she was teaching me about perspective, stacks of books, cups, and saucers. Or I laboriously copied one of the many pictures that she’d clipped from magazines for students to choose from.

  I painted, and she talked. She talked about attending the Chicago Institute of Art, and how once her instructor in the figure-drawing class reprimanded her for working so long on the face of the model. “This is a figure-drawing class,” he’d boomed loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Not portraiture!” I tried to imagine her as a young woman in a real art school, red-faced with embarrassment at being publicly chastised, but I couldn’t see her as anything other than confident. Mrs. Forbes, I thought, would have held her ground wherever she was. And she went more places than I’d ever thought of going. She talked about her teaching at the Sac and Fox Agency of the United States Indian Service and about her trip to England to see the coronation of King George IV.

  She had a drawer full of poems and stories she’d written in response to her experiences, and she would sometimes read stories to me about Byfleet Manor in England, about Wapemac, the Indian boy who didn’t want his braid cut off, or Wishewah, the little Indian girl grieving for her mother. Or she would read “Frowsy Old Grumble” or another of her poems. I was especially intrigued by her poem “Fireplace Imps,” with all of its crackling, sizzling, spitting, and spouting. It fed my own fascination with fire and my love of sitting in front of the fireplace in my parents’ bedroom, imagining a world in the shapes and colors of the hot coals and flames. But the poems’ references to “grown-ups to tea” and the use of words like “wee bit” and “ ’twas” made them feel like something left over from another century. For the duration of the listening, I could be a contented child in some fairy-tale world or a simple, happy child, and not the child I really was.

  The child I really was was troubled, but I told no one what I perceived to be the source of my trouble. I felt too frightened of what I thought and too ashamed of the solution that had erupted unbidden in my mind. When I was eight years old, and hanging upside down from the trapeze on the swing set in our backyard, I first realized the problem consciously enough to put words to it.

  The swing set stood near an old oak tree that was half-dead and covered by wisteria vines heavy with blossoms. From where I hung I could see the wisteria on my left, while in front of me and across the coarse grass stood a large clump of banana trees. I loved the long, broad banana leaves and the twisted vines of the wisteria. More than anything else in the yard they reminded me of the jungle.

  I was thinking about the jungle that day I’d been to a Tarzan movie at the Zebulon picture show. For nearly an hour and a half I’d sat in the dark theater, eating a king-sized Baby Ruth candy bar and a bag of buttered popcorn, while watching Tarzan swing from vine to vine through the jungle from one adventure to another. After sitting in the dark for so long, I had to squint at the blaze of the late-afternoon sun when I left the theater. It often took me the two blocks of my walk home before my eyes forgot the dark and got used to daylight again. For those two blocks that day I thought about Tarzan.

  Home, I opened the front screen door, calling, “Mama!”

  For years I’d called my mother “Mother,” except when I was upset and in need of comfort.

  I called again: “Mama!”

  No answer.

  I walked across the living room, into the hall, and to my parents’ bedroom, where I stood at the open doorway looking in. Mother was asleep on top of the bedspread. Her glasses had slipped halfway down her nose, and one of her women’s magazines—Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, or Redbook—lay open and spread across her belly.

  The hall behind me was dark, and the house felt large and empty with her asleep. I wanted her to wake up. I watched her belly rise and fall with each breath. The electric fan at the foot of the bed ruffled the pages of the magazine a little, but my mother didn’t stir. Not daring to wake her, I hoped that my steady stare would make her open her eyes and look at me, but it didn’t.

  After a while I turned away and walked down the hall. I wished Bubba was home, but his room was empty. I went to my room, kicked off my shoes, took my dress off, and put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. Then I went out the back door to the swing set, where for a long time I hung upside down from the trapeze, thinking of Tarzan.

  In the movie, Johnny Weissmuller played Tarzan. I don’t remember the name of the actress who played his mate, Jane. Jane didn’t matter. Tarzan was the one who rode the elephant at the head of the herd; he was the one who wrestled alligators and protected Jane from the charging rhinoceros. I wanted to be like Tarzan, not like Jane, leaping helplessly from the tree limbs into his strong arms, or fixing the food and waiting for him to come back from another adventure.

  It wasn’t just Jane I didn’t like. It was suddenly and painfully apparent that I didn’t like being a girl who would grow into a woman. I thought of Mother struggling into her girdle on a hot day, sweat already trickling down between her breasts when she’d hardly dried herself from her bath. I’d watched her straining to pull the sides of the corset together over her flesh, fastening the hooks and eyes one by one, then tugging the zipper closed with short, hard jerks.

  I began to swing back and forth on the trapeze. I let my arms hang limp from my shoulders, fingertips touching the dirt where the grass had worn away. Tarzan, King of the Jungle. To be at home in all that wildness; to not be bound by rules and expectations. A large grasshopper hopped through the grass just beyond my reach. Then I heard the rush of water running in the kitchen sink. Mother was up, cooking supper.

  Some days Mother didn’t change from her nightgown until afternoon. On those days she moved slowly and her mood felt heavy like the heavy breasts that hung loose under her nightgown. Mother’s life felt like a chore to be completed, a burden to be endured. She was always stirring a pot of grits or frying bacon and eggs, and the trash can by the stove was always running over. There were tubs to be scrubbed clean of scum and stray hairs, beds to be made, floors to be swept. And all the while, despite her slow and labored efforts, dust settled on the tables again, floors lost their luster, clutter accumulated. It was as if the house, with its attendant chores and demands, conspired to keep her forever captive; as if the tasks multiplied and took over her whole life the way kudzu vines took o
ver abandoned places in the country, climbing walls, roofs, outhouses, and tool sheds.

  Swinging back and forth on the trapeze, I was flooded with images from my mother’s life. Relentless as kudzu, insistent and intimate as blood, they flowed through me. To be a woman was to be dead. I thought I would just as soon sit down in an electric chair and have someone strap me in and pull the switch. I’d never felt more alone and lonely. And it didn’t matter that Mother was awake now, because there was nothing she could do. There was nothing anyone could do. I was a girl, and being a girl, I had no choice except to grow up and be a woman. My face felt hot. I gripped the trapeze bar with both hands and swung down. I felt sick to my stomach, and a little dizzy. I walked over to the oak and sat on the grass behind it. My mind filled with the image of mother’s large, pendulous breasts. After her bath I’d watched her lift them—first one, then the other—and pat Yardley’s bath powder under them with a large puff, clouds of powder rising all around her. I felt my own chest, smooth and flat under my T-shirt. I thought of Tarzan’s chest, smooth and muscular. And Jane’s chest, too, with its breasts. Maybe the problem after all had to do with breasts. Maybe when I grew up, I could find a doctor who would slice mine off. But as I thought this, I felt a rush of guilt flood through me, threatening the fragile hope I held in my heart. How could I think about doing such a thing? The thought itself felt like a sin. What would Mother think of me if she knew I had such a thought?

  I went inside. My father and brother were already seated at the kitchen table waiting for their supper. Mother was spooning grits onto Daddy’s plate. I sat down and put my napkin in my lap. “I wondered where you were,” Mother said, spooning grits onto my plate. “I thought that picture show should have been over by now.”

  “I was out back on the trapeze.”

  Mother went to the stove, got a platter of fried eggs and bacon, and set it on the table along with a stack of toast. Then she sat down. I scooped a large spoonful of grits onto my plate, slid an egg onto it, and took two slices of crisp bacon, crumbling them into my grits. I cut a large slice of butter and dropped it into my grits. For a few seconds I stared down, watching the butter melt to a yellow pool. Then I chopped my egg up, mixed it with the grits and bacon, spread grape jelly on a piece of toast, and propped the toast on the edge of my plate. Without looking up, I began to eat.