by Terry Persun
“I’m sorry,” Bob said.
“I grew up in a white family, but for years learned nothing but black ways. My parents were curious people, willing to learn anything new and to try it out on their own. When I started school, I didn’t even act like the other children. I didn’t talk like them or think like them. My brothers went to fight for what they believed in, and God went with them and brought them back alive, but sadder.
“I stayed home and helped Ma and Pa raise twelve Negro children whose daddies and older brothers went to fight. Just like my own brothers, the ones who came back were sad, different. They took their children, sisters, and wives, and left town like it was a bad memory. If you looked into their eyes, you’d see that their whole lives had become a bad memory.” Jenny lowered her head.
Bob waited. He didn’t know what to say. He slid down to the floor, his back against the door jam. He hugged his knees.
“I felt like I’d been left behind. Ma and Pa died. Jimmy lets me live here. You’d think with all the drink and laughter at night that this would be a happier place.”
Bob let his legs stretch along the floor.
“Then you come along,” she said. “Even with your own sad story, you brought something good. I thought that a white man would never love me. Until you. You didn’t care about all the Negroes coming and going around here.” She looked up and tried to produce a smile. “Now I know why,” she squeaked.
“I’m as much white as black.” Bob tried to make her see that it wasn’t all a lie, that it wasn’t so bad.
“You’re sweet to say that.”
“It’s true. I have few happy memories with my black parents.” He thought about what more he could say, but came up empty.
“You must tell me everything. Your name. Where you’re from. How you lived.”
Bob froze. He’d have to run if he told her. He’d have to go far away if anyone knew the truth about him. He breathed deeply, opening his mouth to pull in gobs of air and letting the air out through his nose. He looked around the room. He could lie. He had become good at making up stories that sounded real. And what of his latest memory? What about the information he had just learned himself? How could he tell her something, out loud, that he literally couldn’t stomach even as memory? His lips pursed. His eyes filled with water. His nose ran. He sniffed. He knew he was going to tell her now. He waited for the courage to well up, to take over his body. He always knew long before his mouth could open that truth was about to be spilled, like the blood that had spilled over and over again in his life. His body began to sweat. His breath became hesitant. He drew his legs close and hugged them.
Jenny stared at him, with patient eyes, waiting for him to be ready.
“My name is Leon. I lived on the Fred Carpenter farm from birth. He was a kind man,” Leon hesitated, “and a cruel man. He loved my mother. He trusted my father with the farm. My father,” he raised his head. Tears slid down his face. “My black father tried to kill me when I was born and when he couldn’t, he killed himself, little by little, until he was shot, dead, by my, my—”
Jenny lowered herself to the floor and went over to Leon and sat with him just as they had near the river the evening before. She took his limp hands into hers. “You’ve got to go on.”
“I was born, so I was told by my Aunt Martha, during the Lord’s sweet song into night. When my black pa came home from the fields he tried to rip me out of my mama’s arms and she never forgave him that.” Bob swallowed, then went on. He spoke of all the meaningful details including how he began to escape mentally by making up songs in his head. He walked Jenny through many of the stories of his life clear up to when the Carpenters came into town to sell hay. He explained how he recalled the awful truth of his mother’s molestation. To Leon, it brought all things to a point of clarity. He left out details only to hold back his own nausea.
Jenny collapsed onto him. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “How could you know?”
Her understanding, her forgiveness, broke the logjam inside him. Finally, it truly wasn’t his fault.
He held onto Jenny, his arms across her back. He felt her shiver and cry. She cried for him. She wasn’t going to expose him, or kill him, or run from him. There was a release that happened inside Leon that pulled him together, drew all the pieces that had been taken from him, little by little, and drew them back to him. His own tears dried.
There were still questions inside him. “What, now, shall we do?”
Jenny looked into his face and asked the one question he couldn’t answer himself, the one question he’d asked over and over again his entire life: “Who do you want to be?”
In that moment, he knew that he needed to honor his past, yet move into his own private future. “Leon. . . Leon White.”
She then let him pull her onto his lap, and they stayed together for a long while.