by Julie Kibler
Miss Isabelle’s face had gone pale as bone while Nell spoke, and I reached for her arm, afraid she might faint and topple from her chair. She spoke slowly, her words drawn out, gaping holes like questions between them. “My father? I can hardly take it in, Nell. I don’t know what to think.”
Nell nodded. “He did. He loved you, Isabelle, and he cared what happened to that baby—his own grandchild—even if he couldn’t figure a way for you to have her. He was a good man, Doc McAllister. But he had one big flaw: He was scared to stand up to your mother.”
I wondered who hadn’t been scared of Miss Isabelle’s mother. I had no sympathy to waste on that woman. But now, I found a sliver of respect for her father—even if he’d refused to do his good where all the world could see. Where his own daughter could see.
“Why didn’t he tell me?” Miss Isabelle asked. “Why did he keep it from me that she’d lived? No matter how hard it was for him to stand up to my mother, he should have told me.”
Nell had gone very still. “That she’d lived?” she asked. “Who told you she died?”
Miss Isabelle sat for a moment, thinking back through her memories. “I remember clearly. Mother said, ‘It was so early.… It was for the best.’”
“Oh, honey,” Nell said. She stood, moving slowly, coming around the table until she was touching Miss Isabelle’s arm. “We believed you didn’t want her.” Her eyes seemed almost frantic as they sought Miss Isabelle’s out.
I’d just lifted my coffee to my lips, and I set the cup back down so hard, it clinked and liquid sloshed over the side. I forced myself to reach for a napkin, to stop the spreading stain from running over the edge of the table, though I could hardly move my arm. Miss Isabelle rocked in her chair, her eyes burning holes in her lap, obviously struggling to keep her composure. Nell stayed close, and I saw now that, before, she’d been holding something back. All her reserve was gone in an instant, and in its place was only sorrow.
Felicia pulled Nell’s chair next to Miss Isabelle and pressed Nell’s shoulder until she sat. Nell’s voice shook as she continued.
“Before Sallie left your house, your mother gave her a sealed note, said to deliver it with the baby. Sallie had tucked the note inside the blanket she’d wrapped around Pearl, and we didn’t find it until later. It said, ‘I do not want this child. Please do not try to contact me.’”
They had all believed she didn’t want Pearl. I thought of the time Miss Isabelle had seen Nell in the market, how cool and indifferent she had been. Miss Isabelle assumed it was only because of the trouble she’d caused. It was so much more than that.
“I wanted her. Oh, how I wanted her.” Miss Isabelle’s voice trembled “And my father knew better. Why didn’t he tell me?”
“He never saw that note, but if he had, I suppose he would have been afraid you’d try to go off after her, and between you and me, Isabelle, if you had, I think your mother would have made life even more miserable for all of us. We’d already lost our jobs, though we were doing okay by then—Daddy had gotten a raise, and I was newly married and starting a family myself. But I think your father wasn’t just afraid of your mother. He was truly afraid for Robert. It was bad enough, what your brothers got away with, but I believe he felt they would have killed Robert if they could have found a way around the law. It wasn’t hard in those days. Black boys and men died for lesser things. Looking at a white girl or woman the wrong way was considered a crime. Fathering a white woman’s baby? That would have been too much. They’d have had a group of folks lining up to lynch him. We could hardly believe you didn’t want her. That nearly killed Momma and me. But, honey, I guess we accepted that in the long run, it was all for the best.”
“Did she know about me, growing up? My name, it was in her address book.…”
Pearl. Miss Isabelle wanted to know what her little girl knew of her mother.
“We never spoke of it openly as long as Momma was alive. There didn’t seem any point. And, of course, we just didn’t in those days—that kind of thing happened more than you’d ever believe. The story went that Sallie Ames delivered an early baby in another community and the mother died in childbirth. That she’d brought her to us because Momma was out of work and could care for her better than anyone else around. Your daddy, he brought money for a long time, making sure Momma had enough to provide what Pearl needed—extra food for our table, clothing, so on—even after Momma went back to work and I started keeping Pearl days. Up until he died, little envelopes showed up under the door, filled with cash, no name or anything, but we knew who’d left it and knew who it was for. Before he died, one big pile of money—enough to send Pearl through college. So Momma was able to raise that little girl as if our home was Pearl’s own home, and Momma was her mother.”
“I know she did,” Miss Isabelle said. “Cora was a better mother to me than my own. I’m grateful to her. But I wish I’d known about my baby. All those years, I thought she was dead. And Robert? Did he know?”
“It’s hard to say, but I think he probably did. Robert never moved home after the two of you ran away together, only stayed for a few days that once when he was … injured. He worked in Cincy until he went back to school that fall. After he joined up, when he came home on leave, he told Momma he’d found you, that he wanted to bring you to her to wait out the war. I think she would have admitted the truth about Pearl then—she was two or three years old and the spitting image of the both of you—but Momma knew he needed to go, to serve his country. I suppose she thought she couldn’t tell half the truth—that Pearl was his—without telling the rest—that you’d given her up, or so we believed. It would have killed him. And then, of course, you never came. We assumed you wouldn’t, in spite of what he said.”
But if Miss Isabelle had gone with Robert, she would have gone to where her baby girl lived with everyone who loved her—except for that baby’s own mother. I understood Nell’s reasoning in how dangerous it would have been at first, but by then, would it have mattered?
Who would ever know? It was such a mess, and so far in the past, nothing could fix it now. But I think Miss Isabelle was about to boil over with emotion inside. I was worried for her heart, both figuratively and literally. She held her hands to her collarbone and breathed in and out carefully. The grief in her eyes seemed to dull them and reveal her pain all at once.
“After Momma died, though,” Nell continued, “when Pearl was grown, I did tell her about you and Robert. She said she’d always suspected there was more to the story than what Momma had told her, but she’d been afraid to dig. She suspected, as light as her skin and eyes were, that one of her parents was white. She looked enough like us, she’d long wondered if Robert had been her father. She used to study his pictures, matching up his features with hers.
“I never told her you didn’t want her. I thought that was too cruel, though I worried about that all along—whether it would be a mistake. I’m thankful for that now. I left it up to her how to deal with it then, Isabelle. It was her choice. Pearl said she’d tracked you down to Texas. She told me she’d started to call you a few times—went so far as to dial your number and wait for an answer. But when you answered, she didn’t have the courage to speak. I guess she was afraid you’d reject her—a white woman who suddenly discovered her black daughter was still alive? She worried about your family, too. Your husband. Any other children you’d had with him. She was happy enough in her life, with her son, with the things she did and how she was able to mentor her students. I think she was mainly curious about you, and in the end, she decided not to trouble the waters.”
“I remember,” Miss Isabelle said, her eyes focusing on something Nell and I and Felicia couldn’t see. “For about a year, the phone would ring, and I’d answer and there would be silence on the other end, but I knew someone was there. I never dreamed it was her, though. I had crazy ideas—that Robert hadn’t died after all. That he was calling to say he was coming for me.”
“He was, in a way,” Nell sa
id, and Miss Isabelle’s expression took my breath away.
“I wish she’d spoken. Oh, how I wish she’d spoken. I would have given anything to know my daughter.” Nell pulled Miss Isabelle’s hands close to her and held them while they wept silently, together.
We sat for a while, Miss Isabelle and Nell thinking of the past and how they might have changed it. Me, waiting and hoping that Miss Isabelle could survive this one last blow. Felicia stood and began to tidy up the kitchen, wiping the counters and rinsing and stacking our coffee cups when we turned down refills.
As we prepared to leave, Miss Isabelle and Nell hugged for the longest time. I think she knew Nell had always had her best interests at heart—had always wanted to protect her and Robert and Pearl from the danger of the truth. Times were different then. What a burden Nell must have lived with all those years.
At the door, Miss Isabelle grasped Felicia’s hand between hers and gazed into her eyes, thanking her for bringing everything to light, making her promise to send photos of the precious little girl who had already stolen her heart, maybe even to come visit her in Texas, though I wondered if that would ever happen. How hard would it be to jump-start those relationships, at this late date, with no history to build upon? Though he was kind and polite to Miss Isabelle, Pearl’s son didn’t seem to know how to act or what to think. Their brief conversations had been stilted, trailing off in so many unspoken and unanswered questions. But I think Miss Isabelle was happy to know that in that man, and in that beautiful girl child and any others yet to come, the love she and Robert had shared finally had a legacy. In spite of everything, it really was meant to be.
As I started the car, I asked Miss Isabelle the question that had been bothering me ever since we’d arrived at the funeral home. “Why didn’t you tell me it was your daughter, Miss Isabelle? Why didn’t you tell me before we set out?”
“I just couldn’t talk about it at first, Dorrie. All I could do was tell my story as much as I knew so far. Then things started happening at home—your mess with Stevie, your worries about Teague—and I was afraid if you knew about Pearl, you’d refuse to return home even if you really needed to. You’d feel like you had to stay on the road, with me.”
“Oh, Miss Isabelle,” I said, shaking my head. “Sometimes you just have to ask for what you need. But thank you.”
We drove away from Nell’s house, and Miss Isabelle gazed into the dusk as night fell around us.
41
Dorrie, Present Day
WE LEFT CINCINNATI the next morning a different way from how we’d entered it. Instead of crossing the main bridge back into Kentucky, Miss Isabelle directed me back toward Newport, toward the area where Nell lived, except we drove the other way down the main road until we came to a sign.
WELCOME TO SHALERVILLE.
“That’s where it was.” She pointed her trembling finger at the side of the road. Now, a huge old oak tree was the only thing keeping the welcome sign company. I pictured it in my mind, the sign that would have kept me from crossing the city limit after dark all those years ago—and not that far in the past. Miss Isabelle thought maybe the signs had come down around the late 1960s. But Nell had told us hardly any black folks lived in the area even to this day, except for a small population in Newport and in one little town nearby that had a university.
Back home in Texas, even when no sign stood at the side of the road, I still wouldn’t be safe driving through some towns, especially at night—heaven forbid I had a flat tire or something and had to walk anywhere. There’d been plenty of small communities like that near my East Texas hometown. For all I knew, there were places like that close to the big city where Miss Isabelle and I lived now. These little sundown towns had been established everywhere—north or south of the Mason-Dixon Line, east or west of the Great Divide. Maybe it wasn’t as in your face now as it had been back then, maybe it was no longer politically correct to keep someone out of your town just because of skin color, but that didn’t stop some folks.
We drove up the main street of her hometown, and then Miss Isabelle directed me into another cemetery—the biggest, hilliest cemetery I’d ever seen. Gravestones dotted every available surface, no matter how steep, and narrow driving surfaces ran in every direction, up and down and around the hills. A fancy old stone building rose from one of the hills, and another one in a lower spot housed mowers and landscaping equipment. Workmen performing various tasks ignored us as the car crawled the tiny streets of this town populated by the dead.
Miss Isabelle knew her way this time. She asked me to stop first in an out-of-the-way corner. We stayed in the car, but she pointed out a tiny headstone so dark with damp and age, the writing wasn’t visible from my window.
“That’s Aunt Bertie,” she said. “One time, when I was still a girl, I followed Mother here. She didn’t know I was only steps behind her as she walked this road to tend her sister’s grave. I wouldn’t have known where she was buried otherwise.”
She studied the grave for a moment, and when she spoke, her voice broke in places. “I hid behind a tree and watched. My mother lay over this grave and she cried, Dorrie. It was the only time I ever saw her cry.”
A moment later, we pulled close to the edge of a road to park, and she pointed out a family marker. McAllister.
“Will you help me, Dorrie?”
I helped her from the car, which seemed more difficult every time she attempted it. She’d brought a cane on our trip, but she had refused it before, insisting I leave it in the trunk. She asked for it this time. We walked as close as we could get to the marker, though we had to stand back a distance. Her mother’s and father’s names were etched on flat stones nearby, as well as Jack’s and his wife’s. The stones were skewed on their crumbling concrete bases, her mother’s tipped at an odd angle into the grass. Miss Isabelle clucked her tongue. “All those years ago, Mother thought us better than anybody else in town, and now look—nobody even tends their graves.” But her eyes were cloudy, emotion-filled again. After a minute, she whispered words I strained to hear and understand. “Thank you, Daddy. Thank you for helping my little girl live.”
Tears clogged my throat.
We drove all day and into the evening, only making pit stops for gas and bathroom breaks and sweet snacks—all Miss Isabelle would agree to eat. Along the way, she paged listlessly through her crossword puzzle books when I asked her to read me a few clues. I pretended I was sleepy and needed her to keep me awake.
Somewhere around Memphis, she talked about what happened after Dane was born. Max’s company expanded, and he was offered a promotion and a raise, but they had to move to Texas to take it. Miss Isabelle said she was perfectly fine leaving the place where everything seemed to hold excruciating memories.
In Texas, they made a quiet life. She and Max struggled, but they maintained their marriage. Once, though, shortly after their move to Texas, Max made no secret of seeing a woman two or three times, someone he’d met at an office party. Miss Isabelle didn’t react. She felt she had no right—still guilty for deceiving him all those years earlier. The affair fizzled when Max realized nothing would change. He was only trying to get her attention. He broke it off and returned his steady, careful attention to Isabelle and their household. They settled into a life with few bumps after that—other than a brief period while Dane served in Vietnam. He returned safe, if cynical.
“What about those big things you promised Robert you were going to do, Miss Isabelle? Did you do any of the things you dreamed about all those years ago?”
“Oh, Dorrie, not really. Nothing too big. I tried to be a good wife and mother.”
We talked about the neighborhood where they’d lived in far east Fort Worth. A prosperous new community when they moved there, Poly Heights later fell victim to blight when the racial makeup began to shift. Isabelle and Max stayed even while white flight was in full swing. I could tell she was a respected part of her community, though she didn’t say it. She volunteered in her neighborhood, tutore
d schoolchildren, helped children and adults alike apply for library cards, and encouraged her neighbors to fill out voter-registration forms. She joined civic groups that pushed the school administration to make more efforts to desegregate. The schools had remained mostly segregated by virtue of districting lines, even when the enrollment rules changed.
So in her own little ways, Miss Isabelle had done some pretty big things—things most women like her wouldn’t have dreamed of doing. I knew the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived until they finally moved, after Max retired, to the smaller, easier-to-maintain suburban home where I did her hair now. Poly was the kind of neighborhood white folks ditched at the first signs of diversity in those days. It was one of the few older neighborhoods in Fort Worth mostly untouched by young professionals now that it was cool to live in the city again.
Max died peacefully in his sleep at almost eighty. Dane grew up and moved away to Hawaii. He lived and worked there until he passed only a few weeks after a cancer diagnosis. He left behind a wife and a couple of grandkids, whom Miss Isabelle seldom saw while he was alive, and even less after he died and his wife remarried. They sent her cards at birthdays and holidays, but it had been years since any of the kids had visited and months since she’d heard from them by phone. She felt like maybe it was her fault. “It’s hard to keep up relationships long-distance these days, Dorrie,” she said, “especially if they aren’t so strong to begin with.” She wasn’t sure she’d ever allowed Dane to depend on her as much as she should have. Had she kept him at arm’s length? Was her ability to love damaged by her losses?