by Neely Tucker
She and Pete lived on a hardscrabble farm a dozen miles from our house, on a dirt road that I suppose you could say was near the community of Bradley, but it’s probably more accurate to say it was way out in the sticks. In the summers, Shane and I would load up plastic buckets and burlap sacks into the back of our rattling old station wagon just after dawn. It was cool in the shadow of the trees at that time of day, the overnight dew soaking the grass and settling the dust on the back roads. The radio played country music, buzzing with static, as my mother turned off the paved highway and onto one gravel road and then another until we got to their place. We came upon the little wood-frame house with a chicken coop in the back and a box fan with streamers, blue and red and green and yellow, propped in the open kitchen window. We referred to the place as if it were one word, GrandaddyPetenBonnies. Bonnie would come out, wondering why we were so late. “It’s already seven o’clock,” she’d call out, frowning, “the day’s half gone.” She would put on a broad sun hat and we would walk down to a garden that covered three acres. The morning would unfold, the sun rising into a blast of heat, the humidity a living thing that would run a wet hand down your pants and under your shirt and clamp a sweaty hand over your mouth. The butter beans would go by, your back hunched over and aching, then the bright yellow squash, which we could sell in town for what Bonnie called “cash money.” Then there were the long rows of black-eyed peas and string beans and corn and okra and greens and the watermelons. We spent the afternoon in the cool of Bonnie’s house, shelling what we had picked. There was no air conditioner for many years, nor was there indoor plumbing until the mid 1970s. You went to the outhouse in the backyard next to the chicken coop. For showers, we went down the road about three hundred yards to the “old house,” a shack that had a water pipe hooked up to the back wall. You stripped down and stayed close to the house, under the water, so that no one driving by could see you.
In the fall, we cut trees into firewood. Pete worked with us, a leathery man in overalls or work trousers and an old shirt, a Winston dangling from his lips and a pack in his shirt pocket. I loved him, of course, as he taught me about snakes and fishing holes and deer hunting. I would sit next to him in the woods late on chilly autumn afternoons, taking a break from chopping wood and soaking up the smell of his sweat and cigarettes and old clothes as he talked.
Years later, during a rare visit home, I drove out to their house one morning to help Bonnie make a set of fried apple pies for my parents. Pete had died several years earlier, and she lived alone in the house now. She still awoke before daylight and was waiting for me when I pulled up, a cloud of red dust from the road settling over the car. The chickens in the backyard were gone, as were the cows in the pasture. She was alone most of the time with her daytime game shows and “stories” (soap operas). We cut up the apples while sitting at the dining table, set two steps away from the kitchen, in the room where I had spent so much of my youth. She did not turn on the lights, content to let shafts of morning light stream in through the windows, dust motes dancing in the air. The screen doors let in a soft whisper of a breeze, carrying the first touch of fall. We talked a while, a conversation punctuated by her observations that I was a pretty lousy apple slicer, and I finally got the nerve to tell her something I had never told anyone: She had always been my favorite relative, I said, and I loved her as much as I did anyone I knew. She worked to keep the corners of her mouth from turning up into a smile, which was only partly successful, and told me I should watch out or I would slice my thumb off.
On the way home, I opened the tin box she’d put the turnovers in, removed the wax paper covering, and pulled out two for myself. They were the last Bonnie ever made for me.
Even though I know the full family history now, even though I realize that Pete and Bonnie were actually my former stepgrandfather and his second wife, I have never considered them as such. They were my grandparents, and I knew that because my heart told me so.
This sense of family, something that goes beyond bloodlines and shared last names, was strengthened in my generation. When I was five years old, my first cousin, Cathy Brown, came to live with us. Her parents were parting in an ugly divorce. On the day she came to our front door, my parents did not say, “Your cousin is coming for a visit.” They said, “Your sister will stay in this room.” She has never been referred to or regarded as anything else, in more than three decades. I stayed the baby of the family for years, until my parents met a young Indian immigrant named Vanishree Rudraswamy, who was trying to make it alone in this country. Vani now calls my parents Mom and Dad, comes home to the farm for holidays, and, when I introduce her to my friends I just keep it simple: “This is my little sis.”
FOR HIS PART, the two-bit bastard who gave us his name, Clayton Tucker, lived his entire life within ninety miles of us, my father found out years later. Clayton’s children by other marriages discovered my father’s existence only after Clayton died, his cast-aside son mentioned in some obscure papers buried in the bottom of a trunk. Clayton had never called my father, made contact, or showed any interest in us at all, though he could have driven to our front door within an hour or two.
My father was always happy to return the favor.
Other than mentioning his family details to my mother once—and only once—when they were dating, he never again mentioned his father. Not to his wife, to his friends, and never, not once, to his children.
The power of such a stance, held over decades of time, honed and refined to a sheer state of nothingness, impresses me still. It was the inverse corollary that verified Pete’s role as father and grandfather. Taken together, it defined what family was and was not, what love was and was not.
I inherited that way of looking at the world. Though I spend large parts of my life tracking down obscure details for eight-hundred-word newspaper stories, though my files for this book fill two filing cabinets, I have never so much as lifted a finger to find out anything about my “real” grandfather. I have never even seen his picture. I have no curiosity to do so. In my family, Clayton Tucker, patriarch of us all, adds up to a little less than zero.
WHEN VITA AND I were married, I thought that was pretty much it for my family ties, whatever they might once have been. My parents and I had been estranged for several years preceding the wedding anyway, split by issues about race, long hair, earrings, and tattoos. It was obvious that they were not about to warm up to the idea of a black daughter-in-law. Interracial marriages had been illegal in Mississippi until 1969, and my parents’ generation saw miscegenation landing somewhere between the unnatural and the downright sinful. But time has its way of working away at things. The year after we were married, Shane and my mother flew to Poland to visit us. While Shane and I went for a jog one afternoon, my mother pulled Vita aside on the couch.
“I just want you to know that I have prayed about this, Vita, and I was wrong about this race thing,” she said. “I was just plain wrong. I don’t know how else to say it. I was raised a different way, I guess. But I want you to know how very sorry I am about it. I apologize and hope you can accept it. I didn’t intend to hurt your feelings.”
“I didn’t take it as something to do with me,” Vita said carefully. “We had never met, so it couldn’t have been something about me. If you had problems with black people in general, that sounds more like your issue.”
“It was,” my mother said. “But it isn’t anymore.”
The rest of the visit went well. They flew back home, and my family mostly just got on with things—although at a cautious, transatlantic distance.
But when Chipo came home with us, it initiated a remarkable family rapprochement. My father, who had grown up with the sting of being abandoned, took to her immediately. He applied for an expedited passport and bought a plane ticket to Harare. He seemed to forget that he hates to go north of Memphis or east of Tuscaloosa. He and my mother traveled for thirty-eight consecutive hours—Mississippi to Atlanta to London to Johannesburg to Harare—so th
at they could see their only grandchild. Race, the defining issue of life in Mississippi, suddenly became a minor thing. The differences we’d had seemed to be a memory of the distant past. During that visit, my mother related the story of Charles Brown, my great-something-or-other grandfather, the one who was said to have run away to be with a freed slave—the first time I heard that little family secret. Charles and his lover disappeared from family and Mississippi history, it appears, leaving a question mark that has lingered for more than a century. No one knew what became of them, my mother told us after dinner, while I listened in stunned silence.
Vita was very amused.
“Once a century, somebody in the family just has to run off and marry a black girl,” she giggled at the table. “And here you were, thinking you were blazing a trail. You’re just a family retread, sweetheart.”
She kissed me on the nose.
Later, after my parents returned to Mississippi, my father went to his fiftieth high-school reunion. It was in Clarksdale, a drowsy little town lost in the heart of the Delta, mostly renowned for the extraordinary number of blues musicians who once resided there.
In the small banquet hall, those in the all-white crowd were in their late sixties, the generation of Mississippians who once had battled so fiercely against integration and the civil rights movement. After dinner, they were each given the chance to stand up and tell their former classmates the one thing—the most important and meaningful thing—that had happened to them in the half century since they were all classmates and teenagers.
My mother, sitting beside my father, silently wondered what he would say. He had been the first person in her family or his to go to college. He had also gone on to get a doctorate (in animal husbandry), and now everyone called him Dr. Tucker. He had risen in his chosen profession, the Cooperative Extension Service, to being the state’s number two official, a position of some clout in an agricultural region.
When his turn came, my father stood up. He didn’t mention any of that.
“I am most proud to tell you that I have a granddaughter, her name is Chipo, and she is from Zimbabwe,” he said.
And then he sat down.
My mother was speechless. And then she could have kissed him.
9
CHILDREN OF THE DRY SEASON
JUST BECAUSE we considered Chipo to be part of the Tucker clan didn’t mean anyone else did, however. The question before us was how to get approval from everyone in the Department of Social Welfare, all the way up to the presidential cabinet, for an adoption that would make her legally ours. The early assurances Vita had been given that all of this would go smoothly had quickly proven to be nonsense. I remembered Tony Mtero’s words of warning about the process, and it stopped us from immediately filing an application to adopt. We knew that would be rejected outright. After debating on a course of action for a couple of weeks, and doing a little legal research, we decided to begin with a flanking operation. We submitted paperwork to become foster parents, the step Tony had mentioned that night at dinner. There was no law excluding foreign nationals from this, and while fostering still had to be approved by the department and legalized by the courts, it was not subject to the same rigors as adoption.
A new social worker, Florence Sibanda, did another home study, and we answered all the questions and filled out all the forms a second time. She was very nice but almost never in her office. She once showed me her case files—the thin folders were stacked more than a foot high—and said, “Mr. Tucker, your file is one of these. All of these people want to see me. If you need me to do something on your file, you must find me.”
She wasn’t kidding, and I wasn’t shy. I probably spent more time following Florence Sibanda around than I have any public official in my professional life. All I needed her to do was sign and date the emergency placement order, an act that was becoming a thirty-second formality, every two weeks. The problem was that her signature was harder to get than that of a Mafia don. She would not make appointments, never answered the phone, never returned the dozens of messages we left for her, and didn’t keep regular office hours. I tried to track her down at her office, at court, on her lunch hour, when she came to the building in the morning, and when she left at night. I would start stalking her every other Wednesday to make sure I found her by the Friday deadline—or, if I was out of town, Vita would. When it was my turn, if I had not found her by midday Thursday, I would take my cell phone, a notebook, and a couple of files to the department. I would sit cross-legged in the gloomy hallway and conduct interviews from there, sliding my feet to the side when people passed.
Neither would she provide a checklist of required paperwork for foster custody—things such as our marriage license, birth certificates, pay stubs, police clearance, personal references, and so on. Instead, she would mention two or three items she needed from time to time. We would go away, get those things, and come back with them, and then she would ask for two or three more.
For the police clearance, you had to buy your own fingerprint form at Kingston’s, the state-owned bookstore, then drive out to your local precinct and be fingerprinted. Then you had to take it back to the Department of Social Welfare to be vetted. We went to the Borrowdale police station to be printed late one afternoon. An officer waved us into the back of the compound. A young woman was with him. She wore blue jeans and a disheveled look. He printed her, standing outside next to a water hose, rolling her fingers across the ink pad, then carefully across the white paper. He walked away for a moment. She looked at us, rubbing her hands beneath the water to get the ink off, sizing up what a pony-tailed white man and a dreadlocked black woman might have been doing to get arrested.
“What are you here for?” she finally asked.
“Fostering,” Vita said. “You?”
“Sex.”
“Don’t tell me they outlawed it.”
“Only if you sell it.”
She walked off, and Vita nudged me, whispering, “Go on, baby, make her an offer. See if you can get some play.” I tried to stifle a laugh, nudging her back, and then we were giggling—the first laugh we’d had in a month.
It was difficult to relax, even though Chipo’s health seemed to be stabilizing. The situation at Chinyaradzo was as grim as ever. Tadiwanashe Mtero, an infant who had slept across the room from Chipo, died in the hospital due to diarrhea and vomiting. He was the fourteenth infant to die that year.
Not only was there still no inquiry, it had come to the point where the government almost seemed to resent the wave of abandoned children. Articles would pop up in the government-run newspaper from time to time, lecturing the overwhelmed public that they should somehow take up more of the responsibility themselves. “Communities Must Assist Disadvantaged Children,” read the headline of one article in the state-owned Sunday Mail. It was buried deep inside the paper despite some astonishing information. “About 10,500 orphans went through the Department of Social Welfare in the last seven months. One of the children’s homes in Harare reportedly admits not less than four abandoned children every week. These children are found by the police or members of the public. Since March this year, Harare Central District dealt with 91 cases of abandoned children.” The numbers were extraordinary by any measure, and almost beyond belief in a nation of eleven million. But the statistics were at the bottom of the story. The lead, in the state-sponsored style of journalism, read as a government scolding to the proletariat. “Although Government has, through the Department of Social Welfare, tried to accommodate disadvantaged children in institutions, it has now run out of resources and most of the available homes are reportedly over-enrolled. It is now up to the communities to take the burden off Government and bring an end to the anguish of these children,” the article began. Florence Kaseke, the same deputy director of social welfare in the Harare office whom I had met, was quoted as saying: “Our traditional system of caring for children in need of State care and protection is rapidly becoming inadequate, ineffective and unsuitable.
”
The article was striking for several reasons. The news judgment to bury it deep inside a paper that would sometimes strip a story about a decent rainfall across the top of page one was beyond me. Ninety-one children abandoned in six months in one province! It read like a typographical error. Further, the willingness to turn truth on its head was jarring—people were turning to state-run orphanages to help with abandoned children because their extended family networks were already overrun, as the UNICEF study had shown, not because they didn’t want to be inconvenienced. And while the government was indeed facing high inflation and some very real financial pressures, none of it was because they were spending too much on orphans. It either did not matter or did not occur to President Mugabe that by dispatching more than eight thousand Zimbabwean troops to protect “the precious lives of the people of Congo” in that nation’s ongoing civil war, he was sealing the fate of his own nation’s most vulnerable children.
We had no illusions about making changes in this vast system. But, struck by the rapid-fire deaths at the orphanage, we did think that by focusing on the medical care of ailing infants in one ward, we might be able to at least slow the mortality rate there. Getting the infants to three years old seemed to be the trick; the death rate dropped off dramatically after that. So we made dozens of trips to Makro Cash and Carry, the city’s warehouse grocery, buying more than three hundred large cans of powdered formula, dozens of bottles of vitamins, more than one thousand diapers, cases of baby powder and skin cream, garbage cans, laundry baskets, and an electric kettle for the kitchen.
One afternoon when I was delivering some of these supplies, not long after we had brought Chipo home, Stella mentioned that there was another case like Chipo’s. A newborn had been thrown in a roadside trash bin in Norton, a farming village about thirty minutes outside of town. Vita and I were absurdly optimistic about our fostering/adoption chances at this stage, given how quickly Chipo had been placed in our home, and I was moved by the child’s circumstances. Stella made a call to the local social worker, and I drove out there to see him.