Trueluck Summer

by Susan Gabriel

  “She’s not trying to make your life harder, Abigail. She’s trying to be true to her convictions.”

  My comment surprises me. Since when do I offer what is on my mind?

  “What kind of convictions does a twelve year old have?” she asks me, her voice shaking.

  I think the shaking is more from fear than anger. If I had to guess, I’d say Abigail is proud of Trudy, and at the same time Trudy scares her.

  “I saw Trudy at the park earlier today with Paris,” Ted Junior says. “I had to suggest to her that people wouldn’t understand.”

  “How are things supposed to change?” I ask my son. “How do things change if no one is willing to question the current situation?”

  “You know how dangerous this is,” he says to me. “In case you’ve forgotten, we had a cross burned in our yard last night.”

  “All the more reason to—”

  “Stop,” he says to me. “You’ve done enough.”

  “Are you suggesting I’m behind all this?” I ask, even though the “suggestion” is already loud and clear. “Paris saved Trudy’s life, if you’ll remember. That makes an impression on a person. I never suggested that she be friends with him or bring him to the house for lunch. Though I wish now that I had.”

  “It’s okay, Mother,” Ted Junior says to me.

  He only calls me mother when he is upset with me.

  “All I know is, in a matter of days, our life has turned . . .” Abigail searches for a word. “Unpredictable,” she concludes.

  “I would have gone with dangerous instead of unpredictable,” I say, “but that doesn’t mean we desert our principles.”

  “This is Charleston,” Ted Junior says, as if I need a reminder of how history prevails.

  “I know Charleston,” I say. “I’ve lived here my entire life and much longer than you have, by the way.” I was thirty-three when Ted Junior was born. Ted Senior and I had given up on having children.

  My son and I exchange looks, and I remember the defiant little boy he used to be. A defiance I encouraged, even though it wasn’t something I possessed myself. But I am getting nowhere by questioning their parenting.

  I turn to look at Abigail who appears to be holding back tears. “I can’t say I disagree with you,” I say. “But do we want to crush Trudy’s enthusiasm? Our only hope for change is her generation and the generations to come.”

  Abigail pauses. “Our first priority is to protect Trudy from getting hurt,” she says.

  “But are you wanting to protect Trudy or yourself?” I ask, knowing I’ve stepped over a line I promised myself I would never cross. I want to retrieve the words. Erase them. “Sorry,” I add, but it is too late.

  Abigail tosses her dishtowel onto the counter and looks at Ted Junior as though to remind him that she knew this setup would never work. “Talk to her,” she says, leaving the kitchen in tears.

  My son and I are now alone, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. My outspokenness has surprised us both.

  “Overprotection will stifle Trudy,” I say to him, my words soft. “You know what a special child she is.”

  “But this isn’t overprotection, Mom. She doesn’t know the way the world works yet.”

  “But what better way to—” I stop myself.

  Ted Senior always said that we must choose our battles carefully. And Trudy is my son’s child, not mine.

  How will I tell Trudy and Paris that, in the name of safety, the dream they have will have to wait for another day? How will I tell them that the old ways win again? And again. And again. Making us all losers.

  “I appreciate how much time you spend with her,” Ted Junior says. “She really loves you and respects you. You’ve made a strong impression on her, too. You’ve inspired her to do things she may not be ready for yet. She’s only twelve.”

  “But I didn’t mean to inspire anybody,” I say. “You know what a coward I am. I’ve just encouraged her to question things, like I never took the time to do myself. Trudy is more mature at twelve than I was at twenty,” I continue, and wonder if this is a good thing. There is something to be said for having a childhood. I think of growing up in the early part of this century. There were still physical reminders of the Charleston earthquake of 1886 that practically leveled the town to rubble. My mother, who was ten years old at the time, never got over it. A thunderstorm made her physically quake. I grew up with the knowledge that disaster could strike at any moment. I was twenty when World War I broke out in Europe. Wars make life unpredictable, always dangerous.

  I stare at the crossword puzzle I abandoned earlier that morning. Life is a puzzle, too. Or perhaps it is something else entirely. I don’t know what it is anymore. I am fresh out of metaphors.

  “Tell Abigail I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Will you behave?” Ted Junior places a hand on mine. The irony isn’t lost on either of us. Until now I was always the most behaved person in the room. What is bringing on this change?

  When I look up I suddenly see how much he looks like his father. My eyes mist. Before leaving the room, he gives my shoulder a quick squeeze and promises to give Abigail my message. We are all doing the best we can given the circumstances. Including Abigail.

  In the empty kitchen, I let myself feel a familiar sadness. Sadness for people no longer here and the ones left behind. Sadness for the peace this world can’t seem to negotiate. Despite the voice inside me that insists we don’t have time to waste, I contemplate how I will break the news to Trudy that taking down that flag is never going to happen.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Trudy

  In the park, with Paris hiding in the bushes, Hoot hovers alongside me like a mosquito looking for a spot to bite. I wonder how much he knows about what happened last night.

  “You should have listened to me, girly,” he says.

  “Get away from me, Hoot.” I walk my bike in the opposite direction so he won’t see Paris. After hearing what happened to Paris’ father, I feel protective.

  “You’d better tell me what you’re up to.” He narrows his beady eyes at me.

  For several seconds we are in a standoff while he waits on me to spill my guts. It is so quiet I can hear Barbie ticking the time away.

  “If you don’t get out of my way I’m going to scream bloody murder and bring every policeman in Charleston County,” I say to him. I push my front tire right up to his feet.

  In the bushes, Paris edges his way closer in case I need help.

  “Did you burn that cross in my yard last night?” I ask Hoot.

  “I didn’t do anything to no yard.”

  “I don’t believe you for one second, Hoot Macklehaney.”

  Hoot grins.

  “You best be getting out of my way.”

  He pauses, but then takes a step back. “Once I know what you’re up to, I’m going to tell everybody,” he says.

  His pimples appear to stand at attention, and he glares at me before he walks away.

  “Meet me at the corner of Meeting and Broad,” Paris whispers from the bushes.

  I agree and head in that direction. When I get there, I find Miss Josie sitting under a red umbrella surrounded by her sweetgrass baskets and two white buckets full of fresh flower bouquets. Colored women use umbrellas to keep the Charleston sun off their faces. White people only use them when it rains, which seems silly since we are the ones who burn to a crisp from getting too much sun. Paris stands next to her, Teddy’s bicycle leaning against the curb. He must have taken a shortcut to beat me here.

  Miss Josie smiles when she sees me and finishes weaving the feathery sweetgrass into her latest creation. Tourists, all white, stand and watch her as if she is part of a living museum.

  “I’ve been making these since I was your age,” Miss Josie says to me.

  “They’re beautiful,” I tell her. “I don’t know how to do anything like this.”

  “We all have a talent that’s ours to grow, Miss Trudy. You’ll find yours soon en
ough.”

  She winks at me and then takes ten dollars from a white woman who buys one of her largest baskets. She thanks the woman and folds the bill into a small leather pouch. I like thinking I have a talent that I will discover later. Something that will put money in a pouch.

  “What’s Paris’ talent?” I ask after the tourist leaves.

  She smiles again. “My grandson has the gift of persuasion. He’s going to have a lot of influence one of these days.” She looks at Paris like she believes this with all her heart. Paris smiles in response, and I step closer, proud to be his friend.

  A couple of white people walk by getting an eyeful of me and Paris. Dark clouds move in on Miss Josie’s sunny face. “I appreciate what you’re doing, Miss Trudy, wanting to be friends with my grandson.” She pauses like she is debating how much to say. “It worries me, though,” she begins again. “You two better be careful. You can’t push a river.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say, wondering what a river has to do with anything.

  Miss Josie hands me a daisy I stick behind my ear.

  “Let’s go to the Battery,” I say to Paris.

  The Battery is a fortified seawall and a public park. You can see Fort Sumter from there, where the Civil War started.

  “But Miss Josie said we shouldn’t be seen together,” Paris says.

  “We won’t,” I say. “I have an idea of how we can be together but not together.”

  Paris looks confused, but when I hop on my bike he follows a block behind. All this following business makes no sense to me. It seems like an insult to our new friendship.

  Once we get to the waterfront, grand houses line the street. Some of them have widow’s walks, little porches on the top of the houses where wives watched for their husband’s ships to come into the harbor a long time ago. Nana Trueluck says sometimes these men were lost at sea and didn’t come home and the women became widows, which explains where the name came from. Nana Trueluck has told me all sorts of stories like this one.

  Because of the breeze from the harbor it is a few degrees cooler here but still hot. I leave my bike leaning against a tree, and Paris does the same, several trees over. I sit on one side of an old cannon and motion for Paris to sit on the opposite side. With the cannon between us, we can’t see each other but we can talk. Battery Park has several cannons, tributes to the Civil War. The gray and black one that sits between me and Paris points toward Fort Sumter where the first shots of the War were fired in 1861. History is everywhere in this town.

  A man with his suit coat draped over his arm smokes a cigarette nearby on a bench. He turns and stares like he is onto us, but he doesn’t say anything. A minute later he stomps out his cigarette and walks away.

  “Why do people feel like they have the right to stare?” I say. “I wanted to slap that look right off his face.”

  “Martin Luther King Junior doesn’t believe in hitting people. He believes in non-violence and turning the other cheek.”

  I turn my cheek and look out over the harbor. Then I remember another story Nana Trueluck told me.

  “Hey Paris, did you know that they used to hang pirates from these trees?”

  “Oh my heavens!” Paris says, his southern accent pristine.

  I lean forward to see his reaction and catch him looking up into the trees as if imagining the ghosts of pirates swinging in the coastal breeze.

  “They were probably Hoot Macklehaney’s ancestors,” I say. “He reminds me of a pirate the way he’s always lurking around, looking for ways to get us in trouble.”

  Paris doesn’t answer. He is still looking up at the limbs of the trees as if spellbound.

  “What is it, Paris? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I’ve got a story to tell you, Trudy, but it’s way scarier than pirates. Do you want to hear it?”

  It is hard to imagine what would be scarier than pirates hanging in the trees, but I say yes.

  He pauses for a long time, his voice almost a whisper when he finally speaks. “Have you ever heard of a lynching?” he asks.

  I say no, and wonder if this story is going to be as sad as what happened to his father.

  “I had a second cousin who it happened to,” Paris says, his voice so soft my ears have to reach for the sound. “He lived in Mississippi.”

  Paris pauses again for a long time, and I feel sadness coming in like one of those storms that sometimes batter the harbor.

  “What happened?” I ask finally, my patience battered, too.

  “It’s the same thing that happened to the pirates,” he says. “Except my cousin didn’t do anything wrong. They hung him because he was colored.”

  “That’s a lie,” I say before I can stop myself. But Paris isn’t the type to lie. “I refuse to believe that people can be that mean,” I say, more to myself than him.

  “I swear on my cousin’s grave,” Paris says from the other side of the cannon.

  “But how could somebody get away with that?” I ask.

  “You’d be surprised what white people get away with, Trudy.”

  My face burns with the awareness that with my Scottish roots I am about as white as a person gets. Although, when I look at my own skin it isn’t white at all, but a shade of light beige. And everybody knows that beige is boring.

  “Sorry, Trudy, I know you’re white, but you’re different. Your family is different, too.”

  I scoot closer wishing we could be like regular friends, without a Civil War cannon sitting between us. Yet somehow that cannon there makes perfect sense.

  “I’m so sorry that happened to your cousin, Paris. It makes me spitting mad.” Then I remember his great-great-grandmother had to clean a whole mansion every day of her life, and I work up more spit.

  “It makes me mad, too,” Paris says. “But more than mad, it makes me determined. That’s why I want to go to Hollywood and make movies. People look up to actors and listen to what they have to say. After I get famous, I’ll march alongside Dr. King, and I’ll tell the movie magazines how unfairly colored people are treated.”

  “I admire you, Paris. I do.”

  He thanks me. We sit in silence while a formation of six pelicans fly overhead toward the sea.

  “Miss Josie says that if anybody took even five minutes to talk to colored people they’d see we were just like them, with the same wishes and dreams and feelings,” he tells me.

  “Your Miss Josie is very wise.”

  He agrees.

  A colored nanny pushes a white baby in a fancy stroller. She gives Paris a look like she is thinking: Why in the world are you sitting next to a Civil War cannon in downtown Charleston talking to yourself?

  Then she looks over at me.

  She stops and puts her hand on her hip.

  “Don’t you have somewhere you need to be?” she says to him.

  “No, ma’am,” he says, his accent matching hers.

  “Aren’t you Miss Josie’s grandson?”

  He nods.

  “Is this that girl you rescued?” she asks him. Her eyes point to me.

  He nods again.

  She gives me a long, slow look. For the first time I glimpse what it is like to be judged for the color of my skin. It never dawned on me that colored people might be prejudiced, too. All of a sudden I feel like I have fallen into the deep end of the swimming pool. I wish I were a stronger swimmer.

  She walks away, tisking us like we don’t have the sense God gave a lima bean.

  “I forgot to tell you,” Paris says. “My Uncle Freddie came by Miss Josie’s this morning, and he’s agreed to take me with him to Columbia on Saturday.”

  “Well, that’s terrific,” I say. “Nana Trueluck has agreed to take me and Vel, too. Now we need to come up with a good reason to go. If we tell people the truth, they’ll try to talk us out of it.”

  We both go to pondering what a good reason might be.

  “I’ll say, if it isn’t Trudy Trueluck.” I look up from picking a knee scab to see Madison
Chambers, a good friend of my Grandpa Trueluck.

  He tips his hat to me to reveal a full head of white hair. He then looks over at Paris and bows, too. His eyes ask me if I realize there is someone sitting on the other side of the cannon, so I introduce them. He insists that we call him Madison instead of Mr. Chambers.

  During the centennial celebration of the Civil War, Mr. Chambers wrote letters to the editor of the Charleston newspaper about how white people should take colored folks’ feelings into consideration. Daddy read them aloud at the breakfast table. If there is one person in the whole city of Charleston who might understand what it is we want to do, it would be Madison Chambers.

  “Your daddy’s doing a fine job as mayor,” he says to me.

  “Thank you,” I say. “I’ll tell him you said so.”

  “Please do,” he says.

  “How’s your lovely grandmother today?” he asks with a smile.

  I forget sometimes that Nana Trueluck and Mr. Chambers are friends.

  “Did you hear about the cross burning?” I ask him.

  “My heavens, no,” he says.

  I proceed to tell him the whole story.

  “Is Ida okay?” he asks when I finish. The concern on his face tells me he may like Nana Trueluck more than I realized.

  “Well, we were all pretty shaken up,” I say.

  He nods, showing more concern. “Something needs to be done,” he says, glancing over at Paris.

  Paris and I lean around the cannon and exchange a look where he gives me permission to tell Mr. Chambers.

  “Well, sir,” I begin, “you know that rebel flag that flies over the State House in Columbia?”

  “Yes, I do,” he says. “It’s an abomination.” His smiling mustache stops smiling. “Three years ago they put that flag up for the centennial celebration. Funny how they seem to have forgotten to take it down.”

  He arches his bushy eyebrows at Paris as if to offer an apology from the entire white race.

  “That’s okay, sir,” Paris says. “I know you didn’t put it there.”

  Like spies in old movies meeting to exchange information, we talk without looking at each other.