Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  But perhaps that was not a real defeat. For while she had never again blocked a passageway in Moses Washington’s house, he had pretty much tolerated her other occupations. He had said nothing at all that I could recall about the use to which she had put the dining room, which was to turn it into a family photo gallery.

  My mother had an inordinate love of photographs. For years she put them everywhere, sticking them in the edges of windows and mirrors, pasting them to walls and taping them to doors the way some people hang up flypaper. Eventually she had tired of such a haphazard arrangement, and established the dining room as the Washington Gallery, collecting in it the pictures she believed were most representative of us all. I think that was her rationale. At any rate, she had selected the pictures, after lengthy and silent deliberation, and the representation seemed significant because, in the presence of such a wealth of material, it was so Spartan.

  Moses Washington himself was there only three times. The first photograph was a formal portrait, perhaps the first picture ever taken of him, which dated from the time he had returned from the war. He wore his uniform, the decorations weighing down the material. The photographer had tried to make him seem humble and benign by having him pose with his hands resting on his thighs, but the strategy had failed: the left hand was beginning to curl into a fist, and despite the sepia tint and the fading print, the eyes shone out hard and dangerous. The second photograph was a wedding picture. In it he was dressed formally, white tie and tails, and a top hat. He stood rigidly beside my mother, his arm arched uncomfortably around her. She was smiling. He was not. The same arrogant eyes stared out from beneath the brim of the top hat, which he had somehow managed to sport at an angle like a Stetson.

  The third photograph was the one that had always fascinated me. In it he was standing on a hillside, his feet and lower legs concealed in wild grass, his back to a low stone wall, behind which was a stand of leafless elms. He was dressed oddly for him, in a wide-lapeled coat and white shirt and sober tie, and pants that might have been the match of the coat—it was hard to tell and still harder for me to believe that he had ever voluntarily worn a black suit. And it certainly must have been voluntary, because in the picture there was nothing of the stiff, formal discomfort that showed in the others; he looked relaxed, calm, his eyes deceptively sane. And so I had wondered where the hillside was, and when the picture had been taken, and by whom. I had never found out; it was one of my earliest researches, and like the ones that followed, it had ended in dead-end confusion. I could tell from the way the shadows fell that the hillside was facing south, but that was all I could tell; I believed the hill was local, but it could have been any place that had a similar climate and geology—certainly it was not familiar to me. The photograph had appeared shortly before his death, and the paper was of a type that was in common use in the mid-fifties, but the negative could have been made at any time before then, and Moses Washington did not appear any older or younger in that photograph than he did in any of the others. I had at first believed that the key, not only to dating the picture but to finding out more about its background, was to discover who had taken it, but nobody knew anything about that. My mother claimed not that she had not taken the picture, but that, in fact, she had not even selected it; it had been something pressed upon her by Moses Washington. Old Jack also claimed ignorance, and even Uncle Josh, who grunted his answer in monosyllables, denied any knowledge. I had concluded that Moses Washington had, for some reason, decided he wanted a picture taken of himself, and had gone out and figured a way to take it himself. Further research revealed that the idea of a black thread device, which would have made such self-portraiture possible, dated back to at least 1878. And so my research had ended, as it always did, at a stone wall.

  From looking at the gallery one would have suspected that my mother was a modest woman; she had placed only two depictions of herself on display. She smiled out from a small oval portrait that showed her sitting on an angle, shoulder dipped slightly forward in the old-fashioned style. Her face was unlined, youthful, beautiful. It was a graduation picture. She smiled out from the wedding picture, teeth flashing, face framed by the white veil. She looked a bit older there, a bit harder, but still young, still beautiful. But that was the end of it; it was as if she had given up having her picture taken on the day of her wedding. Or perhaps she had just stopped smiling. But I did not need a portrait; I knew what she had looked like. In the first few years after Moses Washington had died her body had thickened and softened, her breasts and thighs seeming to swell to form a warm safe nest for Bill and me. It was hard to imagine where the plumpness had come from: she never ate breakfast, although she prepared it for us, and she always skipped lunch so that she could get off work early and be there when we got home from school. She walked everywhere then, sometimes pulling us in a big stake wagon, to the river to wade on summer Saturday afternoons, or to the green on summer evenings when the local softball teams had fought it out for the greater glory of Calhoun’s Atlantic or Deist Cleaners. But despite the skipped meals and the exercise, she got plump. I wondered about it even then, and I watched carefully to see what it was she ate, and once, only once, I saw her slipping down the back stairs in the dead of night, and I slipped down the front stairs and crept into the dining room and saw her take a quart of vanilla ice cream from the back of the freezer and sit at the table with a spoon poised, and sigh, and consume it all. Perhaps it had been the ice cream that had fattened her, although she would have had to eat it every night. Perhaps she did; perhaps it was a ritual born of sublimated sexuality, or just a simple indulgence. But whether it was the ice cream or not, something had plumped her, and although she had never really come to look fat, she did begin to look more like a member of the WH&FMS. But one day she had changed.

  In later years I had looked back on that change in her, trying to find a cause for it. I never had. Not that her motivations were as unfathomable as those of Moses Washington. The difficulty was that there were so many possible motivations; it had been a year of change for her. The ancient lady who had been the legal secretary for the Scott law firm had a stroke. In her usual fashion and with no more fanfare than a subtle cough, my mother moved from her tiny desk in the front office, at which, ever since the third week after her husband’s death, she had been answering the phones and typing nice neat copies of leases and wills and contracts, to the rather more elegant one in the middle office. There was never a formal promotion; in fact, as far as I had ever been able to figure out, neither old Judge Scott nor his son and partner, Randall, had ever told her to move. She just began to pile her papers in the middle office, and eventually the fait accompli was recognized, her salary was raised, and her working hours became more flexible and quite a bit longer. Not that that mattered; I was twelve then, and occupied after school with delivering papers and selling Burpee seeds. Bill was ten, and he had discovered football, wrestling, and baseball; he probably never even noticed that she was no longer waiting at the schoolhouse door. Not that she neglected us; breakfast was always prepared, lunches were always packed, dinners always hot and plentiful. She was with us almost as much as she had ever been, certainly as much as a mother needed to be with two young sons coming up on adolescence. But there were Saturday afternoons and evenings after supper when she would announce that she was going back to the office for a few hours, and disappear. There were rumors, of course—a woman did not disappear from the Hill, from anyplace in that town, for that matter, without there being some kind of talk. None of it was true; I knew because I had gone down after her and peeked through the back windows of the office, to see her poring over books and papers, making notes, checking references, and I had known that one day soon old Judge Scott or young Mr. Scott was going to need to know something and was going to be nonplussed by the speed with which his newly promoted secretary could have the reference available. Before they were done they would realize—because they would have been shown in ten thousand subtle ways—that they could not
get along without her. And if they responded correctly, they would never find out that she could destroy them.

  Perhaps that—growing sons, growing responsibility in another area—had motivated the weight loss. Or perhaps she had had an affair or two (although we had never seen evidence of it, and I secretly suspected that once a woman was married to Moses Washington, the thought of having another man would seem like the most boring notion this side of a baseball game in July). Or perhaps it had been the death of the Professor.

  Bill had never liked the Professor, mostly because the old gentleman was given to making Bill stand beside him while he lectured interminably on the incompatibility of brain and brawn, implying, sometimes stating, that Bill’s interest in athletics was sure indication that he was little better than an ape, certainly no better than a savage. I had hated him, mostly because he refused to let me read any of his books. His house was full of them. He had books that no local library or high school library, not in western Pennsylvania, was going to have. Books by black people. Books by Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and William Melvin Kelly and Paul Laurence Dunbar and all the rest. He loved to take me into the library and point them out to me, taking them down and showing me that here was a first-edition copy of Cane by Jean Toomer, and that there was a copy of The Souls of Black Folk with a personal inscription from W. E. B. Du Bois, making sure I did not touch the pages, because I was, he said, too young to comprehend them. Even though I had, certainly to his knowledge, read and reread every book the County library had to offer. The thing that most outraged me was the fact that he didn’t read them. He rarely even touched them. He had hired a woman to come in and dust them, a white woman; he had been particular about that. So I had hated him, hated him for every time he had taken me in there and tortured me. But when he did it I had never said anything but “Yes, Grandfather.” Because I had known that sooner or later I was going to find a way to get in there and steal a book and read it and put it back without his knowing, and do it again and again until I had read them all. But he died first. I had hoped he would leave me some of those books; not, perhaps, the signed first editions, but some of the more mundane volumes. But he left the lot to Howard University. And so when they had buried him neither Bill nor I had shed any tears; for me, dropping the ritual spade of earth on his coffin had been a pleasure tempered only by curiosity—he had been buried in his ancestral home in Virginia, and I had never before then seen red Piedmont earth.

  But for my mother it must have been something different. For years she had been almost a wife to him, keeping his house in Washington while he taught his classes, acting as hostess for the parties he threw to drag in anybody who had a name and whose presence might serve to get his “soirees” mentioned in the Pittsburgh Courier, and then she had closed the house and helped him move to the town to which he, in the tradition of rich white families stretching back for two hundred years, had been coming each summer to drink the mineral water and bathe in the medicinal springs. (Evidently the Professor did not realize that hydrotherapy was out of style, or that Chalybeate Springs, one of the most famous medicinal spas, had become, instead of a retreat for Republican Presidents like Garfield and Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, a swimming pool that would not admit black people.) And then she had left him for Moses Washington, a man four years his junior, with four times his wealth, forty times his virility, and less than a fourth of his respectability. Over that decision there had been battles fought, and while my mother had won, as she always won, and Moses Washington had won as he always won, the old man had not been without his weapons and his tactics, and she must have borne scars. And probably she loved him. And so perhaps the weight loss had had something to do with his death.

  But the odd part of it all was that her appetite, which had, to all appearances, vanished years before, improved just as all the other things were taking place; she had begun to eat and lose weight at the same time. She had always cooked good wholesome meals for us; now she began to eat them herself: big two-course breakfasts, pancakes and bacon-and-eggs; lunches of cold fried chicken; dinners of meat and potatoes and homemade bread, with pie and cake for dessert. Perhaps she gave up the ice cream; it must have been something, for by the time Bill entered junior high school and began winning at every sport in sight she had shrunk back to the size she must have been when Moses Washington first saw her. And she had stayed that way, through all the years since. Her body had come to sag a bit, but mostly her aging showed only in her face, in jaws that came to be just slightly pouched, in lines that crept imperceptibly away from her eyes. And that, perhaps, was why there was no current picture of her there; none was needed.

  The Professor was there, of course, but only once, in a pose that was more typically him than any other I could imagine: he was seated in front of a wall of books, at a table that was barren as the Dakota plains. The photograph was fairly recent, no more than twenty years old; my mother must have had it taken when she sensed that his years were drawing to a close. It was set in a gold-painted metal frame, covered with glass; just the way the Professor would have liked it.

  Down in the lower-left-hand corner of the frame, in an ancient, tiny photograph, was my grandmother. It was impossible to really see her, to tell what she looked like; all I could see was that she had been a young girl when it was taken, her hair wrapped in braids around her head, her eyes dark little nuggets against the faded print.

  And then there was me. I had always been bemused by the pictures that my mother had chosen to represent me. Some, of course, were inevitable: the ordered progression of school photographs, showing me changing, through predictable stages of plumpness and pimpledness, into a too-serious-looking “young man” with smooth-shaved cheeks and a part razored into hair trimmed so short as to be little more than a skullcap, thus concealing its natural kinkiness; the series of photos in which I was little more than a prop to the pose of a gaggle of buxom ladies who had sat in the living room praying while my mother had struggled upstairs to bring forth her firstborn at the relatively ripe age of thirty-three, and who had thereby earned the rights to a place in the photo gallery and the honorific “Aunt.” But there were other pictures, odds and ends of photography that fit into no sequence and had no obvious raison d’être: pictures my mother thought were “me.” The first showed me as a plump-legged toddler with a great mass of dark wavy curls—“good” hair that had delighted both my mother and the Professor until, when I was about eight, it had suddenly recalled itself and become properly kinky—and dressed in white shoes, white socks, white bibbed shorts, and a white shirt. Another showed me, at about five, uniformed in a miniature sailor suit, accurate to the last detail, right down to a thirteen-button—scaled down to about a six-button—fly, a feature that had made it all but impossible for me to go to the bathroom without assistance. A third caught me as I came down the steps of the church, dressed in my seven-year-old’s Sunday finery: a blousy, wide-sleeved white shirt, a red bow tie, and a pair of pleat-fronted black trousers held up with suspenders because I had been so thin that a belt slipped past my nonexistent hips. There were others, taken at different times and at different places, but they all had two things in common: in every one I was clad in one of the outfits my mother had made by improvising on a theme from a standard pattern bought at the dime store or culled from some magazine sold at the checkout counter at the A&P; and in every one of them the configuration of my face and body was precisely the same, my eyes flat and empty, directed straight at the camera, my mouth in a straight line, without a hint of curl in the lips, my body straight—head level, shoulders squared, hands flat against thighs, feet firmly planted and perfectly parallel, not a hint of a bend in either elbow or knee. It seemed an abnormal posture, and yet I looked calm and relaxed—I had, it seemed, learned the lesson that parents have been trying to teach their offspring for centuries: how to stand up tall and not fidget. But it was not a pose of obedience. Perhaps then I had thought it was. But now I could look at a fading image of myself, cloaked
in one of my mother’s costumes, and tell that, at age seven or five or two, I had been angry. No; furious.

  That was the sum and essence of the official family portrait gallery: one hincty old man, one cipher of a wife, one dutiful—and probably resentful—daughter, one ex-moonshiner and murderer who had taken up philosophy, eccentricity, church-cleaning, marriage, and fatherhood as retirement avocations, and one furious child. There had been another child in the gallery, but he had not fitted in. He had declined to participate in the family’s inter- and intra-necine emotional football games. His passion had been for real football games on crisp autumn days and for bringing ten-year-old Chevys down the dark winding road off Blackoak Ridge, with the gas pedal flat against the firewall and the brake drums glowing cherry red. He had liked milk shakes and hamburgers and french fries almost as well as normal food; he had been the first black in the history of the County to call and have a pizza delivered. He had somehow delved into the tortured family gene pool and come up with “normal” American interests, hopes, characteristics, abilities. Not the bad ones, not the conservatism, stodginess, stupidity, chauvinism, jingoism, and greed that have helped motivate the making of blots on our history. He had got the good things: the patience to invent vulcanized rubber; the self-confidence to launch the steamboat or buy Alaska; the determination to cross the Great Plains; the strength to give orders; the humility to take them; the loyalty to stay by his friends; the bravery to confront the clear and present dangers of the world. You could say he had been sane. Or he would have been, if it had not been for the fact that his skin was the color of Hershey’s chocolate; given that fact, normality—or perhaps normalcy is a better word—was probably a distinctly higher order of insanity than that possessed by the rest of us. But at any rate, he did not belong among people who could take an event and swallow it and worry about it for years, hoping for a pearl but ending up with a tumor, and so she had taken the earliest opportunity to get his simple face out from among our tortured visages. She had done it with a speed too great to be termed deliberate: she had received the telegram and long before whatever had been scraped out of the body bag and smeared into a coffin had been delivered to a local undertaker (charges, FOB San Diego, plus domestic haulage, courtesy of the formerly segregated United States Marine Corps), long before she had informed me, she had taken the pictures—the school portraits, the pictures of him kneeling beneath a goalpost or crouched in a wrestler’s stance, or swinging at a baseball, the snapshot of him dressed in his overalls and kneeling in the garden plot, the picture of him in the costume that he had worn in the Sunday school Christmas pageant (in which he, portraying the innkeeper, had explained the cold fact of no vacancy with such honesty and compassion that the Christmas story had taken on a much more complex meaning), the picture of him in his uniform with his PFC stripe, and the blurred Polaroid of him and his buddies standing mock guard over a grass hut with a Budweiser sign in the window—and she had put them, together with the telegram (which she had framed) and the other nonsense that surrounded his dying and burying, on a flag-draped table at the far end of the dining room. She had arranged lighting, two small spotlights, perpetually lit, and I was half surprised that she had never managed to hook up some kind of recorder to play patriotic organ music. But even given her failure with sound effects, she deserved a lot of credit for having got him out of the family portrait gallery in the only decent way: she had got him killed and then she had enshrined him. She had kicked him upstairs.