Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  “Anyway, she had two daughters, both by white men—nobody knew exactly who, and Miss Linda wasn’t about to tell them, if she knew, because she was collecting money from five or six different men who were all afraid she might be able to prove one of those girls belonged to one of them. She didn’t try to hide it, either—they knew about each other, and they liked it that way, because then they each had something on the others. And if one of them got a little behind, they’d cover for him for a month or so; but if he decided he wasn’t going to pay at all, they’d jump on him real fast, because they were afraid Miss Linda would expose them all. It was beautiful; she never even had to threaten. And she kept it quiet. Nobody on the Hill even knew about it. They thought Miss Linda made all her money on current fees; they didn’t know she was collecting royalties.”

  I stopped then, and sipped at the toddy. It didn’t seem hot enough, somehow, and I poured in more hot water, sipped again. I heard her move, and again I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. “Mara was a year younger than I was,” I said. “I knew her; there weren’t many children on the Hill, and we all played together. My mother didn’t like it, Bill and I playing with Miss Linda’s daughters. She and Moses Washington had a fight about it; she wanted him to make us stop, and he said he would, if she would explain to us exactly what it was that Miss Linda did that made it bad for us to play with her children. That ended the whole thing real fast. I don’t know what she was worried about. And I think if she had known me better, she wouldn’t have worried at all. Because about that time, Mara started school. I was in the second grade; Bill didn’t go to school yet. So it should have been natural for Mara and me to go to school together. But we didn’t. I took her down the first day with me, but after that she walked down by herself, and so did I. And even though we’d play together in the afternoon, she’d walk home by herself and so would I. Sometimes I’d see her a block ahead, walking, and I knew she knew I was there behind her sometimes, but I never hurried up to catch her, and she never stopped to wait. I never knew if she wanted to, but she didn’t. And during the day, we didn’t talk at all, on the playground, or anywhere.”

  I stopped, sipped at the toddy. She still didn’t say anything. I wished she would, but she didn’t. “After Moses Washington died, my mother told us not to play with the Jamison girls anymore. It didn’t matter much to me—I was busy with other things. So I didn’t see Mara at all, really—she didn’t come to Sunday school or church. It was sort of funny. In a lot of ways Mara Jamison was the girl next door. God knows she was pretty enough for anybody. Even for the Town. They made her a cheerleader. It wasn’t all that simple; there were some folks who didn’t think a black girl ought to be a cheerleader. But Miss Linda talked to some of her ‘friends,’ and that was enough to get Mara on the junior high cheerleading squad. That was about the only thing I knew about her. Until one day—I was sixteen, so she would have been fifteen—she came to the house. My mother wasn’t home from work and Bill was at football practice or something. So I answered the door. She stood on the porch and said she wanted to talk to me. I told her to come in, but she didn’t want to talk there. She told me to meet her in the woods. She told me where, and when. So that night after supper I went out and met her. It was fall, September maybe; it was just dusk when we met. It was up along the ridge, above the graveyard. She was there waiting for me, sitting on a log. I sat down beside her. I didn’t know how to ask her what she wanted, so we just sat there until it got dark, not saying anything. Just sitting. Finally she told me what it was. Her mother wanted her to sleep with a white man. He was a lawyer. Big in the town. He was married, and he had a wife and a daughter a year younger than Mara. She didn’t say who he was, but I knew. And her mother wanted her to go with him, and get pregnant, and have his child, and be set for life. I said I didn’t know what to tell her to do. She said she knew what to do if I’d help her. I said I would. So she explained Miss Linda’s theory about white men, how they wouldn’t want a woman after she’d been with a black man, and she asked me if I’d be with her.

  “So we did it. Right there, in the woods up above the graveyard, up above where Floyd used to keep his pigs. That’s just about as romantic as it was, too. The ground was hard and the sky was clouded over. There was a cold wind blowing up the slope. I was afraid and nervous, and at first I couldn’t do anything. Miss Linda must have told her things to do in case that happened; anyway, she tried everything. Nothing worked. Finally she gave up and we just lay there, shivering in that wind. She was crying. I told her to stop, that we’d try again tomorrow, but she said that was too late, because he was coming that night. I don’t know what happened… No, that’s a lie. I know what happened; I started thinking about how excited he had to be, thinking about what he was going to do. And then I could.

  “When we were finished we just left. We straightened our clothes out and went away from each other; we didn’t kiss or hug or anything. It hadn’t been anything particularly soft or warm or gentle. But it was good; she was safe. Because she could go down there and tell Miss Linda—tell him too, maybe—that she’d been with a colored boy. And I could go home and sit up there in Moses Washington’s attic and know that I had done something like the things he did; I had cheated one of those white bastards out of something. I was probably wrong about that—Moses Washington would have seen eye to eye with Miss Linda—but I didn’t think so then. I thought he would have been proud of me, taking something right out from under the lion’s nose.”

  I drank the rest of the toddy in one quick swallow; it was cold, and made a cold place in my belly. I mixed another one quickly, not bothering with the sugar, using only enough whiskey to give it taste. I wanted the heat. Judith still didn’t say anything. I wondered what she was thinking.

  “It didn’t work,” I said. “It was never going to work. All you had to do was to look at the facts to know that. Her mother made her living catering to white men that way. So did her sister. What was she going to do? Get a job as a secretary? Nobody was going to hire her for that. Work in one of the factories? There weren’t that many jobs, and if business got bad she’d get laid off first. Waitress? She’d spend all day or half the night dodging passes from truckdrivers and guys on the night shift, anyway. And so one day it came to her that there wasn’t any reason for her to fight so hard. Not a reason in the world. And so she went into the family business. But she made them do it differently. Oh, yes indeed. Because Mara was as smart as she was beautiful, and she’d gotten a little bit too close to somebody who spent all his time, or almost all of it, fooling around with books. She knew how to do things right. And before long she and her mother and her sister had moved off the Hill and down into a place in Town. They bought one of those old houses the Town Fathers keep wanting to put plaques on, and Mara insisted that the place be redone, and she had the plumbing contractor send away for three bidets, one for every bathroom. It was funnier than hell; Bill kept writing back from Vietnam, talking about how he’d trade in all the bar girls in Saigon for five minutes on Mara Jamison’s bidet, and how the first thing he’d do when he got home would be to march down there and tell her she was drafted into the service of the United States Marine Corps. He had always had a kind of crush on Mara, you see; she was his girl-next-door too. He didn’t know about Mara being with me. Nobody did. Mara never told Miss Linda who it was she was with, and I never told anybody. Not after the first time, and not later on, when we… when I went over and asked her to be with me again. I went in the dead of night and tapped on her window, and we went up along the ridge and I built a shelter and made a fire, and we stayed there together all night; we sneaked back in just before dawn. We kept that up for years, until I went away.” I stopped then, hoping she was going to let me leave it there. But I knew better; Judith, in her own way, is more merciless than I.

  “And you think it’s your fault that she…”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Because you went away?”

  “I was always going a
way.”

  “Because you didn’t take her with you?”

  “She was always staying,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I loved her after a while,” I said. “I started out wanting to keep her from them, and after a while I just wanted to keep her; I guess that’s love. But I never admitted it.”

  “You never told her you loved her?”

  “Oh, I told her,” I said. “I just never told anybody else. I told her that people would talk if they knew, and I didn’t want anybody saying things about her, like they did about her mother and her sister. So I insisted that we meet in secret. We did. We’d go up in the hills and spend the night, and sneak back before dawn. But when we were back on the Hill, or in Town, we acted like we barely knew each other. That was how I wanted it. Because I knew that sooner or later she was going to do what her mother wanted her to do. And when it happened, I didn’t want anybody thinking that those white men had gotten something that I wanted. And I knew they would. I hoped they wouldn’t but I knew better; I’d actually sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil and figured out all the pressures that were going to be on her when I was gone, and I figured out just about when she was going to give up. She fooled me, in a way; as close as I was ever able to figure, she lasted six months longer than I thought she would. She actually tried all those jobs; she fought like hell. She’d write me letters and tell me about it. Then the letters stopped coming, and I knew what had happened. And nobody ever knew about us. I’d never written her a letter or anything; there was nothing to connect us. But I used to think sometimes that maybe if I hadn’t known so much, maybe if I’d believed in her a little bit…”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe you would have won.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You know, I’ve always wondered what the hell you wanted with me. Why you would have anything at all to do with a white woman. I thought maybe you wanted to make me suffer, brutalize me in some way. But you never did. So I started to think that it was just a kind of accident, that you had fallen in love with me the same say I had fallen in love with you, and you were as confused by the whole thing as I was, and that what was stupid about it was that there should have to be a reason for us, any more than there would have to be a reason for two other people—two black people, or two white ones. That’s when I decided it was all right; there were going to be problems, but they weren’t the kind of problems… Oh, hell, you know.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “But I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You wanted me because I was a white man’s woman. I was a white man’s daughter and when you met me I was a white man’s lover, and if you hadn’t come along I would have become a white man’s wife and probably a white man’s mother, and if I wanted you then you could cheat them all. That was it, wasn’t it? That’s still it. I’m just like Mara, only this time you’re not just keeping something from them; you’re taking it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “John,” she said, “you’ve got to answer me.”

  “I didn’t want you at all,” I said. “I wanted to stay as far away from you as I could. Because when I thought about being with a woman, you were exactly the kind of woman I thought about being with, except for one little thing. But you wouldn’t let me stay away, and it all happened just like I knew it was going to happen, and I ended up loving you. But I didn’t know why. Oh, I believed it was for every reason that’s right and good, and for none of the reasons that are anything else. I still believe it. But I don’t know it.” I stood there by the stove, so close to it that I could smell my pants starting to smolder.

  “You’re never going to be sure, are you?” she said after a while.

  I stepped a little away from the stove then, but not too far; I could sense the pain from the burning, but I could not feel the warmth at all. “I can’t imagine how,” I said.

  I had tried all the combinations; I had merged the white cards with the blue, I had mixed in the red, I had tried red and white alone. I had put in the orange. I had cut out the white cards and mixed in the gold. I had made notes. None of them made any sense. Now I went through the laborious process of separating out the cards, isolating each color once again into its own stack. When I had them isolated I started in again, going through the red ones first, one by one, looking at each, memorizing it almost, getting the context set in my mind. Then I went to the white ones. I went through slowly, making associations. I pulled a legal pad to me and started making notes. Once or twice I thought I had something going, but it was nothing but smoke. I went back to the beginning and tried again, working only with the new white ones at first. In the year of our Lord 1787, on a plantation in western Georgia, a child, later named “Zack,” was born to a slave woman; her name is unknown, as is that of the father, but she claimed that he was a full-blooded Cherokee brave. In the year of our Lord 1790, on a plantation in northern Louisiana, a child was born to a quadroon house slave named “Marie.” In the year of our Lord 1805, on the same plantation in Louisiana, a child, later named “Brobdingnag,” was born to an octoroon house slave named “Hermia”; the child’s father, apparently, was Zack. In the year of our Lord 1856, in the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania, a child, later named Lamen, was born to “Bijou,” a former slave-prostitute of unknown age and ancestry; the father was almost certainly a man calling himself C.K. And in the year of our Lord 1890, in the city of Philadelphia, a son, later named Moses, was born to Cora Alice and Lamen Washington. That was all comforting. That was all clear. Then I took up the old white cards, the ones that were yellowed with age, and looked at the last one. In the year of our Lord 1958, in the eighth month, on a hillside approximately four and one-half miles south of the town of Chaneysville, Pennsylvania, Moses Washington departed this life. It still made no sense. I took up my pen and added a notation: departed this life probably by the action of his own hand. And it still made no damned sense. I picked up the pad and tore off the sheets with the notes on them and balled them up. I went and dropped the papers into the fire, watched them crisp brown and blacken and burst into flame. For a minute I thought about doing that with everything: the cards, the notes, the notebooks, everything. For a minute I wanted to burn it all.

  “Nothing?” she said.

  I put the lid back on the stove. The flames left an afterimage dancing in my eyes. I turned around. My eyes adjusted slowly, but I waited until she was more than a shadow, until I could make out the details of her face in the lamplight.

  “No,” I said. I turned back to the stove and pulled the kettle to the front. I could have used water from the reservoir, but I wanted the toddy hot; as hot as I could get it. Hotter. So hot it would burn.

  “Can’t I help?” she said.

  I took down the whiskey and the sugar. I mixed in the old way, measuring sugar with my thumb. I didn’t use much whiskey; the heat was more important than the alcohol. The water boiled and I filled the mug to the brim, glad that it was a thick earthenware mug, not one of the Judge’s bloody demitasse cups. I pushed the kettle to the back of the stove and went and sat down.

  She sat across the table, her jaw set, and watched me take the first sip. She had been reading something in a folder; she looked down at it, reached out and took up her pen and made a note, then closed the folder, put the pen down, and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know how you see anything in this light,” she said. Her voice was neutral, but when she brought her hands away from her face I could see her jaw was still set and her eyes were still on the mug.

  “It seems,” I said, “that I don’t.”

  The clench went out of her jaw and her eyes softened. “Maybe…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe if you talked to me about it.”

  I shrugged and took another sip. The toddy was not as hot as I wanted it; I would have to drink it fast before it cooled even more. “There’s nothing to tell you,�
�� I said. “That’s the problem. I’ve got lots of facts and none of them connect.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re trying to find out,” she said.

  I sipped the toddy.

  “And of course you won’t tell me until you know all the answers.”

  “Look,” I said, “that’s the way I am.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just feel like there’s something I ought to be able to do to help you, and I can’t do anything because you won’t tell me anything.”

  I finished the toddy, sat looking at the empty cup. The warmth hadn’t made a dent on the cold in me. I looked at the cards.

  “John,” she said.

  I looked up. “What?”

  “Is it all right if I talk to you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Isn’t it always?”

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t before. I made you talk. I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to stop you from doing…whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “What do you want to talk about?” I said.

  She opened her mouth, closed it. Then she smiled. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just… All the way up here I was waiting to talk to you. I was mad and I was worried and I was scared, but what I wanted was to talk to you. So I get here and all I can do is yell at you and badger you and act like… I don’t know, like a Southern belle who can’t have everything nice and neat and clean the way she wants it, and so I haven’t gotten to talk to you at all really, when that was what I wanted all along.”