In the spring, she knew she would be able to sit at the computer in her work space, with French doors thrown open, and smell the tangle of wisteria vines that covered and, Mr. Renfroe warned her, threatened to kill two tall pines sticking out of a grove of cypress trees.
She knew that from her kitchen window, she could pause in the late autumn and watch the low golden light glance off the rustling leaves on the tops of the hundred-year-old pecan trees on the other side of the well-worn bridle path that would weave along the river and throughout her property. In the dead of winter, she knew she could stand and warm herself by the fireplace in her bedroom and see the cold wind coming off the Ocawatchee and chilling the blooming tea olive bushes on her land on the other shore.
Nature had already done so much. Blessing the bucolic site, She had placed sweet fragile-looking dogwood trees with white blossoms throughout the woods and all around the planned site of her house; scattered mounds of vivid pink, crimson, violet, rose and vermilion wild azaleas and wild hydrangeas at the base of tall Georgia pines; seeded wild cherry trees in a clearing where the blossoms could be easily seen from three directions; planted tall hedges of wild-species roses and Indian hawthorn in sunlit spots; strung vines of yellow jasmine all up and through the oaks and pines and rhododendrons like garland on a Christmas tree; blew ageratum on the wind from the south to brighten a cove, loblollies and magnolias springing up out of the ground tall and displaying their nearly obscenely fragrant white blossoms. At first, Lena and Mr. Renfroe felt they were gilding the lily by adding their own landscaping ideas. But they could not help joining in. They just took their cues from Mother Nature and continued her theme.
In open spaces on high ground, they planted peach trees and plum trees and pear trees and pomegranate trees, dotting the grassy rises. Mr. Renfroe gave her a few ground rules about planting fruit trees—distance apart, soil requirements, sun required—and then turned her loose to decide where to plant things. He only had to come back and rearrange a few of her choices and she could see right away they were the best decisions. Mr. Renfroe knew his horticulture.
Between her house and the stables, a cluster of pecan trees, ten years old when she built the house, grew thirty feet into the air. A tangle of lavender wisteria had overtaken one side of the stable. In the spring, the scent of the flowers in the air made it impossible to smell the horses’ manure.
The stable with its brick flooring and wood and steel paddocks was erected at the edge of a winding road at the northern side of the house. Goldie was a magnificent golden palomino that only Lena and the best riders could handle. Keba was a dark red chestnut mare whose coat looked like Lena’s hair in the sun when she washed her braids and stood outside to let them dry. Baby, a black filly, was truly the baby, the last animal she added to her family, expecting and getting most of the attention from Lena and the stable hands. She was not as large in stature as her “sisters,” Goldie and Keba, but she was strong and frisky and adventurous, sometimes too much so. With Lena on her back, Baby would take on any obstacle they faced in their rides: ford rushing creeks, plunge down treacherous ravines, strain up fierce inclines.
When Lena drove her burnished Mercedes into her compound in the evenings, the three steeds would gallop along the corral’s wooden fence with her car, their big heads and hers thrown back in an arc, all their tresses—her braided hair and their free manes—blowing in the river-cooled wind. Their spirits seemed to ride each other.
Just at the turn where the wild grapevines grew, throwing tight sweet purple and green scuppernongs at her feet, the horses would veer off to the right, and she would take the road to the left. They would meet again at the exercise rink near the barn.
Nearby, there was a sprawling weeping willow tree. She had seen it in the spring down by the river about to be washed into the still-rushing waters as the Big Flood of ’94 receded. She was able to get a few of her mother’s boys from down at The Place—one with a truck and hoisting equipment—to come out and save the tree for replanting.
Just that week in April, Lena had noticed that the big graceful tree was putting out lime-green leaves all along its slender tendrils, turning the very air around it verdant. It had seemed to happen overnight.
Lena missed so much in the passing parade of life. She would look up one day and the trees on her property were just putting out baby buds. Then, she would look up in what seemed like the next week and the same trees would be dropping their brown and gold and orange leaves.
“Good God, don’t time fly,” she would say as she zipped along to another meeting or house closing or banker’s appointment, sounding like her own grandmother.
Deeper in the woods in the opposite direction from the river, Lena and Mr. Renfroe even found two mulberry trees growing in a clearing. One was a weeping mulberry that formed a houselike canopy over the two of them that reminded Lena of the chinaberry tree house that she and her first childhood friend, Sarah, shared on Forest Avenue. The gardener said the trees were at least two hundred years old. He was as pleased as Lena was to find them there.
“You got a good-luck piece a’ land here, Lena,” Mr. Renfroe told her with pride as if she had personally cultivated every stick on the place.
And he was right, too. To be so close to the river, the surveyors found that Lena’s land was on extraordinarily high ground. When the big floods of ’94 had come, no one could hardly believe that Lena wasn’t washed away out there by the river. But she wasn’t. Even the wooden bridge on her land that spanned the river where it narrowed before rushing into town was not washed away by the deluge. Her wine cellar wasn’t even flooded.
From the beginning, Lena felt it was a blessed place. From the moment she stepped foot on the property, she felt she belonged there.
On her first trip to Mulberry after Lena started building her new house, Sister declared the property out by the river an “ecotone.”
“See how the river meets the land meets the air meets the woods?” Sister asked as they walked the land for the first time, explaining the meaning of the term. “It’s an ecotone, the overlapping of all these environments. It’s the best place for life to form. You know, like the Garden of Eden, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile Valley.
“Good spiritual place, girl. And you a Scorpio. The river, a swimming pool, little streams. More water. Good place, girlfriend.” And she poured a warm libation of valerian tea from her paper cup right there on the ground to sanctify the spot.
Lena felt safe and protected on her own land. It was hers. It felt like hallowed ground.
Sister had told her, “Some folks think hallowed ground is where some powerful somebody is buried, but it’s not. Actually, hallowed ground is where some powerful somebody live!”
In the spirit of women and water and life, Lena had named her swimming pool “Rachel’s Waters” in honor of the ghost of a gentle slave she had once seen on a Georgia beach. Lena was seven when she wandered away from her brothers on a family vacation and discovered a thin, dark, damp apparition sitting on a whitened beached log, not far from the rice plantation she had fled, smelling like the very ocean itself. Rachel the ghost sat at the spot where she had drowned herself.
Rachel had explained, “This is where I wanted to be, this is where I choose to be. This is where I is.”
Lena tried her best now to forget the ghosts, gentle and scary, that had haunted her childhood. But Rachel—a woman who chose to kill herself in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean rather than submit to slavery—was one she wanted to remember.
It was on her property that Lena was at last able to make peace with the woods, any woods. Even though she did not know she was doing it, when she was a teenager, she had spent many a night sleepwalking in the stand of pines and oaks and magnolias and dogwoods that grew on the other side of the stream behind her parents’ house on Forest Avenue. Then one night she had actually awakened in the middle of the woods in her soaking cotton nightgown with her back propped up against the rough bark of a sycamore tr
ee, lost and confused and scared.
For most of her life after that, she could not bear to go into any verdant patch of earth or wooded area except for her grandmother’s garden. Just the sight of a tree’s bark up close could sometimes terrify her. If she accidentally brushed against a decorative rubber tree in someone’s office or a big ficus tree in the Mulberry Mall, she would have to keep herself from crying out at the psychic pain of the touch.
But as soon as she laid eyes on the thick undeveloped land out by the river, she began to make peace with the woods. There was something of the sacred in the woods on her land. She felt it from the beginning. From there, it seemed an effortless step for her to learn truly to love the woods.
Lena had bought the land with her own money, money she had earned herself, something she didn’t get much credit for because everyone in Mulberry knew that everything Lena touched turned to gold. She was just a damn smart and lucky child.
Jonah would brag to his friends around the poker table that Lena wasn’t allowed to gamble with him.
“Shit,” he’d say, throwing his handsome head over his shoulder, “my baby could pee in a Coke bottle swinging from a chinaberry tree on a windy day. She’s the luckiest Negro I ever seen in my life!” He tried to feign objective wonder, but all the men and the one woman at the table knew he was just eat up with pride over his wheelin’, dealin’, chip-off-the-ol’-block, look-like-he-coulda-spit-her-out, moneymaking daughter.
Her father was only briefly disappointed that she didn’t take the land that he had given her across the street from his own home on Forest Avenue and build her own home there. Nellie told him it was an “unreasonable idea.”
Later, she had just shaken her head and muttered, “Goodness gracious, men can be such fools! Why in the world would Lena want to live right across the street from us? Like we some of those old-timey people who have to live all on the same little patch. Like Lena says, ’We’re living in a global village now.’”
Lena’s plan to tear down the rickety old shotgun houses barely still standing there and to build single-dwelling low-to-moderate-income housing (a project she had begun planning as an economics assignment in college) in their place did little to assuage his hurt feelings. But when the moderate-income houses were snapped up in a more than break-even deal and the news of the project began spreading—first through local media, then a piece on CBS Sunday Morning—Jonah wouldn’t stop bragging about “my baby girl out ’changing the world around her,’ as they said on CNN. And making a profit in the bargain.”
Even Nellie had to laugh and say, “Now, you know that’s Jonah’s child!”
Lena had to admit she reveled in all the attention the project brought. She couldn’t help herself, she was the baby of the family. She loved attention.
But what really lifted her heart was the sight of a little dark brown girl with braids and beads in her hair playing under the huge mansion of the chinaberry tree next to her new house in Lena’s project. The little girl, Teesha, was in college in Atlanta now, but she was still one of the children Lena thought about when she honked her horn each time she drove by the houses.
As the motorcade of Mr. Jackson’s truck and her little car following passed a low open field of sprouting Indian paintbrush and rud-beckia, she was gladdened again to be nearing her own home. The contractor’s man stayed outside with her car, but Mr. Jackson insisted on escorting her in.
The last thing Mr. Jackson said as he reluctantly rose from his comfortable seat in the Georgia pine-walled Great Jonah Room was, “Now, you promise to lie down and call down to the gatehouse or call me if you don’t feel so good. Now, you promise?”
Lena nodded her head solemnly with as sincere a look as she could fake on her face.
“I am a little tired, Mr. Jackson. I think I’ll just wait ’til tomorrow to handle anything. I’m just going to stretch out and go to sleep. The doctor gave me some medication. I’ll take it and go to sleep.”
“Okay,” Mr. Jackson agreed as he headed down the hall next to the wall of bricks of colored glass she had salvaged from one of the nightclubs her father had secretly owned in the fifties and eventually torn down for the property. Lena could tell the contractor was slowing down and reconsidering his exit when he reached the end of the hall. But she patted him on his broad back and ushered him on out the side door leading to the side driveway and walked him to his truck.
Lena remembered to say, “You’ll have to bring your grandson out to ride again sometime soon,” as Mr. Jackson and his man pulled away around the stables and on out the road back to Mulberry.
Lena almost wiped her forehead and went, “Whew!” as she watched Mr. Jackson’s truck’s rear lights disappear down the dirt driveway that was more like a rutted country road with tufts of grass growing merrily down the center. The night was cool but not chilly; and the full moon flooded the land with golden-orange light right down to the river.
Lena was exhausted, but she could not resist walking along the fence by the road a bit where wild honeysuckle and Carolina jasmine tumbled along the fence posts. The evening breeze blew a bit, bringing the scent of the wisteria growing on the side of the barn along with the sweaty scent of her horses—all bedded down for the night—with it. She was relieved at first when the wind ruffling her skirt and zipping through the braids of her hair just felt like the evening breeze. Then, as she leaned her back among the pink and white and purple trumpets of blossoms in the fence, she wrinkled her nose prettily in disappointment the way her mother had when she realized that the night air held no scent of a man, just that of honeysuckle and the nearby river’s waters.
She found herself wistful, missing something she felt she had never fully grasped, as if it were vapor in her hands. When she spied first one, then three and then five or six lightning bugs in deep woods across the road, she had to smile in childhood memory of collecting the bugs at dusk, of putting them onto her ears for earrings that glowed in the dark.
But her tranquillity was short-lived. By the time she had gone back inside and just thought about turning off the outside lights and locking up, she saw a new set of headlights heading down her road.
She knew it had to be a stranger because everyone who had made the trip before knew enough to slow down when they turned onto her bumpy little road.
One of the main reasons she found any peace and solitude in her home space was its distance from town. She got some satisfaction from knowing what folks in Mulberry said about her house and property.
“Uhhh, Lord ham mercy, Lena live waaaayyyyy out there by the river, don’t ya, Lena?”
“Oh, don’t go visiting her anytime near sunset ’cause you sho’ gon’ get caught out there where there ain’t even no streetlights or street signs atall! Shoot, ain’t no streets!”
“Let me tell you, Lena McPherson live in the country! She sho’ nuff live in the country!”
The drive did indeed discourage some folks. But not all.
“Now, how Cliona from Yamacraw get a ride all the way out here at night?” Lena wondered aloud as she looked out the long wall of wavy glass that exposed the back of the house to sunlight. Cliona stood at Lena’s door under a yellowish floodlight trying to sneak a peek inside the house. She was dressed fairly sanely this evening, not like “a patient from the crazy house at Milledgeville,” as Grandmama would say. Someone had even thrown an old heavy tweed coat around her bent shoulders against the dampness of the night air.
God, I hope that old lady ain’t out trying to drive again, Lena thought as she unlatched the door and, fixing a smile on her face, ushered Cliona from Yamacraw into the hallway.
“Miss Cliona, I can’t believe you found time to come way out here to visit me this late. Come on in. You by yourself?”
Lena didn’t make any comment on it, but she noticed that the old lady was clutching a small Listerine bottle full of clear greenish water in her wrinkled hand like an old girlfriend as if Lena didn’t have the whole Ocawatchee River of Cleer Flo’ rushing b
y her house right outside.
7
GIRLFRIEND
It seemed sometimes that Lena had a glut of girlfriends. Everyone in Mulberry claimed to be Lena’s friend. She was godmother to so many children that at some point she finally had to call a moratorium. The christening, birthday and graduation presents were no problem. It was the drain of remembering all those events and dispensing all that love as her godmother, Miss Rita, had done for her.
Lena had cosigned so many business loans for women around Mulberry to start their own enterprises—catering, sewing Afrocentric clothes for children, designing greeting cards, baking and selling real tea cakes and opening day-care and geriatric centers—that she had her own loan officer at the bank who dropped whatever she was doing whenever Lena walked in the door of the beautiful old bank building. The vast majority of the businesses had done very well.
Over the years, she had employed and mentored a dozen or so of the same women who as eighth-grade girls had refused to speak a word to her for nearly five years of school. Now each one swore that she had been a closer friend and classmate to Lena than the next. Sometimes they even believed themselves that they had always loved Lena, and she had always loved them. That they had always been her friend, and she had always been theirs. That they had always been close. As Lois now said, “Since we were schoolgirls, we’ve always just clung to one another.”
Sometimes Lena had to laugh right in their faces. The women didn’t even care. They were just glad that Lena’s good nature had enabled her to laugh about it.
Lena knew as well as they did that the women, now in their forties, some of them grandmothers, remembered all too well their treatment of her in school when they found her just too strange, too much for them. They remembered one day when they all decided to stop speaking to her for the next five years at Martin de Porres School. In fact, each one of Lena’s “friends” had a special, particular memory of that cold ostracism that would come flooding back to her every once in a while. Lena got sick of seeing the look in their eyes as these same wicked scenarios played in their minds. So, she tried to treat them all with the love and sweetness of a truly dear old friend to help them all forget.
Tina Mcelroy Ansa Page 8