The Ada Decades

by Paula Martinac

  Bywater Books

  Copyright© 2017 Paula Martinac

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61294-085-4

  Bywater Books First Edition: March 2017

  A slightly different version of “Comfort Zone” was first published in Raleigh Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring 2016). “Raised That Way” originally appeared in Minerva Rising, Issue 11 (Winter 2017).

  E-Book ISBN: 978-1-61294-086-1

  By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Bywater Books.

  Cover designer: Ann McMan, TreeHouse Studio

  Bywater Books

  PO Box 3671

  Ann Arbor MI 48106-3671

  http://www.bywaterbooks.com

  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters and events described by the author are fictitious. No resemblance to real persons, dead or alive, is intended.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Private Things

  Madam Librarian

  The Book Club

  A Normal Life

  The Plan

  Trouble

  The Language of New York

  Raised That Way

  Eclipse

  Comfort Zone

  Her Story

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  This is a work of fiction, inspired in part by actual events, people, and places. Although Charlotte, North Carolina’s public schools did experience racial strife in 1957 and 1970, Central Charlotte Junior High never existed; Mary Burney is not a historical figure, but an amalgam loosely based on the African-American students who integrated public schools in the South; and Robert Browne is a product of my imagination. I derived an understanding of events in Charlotte and places like Little Rock by reading the work of James Baldwin, Jim Grimsley, Thomas W. Hanchett, Davison M. Douglas, and David Margolick, and the coverage of school integration in the Charlotte Observer.

  There was indeed a lynching of three African-American men in Salisbury, N.C., in 1906, and a postcard of the murdered men appears in the collection of WithoutSanctuary.org. But there are no shadowy children in the photo, and I changed the name of the photography studio on the back of the postcard. I owe my knowledge of this horrific event to the work of Susan B. Wells.

  To my knowledge, there was no raid on a gay cruising area in Charlotte in April 1962; my chapter “The Plan” took its inspiration from many such incidents that occurred all over the United States in this time period. For my understanding of LBGT life in the South before Stonewall, I’m indebted to James T. Sears’s oral histories. An exhibit at the Levine Museum of the New South in 2014”—“LGBTQ Perspectives on Equality”—helped inform my understanding of Charlotte’s queer past.

  Musical theater mavens, please forgive the small liberty I took with the date of The Music Man, which did not open on Broadway until December 1957—three months after Cam sang “Marian the Librarian” to Ada. The song was just too perfect to pass up.

  Paula Martinac

  Charlotte, NC

  “The world is violent and mercurial—

  it will have its way with you. . . .

  We live in a perpetually burning building,

  and what we must save from it,

  all the time, is love.”

  —Tennessee Williams

  “Love is a growing up.”

  —James Baldwin

  Private Things

  1947

  Ada’s daddy kept a postcard of three dead colored men in his toolbox. He stashed it in the bottom well, under the removable tray, in a ratty, soiled envelope.

  She had volunteered to fetch a wrench. At almost twelve, Ada took pride in knowing the difference between a wrench and pliers, because most girls her age didn’t and her mother thought she shouldn’t bother. “You won’t need that when you’re married,” her mama, who wed at just seventeen, said. “That’s what husbands are for.”

  If she hadn’t decided to lift the tray, just for a peek, Ada wouldn’t have noticed the envelope at all. It was wedged behind several boxes of nails, demanding investigation. It looked like half of North Carolina had handled it, so why shouldn’t she? She tucked it into the inner pocket of her overalls, the one she had sewed in as a secret storage place, then delivered the wrench to her father.

  “Good girl,” her father said when she returned from the tool shed. He was on his back underneath the kitchen sink, attending to a leak that had been dripping for days. It used to be Clay Junior who assisted with these tasks, but Ada’s older brother was too busy with basketball practice and other unspecified high school activities. Soon, her father would train Foster, the youngest, in the workings of the toolbox, but in the interim, Ada pitched in. She didn’t mind—it was about the only time she spent with her father, who in his free time was less prone to talking than drinking, smoking on the porch and listening to shows like Amos ‘n’ Andy.

  It occurred to her that if he put the wrench back himself, her daddy might miss the envelope and then he would whup her for sure. She figured she had no more than fifteen minutes in which to explore the contents of the envelope. She closed her bedroom door just partway so she could hear if he called to her again, and withdrew the ragged paper from her secret pocket.

  The envelope held a strange assortment of items, including half a dozen dirty pictures of women, all with big bosoms exposed to the world and legs wide open. Their heads tilted in the same provocative way. One woman had no panties on and crossed her hands demurely over her privates.

  The envelope also held a used bus ticket to Charlotte and two yellowed teeth. The ticket, she figured, might be the very one

  that brought her daddy to Charlotte in the ’20s as a young man looking for work in the cotton mills. The teeth she let be, her curiosity not deep enough to prompt her to touch anyone else’s teeth, even if, for some reason, they had once belonged to a member of her family.

  And then, inside another thin, dirty sleeve was the postcard of the dead men.

  At first, she wasn’t sure what it depicted, but a closer look made her stomach pitch. One man was swinging from a tree by his neck and legs, almost like he was flying; his face seemed to be half gone. The bodies of the other two were slumped against the trunk. None of the men had shirts on, and their trousers were in tatters. To the right a white hand held up an unreadable sign, while a straw boater covered the owner’s face. Almost out of frame were three small white blurry heads—children in motion. The postcard was stamped on the reverse, “From Carson’s Studio, near Court House, Salisbury, N.C.” Someone had scrawled an inscription, and the ink had faded to gray: Remember this?

  Many of her extended family members, including her widowed grandmother, still lived in the farmlands just outside Salisbury. Her father had been the first Shook to leave, followed by his older brother a year later. He was just shy of twenty and had never been to a city. “He wanted a better life,” her mama said. “He didn’t want to be scraping by like a field hand his whole life.” At the Mercury Mill, he worked his way up to weave room overseer, which secured him a slightly larger house in the mill village and allowed Ada’s mother to quit her job as a spinner at the same mill.

  Ada heard her fath
er stirring in the other room, sliding out from under the sink. “That ’bout does it, Janie!” he called out to Ada’s mother. Ada stashed the postcard in her school bag and the dirty envelope back in her pocket. It was a risk to hold onto the card, but she would find some way to replace it before he missed it. She wondered how often he actually looked at the grisly thing, and if her mama knew about it.

  “Let me put away that wrench for you, Daddy,” Ada said, slipping it from his hand. “Why don’t you sit down now, and I’ll bring you a glass of cold tea?”

  Clay Senior offered a rare smile. A hand went out to touch her hair, but it was slick with grease and he withdrew it before it made contact. “Well, aren’t you the sweet one!” he said. “I knew there was a reason I call you Sugar.”

  In the tool shed, sweat broke out on Ada’s upper lip when she couldn’t remember whether the flap of the envelope had faced out, toward the boxes of nails, or in, toward the toolbox itself. She took a guess and then closed the top of the wretched thing with a thunk.

  That night, she dreamed she was being chased by three brawny men, whose skin colors kept changing; she tried to scream, but nothing came out of her mouth. One man looked a little like her daddy, but then he didn’t. She ran into a field where the bodies of white and colored children littered the landscape, and she woke up shrieking, her nightdress soaked in sweat.

  Her mama hurried into Ada’s room, still throwing on her wrapper, and didn’t turn on the light. “Ssh, Ada Jane, you will wake the dead!” Her voice was a fierce whisper, and Ada knew it was her father Mama was worried about, not the dead. If Daddy didn’t sleep, he took it out on her mother the next morning, and the bad mood might even continue when he got home from the mill. Mostly, he barked at her, but Ada worried that someday he’d outright hit her.

  Mama sank onto the edge of the bed and swept the damp hair off Ada’s face. She never stayed mad for long. “Bad dream?”

  “I was being kind of hunted. By real scary men. And there were dead children.”

  “My goodness, honey, what on earth brought that on?”

  At her mama’s light touch, Ada’s heart settled back into its regular rhythm. “I don’t know,” she lied.

  “You weren’t up reading again, were you? One of those mystery stories you like so much?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, you go back to sleep now. Think about something sweet, like the apple pie I’m aiming to make tomorrow.”

  But the shadows that flitted across her room resembled branches of a tree, and Ada was awake for much of the night.

  § § §

  The head librarian, Miss Ruthie, could be harsh at times, physically removing girls from the main reading room for giggling, grabbing boys’ arms with unexpected strength if they dashed past her circulation desk. She was a woman of considerable size, older than Ada’s parents, and had acquired the nickname “Mad Old Maid” from young people who had incurred her wrath.

  But if she took to a child, the way she had to Ada at an early age, Miss Ruthie was a guardian angel. She introduced Ada to the wonders of authors like Charlotte Brontë and Pearl Buck, and showed her photos of breathtaking places Miss Ruthie herself had visited with her friend, Miss Cicely, like the Grand Canyon and the Everglades. The librarian also had an uncanny knowledge of just about everything that had ever happened in North Carolina, right on back to colonial days, so Ada was certain she would be able to tell her something about the postcard.

  Figuring out how to approach Miss Ruthie without admitting where the souvenir came from, however, was a puzzle. Still, the more days that went by with the photo in Ada’s possession, the worse it would be for her if she were caught. On a quiet afternoon in the library, Ada waited until Miss Ruthie’s break. The librarian always took fifteen minutes late in the day, disappearing behind a door with a frosted glass window marked OFFICE.

  Ada approached the door and rapped on it gently, once. When there was no answer, she repeated the knock more forcefully.

  Miss Ruthie answered with a dour look reserved for children who didn’t appreciate the sacredness of the public library. Wisps of smoke drifted in the air behind her.

  “Yes, Ada?”

  It wasn’t the friendly, melodic Yes, Ada? she was accustomed to when Miss Ruthie took her questions. Ada was sorry she had ventured this far, but it was too late to do an about-face.

  “I wanted to show you something,” she said.

  “I am on my break, Ada. Can’t it wait?”

  “It’s . . . not something I can show you out here,” she explained.

  Miss Ruthie waved her in and nodded for her to sit, but there wasn’t a single chair that was not covered in books and magazines. The librarian stubbed out her unfinished cigarette, and tossed a pack of Chesterfields into a desk drawer.

  “You did not see me smoking,” she instructed with a sly smile, as she sat down behind her desk. “Well, don’t just stand there, child. What’s so important?”

  Ada opened her school bag and fished through her papers until her fingers reached the cardboard of the postcard, which she laid on the desk. “Do you know what this is?”

  Miss Ruthie’s face went gray, like she might be sick. She flipped the postcard upside down on her blotter.

  “Where did you get this, Ada?”

  “I found it . . . somewhere.”

  The librarian bit her upper lip, and Ada’s heart beat double-time. Miss Ruthie might press her further, but if Ada were lucky she would let the word somewhere lie between them like a dead dog no one wanted to touch.

  “I see,” the librarian said, and Ada’s pulse slowed. Miss Ruthie adjusted her glasses to read the inscription on the back of the card. “You are surely old enough to know people are capable of great cruelty.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You know unspeakable things happened to the Jews during the war.”

  Ada nodded, not sure how that related to the colored men. She didn’t exactly understand what had happened to the Jews, but she reckoned it was something bad. Her mother’s youngest brother, Uncle Rad, had been involved in freeing people from camps and whispered on their back porch late one night about prisoners who “looked like skeletons.”

  “This incident . . .” Miss Ruthie began, then stopped and started again. “I was a girl not much older than you when this happened, but I never forgot it. The newspaper here was full of it.”

  Ada waited, seconds slipping away on a wall clock above Miss Ruthie’s head.

  “Somebody killed a white family in Salisbury. This was, oh, forty-some years ago. I don’t recall their name now. Anyway, they were butchered with an ax, and their house was set on fire. Folks got it into their heads that their hired hands, three Negroes, were to blame. A mob found them guilty, and they were tortured and lynched, just like that.” Miss Ruthie turned the photo right side up again. “Thousands of folks watched. Some came in from other counties. People took . . . pictures, like this, and made postcards out of them.”

  “Oh!” Ada said. Her stomach felt like it had been squeezed through her mama’s wringer washer. Forty years ago her daddy was a little boy not even Foster’s age, so he couldn’t possibly have been involved in the lynching—but had he witnessed it? And who had given him such a gruesome souvenir?

  Miss Ruthie’s eyes seemed to focus on an ink spot on the blotter, just to the right of the postcard. “Did you get this from home?” The question was so unexpected that Ada had no choice but to nod yes.

  “My daddy’s from Salisbury,” she said.

  Miss Ruthie handed the postcard back, then removed her glasses to rub her eyes. “You best put this back where you found it, Ada,” she said. “I doubt anybody meant for you to see it.”

  Ada slipped the card back into her bag and left the office. She took a volume of the encyclopedia to an empty table in the main reading room and pretended to read it. Miss Ruthie didn’t come out as expected at 3:30. She was a full six minutes late.

  § § §

  Ad
a replaced the postcard two days later, when her daddy was at work and her mother was peeling potatoes. She didn’t need to look at it again after her talk with Miss Ruthie, because the image was branded in her mind.

  She was settling the envelope back into its secret place, relieved she hadn’t been caught, when her mother’s voice behind her, sharp as a paring knife, made her jump.

  “Ada Jane! What are you doing?” Jane Shook was not a tall woman, but she towered in the doorframe, hands on her hips, face red and pinched. “You come here.”

  Except for the occasional swat on the behind, her mama never hit her, but she had a strong grip that left its mark on tender arms. Her fingers wrapped so tightly around Ada’s forearm it felt like she might faint.

  “What are you doing, snooping around in here?” she asked, squeezing harder for emphasis. “You got something to say for yourself?”

  “No, ma’am,” Ada replied, tears filling the corners of her eyes. “Please, mama.”

  “‘Please, mama,’ what?”

  “Please, please, don’t tell him.”

  Her mama’s grip relaxed and changed to light strokes, as if she could erase the pain she’d inflicted. “Your daddy has private things,” she said. “You best respect that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you stay out of this shed. It’s no place for a girl.”

  Ada’s head bobbed up and down, then she broke free and tore off toward the house. From the kitchen window, she watched for her mother to emerge from the shed, but it took longer than Ada expected for her to close the door and return to her chores. That evening, Ada waited for a fight between her parents that never came. The house was oddly silent, almost like nobody lived there.

  Madam Librarian

  1957