“She was always taking in those who was put out.”
Lee Roy raised eyes to the last remark and found apologetic hands that pressed envelopes into his loosely clasped palms. His grandmother hadn’t taken him in from any out. She’d been with him from the very beginning. He never understood the fictions neighbors wove to patch the gaps in their knowledge. Lee Roy had not been taken in so much as his parents had been put out—long before his own memory ignited.
They filed in a line to his seat, squeezing his shoulder in passing. Elderly women embraced him in heavily powdered bosoms.
“Thank you,” he murmured to no one in particular and everyone in general. It was a parade of sympathetic brown eyes and then . . . a pair of blue ones.
He looked into a face that was so similar to his own, but much paler, that he knew it instantly. “Your grandmother was an amazing woman. She was more of a mother than I could have been, you know.”
He was paralyzed. It wasn’t until her gaze shifted to a teenage girl beside her that he blinked. She told the girl, “Go ahead, Amy.”
The girl had been clutching an envelope to her chest. Receiving the woman’s permission, she thrust it into his hands. “Sorry for your loss,” the girl added shyly.
He nodded and watched them descend the aisle to the exit. Not knowing what to do with the experience, he filed it away—as he did the unopened card when he returned to his grandmother’s apartment. He loosened his tie and sat in the living room. In the kitchen and dining room, women he didn’t recognize bustled about, dishing food onto Dixie plates and cramming aluminum-foil-
covered dishes into the refrigerator.
The boys with whom he had once run the streets of Woodlawn were, like him, now adult men, but that is where their similarities ended. One kept refilling the red plastic cup in his hand. “This my nigga, right here!” he exclaimed, sloshing Crown Royal from the bottle to the cautioning cries of the others. “So, you say you gonna go down south now? College, huh? Ain’t fuckin’ with them Rukn Ranger niggas no more?” He continued without waiting for a response, “That’s good. Slanging all that dope in the neighborhood.” He pointed his glass toward the framed photo of Lee Roy’s grandmother. “She probably turnin’ in her grave. Rest in peace.”
Lee Roy nodded. “Yeah,” he replied, glancing at the photograph. He hadn’t thought much about college after high school and had been content with the community service jobs that membership in the Rangers had afforded him. It allowed him to stay and care for his grandmother when she most needed it.
Tiny furiously shook his head. “Negroes leaving the South in droves and you carrying your simple ass against the motherfuckin’ stampede.”
Lee Roy tried to explain to them about Booker T. Washington building the school from nothing. Even making the bricks for the buildings. He snatched up Washington’s autobiography and pointed emphatically to the cover. “I mean, he was like the man, y’all.”
Tiny stared at the book. “I ain’t never seen no Negro on no book. Not like that.”
Someone quickly chimed in, “And how many books have you even seen, Tiny?” which caused an eruption of laughter from everyone. “Seriously,” the prankster continued. “You say this Booker T. man started this school with his wife and then had a woman on the side too that he married?”
Lee Roy frowned. “Not at the same time. Why you gotta focus on that?”
Tiny laughed. “You know we got folks like that up here too.” He paused for effect. “We call ’em pimps.” He clasped Lee Roy on the shoulder nearly upsetting his drink. “Nigga all highfalutin’ nah! Gonna have hisself a shitload of degrees.” He beamed at Lee Roy, who stared blankly back. “Man, we gon’ hafta call you Luh-Roy. You too sharp to be a Lee Roy.” The others murmured their agreement.
“Hey, Tiny, how long you gon’ hang on to that Crown, man? We thirsty over here.”
As the bottle made its way across the room, Lee Roy felt his body relax and his mind numb. He found himself smiling and laughing with Tiny and the others. When they slipped into calling him Luh-Roy, he didn’t correct them.
Brother LeRoi sat in his office. It was the anniversary of his grandmother’s death. Later in the evening, he would meet his old neighborhood friends to toast her memory. He’d pick up a bottle of Crown Royal, knowing they would feign surprise and promise to grab the next one.
He thought of his students. There were those who diligently took notes and would return with the requisite amount of information and would uncover enough “new” family history to judge the course a success. Then there were a few who wouldn’t want to do the work. He’d find the class enrollment decreased by this number in the upcoming weeks. What he searched for were the ones who had more questions than answers. They came to his class searching because they had not found answers in the comforts of their own lives. Under his tutelage, they emerged from the cocoons of their own darkness into the knowledge of daylight. This is what he perceived as he waited for Eve Mann to arrive at his office.
There was a knock on the door, and when he said “Come in,” he was only partially surprised to see pale skin and blond hair instead of the darker woman he had been expecting. Other than her appearance in class, he hadn’t seen her since his grandmother’s funeral. She was taller, and the teenage roundness of her face had slimmed into young adulthood.
“Brother—” she began.
“I have an appointment,” he interrupted.
Unperturbed, she plopped into the chair across from his desk and dropped her macramé bag onto the floor. “Well, it’s not like you’ve allowed me to make an appointment. So I thought the element of surprise would be best.”
“Oh? And you felt you didn’t achieve that when you showed up for my class?”
“Brother—” she began.
“Stop calling me that.”
“Why? Everyone else gets to. But I guess it’s just weird from me, huh?”
Brother LeRoi leaned back into his chair and exhaled. Perhaps he was going about things the wrong way. “Look, Amy, I guess I can understand things from your end. But this is not the way to forge a relationship with me.”
“So, what would you suggest, Bro— I mean, Professor?” She smirked.
Brother LeRoi removed his glasses and slowly cleaned the frames with one of the many lens-cleaning cloths he kept. “Drop the class, Amy. You don’t need to be here.”
Amy stood quickly, nearly upsetting the chair. She snatched her bag from the floor. “This isn’t fair. How can you be so hypocritical?”
“This whole thing has been unexpected. Just give me some time. We’ll talk.” He gave a reassuring smile.
“You promise?” Amy wavered.
He did not want to give her promises. He wanted to reject her, like their mother had rejected him. But she was not his mother, and he couldn’t take out the ambivalence that he felt toward his mother on her. “I promise.” He searched her face. “But I need you to drop this class.”
“Fine, but I’m not going anywhere.”
“Duly noted.”
Outside of the office, Eve listened and quickly jumped back upon hearing noise moving toward the door. When Brother LeRoi opened the door and ushered Amy out, his eyes rested on Eve’s. He wondered what, if anything, she had overheard.
She entered and took a seat opposite his side of the desk and they proceeded to play a game of manners, knowing but denying with their silence that they both had engaged some taboo. Eve, guilty of eavesdropping, felt justified given her discovery of Brother LeRoi’s covert meetings with the enemy. She imagined him spouting Black patriarchal rhetoric while lusting after white hippie girls. Eve had known brothers like him during her brief time at Tuskegee—the ones who’d bring giggling white girls from neighboring Auburn University to the Soul Inn on the outskirts of town.
Brother LeRoi was the first to speak. “So, you have concerns about the assignme
nt?”
“Yes.” And now she had concerns about other things—his ethics, his personality, his taste in women, his professionalism, his commitment to the community. Eve glanced skeptically at Brother LeRoi, thinking that he would not be the first to attempt to fashion himself in the Shaft mold. Black America was in the early titillating thrall of Shaft. Written by a white man, the originally white title role went to Richard Roundtree, instantly making race a major factor in the script. Shaft, the movie, targeted Black audiences with the lure of a Black male protagonist restoring the racial balance of New York one corrupt police department, racist white man, lusty white woman, and insubordinate Black woman at a time.
He interrupted her thoughts. “What seems to be the problem?” The tension was palpable. He knew what she was thinking, or at least some version of it. They were employing a game of double-talk, inquiring on two levels of conversation.
“Well, it’s kind of personal . . .”
“I see.”
They were at a verbal impasse: Eve unconvinced she could trust Brother LeRoi with personal information, Brother LeRoi called to convince her that he was deserving of such trust. He tried a different tactic. “You know, whatever you discuss here with me is confidential. I can’t share what you tell me with anyone.”
She smiled. This was a chess game, and he had her in checkmate. He couldn’t share her personal information, neither would he be able to share that of another student, a white one in particular. Eve relented. “I don’t have a family history to gather information from.”
“Well, that can’t be right. We all have family histories. Some—many in fact—just aren’t known to us. Is that your concern?”
“Sort of.” Eve inhaled and exhaled several times. She’d never discussed her feelings about her lack of family history with anyone other than Nelle.
“Please, go on.”
When Eve finally spoke, it all came out in a rush of words lubricated by slow, fat tears that took her by surprise. She told him about her aunt and the little that she knew of her family, which only amounted to her mother’s death and her grandmother’s a while later from cancer. She searched his face for a hint of the teasing she had experienced as a child, for a sign of the pity that she sometimes got from Nelle, for the irritability her aunt often displayed. She found none of those things reflected back at her, but still, she had to make certain. “I may be sobbing, but this isn’t a sob story. I’m not looking for pity.”
The information surged over Brother LeRoi. “Mother’s sister?”
Eve nodded.
“I assume—” he began but stopped himself. He did not want to make assumptions. History is buried for many reasons. When one digs, one must be ready for what may be uncovered. “Why are you here, Eve?”
“Because you told me to see you during office hours.”
Brother LeRoi raised an eyebrow.
“Sorry,” she said and took a moment to compose thoughts that had coalesced into the most intense desire of her life. “I’m here because I’m tired of not knowing. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it means. I sometimes feel as if I don’t know a very large part of myself.”
Brother LeRoi handed her a tissue and busied himself inspecting a preserved bird’s egg that he kept on a stand on his desk. “Well, I can help you.”
“How?” Eve dabbed at her eyes.
“In class we’ll be looking at many resources for gathering information outside of the family. I’m sure once your classmates start sharing their stories . . .”
Fear flooded Eve and she stood. “No. I can’t do this in class. It’s hard enough talking to you about it here. I can’t . . .”
Brother LeRoi turned the egg quicker in his hand. “Okay, okay. Calm down. Have a seat. Let me think. Just, please . . . sit.” He handed her another tissue for the new batch of tears that threatened at the corners of her eyes. He pulled out a pack of chewing gum and held it toward her. “Juicy Fruit?”
Eve looked at Brother LeRoi’s eyes, wide and full of unexplained loss, and laughed. She took the gum and relaxed in spite of herself. She felt some strange kinship with him in this moment and wondered about his own story. “I went there too.” A hint of jealously tinged her words. She nodded in the direction of his wall, toward a row of framed diplomas and degrees. Her eyes narrowed on the framed degrees from Tuskegee University.
“Yeah?”
“Just briefly though.” They hadn’t known each other then, of course, but they had surely passed one another occasionally on campus. “My best friend Nelle stayed the whole time.”
“Nelle?” The name was familiar to Brother LeRoi. He remembered Tuskegee. Professor Woodridge. He remembered Sammy and his fraternity days. Then the name appeared. In 1968 he had officially become Big Brother LeRoi to a group of anxious young pledges. There was one that nearly hadn’t crossed, being so heartbroken by a woman called Nelle. To hell with Nelle, he had encouraged his pledge with the mantra. LeRoi had assured his pledge that once he crossed over into full membership, there would be a girl like Nelle for every day of the week and two on Sunday. Looking back on the advice, it troubled him. The sexual politics of manhood always seemed work to the detriment of women.
Brother LeRoi was no John Shaft. He remembered how it felt to be bullied into nearly accepting a lesser version of himself and was reminded of it whenever he noticed the same tactics applied by men against women. Brother LeRoi did not attend the mix of feminist meetings and organizations. It wasn’t his place; nor would he have been particularly welcome in the mostly white female space. He recognized that some of his friends did have a thing for white women, but Brother LeRoi had a thing about white women—which was a considerably different experience.
Unlike Eve, Brother LeRoi had no questions about family. He knew his mother’s identity, had even met her briefly at his grandmother’s funeral. But there was nothing more that he cared to know about her. It was fully understood why a white woman would give away a Black child even at this moment in 1972, and it was understood even more when he had been born, some thirty years earlier. He felt that he had nothing to search for. But Eve’s plight ignited his historian’s thirst for a vicarious treasure hunt.
“Don’t come to class,” he said.
“What?” Her thoughts flashed back to the eavesdropped conversation, and she feared that he might be telling her to drop the class.
“Don’t come to class. This can be an independent study. You can meet with me here once or twice a week.” The idea came so suddenly that it took even him by surprise.
“We can do that?” Eve wondered how many times he had offered this arrangement to other students and if his previous visitor had a similar agreement.
“Yeah. Yes, we can.” His voice deepened in an effort to appear more confident than he felt. There was doubt in his tone, but it was the hopefulness, previously foreign to her, to which she responded.
“Give me a few days to gather some helpful information for you,” he added.
“What should I do in the meantime?”
“You live with your aunt?”
She nodded and he hesitated before continuing, aware of the implications of what he was about to recommend. “There’s information in that house. Somewhere. You see, we hide things from others and ourselves. We don’t want to see them, but we don’t want to destroy them either. It’s there, Eve, you just have to look.” His own secrets were still buried in an unopened envelope in a box in the back of a closet. Had it contained perishables, it would be foul-smelling and leaking. He regarded it as if it were such, from the scripted name he no longer claimed written in block letters across its front to the weighty thickness of its unknown contents. He thought of the hidden envelope even as he suggested to Eve that she violate her aunt’s dark corners and closets. His hypocrisy was not lost on him, and he recalled that he had just been accused of such.
Eve wondered whe
ther she would find treasure or curse on her information hunt. She thought back to her last demand for information from Mama Ann before leaving for Tuskegee.
“You know, if you’re really my mother, you should just say so,” she said softly as she packed.
“That’s just nonsense, Every,” Ann responded, clearly flustered as she fumbled together a care package for Eve’s dormitory life.
“Is it?” Eve paused. “I mean, if you and that boy James got into a little . . .”
“Every!” Ann shook. “Things moved different back then.”
“If that was the case, then I wouldn’t have been born to an unwed teenager,” Eve shot back.
Ann moved directly in front of Eve, grabbed her face, and slowly turned it toward her. “Your mother was Mercy Mann. She was my baby sister, and she’s dead.” Releasing Eve’s face, Ann left the room and the haunting thoughts of sending her dead sister’s child into the very South that Mercy escaped during the steady hemorrhaging of Blacks that migrated north.
Eve shook off the memory as Brother LeRoi continued to maneuver the egg around his long fingers in accordance with the speed of his thoughts.
“What is that?” Eve nodded toward the egg.
LeRoi smiled. “Someone once told me it’s a beginning.”
Because Brother LeRoi and Eve didn’t know what else to do, having shared what felt like too strong of an intimacy for their relationship, they shook hands. Determined to escape the sentiment foretold in the popular refrain of a Negro spiritual: “sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” they were two people living alternate versions of themselves, from their conscious revisions of their names to their decisions to rewrite the migration stories they had been given to perform. Stories that migrated with people and snaked across the country as veins pumping blood to new transplants.
Four
the hillbilly highway
They’re American-born white-skinned natives, with
everyman Page 5