Eve stood and surprised Nelle with a quick squeeze. “You still know how to say all the right things.”
“Further proof that I haven’t changed.”
“I’m going,” Eve declared.
“I know,” Nelle grinned.
“Yeah, I mean I’m going—like, I’m leaving this charming bar to check on bus schedules and pack and tell Mama Ann and . . .” She sighed heavily.
Nelle grabbed Eve’s hand in support. “Breathe, girl. You got this.”
Eve nodded. “It’s just I’m sure I’ll be leaving in the next few days and we probably won’t get a chance to see each other before I go, and even if we did, I’d be nervous that we’d backslide into weirdness.”
Nelle drew her into an embrace. “Only forward from here on out.”
“Promise?” Eve asked into her shoulder.
“Damn straight.”
Eve pulled out of the hug. “Well, at least the intention is there.”
Nelle watched Eve leave the bar, laughter plastered on both of their faces, when she turned to find the object of her previous attention standing beside her at the bar.
“It’s not polite to stare and not say hello.” The southern drawl revealed roots, but the husky voice belied no gender. “It’s also not polite to ask.”
Nelle was stunned and stammered, “What, what can I call you?”
“Jean, and the pleasure is mine.” Jean extended a hand.
Nelle shook hands and glared. She opened her mouth but quickly clamped down the questions and comments that would demand the revelation of Jean’s gender.
Jean smiled. “That’s a good girl. Because you really don’t.”
“Don’t?”
Jean drew closer to Nelle’s ear and whispered, “Have to.”
“To what?” Nelle’s breath quickened.
“Know,” Jean concluded. “You actually only need to know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“That I drink gin or rum. They rhyme with all the best words,” Jean giggled.
It was the start of a peculiarly intimate friendship that engulfed Nelle during the time Eve had given her to consider the trip. Jean coaxed Nelle into exploring bars and events outside the South Side’s small Black lesbian enclave where she had joined a small community of brown women who liked brown women. They gathered in found spaces to dance, sing, talk, and laugh. Nelle wondered what it looked like to love a woman within the traditional confines of a relationship. This community gave her a lens to see Black lesbians beyond sociopolitical conversations. They talked about sharing homes and dreams. They discussed what to make for dinner, where to vacation, music that spoke to their lives.
They were an incestuous bunch in that friends became lovers, lovers became friends, and friends of lovers became lovers, so much so that it seemed to Nelle that everyone knew the taste of everyone else. She was hesitant to add her own flavor to the stew. Through Jean’s various lovers, Nelle was introduced to the depths of queerness, beyond the dichotomy of gay and straight.
Nelle, still new to the community, admired the coalition building and camaraderie from the periphery. She attended their functions, usually before meeting Jean for drinks.
Jean never attended the concerts or poetry readings held in the rented church rooms. “They’re separatists, you know,” she confided after Nelle returned from an event particularly moved by the words of philosophy professor and Black lesbian activist Jackie Anderson.
“Oh, Jean, if you could have heard how impassioned she spoke about the need for Black women’s spaces within lesbian spaces!”
“They don’t much trust me because I’m not a lesbian.” Jean disclosed as they sat in Jean’s small studio apartment.
“They just don’t know what you are,” Nelle explained.
“You don’t know what I am.”
Nelle stood and refilled their drinks, pouring a healthy dose of rum into Jean’s glass. She returned and planted a kiss on Jean’s forehead. “I know who you are.”
Nelle sat across from Jean, the person who had become her closest confidante in such a short time. She confided to Jean about the details she could not share with Eve, like leaving the bar one night, giddy with the gaiety of breathing in too deeply, too quickly the same-gender-loving spaces. High on acceptance, she failed to notice the tall figure approaching her on the sidewalk until he grabbed her purse and shoved her hard enough to send her tumbling backward.
“Dyke,” he sneered before running off and disappearing down the nearest alley.
Before the last of her tears had dried, Jean was there to collect her from the bar patrons who nested around after the incident. As Nelle lifted her eyes from the line of bourbon shots purchased in her honor, a heavily made-up, evening-gown-wearing Jean parted the crowd. They retreated to Jean’s apartment, where Jean tried to console Nelle.
“It’s not even the theft, although that was fucked up,” Nelle noted. “I don’t even care that he called me a dyke.”
“Oh, honey,” Jean cooed and rubbed Nelle’s back.
“I mean it,” Nelle sniffled in spite of herself. “He was just a kid. Tall as a man, but that lanky run, and those wide eyes.” She shook her head in disbelief.
“Big paws on a pup. That’s what my daddy called it.”
“The worst part, though—” Nelle shook with rage.
Jean placed a manicured hand on Nelle’s shoulder. “Don’t.”
“I thought that she’d at least show up to see if I was okay.” Nelle had recently been involved in a brief infatuation—in the ways that unreturned affections can be brief.
“That’s not the way it works, love.”
“I thought one-night stands were more mutually agreed upon.”
Jean bellowed loudly, startling Nelle. “Chile, that’s the funniest shit I’ve ever heard.”
For her part, Nelle played nursemaid in the aftermath of Jean’s many dalliances with male and female lovers. The boyfriends referred to Jean as “him.” The girlfriends called Jean “her.” Nelle stuck to Jean, foregoing all gendered pronoun usage. It was easy. Most of their interactions simply required Nelle to say “You.”
In a matter of weeks, Nelle picked up the literal and figurative pieces of Jean’s affairs. Jean and the lovers always fussed. They threw things. They never hit, but occasionally shards of some ill-aimed item would bounce off a wall and imbed themselves into the arm or leg of Jean or one of the lovers. Jean shared the guilt of the tirade, launching as many glasses as were dodged.
One evening—Nelle couldn’t even recall whether it was a boyfriend or girlfriend—a fight had occurred. Nelle pressed a cold towel to Jean’s head and remarked, “You know this ain’t gay love.”
Jean removed the towel. “I ain’t gay.”
Nelle gently pressed the towel back. “This ain’t love at all, love.”
In the adjacent bathroom, water ran into the tub. Their weekly ritual involved Jean in the bathtub while Nelle sat on a pillow leaning outside the door. They learned of each other’s lives in this way. Nelle told Jean about the salt incident, Tuskegee, and her ebbing friendship with Eve. She shared her dreams of writing essays for Black lesbians in Black magazines, to which Jean laughed, “Can you imagine Ebony magazine putting lesbians on their cover?”
She told Jean about Professor Woodridge and the egg that she could no longer find. Apparently, it had gone the way of things lost along the way. Favorite T-shirts. Mates to socks in clothes dryers. Underwear stolen by jilted lovers clinging to those fortunate enough to have let go first. Somewhere in the packing of her dorm room and return to Chicago, the egg had simply vanished, along with any inhibitions she may have felt about her sexuality. Woodridge had called the egg her rebirth and a reminder of the ability of flight. Perhaps it had flown the coop. But eggs don’t fly, and Nelle thought that, although beautiful, the analogy see
med a bit one-size-fits-all. Still, she wished that she had the egg to give to Jean.
“So, this egg . . . maybe it represents an ovary?” Jean offered.
“Well, that’s biased,” Nelle laughed. “Can’t it be a testicle?”
Jean laughed. “You know that’s not the way it works, right?”
“How would I know?” Nelle prodded. “How do you know?”
“I don’t know,” Jean teased. “Education? Books?”
Jean shared life growing up in Mississippi. “It was five of us, but my daddy loved me most of all. I had to leave though. It was killing him—me being me. He was a big Black country man, but he told me, ‘Baby, you just be you.’ Can you imagine that?”
Jean’s voice was hollow as it reached Nelle’s ears through the closed door.
“You were lucky,” Nelle responded. “Not everybody got that.” She choked down thoughts of June Bug.
Jean continued, “He was the strongest man I’ve ever known. Wanted to return every taunt and blow that they gave me. But some things you just can’t serve back.” Jean’s voice trailed off before adding, “So he let me go.”
Nelle could hear Jean shifting around in the water as it dripped from unimagined places.
Jean sighed. “No one knows what to do with me but you.”
Nelle laughed. “I’m the only one who doesn’t do anything with you.”
“Exactly!” Jean’s voice raised above the swishing water. “And it makes me so happy. Please always keep doing that.” There was a silent pause, and then the splatter-tap of wet feet on linoleum. The bathroom lock disengaged, and the door creaked open.
Nelle scrambled around and was faced with the fluorescence of the bathroom light, the warmth of the steaming tub, and Jean—wet and nude.
Jean’s eyes held Nelle’s as Jean said, “I’m tired of talking through doors,” before turning on heels and returning to the tub. Nelle looked at the bourbon in her glass, amazed that she hadn’t upset it, and poured it down her throat. Slowly she rose and entered the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.
When Eve told Brother LeRoi about her plans to visit Macon County, he cautioned her to be careful. They sat in his office much like they had on their first meeting, with Brother LeRoi twirling the egg around in his pale palm and Eve perched on the edge of the chair across from him.
“I know that things are different in the South.” Eve responded.
“It’s not just that, Eve.”
“I also know I’m a woman, and that comes with its own dangers—white people but also Black men as well.” Eve remembered the warnings from Mama Ann, who issued just as many cautions against interactions with Black men as she did white people. We love ’em, but they don’t always love us.
Eve liked to think that Brother LeRoi was different. He seemed kind and caring, but she’d known men who were like brothers to her while being the worst abusers to their wives. A childhood friend swore that if any man laid a hand on her, he’d unleash vengeance tenfold. Yet his own wife’s heavy foundation and blush struggled to cover the bruises and crescent-shaped imprint on her cheek that matched her husband’s ring.
“Yes, that’s all true. But my warning is more about things . . . unanticipated,” Brother LeRoi explained.
“Unanticipated? Like what?”
Brother LeRoi thought of his recent interactions with Amy. His half-sister’s persistence in connecting with him and naive imaginings that he could ever access the lineage outside of his Blackness troubled him in advising Eve to go so willfully into the genealogical abyss.
“You’re ready for the truth?” he asked.
“I’ve been waiting all my life.”
“So then, you’re ready for the horrible, painful truth of it all? The god-awful truth and reasons for the irrevocable lies that cover it?” He allowed the egg a spin on the desktop.
Without missing a beat, Eve replied, “I’m ready to be the one who determines what I get to do with it.”
The egg slowly came to a halt, one end pointing at Brother LeRoi, the other at Eve. She left with a list of interview questions, the egg nestled snugly in her corduroy pocket, and a resolve to tell Mama Ann about her plans.
Interlude
damnatio memoriae
(condemnation of memory)
Few women have ever served as Egyptian Pharaoh. At the time of Hatshepsut’s rule around 1500 BCE, there didn’t exist a word for female rulership in Egypt. Upon her death, her stepson-nephew ascended to the throne and obliterated Hatshepsut from history, chiseling his own name over her cartouches, removing her images, and destroying her statues. Hatshepsut was erased from history for 3,500 years. The struggle to wipe events and people from memory is equaled only by their reciprocal refusal to stay hidden. Perhaps there is a place for such erasures: a small Georgia town renamed and reestablished by two railroad executives; the burning away of an all-Black town in Florida; the same fate befalling the thriving economic community called Black Wall Street in Tulsa; the first Great Mississippi Flood that overtook New Orleans.
Ann could no more deny Eve’s inquisition than Brother LeRoi could prevent Amy from disclosing the contents of his mother’s letter. Taking Brother LeRoi’s advice, Eve confronted her aunt with the photograph she had found, her own damnatio memoriae. Pulling it from the rear pocket of her bell-bottom jeans, she placed it on the counter next to the dish rack one morning as Ann washed the breakfast dishes. Ann’s eyes glanced toward it, but she continued to rinse the plate in her hand and placed it in the rack. Drops of water landed on the picture. Eve snatched it and pressed it against her shirt. “Careful!”
Ann continued to wash the dishes, but there was an added intensity to her scrubbing, as if every plate bore the hardened remains of dried food.
“Who are these people?” Eve inquired.
“It should say it on the back,” Ann responded coolly.
“I mean who are they to you?”
“Dead.”
“Well, they can’t all be dead, can they?”
Ann dried her hands on a dishrag. “You’re right. I’m still here. Have been all your life. The only family you know.” She faced Eve. “And now that you all grown up and smellin’ yo’self, I ain’t enough.”
“That’s not true, Mama Ann. You know I love you and appreciate everything that you’ve done for me . . .”
“And this is how you show it? By rifling through my belongings?” Ann’s lips pursed into a tight grimace, and Eve recognized it as a look that had shut down many conversations over the years. But she was not going to be deterred. “Well, who were they to me then?” Eve held the photograph between them and pointed. “I know that’s you. And my mom. And Grandma Gertrude. But who’s this man, Mama Ann?” Her aunt dropped her eyes and began to retreat into that silence where she stood guard over the secrets Eve was attempting to pry open.
“I don’t understand how you can just . . . erase people, family even, from your mind.” Eve’s exasperation cracked through her voice.
Ann lifted her eyes in one final moment of defiance. “You have no idea who or what is in my mind.”
“Then tell me.”
But her aunt’s mind held fast to her secrets, slamming the door against memory to ensure no one else found their way out of the damnatio memoriae, the metaphysical Alcatraz from which an Egyptian pharaohess had escaped and now escorted others. Hatshepsut, the Harriet Tubman of forgotten memories.
Ann untied the apron from around her waist. “I can’t,” she whispered and walked out of the kitchen. Eve called to her retreating form, but Ann continued to walk to her bedroom. Ann heard the words, heard her niece’s threat to find out on her own.
“I’ve already looked it up, and it’s a tiny town, Mama Ann!” The voice was muffled by the time it had traveled down the hallway and penetrated the closed door to reach Ann’s ears. Ann sat on her bed enveloped in
the greenness of her room and sighed. There were things she felt Eve should know, yet she was conflicted. She believed that it was not her duty to speak of them. She had raised her sister’s child. She had even talked of difficult matters with her, as mother to child, woman to girl. She had educated her on bodily changes and hygiene and even sex, to the best of her sexually conservative nature. But there were some things that Ann could not speak of—undesirable things whose very description offended her sense of morality. Ann had tried at various times in the past to provide Eve with information about their family. But every answer she supplied only caused questions to spring tenfold from her niece. So Ann chose the silence and erased the undesirable elements until all that remained was herself and Eve, whose birth story gradually took on the characteristics of an immaculate conception.
But the presence of the photograph challenged the silence. In her bedroom, Ann wondered why she had even kept it only to have it resurface like Hatshepsut’s obelisks from behind the concrete that concealed them. Ann felt her own walls crumbling, but she had known on some level that it would happen. In order to forget one, she had buried them all in the recesses of her mind. She could not discuss her sister, Eve’s mother, without having to address the circumstances of her death and Eve’s simultaneous birth. It was a terrible conundrum. She couldn’t erase names from stories without it resulting in the dismantling of the story itself.
In the kitchen, Eve held the photograph, bringing it close to her face. She had the same high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, and full lips as the other women in her family. She had seen pictures of her aunt, mother, and grandmother before, but this was her first time seeing this man identified by name only in Ann’s faded, curly script on the back of the picture.
Eve stared into the eyes of the solidly built, dark-skinned man. “Who the hell are you, Cornelius Gaines?” she whispered.
PART II
My great-grandmama told my grandmama the
part she lived through that my grandmama didn’t
live through and my grandmama told my mama what they
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