“You sit here and take care of him! The man that killed your own husband! I guess that’s fine with God though.”
The slap was not surprising. Not to Mercy, who didn’t even flinch upon its impact. Not to Ann, who was riveted by the drama. And not to Gertrude, who had been suppressing the impulse since she saw the prenatal spread of her daughter’s body. Truthfully, she had wanted to do much more harm, and it had scared her. The slap served as a compromise. Now, confused by the turmoil of her actions, she didn’t want to take it back but had an impulse to grab Mercy into a hug that was tight enough to be both love and hate. But she didn’t. Her arms stood limp at her sides. Her feet remained planted on the floorboards.
1972
Evelyn had neared the end of her glass. Eve’s remained untouched in her clenched hand. “Who was the . . . Who’s my father?” she asked.
Evelyn sighed. “Well, you got to understand how different things was twenty years ago. Small town. Everybody was always up in everybody else business ’cause we ain’t have all the distractions you young folk got now.”
“Who was he?” Eve repeated.
“Well, your mama never did say. But . . .” Evelyn drained the last swallow of whiskey.
“Ms. Evelyn, please.”
Evelyn nodded. “They say it was Cornelius. He denied it, of course.” Evelyn glanced cautiously toward the door and lowered her voice. “Don’t even think about asking Deuce. He practically raised Cornelius, and he won’t hear no parts of it. Say ain’t no way Cornelius done that.”
“What do you think?” Eve asked.
“I think Cornelius was complicated. He done some bad things, and he done good things. We like to think that men are simple. Feed ’em and love ’em, and that’s all they need. But they more complicated than that. They do some great things and then turn round and commit some of the worst sins ever thought of.”
“Did he . . . Was she forced?”
“She never said one way or ’nother. Never said who the daddy was or wasn’t. And if it wasn’t Cornelius, then Lord help us all, ’cause he went to his grave claiming it wasn’t him. Spent that whole time before your mama took off pleading with her to tell the truth.”
Eve finally sipped her whiskey. The shock of the information overpowered the burn of the liquid making its way down her throat. “Is there anyone else who’d know anything?”
“Maybe Geneva. She and your mama was thick as thieves, if I remember.”
“So . . . my sort of step-grandfather may have been my father too?” Eve looked at Evelyn. Evelyn peered out into the darkness beyond the porch. Somewhere in her storytelling, the floodgates had opened, and lines between what should and shouldn’t be told had blurred. She had not shared the circumstances of Hezekiah’s death, perhaps out of some allegiance to Deuce. Perhaps as a last-minute reprieve to Cornelius, whose kindness to Gertrude she had witnessed. More than likely, it was because of what happens when large chunks of lived experience and relationships are abridged into answers to single-sentence inquiries like Eve’s question. Years of love and pain become trivialized into story lines that resemble soap opera plots—tales for housewives, with which Evelyn had become familiar. She had been a faithful viewer, like most who could manage to steal a break during work hours, of One Life to Live ever since Ellen Holly graced the screen as the first Black soap opera actress. The series saw a spike in its African American viewership, even among men, who were not part of its target audience. To Evelyn, Eve’s summation sounded like something straight out of her morning stories, and she was reminded why no one wanted to go back down this particular road.
Fourteen
unfixable things
I believe that to know the essence of a thing
requires returning as closely as possible to the
origin of that thing. The passage of time tends
to quietly erode meaning and enthusiasm. The farther
you move away from the sun, the colder it gets.
—Wynton Marsalis, Moving to Higher Ground
The past is an unfixable thing. It cannot be mended. Its deeds are always irreparable. The past is read-only. It does not allow for revisions. Yet it remains tethered to the present, waiting for visitors who can only watch it replay itself. Its most salient lesson is not that past wrongs can be made right, but rather that they do not have to be repeated. The past says to remedy seekers, “Look upon me and learn, but do not seek to change me.” It stares at daughters from their mothers’ eyes and is as implicit in the handshakes of strangers as it is in the burial of secrets.
James wasn’t much of a drinking man. Over the years, he had tried, knowing that those who imbibed on a regular basis had some nominal success in keeping the past at bay. But James didn’t have the constitution for it, and the only taste he could develop was for light potables like sweet-flavored wines and sherry. He generally kept a small bottle of something hidden in his shed as most of his friends did in their private spaces. After rushing out of the back door just as Eve entered the front, James now settled himself in his shed and fumbled to pull open the rusted metal drawer that concealed a bottle of port.
The shed was filled with an accumulation of unfixable things: telephones, lamps, and other items that Geneva had insisted he throw away but that never quite managed to make it to the trash. James liked to tinker with them. He took them apart, performing electrical autopsies that sometimes uncovered the cause of their dysfunction. He could put them back together fairly efficiently, but that was the limit of his skill set. So the broken things were dissected and pieced back together without repair. James enjoyed having an intimate knowledge of the parts of things. But he was unconcerned with their function as a whole.
Shed time did not solve the problems of the day, but it did calm most of its turbulence. He could tinker with a “new” item or reflect on tinkering with old ones. James took a swig of the port and gently placed the avocado-green toaster he had purchased less than a month ago on his worktable. Geneva had spent four months begging him to buy it and had taken only one month to break it. He didn’t know the details of its untimely demise, only that it had arrived at his shed soaking wet. James had long ago resigned himself to the fact that his wife seemed to enjoy breaking things as much as he enjoyed tinkering with them once they were broken.
He blamed the magazine subscriptions that Geneva convinced him to purchase. Her weekly visits to the hairdresser had become marred with despondency. She complained about not being current on events. When he suggested that she read the newspaper as he did, she became enraged, pacing and flailing about until she almost knocked over the recently purchased Mr. Coffee percolator that he’d driven nearly fifty miles and exhaustingly stood in line for at the Sears, Roebuck and Company. Once the magazines began to arrive, James realized that it wasn’t so much about current events as it was current fashion, household appliances, and gossip. Essence magazine encouraged them to “subscribe to Blackness,” but James found that what he had actually subscribed to were appliance manufacturers, various makeup and hair-care companies, and other people’s ideas about his daily life. It was a monthly bombardment of advertisements that fed Geneva’s thirst for the “new,” and James was sorry he had ever caved in to her pleadings.
Another swig of port, and he placed his hands on the toaster. He would have personally preferred the copper tone, but Geneva had insisted on the green as it matched the Frigidaire. James picked up the screwdriver and carefully removed the screws from the bottom panel. He pushed the toaster aside and exhaled deeply. His head wasn’t in it. Before his departure from the house, he had seen Eve’s eyes, and they were the same as his own. James had always known, but seeing was a different type of knowing. Now he wanted to push it back into the recesses of his mind, where it had been secured for over twenty years. Even then, he’d thought that the knowledge was too close for comfort. Yet compared to now, with the physical evidence drinking iced tea in his kitch
en with his wife, what he felt before had been a cakewalk. Grabbing the port, he chugged as much of it as he could. James willed his heartbeat to slow from the frantic pace that had begun earlier in the day when Geneva received a phone call from Evelyn Johnston. He’d only caught one phrase, Mercy’s child, but it had set his heart racing. He hadn’t known that he would flee the house upon her arrival. In fact, he’d planned to stay and open the long-buried conversation. But when he glanced the spitting image of Mercy approaching up the walkway, he was out the back door and into the shed before Eve had pressed the doorbell.
When Geneva opened the door, she was taken aback by the resemblance of Eve to her girlhood friend. Eve was a little curvier than her mother had been. Her bell-bottom jeans and matching denim jacket would not have been Mercy’s style even had she lived to see the changing fashions of the seventies with women wearing trousers. Geneva pulled Eve into a startling embrace. “Oh my God, child. If you don’t look like your mother.”
Eve stepped back. “I guess I never realized it till now . . . down here. My aunt doesn’t really say much about her.”
Geneva guided Eve into the sitting room. “Nawl, I guess she wouldn’t. They didn’t get along. Those two were water and oil if I ever did see it.”
Eve sat perched on the edge of the sofa. She’d been a bloodhound on the trail of finding whatever she could about her mother. Now it seemed that all that energy and the implications of this newfound knowledge were suffocating her. Geneva was the same age—late thirties—that her mother would have been. Sitting there talking, Eve was struck by how close in age she would have been to her mother. Her mother had been a pregnant child. She hadn’t really thought of it that way before. They would have grown up together.
Geneva was the youngest person Eve had spoken with in Ideal. It had given her the impression that the town was old. Although Geneva didn’t look old. Her hair was styled in a fashionable bob, she wore green polyester pants and matching loafers. Geneva may have looked youthful, but she, too, felt aged in the way that southerners appear to their northern counterparts. Perhaps it’s due to their unhurried nature. It had taken hours for Eve to get stories from Deuce and Evelyn, and it seemed that information was not going to pour from Geneva any quicker.
Yet, they wanted to share. All of them had. Deuce, Evelyn, and now Geneva had invited Eve into their homes, offered her food and drink, and had every intention of sharing everything they knew about her family. But when they thought of where to begin and flashed back through all the events from effect to cause, they became stifled. Trapped between what should be known and what couldn’t be told.
“Your mother and I were the best of friends. We did everything together,” Geneva told Eve. And she shared with Eve stories of her adventures with Mercy. Stories that were limited to schoolyard tales and pranks on Ann. Stories that were strangely bereft of schoolboy crushes.
Eve’s thoughts naturally drifted toward her lifelong friendship with Nelle. She wondered what, if any, rift had occurred between her mother and Geneva. Had Mercy died before it could be sorted out?
Eve relaxed into the sofa and reached toward her mother through the retellings. Still, she was not deterred from seeking the obvious missing information. At some point in those young-girl shenanigans, Mercy had ended up pregnant. “Ms. Geneva, I don’t know who my father is.”
Geneva paused and walked to the mantel and retrieved a photo album. “She wouldn’t even tell me who it was. We had . . . grown apart in those months.” Geneva suspected the cause, but fearing self-incrimination, she remained silent. She couldn’t tell Eve why Mercy had withdrawn from her that spring of 1950, after Ann had spotted them kissing in the shack.
Spring 1950, Macon County
Geneva and Mercy hadn’t worried about Ann, but perhaps they should have. One evening the sisters were helping their mother clean up after dinner. Gertrude was in an unusually talkative mood. “What you girls gon’ git into today?”
Ann was silent, but Mercy replied, “Me an’ Geneva thought we’d see how that plum tree comin’ around.”
Ann snorted to herself. Gertrude glanced at her before responding to Mercy. “Your sistuh’s right. That ol’ thang ain’t neva gon’ bear no fruit. I don’t know why y’all even waste your time on it.”
Mercy chuckled and put away the last of the dishes she was cleaning. “If you have but the faith of a mustard seed, Mama.”
Gertrude laughed. “Well, I’ll be! Somebody’s been reading the Bible.”
“I know all the good parts by heart.” Mercy grinned and rushed out the door, leaving her mother to shake her head.
Mercy’s departure freed Ann’s tongue. “Mama, don’t you think that she spend too much time with Geneva?”
Gertrude faced Ann. “You wanna spend more time with yo’ sistuh?”
Ann frowned. “Nothin’ like that, Mama. I jes think . . .” She paused as she tried to figure out the best way to tell her mother, a woman who in her mind walked with God, that her daughter was a sodomite.
“You think what?”
Ann couldn’t do it. But there were other options. She decided to choose a path that she felt was righteously silent. Her mother had already lost a husband to sin. Ann wasn’t about to tell her that she’d lost a daughter as well.
Gertrude mistook the silence. “You wanna know what I thank? I thank that maybe you could use a close girlfriend yo’self. Then you ain’t got to be jealous of yo’ sistuh.”
Ann spun on her heels. “I ain’t jealous of her. I hate her!”
“That’s enough! I ain’t gonna stand here and let you spit evil in my house. Hatred against yo’ own flesh and blood. I ain’t raised you that way.”
Ann closed her mouth on the thought that her mother would be surprised at what she had raised. They worked in silence until Gertrude left for evening prayer, a much-needed one due to the evening’s activities. Ann looked out of the kitchen window at her sister, who was picking dandelions in the yard. If prayer saves, then in that moment Ann plotted her sister’s salvation. She retrieved her small Bible from the room they shared and joined Mercy outside.
The first day, she read Romans. “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature . . .” Mercy continued to pluck dandelions and ignored Ann, who continued, “And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust toward one another . . .”
Mercy cast a glance at Ann and began walking away, with Ann in pursuit. “. . . Men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.” Mercy trotted away at a quicker pace. Finding it too difficult to read and walk, Ann returned to the house with a sly grin.
The next day, Mercy awoke to 1 Corinthians in the form of Ann’s withering voice. “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived . . .” Mercy covered her face with the pillow and turned her back toward Ann’s side of the room.
It took two days for Ann to find additional passages, but she was pleased to catch Mercy on her way to visit Geneva. She had memorized the short verse in Leviticus and was able to keep up with Mercy as they tramped through the brush toward the shack. “Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind. It’s a ’bomination.” Mercy faltered in her steps, and Ann smiled before delivering the final blow. “And if a man also lie with mankind as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed a ’bomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.”
Mercy ran into the shack and slammed the door. Ann waited outside and was rewarded minutes later when a stunned Geneva emerged with tear-streaked cheeks. She stumbled past Ann as if she didn’t see her. It was this memory that Geneva withheld from Eve decades later: that whatever happened to her mother, Ann had set it in motion. But no one could extricate themselves from it. Not
Ann. Not Geneva. And not her husband, James.
James loved Mercy, but it earned him no favor with her. She looked right through him as if searching for something better on the other side. But Ideal was a small town, and matches were made in church houses, woodshed groping sessions, and shotgun wedding ceremonies. James knew that unless some stranger came to town and whisked her away, Mercy didn’t have much of a choice other than him. Small-town colored girls dreamed of small-town colored boys, and those that didn’t did not have the mobility to find their fate elsewhere.
It seemed to James that Mercy was coming into this awareness amid frequent arguments with her mother and sister. She was becoming a woman; he had certainly noticed it. Time, he thought, for Mercy to spend less time with Geneva and more time being courted. Everything required timing, and James was just working up the nerve to approach Big C for permission to court Mercy when she sought him out. He was surprised, to say the least. It had seemed that a great deal of her existence was predicated on avoiding him, so when she came around one afternoon to the funeral home while he was making up the recently departed elder Hughes, his first thought was that something had gone so terribly wrong that she had been forced to seek him out. Perhaps as the last man in Ideal.
He placed the cinnamon-hued foundation on the table and rushed to escort Mercy out of the preparation room. Sliding the doors closed behind him, he turned to Mercy. “Everythang alright, Mercy?”
Mercy nodded. “You wanna take a walk?”
Afraid to speak lest his voice squeak and reveal his nervousness, James managed to grunt his consent. They walked down the recently paved road until it returned to its former dirt. Mercy paused at the old dry well, running her hand across the jagged concrete edges. She knelt to sit, and James rushed to her side. He wanted to do something chivalrous like spread out a blanket for her, but he had nothing save the shirt on his back. He stripped off his shirt and grandly placed it on the ground. He was rewarded by Mercy’s laugh, which seemed to emerge from her throat in spite of herself, and she clasped her hand to her mouth in a delayed effort to contain it. James knew he had to say something to try to make the most of each moment with her. He was the man, after all, and it was fully expected of him to take charge of things.
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