The Eves

by Grace Sammon

  Turning from this reality, I try to gather my thoughts and experiences from yesterday. I want to catalogue them as closely as I can remember. I’m not yet ready to give Sonia her due, but I know her well enough that there is always wisdom in her words. She knows me well enough that she’s raised the challenge of writing. It’s my trigger. I love the feel of the words flowing through my fingers on to the keyboard, appearing on the screen. Creating a story where there was nothing. Always surprising myself at the result.

  I give each of the handprints a quick kiss and tuck them under my iPod, grab my coffee, take the stairs to my snug little office, and begin. Closing my eyes, inhaling, I try to be grateful and at peace. Letting the good parts of yesterday flow through me again.

  Title? Sonia’s Project? No. Who is the audience for what I will write? Unknown. I decide to write about yesterday in the present tense. I take a moment waiting for how the day will unfold on my screen. How to begin? At the beginning! Deep breath and my fingers glide:

  It is an October, picture-post-card-perfect Washington, DC, morning. I come bounding, or what I consider “bounding” these days, down the steps of my Hobart Street house. Sonia is leaning against the car waiting. The sky is finally blue again, after months of summer gray. The air is crisp. Sonia utters an equally crisp, “Why is it that you are dressed like that? How many times do I have to tell you, Jessica Barnet, when you are dead, they will not care what you said, they will remember only how you looked!”

  “Good morning to you, too,” I say, handing her a cup of coffee for the quick trip to Anacostia, then down to Martinsburg. Sonia, many, many years my junior, driven, flamboyant, lovely. She’s come out of her way to pick me up. It’s 7 o’clock am. She has already talked to the people in Martinsburg, checking on the details of the day. She’s printed off some materials for me to review, and run three miles on the treadmill, undoubtedly laying out plans for her next academic article as she ran.

  Even with the convertible top down, she’s arrived with every hair in place. She has her hair tightly wrapped in an Evita Peron-like bun at the nape of her neck, yellow and black shirt, black designer jeans, black boots with yellow laces, and new white work gloves with yellow trim tucked neatly into her right rear pocket.

  It doesn’t matter that our goal for the day is to harvest an acre of land. Sonia is all about making a statement. When she speaks, she is strong and decisive. Her words, as well as her gestures, cut the air, ensuring that inflection, body language, and message are all in concert. She has the same Latina charisma I imagine in her fellow countrywoman Evita.

  By contrast, I am dressed in black sweatpants with a hole at the knee, sneakers, a T-shirt with freshly splattered coffee, and a university sweatshirt tied around my waist. I look pasty and pale next to Sonia in both skin tone and attire. My accomplishments this morning entail making the coffee and leaving a scribbled note for Roy, asking him to hold off on the crown molding for the front parlor. He’s frustrated, I think, at the slow pace of the renovation. But the molding is just one more decision I can put off until tomorrow.

  Erica is in the back seat of the Saab listening to music, the ever-present camera at her side. She gives me an “it’s too early” sullen nod but she will come alive by mid-morning, a replica of her mother’s animation in every respect. Sonia was very young and unmarried when she gave birth to Erica. It was the last unplanned thing she did.

  Sonia and I are unlikely friends from graduate school. She is way ahead of me in career plan and accomplishment. She’s already put a few years behind her as Doctor Sonia Cortez. She teaches at Martinsburg Community College in Calvert County, Maryland. She is also Dean of Special Projects—official and otherwise. Each of these projects is geared, in part, for the greater good and, in part, for the good of Sonia. She is, like I said, all about making statements. The energy and the clarity of purpose she brings with her are among the many skills that I believe will eventually position her for national office.

  I assume I am one of her special projects, for which I am, begrudgingly, grateful. You can understand why she’s focused on me. Ever since the trial, it’s been too easy for me to crawl under a rock. My dissertation, “Mitochondrial DNA: Our Mother’s Story,” still sits in the same spot it did a few years ago. I know I am selling the University and my students short—coasting on old lectures. I’ve quit almost all activity, avoid almost everyone, and I’m already thinking of cancelling the trip I just booked to go on an African safari.

  It’s more than the added pounds of the past years that make me sluggish and slow to act.

  Today, I am convinced Sonia is weaving me neatly into a plan I don’t yet understand. It’s part of her “get Jessica out and about program.” She’s mixing that with a small army of college students she’s gathered to bring inner-city youth into new experiences. First, we head into Southeast DC, along Pennsylvania Avenue, decidedly away from The White House. Passing the aging RFK stadium, former home of the Washington Redskins, former home to the Nationals, and current home to the DC United soccer team, we cross the river, unassumingly, into Anacostia. It is one of the poorest, primarily African American, and most historically interesting parts of the nation’s capital. Here, Fredrick Douglass and Booker T. Washington and the Black elite of the 1890s made their homes.

  At Anacostia High School we meet up with a “cheese bus” and thirty brown- and black-skinned high school students. The kids hate these buses. They know the difference between the buses with air conditioning and Wi-Fi for the kids from the affluent Upper Northwest, DC or Potomac, Maryland and the busses waiting for them today. These school buses are old, the color of Velveeta cheese. Sonia has selected them for a reason—to remind Erica that it’s not about the Saab or the Mercedes. Sometimes life is a cheese bus. It gets you there all the same.

  We ride the short thirty-two miles down Pennsylvania Avenue away from Washington and down Rt. 4, across the District line into Maryland. Martinsburg is literally on the rim of the nation’s capital, and worlds away from it.

  It’s an odd thing, I think, how the city evaporates so quickly in every direction from Capitol Hill. Within an hour, sometimes less, you can be in the horse country of Virginia or the tobacco and farming fields of Maryland. As the nation’s capital falls behind us, other things too fall away from the group—the high school students are showing less posturing bravado and the college students are talking in more relaxed tones. Erica, finally awake, is multitasking, chatting about greenhouse emissions and the effects of farm runoff on the watershed, intermittently snapping photographs, and checking out the high school boys. All the while her hands are articulating through the air exactly like her mother’s.

  Our destination is a series of buildings and farmland nestled in Martinsburg, part of Calvert County, Maryland, just north of Calvert Cliffs. Sonia is giving me the background. Established as an independent parcel in 1868, the land was given to Tobias and Delores Thatcher, newly freed slaves, by relatives of Oliver Kelley and his niece Caroline Hall. The gift fell nicely in line with Kelley’s desire to support the establishment of The National Grange Project.

  Sonia is surprised by my blank face, which gives away that I know nothing of this project. Like many people who come to the US from other countries, she knows more US history than those of us who were born here. The Grange came into existence, she says, not-so-patiently, and in footnote-like fashion, following the American Civil War in an effort to unite citizens in improving the economic and social position of the nation’s farm population. She precisely paints the picture of a group of seven men, assisted by Caroline Hall, sitting around a plain wooden table planning to create an organization that would become a vital force in American democracy. Sonia, as in all things, is adamant that these first “grangers” were people of vision, with faith in God, their fellow man, and the future. Today, over a hundred years later, The National Grange building still sits across the street from the White House and is the only privately held building on the block.
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  “I am surprised you do not know of this,” Sonia clips and continues. “Today we are going to a spot where the earliest grangers coupled their vision with a gift to the Thatchers. It was part of the legislated ‘40 acres and a mule’ promised to freed African slaves giving them the opportunity to plow and own their own land.

  “You know, I assume, that that legislation was ill-fated, seldom enacted, and quickly repealed. In fact, it never applied in Maryland, but Tobias and Delores benefitted from the spirit of it and they agreed with ‘Mr. Oliver’s’ and ‘Miss Caroline’s’ intent for the National Grange Project. They decided to call their exactly forty acres, simply, ‘The Grange’ and they named the mule Oliver. I am not sure if this was out of respect for Oliver Kelly, or because Tobias and Delores recognized his stubbornness. Regardless, from that day to this, the land has stayed in the Thatcher family.

  “When we get to The Grange you will see the rolling hills, the outbuildings, and the edge of the cliffs leading to the sharp drop to Chesapeake Bay. The story goes that because of a soft spot in that first Tobias’ heart, and the firmness of his Last Will and Testament, there has been, and always will be, a mule named Oliver at The Grange. There has also always been a Tobias.

  The man you will meet today is the great grandson of the first Tobias. His daughter, and her partner CC, take care of much of the operation now, but, as you will see, it is very much a place where new beginnings take shape.

  “Tia and CC are an interesting pair. I do not think that Tobias imagined ‘white’ or ‘being a woman’ on the list of attributes for his only daughter’s partner. At close to ninety, however, he is happy to turn over the reins and see The Grange slip into a new set of hands. He’s come to accept Tia as she is, and CC as she is. In so doing Tobias has had to accept that the Thatcher bloodline on this land is coming to an end.”

  At this point, the bus takes a jarring left turn off of Rt. 4 and makes its lumbering climb up the gravel drive. Comments from the students pull Sonia away from my introduction to The Grange. The high school students’ comments of “there’s nothing here” and “how come it’s so empty” are sandwiched between wide-eyed anticipation and “what do people do out here.”

  It’s evident, in an instant, how far we are from what we know.

  As we come off the bus we are met by Tia—a pretty, middle-aged, round, coffee-colored woman. She’s patient as she waits for us to get off the bus, and patient still until we are quiet enough to be welcomed. She and CC work in unison. They’ve done these harvests for years. We are given our mission—to harvest one acre of land surrounded by buckwheat. The students laugh at the word buckwheat, their only association being with the wild-haired, ebony-hewed character from The Little Rascals. The plant surrounding our designated acre couldn’t be more of a contrast to that—two feet high, deep green foliage, delicate white flowers.

  Tia waits for the students to settle down again and points out that there are adjacent acres, but the goal is to have us work this one acre, reap the harvest, and package the cornucopia of our work into baskets and boxes for donation to the Anacostia Food Pantry.

  Students who have come more appropriately dressed for the mall than the acreage are quickly and effortlessly refitted with work boots, overalls, gloves, and the like. Sounds of “But there’s nothing here!” fall way to sounds of amazement as huge carrots and softball-sized beets are pulled from the warm earth. Rows of beans of a hundred hues, now dried on their stalks and vines, are pulled, filling buckets. Car tires, stacked tall to protect the peppers from the wind and to keep in the heat, are carefully dismantled and the last of the crop finds its way to baskets.

  Hundreds of garlic bulbs are pulled from the drying shed and the buckwheat is threshed for later milling. There is laughing and singing, along with groans, as the weight of our efforts is pulled to the edge of the field.

  Erica is everywhere, taking pictures.

  We break for a lunch of vegetarian chili made entirely from this land’s harvest. Tomatoes, beans, corn, peppers, and spiciness ground from the pepper seeds. The students are so hungry they quickly stop asking why there isn’t meat in the meal. The warmth of the chili is most welcome. Once we have stopped working, we feel the nip of the October air settle in. One by one we notice a golf cart careening over the fields headed straight for us.

  Tia announces that Tobias will be joining us for lunch. At eighty-seven, he is no longer able to drive a car, but the golf cart suits its purpose. He uses a cane to get from the cart to some bales of hay that lie about. Despite a sense of age, he looks strong and healthy, as if the cane is only a temporary aid.

  “Welcome to this place,” he says, with a gentle timbre in his voice. There is something in his presence that undemandingly demands respect. The students give him their attention. I take in the beauty of the darkness of his skin and the dry, work-wornness of his hands. He continues.

  “My father, and his father, and his father before him, and others before them, farmed this land. The first land records about this place go back to 1670, a time before presidents, a time before there was a United States.” He waits to see if the enormity of that sinks in on his audience. “I own it now, although I am not really sure you can own a place like this. Certainly, the Native Americans who walked these fields before 1670 knew that,” he says with a chuckle. “I’ve always thought we are more like caregivers, tending the earth while we walk it. This land will be here long after we are all buried under it. For over two-hundred years now this land has been worked by Blacks both slave and free. I’m honored you’re here with me today—welcome.”

  As he talks his eyes run over the land as gently as if he was caressing it. “There’s a lot of history here. It’s amazing what can result from a single gift. My great-grandparents were given the original parcel of forty acres of land. Over time my grandfather and then my father bought what used to be the plantation house and an additional thousand acres or so. We lease a lot of the land out, but somehow, it’s still all connected. My father did well by the work of those before him and did well on his own. He made sure we all got an education and made sure we all knew the value of hard work.”

  He readjusts himself on the hay bale and continues pointing to a house in the distance. “The original plantation house over there is the last of its kind in Maryland. You might not notice it, so I’m going to point it out. The house is laid out in the shape of a cross. The architects wanted it to symbolize that here we are committed to the land and to God. The house has got a porch, turret towers at the four corners, and a rear staircase. I always liked a house with a rear staircase.

  “You probably didn’t notice the old store on the corner of Route 4, just before you turn up the drive. We run that, too, and try to keep it both efficient and what CC here would call ‘charming.’ We’re also building a new house over there for the ladies. You’ll meet them later. The new place will be kind to the environment and made, in fact, out of straw bales like you are sitting on. Before you leave you should go over and see the progress we’re making. When it’s done you won’t know that the frame is grown from these fields and covered in stucco made from our clay.

  “Despite the history of the place, we are not really so much about preserving the past as we are about looking at the future. I say this so that when you see my mule Oliver over there at the milling post, you will understand that it’s not about being quaint or historic. Oliver can do the job. It saves us using electricity or gas. Come spring he’ll be out here helping plow the earth. There are pigs and chickens over by the main barn, and llamas and sheep by the smaller outbuildings. We’ve got bees over on the far side of the fields. They seem to be a simple insect, but they are endangered and that’s a bad thing for all of us.

  “The buckwheat that surrounds this field has a job to do. It pours nutrients into the soil, keeps the weeds down, and serves as a nectar, a food, for those important bees.

  “We call all of this, together, The Grange, partly because of a
man’s idea for a project, but mostly because my great-grandfather liked that the definition of the word “grange” is more than just a farm. A grange is a farm but also the residence and outbuildings of a ‘gentleman farmer. A ‘gentleman farmer’” he repeats with emphasis. “Not bad for a freed colored man. But I’ve gotten to talking too long. We still have work to do today. So, I’m honored you came. Thank you for coming. I’m glad you took the time.”

  As Tobias heads back across the fields in his cart, I quickly make the timeline matches of The Grange and my Hobart Street, Mt. Pleasant home. Both can tie their development to the Calvert and Carroll families and their status as “Lords Baltimore.” It struck me as funny that as The Grange was getting started in the mid- to late-1600s not only had my area of DC not been developed yet but Washington, DC, itself would not be created until 1791. Even at that, my neighborhood, just three miles from The White House, wouldn’t see what we would call “development” until the 1900s.

  When Tobias is out of sight, I join in the work of boxing the vegetables, raking back our acre, spreading it with manure, and gently putting it to sleep for the winter. As we finish up, we carry the baskets of beans to the barn. I instantly love the feel of the place as we cross the threshold. The original planking has been worn by many a man and mule. Inside there is a modernized space powered by wind and sun. Twenty car batteries are nestled in the wall, taking nature’s charge, and passing it to lights and fans. Inside there are long wooden tables in a work area. At the far end, behind glass, there is space for Oliver.

  On each of five tables there are large wooden bowls put out for our use as we shuck and sort the beans. At four of the tables there is a woman serving as a table host to the students. They seem ancient to the students, and very old to me. They must range in age from seventy to one hundred.