In the Country of Women

by Susan Straight

  I wear makeup every day, gold and green eye shadow with glimmer (I never wear matte, because I am still of the working-class women Joan Didion eviscerated, and women like me always choose frost).

  My hair now looks exactly as it did during my junior year of high school. My appearance-laziness is well-established in this house, as my daughters will testify. My hair is long because I don’t care about it. My friend Tracy trims it twice a year and suggests I come in more often. Some women in academia and publishing have told me that my hair and lipstick make me appear unintelligent. What they mean is that I look like a Sherry or Debbi—and I do. I am a descendant of two Golden Dreamers with no money. I blow-dry my hair by going into the backyard to feed my chickens, while the hot Santa Ana winds race through my orange and apricot trees. I often see my friends named Sherry and Debbi and Kimberly at Target and in school parking lots and at funerals. We didn’t leave.

  I run my tongue over the canine tooth that inexplicably, now that I am fifty-seven, has decided to edge its way back out of my smile.

  What did other mothers tell their daughters? I never knew that. But I see other old girlfriends, in homeless shelters or on sidewalks, and feel the rip of admiration like a cord pulled down my chest, even now. Their hair is still lush, but sometimes their faces are gaunt, and sometimes marred with lunar holes from years of methamphetamine. Sometimes their graceful hands are large and thickened and nearly purple, from years of intermittent homelessness. Their eyes fasten upon mine. We talk about what we drank back in the day, when we were thirteen and fourteen and downed beer before gymnastics practice, doing cartwheels on the streets at dusk, convinced while we were upside down that we saw people looking at us from the sewer drains in the curb, when we should have been afraid of the boys in cars parked underneath the pepper trees.

  We always talk about our daughters, who are beautiful.

  8

  Daisy Belle

  Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1915

  You so fine I might just have to kill you. Some other fool is gonna take you away, and I can’t have that. Family legend: This is what Daisy’s first husband said to her, while he held the gun.

  Alberta, my mother-in-law, told me the story of her own mother, Daisy, only once, and it was not until after I had my first baby. Alberta was Daisy’s third daughter, named for Daisy’s sister. We were sitting knee to knee by the massive ochre-brick fireplace in the fall, when Gaila was four months old. In the living room that was never empty, we were alone that day at lunchtime, on my break from work, while I nursed the baby. Alberta was watching the damp black curls of my daughter, glistening with heat from the flames, her head lolling back as she fought sleep.

  “My mother never had a home when she was little. Not after her mother died.”

  She paused. My mother-in-law’s hands were elegant, her nails strong and oval and painted, her eyebrows vivid with pencil, her lips always defined with liner and lipstick. We were sitting in maroon leather club chairs whose arms were rolled and graceful, with brass rivets. Alberta said softly, “They were walking down a road. Her and her mother. Mary. She was holding her mother’s hand. My grandmother saw the car coming. She threw my mother out of the way, threw her up where no one could see her, and then the car ran her over.”

  The driver was a young white man with another young white male passenger; the car plowed into Mary Thomas at great speed and then the driver swerved back onto the road and left her behind. Mary had three children—Daisy, five, Arthur, two, and Alberta, one. It makes sense that only Daisy was walking with her, because the others were so young, but no one can say for certain. The three children had been given the surname of their father: Ford. But no one ever mentions him again, either.

  This part stays the same, no matter who tells the story: it was dusk, and suddenly a car was speeding down the narrow dirt lane, raising dust, careering toward them, and Mary knew what was coming, and why, and she threw Daisy up onto the roadbank into the trees, or in the ditch into the weeds.

  That day by the fire, Alberta said sadly, “My mother was so little. And after that, she went from pillar to post. Yes, she did. Pillar to post.”

  Alberta held out her arms for the baby. I had to go back to work, and Alberta would hold her for hours while a procession of women came to visit and watch soap operas and share food and stories and rock this grandchild who was so loved that her cheeks would be whorled red with lipstick kisses when I came to retrieve her at 5:00.

  I didn’t understand the phrase—pillar to post. Alberta watched my daughter relax back into sleep against her elbow, eyelids sliding shut. She said, “My mother never had a home. Not till she got here.”

  Pillar to post: when someone has gone from a wealthy home, with pillars at the front, as grand embellishment, to a poorer house, with porch held up by simple wooden posts. But in Sunflower County, Daisy went from farmhouse to sharecropper cabin, wherever relatives would take care of her for a time. Daisy’s little sister Alberta went to Mary’s sister Margaret, and Arthur went to an uncle. Daisy attended school until the fifth grade, as did Arthur.

  That night, I lay awake thinking of the car speeding straight toward Daisy’s mother while her small daughter lay on the roadbank. I remember the Country Squire passing over me like a large animal. I shivered, wondering what Daisy’s mother felt. She lay in soft Mississippi dirt. Did she die there, with her daughter afraid to come out from where she’d been thrown for safekeeping? Did Mary hear her child crying?

  Did she crawl?

  Years later, at family gatherings, other relatives would offer:

  They were drunk and they killed her, but they were rich white boys and no one in that county was gonna prosecute them.

  They were sent to kill her because she knew things. About the rich white men around there. They didn’t want her to tell.

  They killed her because she was black and walking down the road. And Mary was the prettiest of all the girls. She was beautiful.

  There were only about six cars in the whole county—it was a poor place! The police knew whose car it was. Of course they did.

  Imagine Daisy’s memory, of her small body being flung by her mother’s hands to safety, and where she landed, and how it felt. What she saw and heard after that. It’s beyond comprehension. Did the men stop and look at Mary Thomas? Was Daisy so scared she knew to keep hidden in the trees or the weeds? Did she breathe? Did she hear her mother’s breath? Did she hear pain or crying? How long did she wait by the roadside, and who drove the next vehicle or wagon that came upon them, and what never left her memory?

  Violence like that enters the blood. Changes the DNA. We know this, from accounts by survivors of genocide, of the Holocaust, of war and torture and imprisonment. Reading historical narratives from the elderly people formerly enslaved in the American South, in places like Sunflower County, Mississippi, reminds us of how injury, rape, and psychological pain were endured, and interred, in the bones and brain.

  Some Americans have tried to make slavery a single chapter in the nation’s history, a finite number of years that ceases influence at the end of the Civil War. Tell this to the family of Mary Thomas, and the thousands of other black men and women killed in carefully planned acts of retribution or for casual sport—from the moment the Emancipation Proclamation was read, through the terrors of Reconstruction, to the countless lynchings between 1900 and the 1950s, to the murders during the civil rights movement, to killings that happen right now. This moment.

  By 1989, when Alberta told me that story, her mother, Daisy, had traveled through seven states to make sure Alberta’s childhood was rooted deeply and firmly in a radius of three miles, and we sat in the center of that radius. But Daisy’s odyssey had been long and arduous, and at the end of it, she had four daughters, and endless secrets.

  Daisy Belle Ford Morris Carter remains the mystery woman of our family. We still talk even now about how she never told anyone the identities of the fathers of her daughters. In a time when every pair of high he
els chosen for the club, every new hairstyle or cup of coffee is documented in cell phone images with time, date, and exact street location, it seems astonishing that the phrase “she took that knowledge to the grave” could be true. Over six decades, Daisy never told anyone. Maybe those men were so dangerous she knew what she was doing.

  Fine as wine and just my kind. Bring your fine self over here. So fine you like to blind me when I saw you.

  This is what she heard, again and again. Daisy’s first husband is listed in one census document as Calvin Morris, but no one left here has ever said they actually saw him. Daisy’s cousin Jesse Wall, who’d also been born in Sunflower County and brought to California, told me back in 2014, when he was eighty, “Oh, Daisy was fine. Back in Arkansas, that man told her over and over, ‘You’re so fine, some fool’s gonna take you away from me, and I can’t have that, so I might just have to kill you first.’ He had the gun on the table by the bed, and he’d sit there with it in his hand at night. And Daisy had the baby. Mary Louise. She had to wait until one night when he left and she could get away. She took the baby and went to Oklahoma to find Sweet Annie.”

  That was Daisy’s aunt, Sweet Annie Tillman, legendary in her own right.

  According to family members, Washington Thomas, patriarch of the family, was brought enslaved from Ethiopia to Haiti and then to Mississippi. His name is very common for postslavery times, and it has been impossible to find records that are undeniably accurate. But family history says this: In 1865, after he was finally free, he was extremely ambitious and, by the 1880s, had at least five children: Jonah, Hine, Margaret, Annie, and Mary. Washington Thomas was determined each would have a trade, even the girls: Hine trained as a carpenter, Jonah studied alternative medicine, Margaret learned midwifery. But Annie became a dancing girl at a young age, and Mary, who died on that road, was only a teenager when she had three children.

  Hine’s ambition had gotten him nearly killed when he was a young man. Like everyone else, he was sharecropping for a former slaveowner, but he ran his own truck farm, as independent crops were called, to sell vegetables and make enough money to buy a car. This made local white landowners angry—they didn’t like initiative or independence. When Hine returned from a trip to Memphis, where he’d made money on his crops, he had to be hidden in a trunk on the back of his own truck so he wouldn’t be lynched. (That story always ends with: “He was a small man, which was good.”)

  Then he fell in love with a woman local people thought was white, so his life was again in danger. She was Native American, but so fair that whites assumed her Italian. They had to flee Mississippi for Oklahoma in 1900 to avoid death.

  They went to Wewoka, Oklahoma, where she had tribal land. Hine’s sister Margaret was married with her own children, and she had taken in Alberta, Mary’s youngest daughter, and a nephew, Eddie Chandler Jr., whose father had been hanged in a violent lynching. Mississippi was untenable. Jonah went to Oklahoma after that, followed by his sister Annie. And by the time Daisy was sixteen or so, a lovely teenaged girl, Sweet Annie Tillman, thirty-one, took her niece on the road.

  It was the 1920s, the era of speakeasies, dancing, and transience for many women. Their passage spanned thousands of miles and lasted for fifteen years.

  Daisy’s first daughter, Mary Louise Morris, was born in Arkansas in August 1929, when Daisy was nineteen. In 1930, Daisy ran from Arkansas to Wewoka, Oklahoma, where she stayed with Hine, Jonah, and Annie.

  In 1931, she had a daughter named Myrtle Lee Morris; in 1933 a daughter named Alberta Marie Morris; and in 1936 a daughter named Rosie Morris.

  Our cousin Margaret Chandler, named for her grandmother Margaret Thomas Henderson from Mississippi, told me in 2018: “Myrtle asked her mother for years, until Daisy died, who her father was. She used to cry and cry, wanting to know his name. But Daisy would never say anything. And George Thomas, one of the cousins from Wewoka, Jonah’s son, he came to California once and he pointed at Myrtle and said, I know who your daddy is. But he wouldn’t tell her.”

  Daisy and Sweet Annie left Oklahoma at some point, maybe with just Mary and Myrtle, maybe with all four of Daisy’s babies. They went to San Antonio, Texas, where their car broke down and they stayed for a while with cousins. Then they drove the southernmost route, along the border with Mexico, and made it to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where another cousin had settled. Finally, they made it across Arizona to the California border town of Calexico, a rural place that faced Mexicali.

  Hine, Daisy’s uncle, and his wife had moved to California in 1930. Oklahoma law, passed in 1909, made it illegal for a black person to be married to anyone not black. Anyone. Hine bought farmland in Colorado, and had a thriving business trucking his hay to ranches from San Diego all the way up to Oxnard. He didn’t have to hide in a trunk.

  He made enough money to buy his sister Margaret Henderson a house in Riverside, two hours north, where the weather was cooler. She had fled Sunflower County, too. When Theodore Bilbo was elected governor of Mississippi in 1935, Margaret said she would never let her sons and grandsons stay in that state under his racist policies. Jesse Wall was one of those grandsons. He always told me, “My grandmother said I would be raised in California, as a man.” (His father, Jesse Wall Sr., became a beloved and powerful minister in Riverside; in 1970, Jesse Wall Jr. became the first black male high school teacher in Riverside, and helped desegregate the school system; after his father’s death, he became a minister and preached in the family church until 2018, when he died.)

  Daisy Morris arrived in Calexico with four girls, one a baby. Soon afterward, she traveled north to stay with Margaret Henderson on Eleventh Street in Riverside. It was 1936. By 1940, Daisy Morris was renting a house a few blocks away, on Denton Street. She was thirty years old, widowed according to her account, and her daughters were ten, eight, six, and four. Listed as birthplace for the three younger girls: California. Daisy had reinvented herself and her family—she was a new woman.

  (Alberta never had a birth certificate until 1985, when she wanted to visit her daughter in Germany, where Christine Sims was married to the heavyweight boxing champion of the U.S. Air Force and had a newborn son. Alberta couldn’t get a passport. She could have been born in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, or New Mexico. But a local congressman helped: she received a birth certificate listing Calexico, California.)

  Also living with Daisy in 1940: her aunt Annie Tillman, widowed, forty-seven years old, and the terror of the Eastside, where she is still known as Aint Dear.

  It’s hard to reconcile the stories of Aint Dear, and the single photo I have of her scowling face under a church hat, with a vibrant girl who made a living in clubs. But those hard years must have been the reason Aint Dear turned so strict and fearful after she got to California.

  Daisy was working days at a munitions warehouse in nearby Mira Loma, as a defense worker; at night, she and other women cleaned a meat-packing plant. Aint Dear was in charge of the four girls. She was so controlling that she’d timed the route they took to get home from school—two streets and one alley—and if they deviated for anything, which was always assumed to be boys, they were beaten. Ironing cords, those old ones that were woven thread wrapped around open wire. Wooden clothes hangers. Branches. Hands.

  Aint Dear’s view of the world was clear—every molecule of air was pervaded by danger, every daytime sidewalk and evening avenue, and every boy or man was a threat to Daisy’s daughters. But there is a photograph of Alberta that we all love: She is a California girl, standing on the steps of Irving Elementary School, her grin wide, her hair in braids, and next to her are the friends she kept for her entire life: Susan Strickland, Oscar Medina. It is 1936. Every day, I drive to work past those exact steps where she stood, and every day I glance toward the historic wooden façade of the building where Alberta smiled with open joy. Of all four daughters, hers is the face and wide grin and expressive eyebrows that most resemble Daisy.

  Daisy’s girls were renowned for their looks, and countless m
en fell in love with them. I’ve talked to eighty-year-old men who recall seeing the daughters, and who re-created for me the stunned stumble in their walk, as if they would actually tumble. To escape the ministrations of Aint Dear, the first three daughters married as teenagers.

  By June 1952, Alberta had just graduated from Riverside Poly High School. In this snapshot, taken the next day, she is headed off to be married to General Roscoe Conklin Sims II. She looks down shyly, but you can still see her wide smile. Standing beside her is Fine’s youngest granddaughter, Loretta Sims, watching sidelong in admiration. It is the joining of the two families.

  Loretta Casandra Sims and Alberta Marie Morris, at Daisy Carter’s house, Riverside, California, June 1952

  That day by the fire, Alberta and I were sitting in Daisy’s leather chairs. She was so proud of the house she finally bought in the 1950s that she took formal photographs of her living room, with these chairs. Daisy died in 1982, the year before I married her grandson.

  Daisy Carter: Sunflower County, Mississippi, to unknown, Arkansas, to Wewoka, Oklahoma, to San Antonio, Texas, to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Calexico and Riverside, California. Astonishing: 2,303 miles.

  9

  Driveway #1—The First Love Letter

  Riverside, California, May 1976

  The driveway at 4289 Michael Street was the heartbeat of life for hundreds of southern Californians who made their way into the family of General and Alberta Sims. The first time I walked across the sidewalk, with their son Dwayne, I had no idea this thirty-foot stretch of concrete lined with car engines, a barber chair, folding tables, and ice chests was the apotheosis of the American dream, a corridor of American history, proof of loyalty and love that would not be denied.