In the Country of Women

by Susan Straight

  Daisy and Aint Dear (Annie Tillman) and the four small girls had arrived in 1936 at the house of Margaret Henderson, Annie’s sister, on Ninth Street, until they rented a place. Daisy worked around the clock; Aint Dear and Margaret Henderson watched the children. Daisy worked days in a munitions warehouse, as a Rosie the Riveter, getting a ride to Mira Loma with other women. When she came home, she rested for a short time, and then she worked with a crew at the turkey plant, with Margaret Henderson and other family members, plucking pinfeathers in the terrible smell.

  But on the weekends, Daisy Morris, radiant and lovely, with shining cheeks and luminous smile, went to a club in San Bernardino where the railroad men liked to dance. There, she met an older man, twice widowed, with seventeen children who were grown. Ernest Carter.

  General III loves to say this: “When she married Mr. Carter, our whole family ascended into the middle class.” Ernest Carter had worked for decades for the Southern Pacific Railroad in San Bernardino. In the early 1900s, Ernest Carter was the first black man authorized to carry weapons on the trains, as a security guard working with the legendary Pinkertons.

  With her savings, and the help of Mr. Carter, who was never called anything else by anyone in my generation, Daisy bought the house on the corner of Eleventh and Kansas. They all moved in: Daisy, her daughters, who were entering junior high and high school, Mr. Carter, Aint Dear, and a succession of families who needed refuge.

  Daisy Carter’s boardinghouse became a beacon to women arriving from the South during the 1940s and ’50s. (When Daisy’s cousin Eddie Chandler II, whose father had been hanged in Sunflower County, Mississippi, turned eighty, we went to a community party where he told the crowd, “You know, we were refugees from a third-world country. A war zone. Nobody calls it that, but that’s the truth.”) In Daisy’s house lived Hattie Davis and her three children, who came from Georgia. Hattie married Reverend L. B. Moss, and moved into her new life—at ninety-eight, she still lives in Riverside. Hattie’s daughter Judy Davis married Tommie Chatham, who was a child himself when he came to California from Gary, Texas. The Chathams moved onto Twelfth Street, and their four children are called cousin by the Sims family. My daughters have only ever known Trent Chatham, who is two years younger than me, as their uncle.

  Daisy built a private entrance to one room for Floyd Walker’s mother-in-law, known as Big Ma, born in Georgia just after the Civil War.

  Daisy and the four girls worked every moment of the day and much of the night. Mr. Carter got cleaning contracts for local markets; the women cleaned at Butcher Boy, the meat-packing house that sold ground beef to the first McDonald’s restaurants, in San Bernardino. They worked seasonally at the turkey plant. At home, Daisy made sweet potato pies and teacakes and pound cake to sell. She was famous for her skill with clothing. “Daisy could launder shirts like no one else in Riverside,” her cousin Jesse Wall told me. “Lawyers and businessmen all brought their shirts to her. And they took home pies and cakes.”

  Imagine now the pies cooling and the white shirts hanging starched in the kitchen, the people coming in and out, the hundreds of plates. The four sisters were always there, working outside or inside the house, rarely allowed to go anywhere else, taking breaks to sit two and two on that side porch, with all the men of the Eastside watching.

  They were still under the charge of Aint Dear, whose temper and suspicion had only amplified now that the girls were teenagers.

  “She wanted all of them to get married right away, so they wouldn’t be like her,” Jesse Wall, Daisy’s cousin, said to me when he was eighty, sitting in his pastoral office at St. James Tabernacle, the church his father started back in 1936. “Aint Dear had lived a life—boy, she didn’t want them ever living that life,” he said carefully.

  But Daisy had made it this far, and her entire life was about Mary Louise, Myrtle, Alberta, and Rosie.

  Mary Louise’s oldest daughter, Rita Butts Sweeney, said, “All the older men used to say that—they’d tell me, your daddy, Gato, got the prettiest one out the whole bunch. He had her face painted on a rice scroll when he was serving in Korea.” Mary Louise, at seventeen, married Henderson Butts, nicknamed Gato. They lived near the Santa Ana River. Mary Louise had seven children.

  Robert Anderson, who is eighty-nine now, a former Golden Gloves boxer, surprised me one day, saying offhandedly: “You know who my first love was, when I was only sixteen? Myrtle. I worked at the market with Mr. Carter, cleaning the meat cases. Myrtle was so beautiful, I wanted to talk to her all the time. But Aint Dear, she was mean as a snake. She kept asking me, ‘When you gonna cut some cake?’ I was sixteen! I kept thinking, Where is this cake? Then I figured it out—she wanted me to get married!”

  One Sunday afternoon, Robert talked Myrtle into coming out the side door of St. James, which was Pentecostal, where the services lasted for hours. Myrtle slipped out into the dirt alley, walked around the neighborhood with Robert for an hour, and then went back up the steps. “She opened that door and Aint Dear was right there! She cold-cocked her!” Robert said, holding up his hands in boxing stance. “Knocked her out, right there in the aisle!” He shook his head.

  Rosie Morris, Mary Louise Butts, Myrtle Samuel, at the Top Hat, Riverside, California, undated

  Myrtle was eighteen when she married Clifford Samuel, had three children, then married a man I always knew as Big Earl, had Little Earl, and finally married Bill Bagley, who had lived in Aunt Jennie’s house in Los Angeles, leaving Tulsa with the Sims men he considered brothers. Full circle. Myrtle had three more children, eventually buying a house on Kansas Avenue, five blocks from her mother.

  John Sims loves to tell us: “Oh, I just kept trying to talk to Alberta, she was so fine. I had just gotten here from Tulsa, with my mother, and we made it out to Riverside. I was a senior in high school, and Alberta was the one for me. But she kept saying, ‘Don’t you have a brother named General? I heard he can dance.’”

  In Alberta’s 1952 high school yearbook, her gym teacher wrote, “Hope your married life will be happy and that the best will always be yours.” Two days after graduation, she married General Sims II. She had her first son, General III, in 1953.

  They lived in a small stucco duplex on Eleventh Street by 1958, three houses down from Daisy. One of General III’s first memories is this: “Mr. Car-ter! He treated my grandmother like a queen, and he defended her girls like his own, man! One night, Daddy didn’t like the tacos Mama cooked, and he threw everything on the floor. She called up there to her mama’s, and Mr. Carter came walkin’ down the block. He came inside and pulled himself up—he was only about five-five, you know, and he moved his coat, and I saw that .45 pistol.” General III laughed. “I was about five years old, and I had never seen my daddy just close his mouth and not say a word. But he did that night!” Mr. Carter suggested that his son-in-law always treat Alberta with respect, and that she should never have to call again.

  Daisy Carter’s house became one of the most elegant in the community, with leather wing chairs, a piano, a formal dining set. Her church dresses and hats were floral and epic. “She was the style-setter for the whole Eastside,” said Jesse Wall.

  Alberta and General II had bought their house on Michael Street, near the corner of Twelfth, and that is where Alberta lived, all four of her homes within a six-block radius of the rest of her life. Mary Louise died in 1980 of leukemia, at only fifty. Daisy Carter passed away the following year. And in 1982, Myrtle died of liver disease, also at fifty, an illness brought on, her family thought, by years of using harsh cleaners as a domestic worker. Daisy’s youngest daughter, Rosie, had two sons with Al Terraciano, an Italian-American man, and moved to Las Vegas in 1980. She ran the wedding chapel inside Circus Circus casino, and perhaps from above, Aint Dear watched all the midnight marriages.

  When she was forty, Daisy had a son with Ernest Carter. This was Mr. Carter’s eighteenth child. They named him Ernest Carter Jr. By the late 1980s, Ernie Carter Jr., who’d gone to college and had an
impressive job at the Naval Weapons Center in Seal Beach, California, sold the house to a rental company. The maroon club chair came to us when Alberta died, the leather smooth and oddly slippery to my children, the rounded upholstered arms worn by hundreds of hands.

  I miss the chair. The arms finally wore out, cotton batting exposed like sheep wool under the fingers of my daughters, and Dwayne took the chair when he moved to his own place. I think of Alberta’s lush beauty. I think of my own absolutely ordinary face and flesh, and how my daughters inherited through Alberta and Daisy their defined cheekbones and dimples and high-set hips, along with the resolute skills of survival that are required when you are a black woman with beauty and intelligence, and no mode for subservience.

  Just as with Jennie Stevenson’s white frame house in Los Angeles, Daisy Carter’s house was lived in by the newest arrivals to California, mothers and aunts and children from Mexico. After it burned, everyone parked there to gaze at the black-satin alligator char of the wood frame and scalloped shingles. A month later, a bulldozer took down the remnants.

  I stood there on the sidewalk, the acrid scent wafting in the wind, while Dwayne, his brothers General III and Carnell, General’s son Sensei, and their cousin Eddie Chandler III walked the land looking for relics. Bottles and pennies and shards of crockery. Dwayne found his favorite doorstop, one he remembered from kindergarten afternoons when the nuns at Catholic school pulled him by the ears, and he ran away to Daisy’s house for consolation and teacakes. A heavy bronze square with a ship etched on the side.

  How many hundred-year-old Victorians burn in America, never to be replaced? Who can build a house like that now? And who would, in older neighborhoods like ours, in Detroit or Albany or Baltimore, anywhere in America where the mortgage crisis gutted communities that had resisted urban renewal and other assaults? All over this nation are Victorian and Craftsman homes of women who fled their birthplaces—Italy and Ireland, Greece and Armenia, Nigeria and China, Mexico and El Salvador and Honduras.

  There were four beautiful sisters. My favorite photo shows Alberta, anchoring a fragment of one night. A good night. This woman who changed my life—she is bemused and regal and slightly mischievous, sitting beside Rosie at a table where they are clearly at a formal dance. Are they with husbands? Are they with their two sisters? It doesn’t matter. They both know they’re lovely, that men are staring at them while they gaze at us.

  Here are Daisy’s descendants, walking across her land days after the fire. If you add up the Americans begotten from Daisy and her daughters, fed and clothed from the labors of plucked turkeys and starched shirts and rolled pie crusts, munitions for war and ministrations for love, there are more than 150 people in the world who exist solely because she made her way here, having been thrown over a Mississippi roadbank, threatened with firearms and more, packed up again and again in the dark to start over.

  Dwayne Sims, Eddie Chandler III, General Sims III, Carnell Sims, Sensei Sims, on Daisy Carter’s land, 2011. (Photograph by Douglas McCulloh)

  Here are Daisy Carter and Hattie Davis and Aint Dear, on their way to church. Daisy remains radiant. Do you see her wearing this hat and these gloves, her elegant cheekbones and eyebrows, her smile not dimmed?

  Hattie Davis, Annie “Aint Dear” Tillman, Daisy Carter, undated

  35

  Letter to My Nephew—Our Dungeon Shook (After James Baldwin)

  Riverside, California, 2012

  Dear Sensei:

  I began this letter in 2011, when you lived here, and then put it away because I was too afraid of how it would end. I rewrote it four more times and it wasn’t finished, because more of our people died. Then your son was born, at the hospital down the street. You stayed awake for two days, in the delivery room, and then you came here to sleep. You walked, you got the key from under the pot on the porch, and went to your old bed; when you’d called to let me know, I told you to take off your hooded sweatshirt before you went inside, in case someone who didn’t know you was watching.

  You look like the reincarnation of Bob Marley, your dreadlocks like black coral, your face angular and jaunty, your eyes the color of sycamore leaves, even your mouth and teeth somehow like his. But you are six feet two and that makes you frightening even to some white kids who listen to Marley while they smoke weed. When white people see you on the sidewalk they often think you want something from them, even though you are only on your way to the skatepark, because you are a master skateboarder whose favorite song when you lived here was “Midnight Rider” by the Allman Brothers. When you sang the lyrics, I got to run to keep from hidin’, and I’m bound to keep on ridin’, I got one more silver dollar, I went into my bedroom to cry, because that song was how my brother lived his life, and how he died. He was a stocky powerful white guy with long blond hair, and yet it felt like you were his reincarnation, sitting at the same maple table where he and his best friend used to hatch plans not legal.

  Back then, you were obsessed with the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. Your tattoos were not gang identifications, but a devil-grin skateboard clown and the inscription One Love.

  In your face is all the world. Maybe Ethiopia or Haiti, via your father, General III, maybe Cherokee and Irish; Samoan and Mexican and black and white, via your mother, a woman I’ve never met. She lives in another state; she let you go when you were a baby, to be raised here with the clan of Simses. Gaila was eight months old when you arrived in California in 1990.

  I named you accidentally, when your father called me and asked how to spell Sensei. I said, “Like the marijuana?” and he said, “Like the teacher in Karate Kid,” so I called Ed, a Japanese-Filipino childhood friend, to make sure about the spelling, and then I called your father back. He said, “Thanks, sis, you just named my fourth son,” and I said, “What?” and he said, “I was going to name him Malachi, like Children of the Corn, if you didn’t know how to spell Sensei,” and I said, “Thank God, Ed was home.”

  You wrote your will at thirteen. Two of your best friends, Anthony Sweat and Markess Lancaster, also thirteen, were shot and killed in separate incidents in the summer of 2003. It was the last thing any of the generations before us would have imagined—Oscar Medina and your grandfather, General II, who were like brothers. Your friends were targeted and pursued by a Latino gang, Anthony running to hide on a porch a few blocks from Daisy Carter’s house, but shot by the front door; Markess riding in a car with his friends, coming from a store near my house, and shot in the passenger seat. (In trial testimony, documented conversations showed the gang referred to finding black targets as “snail hunting.”)

  You were arrested at eighteen for felony burglary, when you walked to the store one morning from Michael Street, in your slippers, and you should have been at school, but two friends caught up with you, one carrying a duffel bag. When the police car pulled alongside, and you were all handcuffed, it turned out the bag contained stereo equipment the friends had taken from a house. The older woman who lived at the house testified that she’d never seen you, only the other two boys. She said you were not there. Even so, you were in jail for weeks. You explained to us when you were finally released that you used family donations to buy candy bars in jail.

  You turned twenty-one living here, and burst through my front door one night with your hood up to keep Rosette and me from seeing your eyes—you were crying, and you buried your face in the dog’s fur for a long half hour before speaking. You’d been skating near the hospital, on the metal rails beloved by all your skater friends, and two older guys came through the parking lot to rob you. (Who expects skaters to have any money?) Angry that you were broke, one man demanded your board, and when you held it up as if to hit him, he pulled a gun, pointed it at your chest, called you a name and laughed when you used the board as a shield and ran. Your fingers were invisible in the fur around the dog’s neck, and your forehead on her skull. We made you taquitos and waited.

  It is fifty years since James Baldwin, my teacher, my mentor, wrote
a letter to his nephew James, a boy named for him, the son of his younger brother. I have read that letter countless times. James Baldwin wrote other words that I have on Post-its taped to this desk, where you worked on your essays for community college English class. You saw Baldwin’s words every day, and told me so often how much they meant to you: “I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with the pain.”

  It is thirty-five years since he was my teacher. I was twelve when I first read his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, and I cried when David, the unloved elder brother, watches Roy, the beloved younger brother, dying in the arms of their mother; Roy has been talking shit on the street, confronting other young men, and he’s been stabbed. Roy, my brother, you—all the young men who cannot be confined inside, who have to be out on the sidewalk and the dirt road and the freeway, moving and moving, while other men are angry at your joy and freedom. Fifty years since James Baldwin wrote the letter to his nephew: “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make your peace with mediocrity.” And now, when I see “aspire to excellence” as an academic or marketing phrase beloved by large institutions and by politicians, it comes as a sudden shock that I only wish for you to live. Just to stay alive. That is not exaggeration. That is how we women pray every night—we women who love you and men like you all over the nation. Fifty years later, and we are still praying, and staying awake, and startling at every siren, every backfire that sounds like a gunshot, every phone call after midnight. I have gotten those phone calls. Those hours take a toll.