Absalom's Daughters

 

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About the Author

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To my parents

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could never have been written without the following authors: William Faulkner (especially for his novel
Absalom, Absalom!)
, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, Charles W. Chestnutt, Laura C. Jarmon, Marc Fisher, Lorraine Johnson-Coleman, Dennis Danvers (for giving me
A Richmond Reader
on indefinite loan), Carol A. Kolmerten, Stephen M. Ross, Judith Bryant Wittenberg, Adam Braver, Edward P. Jones, Langston Hughes, Gloria Naylor, and last but not least, Toni Morrison and Alice McDermott.

People I can't thank enough for their help and support and numerous rereadings of the manuscript: Lisa Grubka, my fabulous agent, and Barbara Jones, my amazing editor and teacher.

Any acknowledgment would be incomplete without thanking Vicki Sipe for her love and patience when I needed a quiet house, and her willingness to read, read, read, and read again.

 

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

—William Faulkner,
Requiem for a Nun

 

CHAPTER
ONE

Cassie and Lil Ma and Grandmother lived in a house at the far end of Negro Street in two rooms over the laundry that they ran in Heron-Neck. Whoever had lived there before had papered the walls of the upstairs rooms, every inch of them, with newspapers, spread-out magazine pages, and letters. One crumbling page of newspaper showed a white man with a rifle standing over an animal, which Lil Ma said was a lion, which Grandmother said was a wild animal from Africa that would eat you in one bite. Below the lion a page torn from a magazine showed a rabbit eating a head of lettuce. Underneath the rabbit the words said,
Ridding your garden of pests
. Over by the back window were pictures of ladies in beautiful dresses, all tall and slender, like Lil Ma. There were no pictures that looked like Grandmother, who was short and round. None of the ladies on the walls were colored either.

Lil Ma taught Cassie to read by showing her the words on the walls and making her say them properly. Before bed, she and Cassie would find a patch of wall and sound out the letters. There was a picture of an elephant by one of the front windows with words underneath that said,
Tuska Lives on Coney Island
. Coney Island was a long way from Heron-Neck, Mississippi, Lil Ma said. One summer when the circus came to town, Lil Ma took Cassie down to the other end of Negro Street and across the railroad tracks to see the animals, but said Grandmother wouldn't want them to spend the nickel to see the show. They watched an elephant sway in its chains and a lion pace in a cage. Clowns sang a funny song; a monkey in a little suit danced and caught peanuts in its mouth. Music started inside the tent, and the white people went in with their ice cream cones. Cassie and Lil Ma went home, across the tracks and back to the laundry, where Grandmother was waiting with a stack of linens to be pressed.

Negro Street had houses on one side and railroad siding on the other. Instead of trees there were electric poles that had been standing beside the tracks for years without wires. Beanie Simms, who lived in the house next to the laundry, had three shoeshine chairs in front of the barbershop on the white side of town and a falling-apart truck in front of his own place. In the spring, when everyone on Negro Street planted greens, melon, and tomatoes between the electric poles, Mister Simms was the only one who didn't put up a wire fence to keep the rabbits out. The rabbits got into the other gardens anyway, but Mister Simms said they left his alone. When Cassie asked him why, he showed her a stick carved to look like the head of an animal poking out from between perfect heads of lettuce.

“It's a fox,” Cassie said.

“It only look like a fox,” said Mister Simms. “But th' rabbit
think
it real.”

When Cassie told Grandmother about Mister Simms's fox, Grandmother said that Beanie Simms worked his soil with chicken innards before he planted, and the smell of blood was what kept the rabbits away.

Beanie Simms was sought after on account of his advice and his magic. Sometimes people would come in from other towns and wait at his door all day for him to come home from the shoeshine so they could ask him for guidance when they'd been 'witched. Because she was only six, Cassie was allowed to sit unnoticed on her own front stoop and watch as Beanie Simms dispensed special charms. All his business was transacted in front of his house in a couple of lawn chairs; Beanie Simms never let anyone inside, and Cassie learned a lot from what she heard. For example, there was a special way black folks could turn white, but it required a long trip east of town, and once you went there, you could never come back. She was so captivated by this information that she asked Grandmother about it. Grandmother gave her a hard look.

“If that's true,” Grandmother said, “then why doesn't he leave town and take his hoodoo with him?”

Lil Ma was neighborly enough with Beanie Simms, but after Cassie told her story about how black folks could turn white, Lil Ma told Cassie never to sit on the front stoop while Mister Simms was out there with his eager listeners. When Cassie knew Lil Ma wasn't watching, she sat out by Beanie Simms anyway.

As for schooling, when she was seven, Cassie went to school for one whole day. Since she already knew how to read and count, the teacher let her sit in the back of the classroom with a group of older boys, who ignored her, talking in low voices about girls and money. The way they talked sounded improper, but Cassie couldn't keep herself from listening. Finally, one of the boys noticed her and said, “Ain't you the laundry girl?” When she said yes, he said, “Ain't your mama Adelaine?” The other boys snickered. The first boy said with a knowledgeable air, “You know what we call your mama? ‘
I'da Lain'
down with any ol' white man.'” The other boys hooted with laughter, and the teacher looked at them. The first boy leaned closer to Cassie. “So how come you ain't any lighter than your ma?”

When Cassie got home that day, Grandmother asked what she'd learned, and Cassie said, “I ain't learned nuthin'.” Grandmother decided it was the last of school for her.

That same year Cassie noticed the southern Mississippi heat for the first time. On dry days the dust rose in weightless puffs when Cassie stepped her feet in it, and stayed in the air around her, sticking to her sweaty legs and to the hem of her dress, to her hands, and to the white sheets when she took them down from the lines strung in the yard behind the laundry. Dust flavored the collards and sweet potatoes Lil Ma cooked. Dust lay on the walls and collected in the creases of the papers, letters, and spread-out pages of old magazines, drifting into a thin layer over everything. On wet days, when the air was too heavy even to rain, the heat turned the distance into a white haze, and the dust became a damp grit. On those days it was impossible to run; no one went out to play.

On summer evenings, the houses on Negro Street cast shade over their own front stoops, and the maids, the oil men, and Beanie Simms would come home and sit out front until after dark. Grandmother sometimes pulled a chair out in front of the laundry's plate-glass window to peel potatoes or snap beans. Men would walk by and nod to her. Lil Ma would come out from the storefront after doing the ironing, shiny with sweat, her blouse as wet as if she'd just washed it. Other colored women would stop and talk to Lil Ma and Grandmother. Every one of these women called Lil Ma
Lainey
instead of
Adelaine
, and every time they did, Grandmother would correct them. She was unfriendly about it, as though she was the only one who knew what was proper. Eventually, the only people who stopped by were the colored women who brought the laundry from the big houses across town. None of them stayed to talk, and after two or three weeks without conversation out front, Grandmother took her chair to a shady spot out back of the laundry and snapped beans and peeled potatoes there.

One afternoon while Lil Ma was cleaning collards and Grandmother was peeling potatoes, Cassie heard Grandmother tell Lil Ma that the Negroes in Heron-Neck were the most rude of any, anywhere they had ever lived. Cassie asked, “Where did we live before?” And Lil Ma told her that she and Grandmother had been in another part of Mississippi before Cassie was born. Cassie asked if that was where Lil Ma was born, and Lil Ma told her, no, she had grown up somewhere else, and Grandmother had been born and grown up in a place even farther away. Cassie asked where those places were, and Grandmother would only say that they were farther south in Mississippi and that it only mattered where they were right now. Other children on Negro Street had aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandfathers. “Where is the rest of our family?” Cassie asked. Lil Ma got down on her knees and hugged Cassie and said this was the only family Cassie would ever need. Grandmother sliced the skins off the potatoes with short, angry strokes, and the subject didn't come up again until well after Cassie discovered her father.

Cassie's father and his real family lived on the other side of town, but not in one of the big houses. She found out about him the same summer she noticed the heat and dust. She and Lil Ma and Grandmother were walking across the hot street between Saul's Grocery and the Mobil station. Lil Ma had been saying something about rain coming on when a fat, clean-shaven white man passed them, crossing the other way. He barely glanced at the three of them, but Lil Ma, holding Cassie's hand, tightened her grip and stopped talking. Cassie said, “Who is he?” and Grandmother said, “You've got everything you're ever going to get from him.” From that, and from murmurs she heard on the rare Sundays when they went to church, Cassie knew the fat white man was her father and that his name was William Forrest, and that what had happened, in order for him to be her father, had happened before she was born, when Lil Ma had been doing laundry for the oil men south of town.

After that, Cassie noticed him more often. She noticed his family. His flushed wife, Miz Helen, came to pick up the wash for the wealthy white women in town whose colored maids were too busy to do it themselves. Miz Helen loaded the cloth sacks into two faded red children's wagons and took them, rattling along the street, all the way across town and up the hill to where the big houses idled under big trees. She earned pennies this way. Her children came with her, in patched hand-me-downs. One was a boy named Henry. The other was a girl, Judith, a year older than Cassie, who had the same look as her father—as Cassie's father—and who stared over the counter at Cassie as if she saw something she recognized while Cassie folded white handkerchiefs. There was a mirror upstairs, and when Cassie was nine, she was tall enough to see herself without having to stand on a chair and see only the top half of her face. She tried to see what Judith saw. Narrow jaw. Wide-set eyes. The color Lil Ma had said was cinnamon, when Cassie was little, and Lil Ma had given her the wonderful-smelling stuff on the tip of her tongue. Cassie grimaced, thinking of the spice's dry, sweetish taste, and in the sudden twist of her mouth saw William Forrest and also saw Judith. She stared at herself and understood why Judith stared.