Ghost on Black Mountain (30 page)

Me, I made excellent grades. I practiced piano at the church every afternoon. My anger toward JT turned into a melody and my dreams wove through the very air I breathed. Music was my life. JT hadn’t stolen that.

Two months before I finished high school, I announced to my parents that the college in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, had accepted me. I had wanted to apply to Juilliard, but I couldn’t be that far away from my parents. At least I would be studying music.

Mama turned as white as a sheet flapping on the line out back. “Why do you have to go way up there, Iona?” Mama held a bowl of oatmeal in her hands. Daddy drank his coffee, hidden behind his newspaper.

“That’s the best news, baby girl.” Maw Maw smiled. She had turned fragile over the year, reminding me life runs out. I had to go away. I had to have a chance at my life.

“It’s too far.” Mama frowned.

“Don’t ruin it for her.” Maw Maw frowned at Mama.

I grabbed toast from the toaster. “Chapel Hill is a great college. Don’t you think, Daddy?”

“We’ll miss you.” He folded his newspaper.

“You know it’s a great college. Don’t let Mama win.”

“Win what, Iona?” Mama held her hand to her chest as if I had shot her.

“See what I’m talking about?”

Daddy looked at both of us. “Annie, she’s a grown woman. We have to allow her to decide some things for herself. It’s time.”

“Now I’m not allowing our daughter a life? Really, Iona, is that how you feel?”

I took a deep breath and tried to remember she was scared. “Mama, it’s 1957. You don’t have to hover over me all the time.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Annie, she won’t act like you. Don’t worry.” Maw Maw patted Mama’s shoulder.

Mama shrugged her hand away. “Leave this between Iona and me.”

Maw Maw didn’t look a bit put out. What had Mama done when she was young?

“Why can’t you find a nice boy?” Mama didn’t look me in the face.

“Are you kidding? I have bigger plans than to become a fisherman’s wife.”

“You could do worse.” The words were bullets in my chest.

“Girls.” Daddy sounded a bit stern. “I like a calm home.”

“I’m going to North Carolina. Maybe I’ll meet a nice boy there.” I frowned at Mama.

Mama looked like a trapped animal. “I want to protect you.”

This made my stomach flip. “I don’t need protecting. I promise.”

“You think you know everything.” Mama looked out at the marsh.

“Mama, I’m not you. I’m Iona Harbor, a musician. I’d die in this town.”

Mama looked away, but before she did, I saw her mask of calmness fall. “You have no idea what’s out there, Iona.”

And she was right about that. It would take a few years and some truths before I understood.

That night I heard my parents talking in their room. The truth was I mashed my ear to their door.

“Let her go to college in peace, Annie, because she’s going no matter what.”

“You don’t understand, Harold.”

“I think there are lots of things about you, Annie, I don’t understand. But I do know my daughter. Maybe one day you will tell me what happened to you the spring before you came to live here in Darien.”

“There’s nothing to tell, Howard. You always think there’s more to me.”

Fifty-one

B
y the time I left for college Maw Maw was failing fast. Mama had her hands full. I even started feeling guilty about leaving. “Do you want me to wait until winter quarter?”

Mama was washing dishes and stopped with a plate in midair. “I don’t believe I’m going to say this, but I won’t be the reason you stay home. I won’t be the reason you didn’t go after your dream. I’ll be fine with Maw Maw.”

I couldn’t open my mouth.

“I would give my whole life up for you, Iona. You’re my heart. Do you understand?”

But how could a spoiled precious only child understand anything about selfless love? “Sure, Mama.”

She gave me a sideways look and went back to washing dishes.

“I love you too.” I threw my arms around her.

I left for college right before Labor Day. The first month I cried myself to sleep every night. One afternoon I called home collect.
Mama answered, accepting the charges. “What’s wrong, Iona?”

“Nothing, Mama. Can’t I just call?” My words were much sharper than I intended. I’d planned to tell her how much I loved her, Daddy, and Maw Maw; what a terrible mistake it was for me to go off to college; how the professors saw me as a little hick girl from Georgia.

“Are you homesick?” Mama asked.

Anger swelled inside because she saw through me, hundreds of miles away. “No. I just wanted to talk, but you have to turn it into a major deal.”

“You know, Iona, if you called me to give you permission to quit college and come home, you called the wrong person.”

“You’re the one who wants me home under your wing.”

“I won’t tell you to quit.”

“I don’t need your permission!”

“No, Iona, you don’t. That is exactly my point.” Her breathing was heavy.

“What are you talking about?”

“I won’t have you be thirty, married to some shrimper, with three kids, hating me for ruining your life! You’re not doing that to me, young lady.”

“I’m hanging up now, Mama. I don’t know why I called you.”

“Yes you do.”

“Why then?”

“You needed me to tell you to stay in school and quit whining.”

“Good-bye, Mama.”

“Good-bye, Iona.”

She hung up first and I cried. It turned out Mama was on my side. I’d be home for Thanksgiving. That wasn’t so far off.

*   *   *

The first year of college whizzed by. Before I knew it, I was going home for the summer. Mama had made the decision to move Maw Maw to a nursing home in Savannah. Why would she send Maw Maw away? We were supposed to look after each other, right?

Then one night just after I came home, I woke to find Maw Maw standing over my bed.

“Nellie.”

“It’s me, Maw Maw, Iona.”

Her eyes were vacant. “I need to find Nellie. You know where she is, don’t you? I need to help her.”

“Who’s Nellie?”

She clamped her fingers around my wrist. “Help me find her before the bad thing happens.”

“Come back to bed.” Mama stood in the door. “See, there’s not enough hands to keep her down at night. Twice she’s gone out to the marsh looking for Daddy.”

“There you are, Nellie. You got to get this notion of marrying Hobbs out of your head, girl.” She touched Mama’s face.

“I’m Annie, your daughter.”

“I think I know my daughter when I see her. I’m not crazy.”

“Okay.” Mama winked at me. “Go back to sleep, Iona. I’ll stay up with her.”

I helped move my sweet little grandmother to a home in Savannah. That’s how I met Anthony.

It was the end of June and so humid the air could be cut by a knife. Mama and Daddy were checking Maw Maw into the home, and I couldn’t bear to watch. The place was nice enough, with gardens and benches facing the river, but a prison couldn’t be hidden behind a bunch of flowers and smiles. The old people sat in their wheelchairs or hobbled along with their walkers. They smelled funny and reminded me that someday
I’d be old. I noticed Anthony first. Had we been at school, he could have walked by without me seeing him. But that day I noticed him on the bench looking at a newspaper because he was the youngest person around, not counting me.

“What do you think of Martin Luther King Jr.?”

“Excuse me?” I was standing under a large oak tree, thinking he hadn’t noticed me.

He looked up from the newspaper. “The civil rights movement. Don’t you keep up with current events?”

“I’ve been a little busy with school and now my grandmother. I don’t have time to read about some people riding buses.”

“Some people? Don’t you know what could happen to them? Don’t you care?”

Irritation welled inside me. “Of course I care, but you know they’re bringing it on themselves. They know people are going to get upset. They know the bigots are going to come after them for stirring up trouble. Look what happened at Little Rock.”

He shook his head. “These people can’t eat or sleep where they want. They can’t even use the bathrooms they want to. They have to fight a mob to attend a decent school. What if that was you? I bet you’d pay attention then.”

My head was spinning. “I don’t need this.”

“What would you say if I told you my father was a Negro? Would you keep talking to me?”

His skin was white like mine and I absolutely didn’t like him. “You’re full of yourself.”

“What if I told you that girls didn’t need to go to college? I think you should be home, married, and pregnant with your third child.”

Blinding anger started in my toes and rushed up my body. “I’d tell you to go to hell. I have no intentions of marrying.”

He laughed at me. “See, you can get involved.”

I both liked and hated him. “I’m a musician. I play music. That’s how I plan on changing the world.”

“I took you for an art major.” He smiled a big toothy grin. “I go to the art college. I paint. I paint big. Like wall size. My mother is a nurse here. We’re going to have lunch in a few minutes. Another lecture on finding a real future, like being a doctor.”

“How about your father?”

He gave me a stern look. “That part is true. He was black. He died in a car accident when I was five. Does he change us being friends?”

“No.”

“My name is Anthony.” He held out his hand. “What’s yours?”

“Iona.”

“You’re pretty.”

“Thanks.”

“Do you live in Savannah?”

“No, Darien is home.”

He nodded. “Are you coming back to visit your grandmother?”

“Next week. I have to go back to school at the end of the summer.”

He pulled a pencil from his shirt pocket and a scrap of paper from his pants. “Call me when you come back. I’ll meet you here. We can go have coffee.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll show you the city. Lots of good stuff.”

Fifty-two

I
saw Anthony every week for the rest of the summer. On most visits while Mama sat with Maw Maw, I went off with Anthony, not feeling one bit bad. Mama was so consumed with guilt she made up for my lack of attention. She never asked me what I did with my time.

Anthony took me down to River Street and then to the old cemetery. He rattled off the history of the city. One afternoon a terrible storm blew up while we were reading the headstones. Anthony pulled me under a tree and kissed me for what seemed like forever. After that it was easier to imagine sleeping with him. Two weeks before I was to go back to school, he took me to his mother’s row house close to the river and made love to me in his bed up in the attic.

When he dropped me back at the nursing home, Mama was waiting. “I was beginning to worry, Iona. What do you do with your time?” She searched my face as if she were looking at me for the first time.

“I’m sorry.”

She waited with her hands on her narrow hips.

“I was having lunch and a good talk. The time got away from me. How is Maw Maw?”

“The same. Iona, why don’t you invite your boy to supper next week, please.”

Did I have a choice? “Okay.” I rolled my eyes at the back of her head.

Anthony came to supper the night before I left for my second year at college. Behind us was a magical summer, a kind of limbo, where the world didn’t exist. In front of us was a question. What do we do now? And I was taking him home to meet my parents. How crazy was that?

“Wow, Iona, you didn’t tell me you lived on the marsh.”

“Here it is, my life.” We stood on the porch watching the grass rustle in the wind. Mama’s haunting spirit was always a presence in my mind when I was home.

Anthony handed me a bottle of wine. “I brought it for dinner. I hope that’s okay.”

“It’ll have to be okay. It’s a gift.” I smiled. “I forgot to tell you my father is a minister, but the good thing is we’re Episcopalian. We don’t mind a little nip now and then.” I giggled.

“Jees, that’s a big thing to forget.” He laughed, but I knew he was nervous.