Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion (30 page)

“You want your child to hear?” she asks, her voice low and trembling.

I glance at Sarah, who, as if I had cued her, says, “It’s all right, Mrs. Washington. If you don’t want to talk, I understand But I would like to hear if it won’t upset you. I want to know my history. I don’t know very much about my mother’s family in South America and probably never will. Daddy’s family is all I have, and all I know is that my grandfather was mentally ill and hung himself in the state hospital. I don’t know what his parents were like.

All Daddy tells me is that his grandfather owned several businesses in Bear Creek and didn’t get along with his son. I want to know more than that, and I think Daddy does, too.”

I nod, but find that I am thinking that Sarah is not quite telling her the truth. Until now, I thought her motive was to try to document a fifty-year-old case of rape in the cause of feminism. Yet, by her questions at the cemetery, she wants to know more than I gave her credit for.

The old lady smooths her dress, avoiding our eyes.

“It was such a long time ago.”

Sarah slides off the couch and places herself at Mrs.

Washington’s feet. Her voice almost a whisper, Sarah asks, “Did my great-granddaddy hurt you?”

Mrs. Washington stares over Sarah’s head at me and replies in a firm voice, “Why, Mr. Frank, he never jump on me or nothin’ like that. He’d come by and say he was checkin’ on his property or to get the rent, but I know he was comin’ by to see me. Momma be off cleanin’ white folks’ houses, and I’d be takin’ care of my little sister. We didn’t have no daddy. Least not one who lived with us.”

Sarah asks, “How old were you, ma’am?”

Mrs. Washington looks down at Sarah to gauge her answer. ““Bout sixteen when Mr. Frank started comin’ round. I was a pretty girl. Least that what folks said. Mr.

Frank, he said so, too.”

“Do you know about how old he was?” Sarah prompts.

Mrs. Washington squints at me and answers, “Mr. Frank was a full-grown man. Thirty, maybe.”

I nod but do not speak, afraid if I do, she will stop talking. Each time she uses the words, “Mr. Frank,” I feel sick. Even as a child, I was called by the man who swept the store for my father “Mr. Gideon.” Damn, underneath all that passive behavior, how they must have hated us! I wish this old woman were angry, but either she is masking it well, or time has erased the bitterness it seems she ought to have toward my grandfather.

“What was my great-grandfather like?” Sarah asks.

“He was all right. When he started visitin’ reg’lar, he’d forget to collect all the rent. Say he’d git it next time. After Calcutta was born, he never as’t for nothin’.”

“Calcutta was his daughter?” Sarah says. I realize how skillful a questioner she is. She should be the lawyer in the family, not her old man.

“Couldn’ta been another daddy,” Mrs. Washington says, a melancholy expression on her weathered face.

“My mama be real strict, but white folks kinda do what they want. I liked Mr. Frank. He never meant no harm.

Jus’ a reg’lar man.”

Sarah cuts her eyes at me to make sure I heard that last remark. For good reason my choice of women hasn’t always pleased her. I got high marks for Rainey; she will like Amy, too, if she gives her a chance.

“Did he ever acknowledge that Calcutta was his daughter?”

Mrs. Washington is silent for a long moment.

“After he seen how light Cal was,” she says, “he quit comin’ ‘round to the house. Not even to git the rent money. Mama said he got a li’l shy after that.”

Sarah begins to pull at her hair. She asks, “Where was your daughter born?”

“In the house,” Mrs. Washington says, her tone matter of-fact.

“Wudn’t no hospital in Bear Creek then.”

Sarah knows Marty and I were born in the Baptist Hospital in Memphis.

“Did you see a doctor before or after your daughter was born?”

“Never did,” Mrs. Washington says ruefully.

“Mama didn’t have no money for that. When I had a bad toothache once that wouldn’t quit. Mama took me on the train to a colored dentist over in Memphis. White dentists didn’t like the colored even if you had money.”

Her cheeks now blazing, Sarah asks, “Do you remember if the house your mother rented from him was in good condition?”

Mrs. Washington has come to terms with her life in a way Sarah will never understand. The philosophy of stoicism is not in my daughter’s bones. Patting at the back of her white head, Mrs. Washington says, “It was all right, but it didn’t have no toilet. Still had to go out back.

It was hot, too.”

I wince at the thought of the house. When I was fourteen and received my restricted driver’s license, each week I was allowed to drive a basket of laundry to a house in one of the black sections of Bear Creek. Lula Mae (I never knew her last name) did her ironing in the front room of her house, but all I really remember is the stifling heat in the room, the ironing board, and her asthmatic wheezing. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house each time the feeling was so oppressive. How could people live in such poverty? At that age I never made any connection between our lives and theirs.

Sarah has fallen silent, a sign that she has begun to brood. I will hear a sermon on the way home. Mrs. Washington volunteers that when Cal was about three, my grandfather sold their house to someone else, and she rarely saw him again. He didn’t send her money, see the child, or acknowledge them in any way. Again, she doesn’t seem perturbed about the lack of support. After some urging from me, she adds a few details about her own life. She was married when she was eighteen to a mechanic who ran off after she had four children by him.

Until five years ago when her arthritis got too bad, she cleaned houses for a living.

Mrs. Washington confirms that Calcutta is Lucy’s mother, and I calculate Frank Page became a father more than sixty years ago. Unlike many blacks who left the county to go North to find work, the family has stayed in eastern Arkansas.

“They started coming back these last few years. It ain’t no better up there now, and it be a little worse.” Though it is not warm in the house, she picks up a fan from the table by her chair and stirs the air in front of her face. She seems a little breathless now, and I suspect we have tired her out. She does not object when I announce we have to be going. As we stand to leave, Mrs.

Washington, nodding at Sarah, tells me, “She’s a pretty girl.” It sounds more like a warning than a compliment.

We thank her for talking with us, and Sarah adds, “I hope this wasn’t too hard on you.”

Mrs. Washington smiles for the first time. Talking, her expression says, hasn’t been the difficult part.

In the Blazer, Sarah complains bitterly.

“He was a terrible person! First, he rents her family probably a pigsty;

then he knocks some off the rent if she’ll have sex with him; then after she gets pregnant and has a child, he sells the property and pretends it never happened. That’s just simply evil! How could he have done such a thing?”

I direct Sarah to drive back on Highway 79 through Clarendon and Stuttgart to keep us off the interstate. As we drive past the cemetery again, I try to put the matter in some perspective.

“You need to remember that they were in the Depression then, so the housing isn’t a surprise.

And, we still don’t know if she felt coerced to have sex with him. He may have genuinely cared for her. If she hated him, I couldn’t tell it.”

Sarah passes an ancient pickup with two dogs and three black children in the back.

“How can you defend him?” she says shrilly.

“She was practically a child. He might as well have raped her for all she could do to stop him! It’s all true. Whatever white people over here can get away with, they will. I’m so glad we don’t live over here!”

“I’m not defending him, but it’s not that simple, Sarah,” I lecture her.

“Geography doesn’t have a lot to do with how much we humans rationalize our behavior.

Give any of us too much power, and we’ll abuse it.

There’s some wonderful people, black and white, living in Bear Creek. Granted, my grandfather may not have been one of them, but the older you get, the more you realize we’re pretty much all the same. You just haven’t lived long enough yet to find that out.”

Predictably, I have infuriated her.

“I don’t want power,” she snaps at me.

“That’s all I hear about!

Whether it’s here or up at Fayetteville. Politics, sports, sororities, fraternities, grades, money it’s all about winning Somebody being better than somebody else, having more than somebody else. Why can’t Americans learn how to cooperate with each other and quit trying to beat each other’s brains out?”

My stubborn, idealistic daughter. I look over at her and hope that, as angry as she is, she doesn’t drive us off into a ditch. I am a poor choice to answer this question. Almost twenty-five years ago, when I came back from the Peace Corps with my mixed-blood bride and moved into an integrated neighborhood, I, like my daughter, thought that if the country just tried hard enough, social and economic equality would be achievable. Black and white, rich and poor would vanish. Or, in the words of John Lennon, heaven and hell would disappear and we would all be one. Well, I was wrong.

“You’re wanting something to happen that’s totally foreign to the average person in the United States. Competition to the death is bred into us from the moment we learn that walking is better than crawling. The national bird ought to be a gamecock.

The stereotypical American hero is a type A personality who succeeds whatever the cost, and sacrifices everyone else in the process. While we might give lip service to altruism, it’s no accident this is a capitalist country.”

“And meanwhile most of an entire race of people have been trampled over to get what we want.” As Sarah talks, we go slower and slower, settling in behind Ma and Pa Kettle in a twenty-year-old Ford pickup.

“I don’t know what the hell has happened to them,” I say honestly.

“Do you really think that everything bad that transpires in this country is due to racism? Why can’t they compete any better? Get them off the playground, and they lose their drive. Look at all the other minorities who have come to this country and succeeded. Why can’t they?”

Sarah swerves to avoid hitting a dead skunk.

“That’s really great. You’re back in Bear Creek an hour, and you sound just like the whites. The short answer is that de spite all the discrimination there is a growing African American middle class. Maybe there’s not much of one in Bear Creek, which is in one of the poorest counties in the country, but there is in Blackwell County, and you know it because you can see the evidence right on our street. You just don’t read about it in the papers.”

“That’s for sure,” I concede, glad to have an area where we can agree.

“All I read about is drive-by shootings, the drug deals in Needle Park, gangs controlling the streets, and teenagers having babies. It just seems like things have really gotten out of control.”

Sarah begins to respond but merely shakes her head. In her eyes I’m simply one more racist, an obstacle to progress and enlightenment. As we pass over the White River in Clarendon, I look down into the water and realize how little I believe in the possibility of the advancement of humanity, whatever the race. The best evidence available suggests that we are a violent, greedy, and appallingly wasteful species, intent on pulling the plug on ourselves as fast as we can. Capitalism, stripped of its pretensions, is merely the big rats eating the little ones.

The Soviet Union, of course, demonstrated the utter ineptness of socialism. The only redeeming fact is that I love my daughter even more now than when the day started. I love her for her capacity to be outraged; her willingness to care. Right now, she doesn’t love me, but she will. She always has.

Outside of England, my bladder can’t take another mile, and I tell Sarah to stop at a nondenominational gas station to let me pee. Made of sterner stuff, she waits in the Blazer while I relieve myself in an ancient commode so black with bacteria that out of it could emerge a pre historic monster. Sarah was right to wait. Feeling guilty that we aren’t buying gas, I buy some suckers (a trip wouldn’t be complete without hard candy) and two Diet Cokes. The clerk, a grizzled white male whose foreign travel may have taken place in the jungles in Vietnam, judging from his Army jacket and insignia, takes my money complacently. His status notwithstanding, he could stand a little competition, too.

Back in the Blazer I divide my goodies and say, “I wonder what your aunt Marty will say when I tell her that our family tree has a few more branches than we thought.”

“What can she say?” Sarah says, pulling back onto the highway. She’s a worse racist than you are, her expression says.

“What do you feel about it?”

“I haven’t had time to assimilate it,” I say, glad my parents aren’t alive to have Sarah rub their noses in this unfortunate chapter of our family history. She would, too.

“It was rape, pure and simple,” Sarah pronounces.

“She had no choice.”

Pure and simple? What is ever pure and simple? I try to keep from clenching my fists and stare out at the bare fields, the rice and bean harvests already completed in this dry and mild fall. Now that we have proof (I can’t imagine the old woman was lying, having heard her) of our kinship with Dade and his family, I wonder if Sarah’s attitude will eventually soften about his case. Is Dade now a victim in her eyes, too? Or does his maleness transcend race? What a battle for her ideological soul!

On the outskirts of Blackwell County, I ask, “Isn’t it odd that neither Dade nor his father have mentioned the fact that we are related?”

The sun disappears entirely, and Sarah takes off her dark glasses.

“It’s probably their male pride that prevents them. Their women were raped, and they were helpless to stop it. They probably don’t like it any better than you do. Women are different. Once the baby was born, all Ms. Washington could do was love it. The baby was innocent.”

We drive in silence the rest of the way home. I hope she remembers that someday. Dade didn’t ask to be born either. As we turn in our driveway, she asks me, not for the first time, “Do you still think Dade is innocent?”