Gone Crazy in Alabama (7 page)

We had been gone long enough. Long enough, I hoped, for Big Ma to forget why she had us “git” to begin with. The smells of cabbage, potatoes, and meat on top of burnt cornstarch, lavender, and metal from an afternoon of ironing saluted me when I walked inside Ma Charles's house. I was hungry, and ashamed, but glad to be back. I hugged my apology to Big Ma, and for all of a second, she let me, and then she pushed me off of her, which was her way and her forgiveness. “Go on and wash up” was all she said.

We sat at the dinner table, mosquito-stung and ravenous from our hike. When Ma Charles told me to say the prayer, I asked, “Aren't we waiting for Uncle Darnell?”

Vonetta cut her eyes but kept her mouth closed.
Speaking her sassy mind was what had gotten her Big Ma's belt just before Pa had asked Big Ma to leave our home in Brooklyn. If anything, the sting of Big Ma's white church belt should have encouraged Vonetta to make that whipping her last.

“He's working an extra shift,” Big Ma said. I got the feeling our uncle would be working more extra shifts now that we were here.

“Get to praying so we can get to eating!” Ma Charles said. We laughed because our great-grandmother's impatience was unexpected.

“Rolls,” Big Ma said. “Delphine, go get—” Then, just as I was about to scoot out of my chair, she stopped herself, got up, and went inside the kitchen and came back with the rolls. I should have felt a victory, knowing Big Ma now thought twice about having me do everything. But I felt only shame and said the dinner prayer as fast as I could.

The “Amen” was barely out of our mouths when Ma Charles rapped on the table and said, “Well?”

“Yes, ma'am?” I asked. The South just slipped out of me. Big Ma smiled.

“Well, what did she say about my gift? Speak up,” Ma Charles demanded.

I fixed my mind and mouth to say, “Nothing, really,” but Vonetta jumped in front of me. “Miss Trotter said—” She made her face like our great-aunt, down to the pinched nose, and said, “Dentures? Dentures?” Then she opened
her mouth full of cabbage and beef to show teeth and mimicked Miss Trotter's strong and high-pitched voice: “Go on, young'ns. Run your finger 'longside the uppers and lowers.” And she chomped her teeth, even though Miss Trotter did no such thing.

I was set to kick Vonetta for repeating Miss Trotter's words and tone like that. But Ma Charles seemed to enjoy Vonetta's imitation and reared her head back and cackled. “Do it again,” she said. “Just like that over-the-creek gal said it. Go on.” And she readied herself to hear it as if she were waiting for the second act of the show. For her, this was entertainment.

Vonetta obliged her, only too pleased to perform. She cleared her throat. “Tell her my teeth are just fine. Tell her, why would a wolf need teeth she already has?”

Ma Charles slapped the table and cackled harder and longer. Vonetta was in her glory. “What else she say?”

Fern started to speak, but Vonetta hushed her. “This is my story. Mine.” Vonetta cleared her throat again, put on her Miss Trotter face, and said, “Denture rinse. I got something for her. You wait.”

Ma Charles applauded. “Go on, baby. One more time.”

Big Ma had had enough. “Less talking and more eating. Good food is hard to come by.”

In spite of Big Ma's order, Vonetta repeated her line. If Big Ma asked for a tree switch, I would have run out to the pecan tree and found a nice one.

“This is your fault, Delphine.”

I almost choked on a gob of mashed potatoes. Big Ma's forgiveness wore off quickly.

“Marching them through the woods, across the creek to dig up trouble.”

“Big Ma, you said ‘Git' and they wanted to see cousin JimmyTrotter.”

“And the cows,” Fern added.

Ma Charles cackled. “They saw an old cow, all right.”

Vonetta and Fern laughed at their great-grandmother for calling her half sister a cow. Ma Charles and Miss Trotter might as well have been Vonetta and Fern, the way they sniped at each other.

“The Lord wants you to make peace, Ma,” our grandmother said. “Before the sweet by-and-by.”

Ma Charles coughed or rolled her eyes or made a sound that was as good as teeth sucking. “I'll make peace when that old Negro Injun makes peace first.” To Vonetta she added, “And you can tell her I said so.”

Since Vonetta wanted to ride JimmyTrotter's bike and Fern wanted to moo with Sophie and Butter, we spent most of our days with JimmyTrotter and his great-grandmother. Whenever we came across the creek, Vonetta wheeled JimmyTrotter's bicycle out of the barn and rode it in circles around the barn and house while Fern chased after her. JimmyTrotter and I always lagged behind to talk about teenage things while keeping an eye on Vonetta and Fern.

“You catching on?” JimmyTrotter asked with a smirk.

“I got it,” I told him. “But why?”

He shrugged. “It's how they want it. Now that you and your sisters are here, you can play along while I get back to my airplane models.” He told me the story that I had
heard pieces of from Pa. The story Big Ma didn't want spoken aloud. How my great-great-grandfather, Slim Jim Trotter, married two women at the same time.

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“'Cause I hear it every third day. Milk the cow, cross the creek to Aunt Naomi, and she tells me her side. Then I come back home to Miss Trotter with a basketful of eggs, and as she inspects each dozen, hoping for a bad egg to fuss about, she tells her side. I know the story inside and out. Backward and forward.”

“Don't you get tired of hearing it?”

“What do you think, cousin?” He kicked a cone in his path. “I won't be around long. When I go off to flight school who'll they tell?”

“Why don't they just tell each other? They seem to be the only ones interested.”

“They don't speak to each other.”

“Never?”

JimmyTrotter thought for a second. “Only once that I recall.”

“Oh.” I knew when. The funerals. Four caskets.

“Auntie said, ‘Sorry for your losses, Ruth.' Then Miss Trotter said, ‘Thank you kindly, Naomi.' Then your grandmother invited us in for the repast but Miss Trotter said she wasn't up to it and we went home.”

It was funny that Big Ma loved her soap operas during the day, television dramas at night, and supermarket
gossip magazines when Uncle Darnell brought them in for her, but she wouldn't talk about our own family.

“Our family is a regular nighttime soap opera.”

“You got that right,” JimmyTrotter said.

We had a nice lunch and a slice of pie that came in a white bakery box. Unlike Ma Charles, Miss Trotter sent JimmyTrotter into town to buy groceries from the store. She kept an herb garden for her “medicinals,” as she called them, and a much smaller vegetable garden than Ma Charles's, but she had no hard, fast rules about where everything came from. She chose to be stubborn in other ways.

Miss Trotter watched us gobble down the pie, her own cheeks rising in little, hard apples. Then she asked us, “Speak up if you know who Augustus is.”

Fern said, “I don't know who it is, but I know when it is.”

“Not August, dope,” Vonetta said.

“Cut it out, Vonetta,” I said.

“Can't one of my sister's prized greats tell us who Augustus is?”

We didn't know who Augustus was, which suited Miss Trotter just fine, and that was the point.

“Earliest we know, we sprung from my grandfather, Augustus,” Miss Trotter began, but not without a few words of spite disguised as pity about Ma Charles. “She didn't bother to tell you that? Well, maybe she's getting on and can't remember the family history. Poor old thing.”

JimmyTrotter tossed me a wink.

“I was going to mix up something special to repay her for the denture rinse but I'll give you some history instead.” To Vonetta she said, “Tell her, ‘Great-granny, today we learned our family history from one who knows it.' That'll repay her just fine.”

Vonetta promised she'd say it just like that, even with me balling my fist at her.

“Our Augustus, my daddy's daddy, was not a free man, but became one: a freedman. He wasn't a man at all. Just more than a boy. Like this'n.” Her chin pointed to JimmyTrotter. “Only younger.”

Miss Trotter was all too happy to tell the history and to have someone to tell it to. I knew she had told this story over and over because she sang it more than she plain-spoke it. She said, “One night when the cotton was ready for picking, Augustus looked at his hands and they bled. Just bled at the thought of having to pick cotton from daybreak to day-be-done. ‘No more bleeding and picking cotton for me,' he said. So Augustus watched the moon and stars in the pitch of night and chose his time and stole away. Through the woods. And the marshes. And prickly burs and such. He grew hungry shortly after he'd set out and came upon a lake. In that freshwater lake, fish with long whiskers swam down deep and close to the mud. He knew this and knelt and raised his stick to spear one, but
the fish slipped on by. He tried again and missed. And missed again. When he was mad enough to spit, the water laughed at him. Augustus didn't like the water laughing at him so he said, ‘Stop your laughing at me.'”

Miss Trotter raised her make-believe spear for my sisters' delight, thrusting it downward, and Fern gasped, which Miss Trotter liked.

“He felt something smack the side of his face. It seemed that laughing catfish's tail jumped up and splashed him. Augustus was fit to be tied. He was hungry and that catfish was making sport of him, so Augustus bided his time. He studied the ripple of the water, studied his fish wriggling this way and that, found the spot where the ripple and wriggling flowed as one, and speared that rascal with the sharp end of his stick. Just when Augustus knew he'd humbled that rascal, he heard the laughter again! But the laughter didn't come from the water. It came from behind him. When he turned, he saw eyes that belonged to a girl, no taller than he. She led him to her family, who'd fished those creeks since the creeks ran. When he came into their family to live as one of them, the girl's father said his daughter had caught a big, black fish. He told his daughter she increased their wealth and when the time came and she was old enough, she could claim her prize.

“It wasn't long until all the Indians that lived along the creek, the pine, and the coast were forced to move themselves from the land and go west until their feet bled and
the old folks dropped. Isn't it funny that even the good things of the earth can make your hands and feet bleed? And that is as far back as we know. Back to my father's father. A boy named Augustus. Now, take that back with you.”

As soon as we were on our way, Vonetta said, “We're Indians. Just like Great Miss Trotter.”

“Aunt Miss Trotter,” Fern said. “JimmyTrotter has aunts. We have one too.”

“I guess that makes us part Indian,” I said. “Just part.” But I already knew this from looking at Slim Jim Trotter standing next to my great-great-grandmother Livonia.

“My part's probably bigger than yours. I look more like Miss Trotter than you do.”

“That's silly, Vonetta,” I said. “You, Fern, and I are all the same. From Pa and Cecile. We're what they are. Black.”

“And Afro-American without the Afros.”

“If you know so much, why is our grandpa Indian and we're not?”

“Great-great-grandfather,” I told her. “And if you were listening with your ears you'd know he was half Indian.” I spoke with my foot all in it although I wasn't sure.

“Still Indian,” she both sulked and insisted.

“Vonetta, I thought you were good at math,” I said.

“You thought right.” I let the sass slide because I was making a point and didn't want to get sidetracked.

“If both ours and JimmyTrotter's great-great-grandmas were black, and our great-great-grandpa was half Indian, I repeat,
half
. . .”

She cut her eyes at me and sucked her teeth but again, I let it slide and continued, “. . . half Indian and half black, then Ma Charles and Miss Trotter are what?”

“Sisters,” she said.

Vonetta had cooked up in her head that she was Pocahontas now that we'd heard the story of Augustus joining into his Indian family.

I sucked my teeth hard. “I can't believe you, Vonetta. You know your fractions. You know better.”

Vonetta sucked her teeth extra hard back.

“Look,” I said. “We come from the Gaither side too. We're what they are.”

“Black and proud,” Fern said.

“We come from the Charles side and we're what they are.”

“Colored,” Fern said, because Big Ma preferred to be called “colored.”

“We come from the Johnson side from Cecile and we're what they are.”

Fern said, “Far, far away.”

“Stack up all the black parts, next to the Indian part—”

Fern said, “And you got a whole pie.”

“I don't care what you say,” Vonetta said. “I'm still part Indian.”

Vonetta did what Miss Trotter wanted. She repaid Ma Charles in full. Instead of talking about helping with the cows or having apple pie, Vonetta recited a small bit of our newly learned family history. She made sure she began her recitation with that mean thing Miss Trotter coached her to say: “Great-granny, today we learned our family history from one who knows it.” Once Vonetta began performing the history, not even the threat of a whipping from Big Ma could stop her, especially with Ma Charles egging her on.

“Is that what that Negro Injun told you?” Ma Charles said. Her twinkling eyes told on her. Ma Charles was more entertained than she was indignant.

“Why do you call her that?” I asked. “She's your sister.”

“That's none of your business,” Big Ma said.

“Sister,” Ma Charles said, and now she was indignant. “I didn't know I had one until the first day of school. I went to Miss Rice's classroom because that's where all the coloreds went to learn how to read, write, and not be cheated at the store in town. Picture all of us in one classroom. A handful of kids. Big, small. Dark. Brown. Yellow. Ages five to fifteen. First day of school Miss Rice said to me, ‘Go on, take the seat next to your sister.' I said as nice as I could, ‘I have no sister, Miss Rice.' Then she said, ‘Child, go sit down next to Ruthie Trotter, the girl with your face and name. Go on.'”

“That's how you met your own sister?” Fern asked.

“All the colored folk on both sides of the creek knew. No one bothered to tell me.”

“She's still your sister,” I said. “Aren't you whatever she is?”

Big Ma planted her hand on the table and searched upward. “A mercy, Lord. A mercy at the dinner table.”

“And that makes us Indians too, right?” Vonetta hoped more than asked.

“When the census came around, my mama told them to put ‘colored' for our household. She was so dark they put ‘Negro,' because black was the only color they saw in her. Even though Miss Ella Pearl, Miss Trotter's mother, was as colored as my mother, she told the census taker to
write ‘Indian.'” Ma Charles laughed a
heh-heh-heh
. “Next time you go to see the old cows, ask Miss Trotter which fountain she drinks out of when she goes to town.”

“Now, now, Ma. They took those signs down years ago.”

Ma Charles ignored her. “This is better than the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Go ahead, young'n. Say it again. Leave nothing out.”

Talk about spinning straw. Suddenly, the little bit of family history Vonetta had first recited spun itself into a long, winding yarn. Vonetta was only too happy to transform her face and her voice into Miss Trotter's to retell the story of our oldest known ancestor, Augustus the runaway. She found Miss Trotter's storytelling rhythm, turned her fingers into stars, and thrust her spear into the water. She didn't spare a single detail as she told how his hands bled and he looked up to those stars and ran away until he got hungry and the water laughed and splashed his face, and when he reached to get the fish he felt two eyes on him. And that was how he found the Indian girl who brought him to her people and they became one rich, happy family and moved west together.

Ma Charles asked for her tambourine.

Fern applauded.

Big Ma was disgusted.

Even though Ma Charles was thoroughly entertained, she said, “Don't let her tell those stories about her people. How they brought my grandfather into the tribe as one of
their own. When she tells that story be respectful because that is my handiwork in you.”

To that, Big Ma said, “
Your
handiwork in
my
grandkids? It's all I can do to wash and wring the Brooklyn and Oakland out of them and keep them good proper Negroes—”

Then Fern said, “Black and proud,” and Big Ma said, “Eat your food.”

Ma Charles agreed. “Eat your food, Rickets”—her new name for Fern because she wouldn't eat the food that puts meat on bones—“and you,” she said to Vonetta, “nod and say, ‘Yes ma'am, Miss Trotter,' because she likes to hear that. Miss Trotter. The Lord knows she paid everything she got to be called Miss Trotter, so call her that. But you're old enough to know the truth, daughter.”

I figured when Ma Charles didn't have a name handy, she called any woman or girl younger than herself “daughter.”

“You're old enough, and since we are telling it, we will tell it all.”

“A mercy, Lord.”

“They took in my grandfather, a runaway from the cotton fields. He was about ten. At that time, there was trouble down in Eufaula. War with the last of the Creek. She didn't tell you this part of the history, did she? Hmph. When the last of them was defeated, the governor made the Indians march west to Oklahoma and Texas, and Augustus marched with them. He married the Indian
girl, all right, according to their ways when he became a man. Sixteen. Seventeen. She bore eleven of his children over twenty years. Some look more Indian. Some look more colored. Each time one was born, her father said, ‘See how my daughter increases our wealth?' Hmp.” Ma Charles spat in the house without anything coming out and Big Ma called for a mercy. “My father was the second to the last boy. Don't let her tell you how Indian he was—he looked just as colored as his pa.

“Quiet as it's kept, Indians got good money for their colored. Good money. There came a time when my grandmother's brothers sold my grandfather and four of his colored children into the very cotton fields he freed himself from.”

“Can they do that?” I asked.

“What do they teach you in school?” she asked. “They did that. This is history I'm telling you. The real history she won't tell you.”

“Indians wouldn't do that,” I said. “The Indians were oppressed like us. They wouldn't collaborate with the Man.”

Big Ma said, “Delphine, I know your father spoke to you girls about using that Black Panther language down here.”

“He surely did, Big Ma.”

“I know he did,” Big Ma said to Fern. “Because he doesn't want me to have to ship you back to him in a pine box.”

At the moment I didn't care about what Pa told us. I couldn't believe what Ma Charles said about the Indians. I wouldn't believe it. “They sold black people?”

She nodded like this was common knowledge. “Sold some. Kept some. The woolly-haired colored ones were the first to go. I know it because my father done seen it with his own eyes. Seen his father tied up like a mule and his sisters and brothers led away. Seen it when he was but ten or eleven. His mother hid him because his hair was more wool than straight. But he still had seen it all. How his mother fell to the ground begging her brothers and uncles. So when she tells you they were a happy clan, say, ‘Yes, ma'am, Miss Trotter,' like I showed you how. Don't call her a liar to her face. The Lord doesn't love a disrespectful child. She is old and she is kin. But I am equal to her in years. I pulled her pigtails in Miss Rice's classroom. I can call her a liar, but don't you do it. Do like I told you. Say, ‘Yes ma'am, Miss Trotter.' She likes the sound of that. ‘Miss Trotter.'” Then she said it again. “Lord knows she paid enough to be called that. Miss Trotter.”