No Daughter of the South

No Daughter

of the South

A Mystery by

Cynthia Webb

New Victoria Publishers

© 1997 Cynthia Webb

All rights reserved, worldwide. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by New Victoria Publishers, 7011 S. Pintek Lane, Hereford, AZ 85615

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data

Webb, Cynthia.
No daughter of the South : a mystery / by Cynthia Webb.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-934678-82-0

I.
Title.

PS3572.E1952N6 1997

813’ . 54- - dc21

96-44569

CIP

The first thing you have to know about me is that I’m no daughter of the South. People get the strangest ideas about me because of the way I talk. My accent gets even thicker when I’ve had too much to drink. Some people don’t hesitate to make fun of me for it. They want to think it’s cute or charming. Well, I’m not interested in being cute or charming. Men let me know, in what they think is a subtle way, that my particular accent is an indication that I’m not as smart or sophisticated as they are. One guy even gave me a brochure for a class called “Getting Rid of Your Regional Accent.” You’d be surprised how many times it turns out that these are the same guys that revert to
dat dere
when they have had a few too many.

They can all fuck themselves for all I care.

Same thing applies when they assume that, just because I was born in the South, I’m automatically a racist. The South is full of bigots, they say. I ask them, “Like Bensonhurst and Howard Beach?” Again, these are the same people who have their own little supply of racist jokes. I’ve thought about it a lot, and what I’ve come up with is that when you come right down to it, I think some white guys are still afraid that black guys are sexually superior.

Unfortunately, I can’t give you a comparison of black guys and white guys in bed. I’ve never gone to bed with a black man. It’s not that I wasn’t attracted to them, because I was. For one thing I’ve heard enough black women talk about the pain it causes them when they see a black man with a white woman. And for another, I used to be so tempted to sleep with a black man that I was sure it was something very deep-rooted and psychological. So if I ever did, I was certain that I’d be consumed with guilt, thinking that I did it just because he was black. Southern-white-liberal-guilt runs very deep and can be very confusing. To be absolutely honest here, I’ve got to tell you the third reason. No good opportunity has ever arisen.

And then there’s my sweet Sammy. Ever since Sammy I’ve seen things differently. But first I just want you to know, before I tell you what happened, that I sure as hell don’t believe that all the racism is in the South. The South. That’s another problem. People hear “the South,” and they picture Tara, and magnolia blossoms. Or they think “new South” and picture Atlanta and Dallas and I don’t know what else. If I tell them I’m from Florida, right away they think Miami or Daytona. That I grew up on a beach in a bikini. The truth is much more complicated than that. It almost always is.

My name is Laurie Marie Coldwater. Bad last name. It proves irresistible to a certain kind of man who considers himself a wit. He feels he has to make an original observation along the lines of “You sure are a long drink of cold water.” Yeah, you got it. I’m tall. Very tall.

I’ve got blond hair and blue eyes, but I don’t have the perky little nose to go with them. Helpful friends and relatives have suggested plastic surgery more times than I’ve been able to respond to politely.

I live in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, in an apartment over a French bakery. The apartment is rundown, but it smells good, and I feel safe. The bakery is open all night, baking bread for restaurants all over the city. There’s no way someone could break in here without the guys downstairs noticing. For a woman living alone in the city, that makes up for a lot, including the crack dealers on the sidewalk outside.

I make my living with a little writing, and a little photography, and a lot of temporary work as a word-processor. I’m working hard to turn the percentages the other way around. Sometimes I think I’m actually going to do it. Sometimes I’m afraid I never will.

My family thinks I’m crazy living in New York City. I don’t visit them often, but when I do, something goes wrong inside me. I feel clumsy, out-of-place, and, at the same time, I feel that I don’t quite exist. I explained that to Sammy when she first asked me to find out about her father. I don’t think Sammy realized what I meant.

On a brisk, spring afternoon, I was sitting at my desk working on a piece about tap-dancing classes in the city. It wasn’t as exciting as the last piece I’d done, an account of my interviews with the married guys from the suburbs who cruise the meat market district for queens. They actually drive up in their station wagons or four-wheel drive jeeps. A lot of them have car seats strapped in the back and toys spread out over the floor.

I’m so tall that with over-done makeup, big hair, and uncomfortable shoes, I could pass as a transvestite prostitute. Until I was in the car anyway. Then after the initial shock, most of them were relieved to have a chance to talk. I promised not to reveal their names, or any identifying details. As insurance, I told them right away about Jerry, over on the sidewalk, who had already taken down the license plate number and who had his portable phone in hand. Once I got them talking, most of them couldn’t shut up. They had things to say about love and passion and life and guilt. These guys, who left wives and children in safe, suburban homes to risk violence and disease for a chance to have sex with a man dressed like a woman, these were guys who knew a lot about two of my favorite subjects, longing and guilt. The series of articles that resulted from that project received the first real attention in my writing career. I accompanied each section with a photograph. One of a Volvo station wagon with a “Child On Board” sticker in the window, and a particularly flamboyant transvestite lounging against the side. Another photograph was taken from behind a man in a suit while he was negotiating with one of the ladies. There was something about the pathetic sag in his shoulders, the pleading way he held his hands, that tore at me every time I looked at it.

But now I was working on the silly tap-dancing article, because Jerry wanted it. He had this incredibly kinky fascination with tap dancing. Jerry paid me regularly and well for my stuff, and no one else was standing in line to do that. He also let me write about whatever I wanted. In return, when he got some crazy idea about something, I humored him. That’s what I was doing with this tap-dancing stuff when Sammy interrupted me.

“Laurie? I’ve got a favor to ask. A big one.”

I’d been wanting to do something for Sammy. Sometimes I felt like this big kid that Sammy took care of. This was my chance to give something back. After a moment, I said, “What is it?” As the words left my mouth, I wished I had said, “Anything you want.”

She smiled that big, sweet smile of hers. “Next time you visit Port Mullet, will you do something for me?” And I was thinking, what could I possibly do for Sammy in Port Mullet? Port Mullet is where I’m from, where my mother and father and brothers still live. I’d left it behind me every which way I could. I knew Sammy’s mother once lived near there. We’d talked about that the night we met. It was one of those weird coincidences the city specializes in. Like, you’re walking around in a city of millions of people, but you get on an uptown bus, and who is sitting across from you but your college roommate’s brother. Anyway, Sammy’s mother had had the good fortune to leave Port Mullet before Sammy was born.

“I’ve been wondering about my father. I want to know if anybody there remembers him. Anything about him. What he looked like, if he liked to dance. You know. Just what he was like.”

Sammy had barely mentioned her father to me before, but then I hadn’t asked either. I wasn’t interested in anybody’s past, including my own. I liked to pretend I had been spontaneously generated, that I really had no genetic ties with the people that I called my family. That Sammy didn’t talk about her father was fine with me. She did talk about her mother, though, and how hard it had been on her, a young widow, raising two daughters alone.

Sammy continued. “My momma and my aunt and my grand-daddy never wanted to talk about him, so I figured there must have been something shameful about the way he died. I just let it it be. But Annie’s starting to ask about him, and you know, I realized it’s not right. I should face my past, whatever it is. I ought to know the truth. I owe it to my girls.”

Face up to one’s past? Now that was something that had never occurred to me before. I stood up, and walked over to the chaise lounge where Sammy was curled up, knitting.

She put her needles and wool down and patted the seat beside her. I sat down, feeling confused. She reached out her hand and stroked my hair.

“You did such a great job on that transvestite article, Laurie. It started me thinking. You can talk to anyone. You’re not afraid to ask or look into anything. So, just ask around.”

“But what could I do that a private detective couldn’t do better? It’s not that I don’t want to do this for you, but your father was black, right? I don’t know the black neighborhoods down there, Sammy. I never did.” I could hear how weak and scared I sounded and I hated it. That’s not the way I wanted to be with her.

Sammy was the sweetest lover any woman could wish for. Chocolate-brown, warm, generous, compassionate. Sometimes I wish that I could curl up inside her and stay there.

Years earlier I had made up mind that I was done with all that monogamy stuff. From then on I was going to take love every place I found it. I didn’t care if my lovers were male or female; I didn’t care about their marital status or creed. If they made my blood pulse and my heart beat, if they made me feel that all was right with me and the world, even for an hour or so every now and then, hey, that was more than enough.

But that was before Sammy. We’d been seeing each other a couple of months and I was still crazy about her. The painful truth was that I was afraid that I was falling in love with a grown-up woman who had a life full of responsibilities and commitments and that whole truckload of things I’d never wanted. Now that truck was bearing down on me, ready to run me over. Even if I found the courage to do something stupid like stay in the middle of the street and let it leave tire marks across my chest, I didn’t know what I meant to Sammy. How could a woman like Sammy be serious about someone like me? Even I couldn’t take me seriously.

Sammy wound a strand of my hair around her finger, then let it go. “I don’t want to know things a detective would tell me. I want to know the things you could tell me. The years have gone by and pretty soon it will be too late. I can’t ask my mother. She’s old now, and my aunt, too. I don’t want them to think I’m ungrateful after all they’ve done for me.” She cupped her hand under my chin and turned my face towards hers. “It’s not the bare facts of whatever it was he did. I want you to help me understand him. If he was drunk and drowned himself—well, I hope I won’t despise him.” She dropped her hand, but I couldn’t look away. “You’d be good at this. And I can’t go. I can’t leave my practice or the girls. I want to feel that someone’s tried, even if there’s nothing left to find.”

Here she was asking me to do something important, something that mattered to her. “Sure,” I said with my best swagger. “Of course I’ll do that for you.” A trip out of town would give me time to think about truck avoidance procedures. Anyway, I’ve always been better with actions than words, when it comes to my love life.

We met at a party one night, and it was love at first sight. At that time I was a great believer in love at first sight, and I was on a campaign to experience it as often as possible. But after we danced and chatted, and I’d turned my charm up full blast, I suggested that we go somewhere for a cup of coffee. We did, and I sat across the table from her thinking about drowning in those eyes. Then I noticed her accent, which is much less obvious than mine. I asked her where she was from and she said the Upper West Side.

“Before that?”

“A lot of places.” She’d been talkative and open all night, so I was intrigued by her reticence.

“Well, where did you grow up?”

“L.A.”

“L.A.? With that accent?”

She stirred her coffee, which really didn’t need it. I’d been watching and she hadn’t added any sugar. “L.A. Lower Alabama.”

I told her my life story then, with all the humor stuck in the right places. My spiel is pretty good. I’ve told it enough that I’ve got the timing down just right. I tried to get her to come home with me, but she wasn’t buying it. She looked me over for awhile, though, and invited me to dinner at her place the next week.

She pulled her beeper out of her bag and showed it to me. “I’ll be on call, though. I can’t promise you that I won’t have to leave.”

So right away, I thought she was a doctor. It fit, because she had this quiet, confident way about her, and I could tell she had brains to spare. But one thing bothered me. She was so warm, and open, not like any doctor I’d ever seen. I guessed that maybe she was a pediatrician. I asked her.

“Unh-uh.” She shook her head. “Midwife. I’ve really got to go now, Laurie. I’ll see you on Friday.”

That week I finished my tap-dancing article, developed the pictures in my combination bathroom/darkroom, and turned it all in to Jerry.
The Rag
makes no money. It is in a severe deficit situation, and Jerry is the one who keeps funding it. His story is an old one: rich boy gone bad. He lives in utter poverty in the East Village, using his monthly trust fund check to make sure we keep the presses rolling for
The Rag.

My heart belongs to
The Rag
, I guess, but my body belongs to the corporate world every working day between nine and five. I go to a boring law firm where I type boring legal briefs into the word processor, except for an hour off for lunch, when I get the hell out of there.

Yes, it is a waste, but no, it isn’t so bad. While I’m typing, I’m thinking about the article I’m working on, and the photographs I’ve got to develop. That particular week, the week after I met Sammy, I spent a lot of time thinking about how nice Sammy looked in that short red dress. A midwife! I’d never even met a midwife before. If I had ever thought about midwives, which I hadn’t, I would have thought about some little old lady with dirty fingernails in a primitive village.

The week went by like that, punctuated by my pretending to be respectful to the lawyers in the office and to the word processing manager, a woman not five years older than me who dressed and acted like she could be my mother. Then it was Friday, and after work I went home to change before heading up to Sammy’s place.