No Daughter of the South (3 page)

But she did give me something, something that felt real good. I could tell she was happy about this, that was what she wanted to do. Problem was, we both knew I’d be moving on. When that happened, I’d be stuck with the memory of this feeling, and where in hell in the big city—or any other place on this earth, for that matter—was I going to find it again? For a moment I felt pure, intense anger directed towards Sammy. Hadn’t she thought of that? What she was setting me up for?

Truth was, I felt like a visitor in her life. When we were alone, I’d give her what I thought was the best I had to give, my skills as a lover. But others had done that for her before, and three men had given her daughters. Even her patients gave her more than I did. They listened to her, and trusted her. Followed her advice. They labored and pushed out the babies she caught in her warm, competent hands. Pictures of babies she’d delivered were stuck all over the bulletin boards in her apartment hallway.

Sometimes I’d breeze in, with my latest article or photographs, to show her. I’d walk into her living room, and there she’d be watching Sarah draw with her crayons, or listening to Annie practice her violin. I’d stand there and think, I’m nothing but another one of her kids, an overgrown child she’s nursing.

So I was looking out the window of the airplane and wondering, where do I start with this investigation? A black man fell off a bridge and drowned thirty-five years ago. I just wanted to find enough of the details of his life so that Sammy could put him to rest. She suspected there was something unsavory about him, but she was ready, she said, to face the truth about him.

I was born not long after it happened, a few miles from where Elijah Wilson had drowned. But black and white lives were so separate back then. Even after the schools were integrated, there was little connection between the communities. The black boys in our high school were well-respected for their football and basketball playing skills, but they didn’t come to our parties. And I couldn’t remember a single black cheerleader.

Even now, Port Mullet remained relentlessly white. How could that be? I remembered my American history teacher firmly assuring us that there was no longer a viable Ku Klux Klan in the South. Had not been for a long time. “The automobile did it,” he explained. “And folks are more nosy today. Back then, a bunch of guys would ride on out in the country on horseback. These days, your neighbors would see guys getting out of their cars dressed in sheets and wonder what was going on. That’s why there’s no more Ku Klux Klan.”

I don’t know if I believed it at the time or not. The same teacher showed us the movie that claimed one puff of marijuana would lead us to becoming heroin addicts. My English teacher claimed that a woman who engaged in premarital sex would never achieve sexual satisfaction, even after her marriage. My Sunday School teacher told me the Pope was the anti-Christ.

At any rate, while I read enough to know the Klan did still exist, I’d never seen or heard any evidence of it around Port Mullet. I knew there were people who used racial slurs, but Momma said they were just tacky, like folks that kept old cars and plumbing fixtures in their front yards. My daddy made it clear, in his dinner table conversations with my brothers, that he didn’t have any patience with folks who wasted time running negroes down. “Just shows that they don’t think too highly of their own selves,” he’d say. “Folks who are worried about their own position on the totem pole, they’re the ones that have to make sure somebody else is lower than they are. Besides, some of those negro boys are mighty fine football players.”

So, to make a long story short, I didn’t know any black people around Port Mullet. My first problem was finding someone who had known Elijah Wilson.

It wasn’t likely that my own family would be much help. I was pretty certain they would consider the whole thing just another one of my crazy ideas. I decided I would start off by talking to Forrest Miller, the father of my childhood friend, Susan. The Millers were an old family, had lived in Port Mullet for a long time. Mr. Miller had owned some groves and a citrus packing plant when I was a girl. He’d employed some black and Mexican men to work in his groves. Then, when the building boom started, he’d moved right into real estate development. He knew a lot of people, and was well-respected. Maybe he could give me some ideas about where to start.

I’d call him Mr. Miller, of course. There are those little things, indications that the South is still another part of the world. One of them is that a grown woman never calls her childhood friends’ parents by their first names. When I’m fifty years old, I’d still be calling him Mr. Miller.

The plane landed and taxied to the terminal. I looked out the window at the clear blue sky, and the palm trees, the bright green shrubs and lush lawns. I shivered. Nothing could be as clean and easy as this place looked. I was sure of that.

My brother Seth met me at the baggage claim. Six foot four inches, muscular, blue eyes and blond hair, wearing a pale aqua sleeveless t-shirt and raspberry sweat shorts with expensive-looking high-topped athletic shoes. Only thing was, I was the one who looked out of place. I like to think that I haven’t forgotten a thing about life there, but, the truth is, I can never remember just how hot it really is, and how no one wears dark colors. I was the alien, sweating in my boots and black leather jacket.

He hugged me and insisted on carrying my bag. I tried to guess what sort of vehicle he would be driving. He usually alternated between low-slung sports cars and jacked-up, oversize pick-up trucks, complete with gun racks and bumper stickers.

It was a sports car, lean and red. I pushed my seat back as far as it would go to accommodate my long legs. It’s a good thing nobody else was with us, because we were practically in the back seat. I could see how a year driving a car like that would make him long for a truck as big as a house.

He turned on the radio and ran one hand through his short blond hair. I noticed he had pierced one ear. Now I knew for sure that earrings for men were completely mainstream.

“So, what’s up, Sis?”

We glided across the causeway. Palm trees swayed and the water sparkled. Ski boats bounced across the surface of the bay.

“Usual, Bro. What’s up with you?”

“Don’t give me that. You’re down here. There’s no wedding, no funeral. It isn’t even Christmas. What gives?”

The dazzling sunlight hurt my eyes. The open horizon, the space, the cleanliness, it all oppressed me. I pretended to be looking out the window, but out of the corner of my eyes, I studied Seth. The same blood ran through our veins. We had shared our parents, our childhood home, thousands of childhood memories. And yet neither of us had a clue as to what the other was about. I had empathy to spare for the variety of life in the city. But I’d never aimed that sort of acceptance in the direction of my brothers. Maybe they deserved that. Certainly Seth did, because he had gone out of his way to try to connect with me. He’d even been to visit me a couple of times, and had been good-natured about the way I paraded him to my friends as an exotic species—the country boy in the big city.

We passed a couple of the female hotdog vendors in their thongs. I wondered whether they ever worried about skin cancer in some very delicate areas. I also figured that the local electrolysis clinics ought to be doing really well.

Then we passed a cart manned by a good-looking young guy in a tiny g-string. Seth shook his head. “There you go, Sis. A little something for you to look at.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “From here it looks to be more than a
little
something.”

Further down the highway, we stopped for a light opposite yet another hot dog stand. Beside it stood a scrawny old man with a long grey beard, also wearing a thong. His sagging, fish-flesh white buns glittered in the sunlight. When he moved, his cheeks jiggled like a pillowcase full of jello. Seth and I started laughing, and we didn’t stop until we reached the place that used to be Cowboy Ranch.

For as long as I could remember, Cowboy Ranch had been the only landmark in the long, uninteresting ride from Tampa to Port Mullet. Miles of pine scrub, orange groves and cows, relieved only by the gigantic concrete cowboy boot at the front gates of the ranch. The last few years, subdivisions and strip malls had sprung up to line the road. It looked like the transformation was complete now, and not a single pasture, grove, or cow remained. The ranch and its boot were gone, too, replaced by yet another strip mall.

“Seth,” I said. “I’ve got some things to ask you. I don’t know exactly where to start.”

“Shoot.”

I looked nervously at the glove compartment. Knowing the men in my family the way I do, I thought it probably held a loaded pistol. Seth impatiently repeated, “Go ahead. Ask away.”

That was true enough. I had four brothers, lots of male cousins, and I was the only girl in the family. Girls don’t seem to run in the Coldwater family, nor the Monroe, my mother’s side, either. My singularity only increased the familial dismay that I had turned out to be such an unsatisfactory representative of my gender, and this based only on the little bit they knew about my life. Which was certainly not the half of it.

“I’m going to tell you something, and I don’t want you to tell anyone else.”

Seth turned to look at me, his forehead lined in indication of his puzzlement, and then looked back at the road. He popped another CD in the player, to make it look like he wasn’t too interested in what I had to say.

Seth is my oldest brother. He was plenty wild there for a while, but he has settled down some now. He is into real estate, just like every other person you meet in Florida these days.

The next one is Daniel, the biggest, the only one of us with Daddy’s brown eyes. He’s also the most dangerous. He seems quiet, and he often looks preoccupied. He isn’t given to proclamations and loud talking, but when he’s angry, there’s no stopping him.

Paul is the third. In the shadow of the older ones, and not quite as big. He lacks a half-inch being six-foot, and his arms and legs are bony and long, instead of bulky. He has always tried harder than the others. That has meant, among other things, that he drinks and fights more.

Walter is the baby and it’s still hard for me to think about him with any sort of objectivity. I came along just a year later, and I think that the long-running hostility between us comes from the fact that I just about stole the show. After a few years it dawned on them that I wasn’t going to play the sweet baby sister role they all had in mind for me. But to show you how persistent they are, to show you how they haven’t given up, how deep their dreams are of what I ought to be, most of the time they still call me “Baby Sister.”

Three of them have been married, two of them twice, but they’re all single again at the moment. None of them have any kids that they’ve told us about. Can’t any of them figure out the cause of their matrimonial problems. They don’t do anything different than Daddy does, and he’s stayed married all those years, right?

Seth can put up the same act as the rest of them, but while he may call me “Sis,” he never calls me “Baby Sister.” That is as good a reason as I can give you as to why I thought I’d trust him. I told him, very briefly, why I had really come to visit, “A dear friend of mine, no, actually my best friend has asked me to look into her father’s death. He died a long time ago in Port Mullet.”

He smiled, ever so slightly. “Well, don’t tell Momma and them I told you this, but there has been a lot of speculating going on. Paul is sure you’ve come home because you’re pregnant. Momma hopes that you’ve finally decided to come back where you belong, and live among your own people. That’s about what Daddy thinks, too, but Paul has him a little nervous. Walter thinks that you’re broke, and you’re here to borrow money. But,” and as he said this his smile widened, “don’t forget, Sis, how happy we all are to see you.”

We both chuckled there for a minute, but I sure as hell don’t know what we were really laughing at.

“As to the other thing, first of all I don’t think you’re going to be able to find much—or anything—after all these years. Second, if there is anything to find out, you’re probably getting in over your head. Some things should just be left alone, you know? And I don’t think much of your friend for trying to get a secretary to do a private investigator’s work. If it’s so important to her, why doesn’t she get her butt on a plane and come do it herself?”

I knew he didn’t mean anything by calling me a secretary. There was no social stigma in Port Mullet to doing honest, wage-earning work. But what hurt me was that he knew so little of me, they all knew so little of me, that they didn’t know the most basic, crucial fact about me. I paid my bills with my day job, but in my heart, I was a writer and a photographer. I took it as a slight, and then I did what I often tend to do when I’m put on edge. I spoke without thinking. Or rather, I spoke with only one thought: to shock.

“I want to do this for her. She’s my lover. And she’s black too, if that matters to you.”

I was rewarded by a bright red flush that spread from the neck of his t-shirt, up his own muscular neck, from his chin to the roots of his hair. The tips of his ears glowed an especially deep crimson. We rode past more fast food joints and banks and furniture stores in a strained silence.

After a while I started recognizing the houses, because they were older, built in the seventies, instead of last week. And then, just before we turned onto the street where my parents lived, where I grew up, Seth said to me, his throat tight, “You don’t have to tell that to Momma and Daddy. I know you think we’re all just a bunch of hicks and it’s your job to bring us enlightenment from the big city. But you’re not the one that stays here and looks after them. You don’t sit at Momma’s table for Sunday dinners, which is what the woman wants more than anything else on earth. How do you think she feels, you going a thousand miles away to do a job you could do right here in Port Mullet? You could buy a nice little house here on what secretaries make, and have a decent life, instead of living in that run-down apartment, surrounded by criminals and filth. How do you think she feels, knowing that’s how bad you wanted to get way from all of us?”

Long speeches weren’t much of a male art in Port Mullet, so I thought he must be finished. Long stories, yes, about drinking and hunting and the one that got away, the kind that swims and the kind that wears a skirt, not speeches about emotions or feelings. But he wasn’t even done yet.“If you tell anyone this, Momma will think you are degrading yourself just to spite her. To spite that sweet woman. I don’t care what people will think of you, as long as you don’t. Just don’t do this to Momma.”

I was stunned into silence, a pretty unusual state for me. They thought I left to get away from them. They thought living in the city was a torture I endured just to be away from them. I would have left anywhere, fled from paradise even, to live in the city. But even so, what did they think there was to hold me here—fast food joints, dredged beaches, nylon pastel running suits? How about the little retirement houses with tiny lawns and home state license plates on the mailbox? The Lincoln Continentals with bumper stickers that said “Out Spending Our Children’s Inheritance”?

Well, yes, it’s true, I left my family. And I came back only for state occasions, and then I left again as soon as possible. I loved them, God did I love them, and I never meant to cause them pain. But, hell, it couldn’t be an accident, could it, that everything I wanted to do, everything I had to do, everything that made my life worth living, gave them pain? Was I a thirty-five year old adolescent rebel? Was there any cure for this condition that wasn’t worse than the disease?

We pulled into my parents’ driveway. Seth parked the car, took off his seat belt, and swung his car door open. Before he ducked his head to swing his big body out of the little car, he said, “I’m not forgetting you’re my little sister. I love you no matter what you do. Just stay out of trouble while you’re home. You hear me?” He was pulling my backpack out of the dinky little trunk when he added, like an afterthought, “Momma will kill me if I let anything happen to you.”

By then Momma had come in the yard to greet me. Three or four tiny lizards darted into the bushes before her approach. Wiry and thin, she moves like she means business, which she always does. Surrounded by an armor of perfume, she gave me a big hug that made me feel like a small child, even though I’m nearly a foot taller. Her hair was in a careful set from the hairdressers. She was wearing a baby blue jogging suit with white fringe and rhinestones across the chest, her earrings had fringe and rhinestones hanging from them, and so did her white leather sneakers.

“Baby Sister, I’m so glad you’re home!” I could have told you what she was going to say next. I could have lip-synced the words along with her. “You must be hungry. Come in, sit down, I’ll fix you a plate of something.” She turned to Seth, “You, too, Seth, I made the lady peas the way you like them.”

“Aw, Momma,” he said, “I surely appreciate that, but can’t I come by later? I really have to drop by the office.”

“Just let me make you a plate to take with you. It won’t take me a minute. Just some fried chicken, and biscuits, and a little gravy, and some of the fried okra that Baby Sister loves so, and a big helping of the lady peas.”

“I can’t carry all that to the office, Momma. I’ll come in and eat, but I’ve got to hurry.”

Momma hustled us in the back door. Nobody ever used the front door. The kitchen, which looked smaller every time I saw it, was cluttered on every surface. It smelled like a sweet dream of my childhood, like everything good I remembered about home.

Seth and I sat in the breezeway, at the formica-covered “breakfast table” (actually, every meal was consumed there, with the sole exception of Christmas dinner). Momma heaped plates for us of the greasy, cholesterol-ridden, wonderful food, and then brought us gigantic glasses of sweet iced tea.

The table looked smaller than I remembered. It was hard to imagine all seven of us eating supper here every night for so many years. Momma didn’t sit down; she never did. Every time either Seth or I finished a serving, Momma ran into the kitchen and brought back more okra, or biscuits, or whatever. I kept eating a long time after I should have stopped. I was filling myself up with everything I had missed. I love fried okra. There’s nothing like it. It isn’t the same frozen, and you can’t even find it in most grocery stores in the city. I saw some once in an Indian market in the city, and bought a big bag and brought it home to my apartment. When I dumped it out on the tiny surface in my kitchen that calls itself a counter, I saw that the pods were big and tough. Momma always used small, soft, fuzzy little ones.

I had watched Momma many times at the kitchen sink, cutting the okra into thin, even pieces with a small, sharp knife. She did it with incredible speed, slicing them against her thumb, never nicking herself.