The Undertaker's Daughter (42 page)

Few things are so broken that they can’t be fixed. However, as I looked at Evelyn with her head down, and Jemma with hers focused straight ahead on our father’s grave, I wondered if something here was broken that would never be repaired. I thought that without him the odds on reparation being made were slim.

My mother thought that because he never laid a hand on her or her children, and never denied us anything he could afford, he was basically a good husband. The alcohol and women weren’t enough to scare her away. She had loved him unconditionally.

The other women who’d been his for a night, a week, or several months were not here today. We were his last audience. Patsy and Viv, and who knew how many more, might think of him with . . . what? Nostalgia? Perhaps a grimace of regret, or a satisfied smile? Would any of them remember the crispness of his shirts, the way he smelled, or how he lathered his face with soap in the mornings?

Before they put him in the ground I had the sudden urge to know all of his secrets. I wanted to know if anything important remained unsaid. Maybe something that he forgot to tell us because he was too sick and too frightened. Could there be something, some small thing, we should know that he didn’t think was important, but that to us would be of overwhelming significance? Didn’t he trust us enough to tell us?

T
he day after the funeral, shortly before noon, Jed, a friend of our family’s, came over.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

He looked at me and without a word quickly climbed the stairs to my mother’s bedroom. The cause of his unease was revealed when he made several trips down the stairs and out to his car laden with my father’s beautiful suits. Armload by armload, my father’s shirts and ties, shoes and belts, passed before me in some kind of forlorn fashion show. Jed couldn’t look at me and I didn’t
offer to help. I wished my mother had warned me. But she never consulted any of the females in our family about anything, only Thomas. Why so soon? Why look at an empty closet? I knew why. She didn’t want to bury her face in his clothes and weep or smell his scent and not be able to come up for air.

Rex did a bit of housecleaning, too. My father’s favorite toy, the Buick Roadmaster, needed an exorcism. During those last months, my father used the trunk of the Roadmaster as a receptacle, a place to hide his empty bottles. The trunk, the size of a small boat, held enough glass to build a wall. Rex, who was determined that no one else find the stash, cleaned out the trunk, drove out to a friend’s farm, and tossed the bottles in a sinkhole. He thought he was burying a secret.

I had sorting of my own to do as well. I spent the next days packing my things for a journey from which I would never entirely return. At the beginning of the summer I had written to an acting school in New York. I didn’t tell my mother until I received a letter of acceptance. I never told my father. Two weeks after the funeral, I loaded a U-Haul truck.

“Comes and sees me sometimes when you’re back for a visit.” Belle rubbed her arms nervously and hit me on the back several times in a display of affection.

“I will, Belle. You know I will.”

Jemma looked small and miserable. There wasn’t much for us to say. We’d traveled an ugly road together that summer, and I felt I was abandoning her now by leaving her before she’d found a calmer path.

My mother stood in the driveway crying as I climbed into the truck. I forced myself not to look back at her. In a span of sixty seconds I felt pain from leaving her and Jemma, relief to be leaving Jubilee, and joy at the thought of New York. I felt the house
around me—felt it almost enveloping me—and the lawn, the statue of the lady, and the beautiful, tall columns were the last things I saw before I drove away.

I was told that people couldn’t believe I left my family so soon after my father’s death. At times I couldn’t believe it either, but if I had waited a day, an hour, or a moment later, I might not have been able to make that journey. No one understood that I had to go, except the farmer’s wife who had quoted Keats at me and whose words were continuously in my thoughts:

“You’ve got to get away from here.”

 EPILOGUE 

I
n February 1978, three years after court action began, and one year after the death of Frank Mayfield, the circuit court ruled that the heirs or devisees of Frank Mayfield were the owners in fee simple of the real estate. The judge ruled that the will of the late Agnes Davis did not create a public charitable trust and that the property transmitted by that will to Mayfield was the result of the express desire and intent of Agnes Davis. The ruling stated that the personal property was to be maintained as part of a memorial, and that the Mayfield family could maintain and plan that memorial as they saw fit, and they should not be limited to the use and occupancy of the residence.

George Davis and Fletcher Hamilton appealed the decision. In July of 1979 the Court of Appeals duly reversed part of their decision by saying that the personal property formed a public charitable trust and was to be used to maintain the grounds and the exterior of the home, so that people who walked by could see the
home as a memorial. Fletcher Hamilton and George Davis appealed again. The case moved to the state Supreme Court.

In June of 1980 the decision on Fletcher Hamilton’s appeal came down. The state Supreme Court overruled the lower court’s actions. The justices ruled that Miss Agnes did not intend to leave her estate to Frank Mayfield as a private residence and did indeed create a public trust. The opinion stated, “Clearly, the purpose of the trust is that the house and grounds and the furnishings of the house be preserved and maintained as a museum and be kept open at reasonable times and under reasonable conditions for public viewing.” The decision was unanimous. In November of 1980 the Kentucky Supreme Court denied Mrs. Mayfield’s petition for a rehearing on the case.

Mrs. Lily Tate Mayfield was requested to leave the premises.

The people of Jubilee displayed a variety of reactions from genuine astonishment and confusion that matched our own, to whispers of satisfaction from those who couldn’t wait to get their hands on it or to finally be awarded a gawking session inside the house after all the years of being denied.

A succession of caretakers has since been appointed to occupy the home and maintain it. In June of 1981 five hundred people toured the Bibb House Museum in one afternoon.

The house can now be rented for business and private functions. It is open for both public and private tours. Fashion shows have been held indoors in the winter at which ladies modeled clothes from local shops. Outside on the lawn the Summer Pops Picnic is popular, as is the Fall Gospel Concert. Occasionally, throughout the year, various women dress in red clothing and red hats and greet visitors as they enter the home. Miss Agnes would die a second death to learn of these events that smack of provincial tastes and ignore her specific instructions. How hurt and
angered she would be that anyone would think that my father somehow inveigled his way into her life to steal her estate from the people of Jubilee.

The most recent reports of October 2013 from a Jubilee online news journal state that Miss Agnes donated the house to the public in 1978. An amazing feat of resurrection, considering she’d been dead since 1972.

A
few years ago I visited Jubilee for the first time in many years. I drove down a graveled back road in Bibbtown territory, a place I’d never been before. There is no town in Bibbtown, and the only sign of modernity on this aged land was a few telephone poles that disappeared entirely as I approached the home of Miss Alberta Foulks. The spry ninety-six-year-old lived on the land bequeathed to her great-grandmother, Catherine Bibb Arnold, a former slave of Major Richard Bibb.

Miss Alberta lived without running water, electricity, or a telephone in a small trailer on her property. An educated woman who was once a teacher, Miss Alberta fell upon hard times when the family farmhouse burned to the ground. Although mentally alert, she was no longer able to work the fields her ancestors had plowed or to raise tobacco or tend the large vegetable garden she once loved. Yet still she relished caring for a small, white clapboard church a few feet from her home, the 150-year-old Bibbtown African Methodist Zion Church, also called Arnold’s Chapel, which her people had helped to build. We sat together there on a shiny wooden pew hidden from the searing August sun.

“Catherine, my great-grandmother, was the daughter of Major Richard Bibb,” she told me. “Catherine’s mother was a
house slave in the big house. You know what that often meant back then.”

Suddenly the impeccable character of the abolitionist major lost its sheen. The position of a female house slave brought dangers impossible for the younger ones to avoid. It is not known whether this cruel inevitability between Catherine’s mother and the major occurred one time or one hundred times. All that is known is that the unholy union produced a child.

“Did your great-grandmother ever speak of it?” I asked as gently as I could.

“No, you didn’t speak about such things back then.” The slender fingers of Miss Alberta’s light-skinned hand repeatedly smoothed her skirt.

At the time of my visit, a great deal of hoopla concerned the establishment of an African American Heritage Museum in Jubilee. I asked Miss Alberta what she thought about it.

“There is something lacking in the attempt, and showiness. There’s something inauthentic about it.”

“Might you compare it to throwing a ravenous dog a small bone, then?”

“Yes, something like that. Too little, too late.”

Before we parted Miss Alberta told me that many years ago another woman had come to her property seeking a connection to the history of the house in which she lived. She said the lady wore red and was named Agnes Davis. I was quite struck that I had unknowingly mirrored Miss Agnes’s journey. I understood her longing to put a face to history, and flesh and blood to the bones of that house. The house that came to represent a great sweeping epic of turmoil, battles fought, won and lost. There was the sense of a massive turning wheel and that Miss Alberta, Miss Agnes, and I had each given it a spin.