Manuscript Continued
Mind you, I wasn’t real pretty, but I wasn’t ugly neither. I was different, and men liked to go after you when they didn’t know what to make of you. And over all of that, they liked to call us ugly since we wasn’t white.
But, you know what it was? They told Mama she was ugly so much, she couldn’t see right. But Mama could still see pretty in her children.
Mama was pretty, because she told me how when she ran away and asked a freed man, ‘Can you marry me?’ because there wasn’t any way I could get along alone, this freed man he said, ‘I don’t rightly know. But I think so.’ He didn’t hesitate. He just saw this woman who didn’t have nothing and got to thinking, how can I marry her?
Mama said, ‘we didn’t know if the white man would want freed slaves marrying Indians. But we married,’ Mama said.
Comes Home
Three, four generations down from me, at the time before the world ended for the colonizers, none of the people remembered their ancestors. Peoples’ worlds end, even the world of the colonizers, the world that seemed so hard and mighty. My great-great grandmother’s world ended when the white men came and took the land the way a crazy man soils a woman, and never thinks anything more of it. But their world ended and they lived on without it. We lived on without our world being our world, and white people lived on after their world went on without the world being their world, but their world still ended. Their world needed to end. It had went very crazy and the earth needed their world to end, so it did.
I will tell you about their world and the descendants who could not hear their ancestors. There was a man. Joseph. And there was Lil Suz. They went to a rose garden on a good day in springtime and a neighbor friend took pictures of all of the bridesmaids and escorts and in-laws and the bride and the groom. And they all wore pastels and rented tuxes. Then they all got into cars and they rode off to a pretty chapel like something from one of their fairytales and they got pronounced husband and wife, in the custom they lived by. Before that, in the winter, Suz registered at Bed Bath and Beyond, a place she worshiped. She opened up a gift that she had listed in a registry and she was so happy because she had got her electric toothbrush that told her when her teeth, were ‘good to go’ for her, until morning, when she used it again. She had hoped, as the people were promised, that she would never have to worry about her beautiful smile ever going away. She would keep her teeth with her until she was dead and placed underground in a coffin made by people who did nothing but make coffins that kept the rain and the bugs off of the dead.
At the first moment they met, Joseph saw Lil’ Suz and his heart felt bigger, and feeling his heart go bigger was all Joseph wanted to know. Although he had an average life and death, he never understood that one day he’d be sitting in a chair next to a hospital bed in a downstairs home office turned dying chamber answering, “Waiting to go to hell, damn it,” in answer to the question “how are you?” And none of it made sense and yet, that was why everything was the way it was, this way of being human that killed off other ways of being human. There were more things like cars and computers, but love and happiness did not factor into their equations for living.
Joe’s shit ended up smelling like something stranger that the normal shit stink because of the enemas that the home health aide administered. But when they were young, when he and his new bride looked at each other on their Saturday-in-May wedding, everyone said, “Aaah,” at once. The kind of aah, that said they were blessed.
These are not white people, but they followed the culture. These are the descendants of the daughter I left in colored town when I was twenty six. Black folk. Descendants of mine and the freed slave that I married. When the people looked at the flowers in Lil Suz’s hair, sprinkled with baby’s breaths, they did not realize that they could not imagine flowers like that growing in forests or in meadows, the way it wreathed her bridal hair. Hair made glamorous, is what Lil Suz called it.
My kin. Mary’s kin. I left my daughter, Mary, sitting on front porch. I think she was all of ten. Watching me leave in a wagon. Her hair going down the side of her back. She just waved at me and said, “bye Mama.”
My granddaughter Pearl, had died when she was not yet thirty-five. Mary and her girl, Mamie helped to look after Pearl’s boy. Mary would sit on the same porch that she sat on when she watched me leave. She’d sit there with her grandbaby, Jimmy. She would look at his hair and say, “I don’t know what to do with this hair, boy,” as each individual hair, coiled tight and went its own way.” But in the heat of the summer when he was four, Mary would put her cheek on his forehead, and it was cool from the way the swelter flowed up off of his scalp.
Hair made glamorous. For these kin, who knew the of the kinky hair that grows out at the base of the hair shaft one week after the beauty shop straightening, this day did not have kinky edges. Glamorous meant perfect on that Saturday in May, when all of the kinks were made tame. So, Lil Suz called it perfect.
How could any one of them hear ancestors speaking? They made themselves busy by calling the fanciest caterer in town to have all of the egg dishes arrive at each guest’s table piping hot. Frittata with ricotta cheese next to a spoon of hominy grits topped with cheddar and a little sprig of parsley, one shrimp and hot a biscuit with scalloped edges, in honor of their longing for the familiar. I understand how that feels, to live in a culture seeped in hatred, and try to outrun it with money and status. I don’t know how it might feel, I know how it does feel as I watch them and the feeling seeps inside me.
After the turn of the twentieth century into the twenty first, the kin still lived amongst white people who, in order to forget those who died for their status, in order to forget the slaves worked thin and bent, they needed to forgot a lot. They forgot to know themselves. They dropped the part of their minds that was supposed to see a person, and once that left them, what was left was unnamed fear. The descendants of slaves could talk loud, or speak softly, and under relentless stalking, they could end up broken necked and quieted. Whether the folks living amongst residues of slavery and genocide were the elite with new status, or living in the crumbling buildings that went on for blocks, they weren’t seen right. Both the people I was taken from when I was tiny, and the ones I left my baby with were unrecognized as humanity.
I had lived with my husband since I was fourteen, and I was a woman. A white man from the town came by colored town and said, “you can’t stay here with these n—–.” My folks that they took me from had their own place, land the white people give them down by a big creek valley. They called themselves by their name. But they had to keep moving because the white people kept wanting their land.
When I was around about four or five, the white men who took me said, ‘you ain’t no Indian you a Christian,’ and I said, ‘I and no Christian’ and they say ‘we gone kill you.’ That’s how they tame us. I say to one of them, ‘aint there no place where we can be?’ and they say ‘no, there ain’t no place where you can be. You got to be Christian or we gone kill you.’ I say ‘I ain’t Christian.’ And that’s when I run off.
Some boys that were kidnapped from my tribe came around and took about six of us back. After the boys came, they was boys around sixteen, and took about six of us back with them to our band, I say, ‘I ain’t no colored I ain’t no Indian, I don’t know my name, I don’t know who I am.’ There was something familiar about the faces there that lived in my heart, but I didn’t hardly know how to speak to them. My mama and her sisters were gone. My daddy, gone. They say ‘we teach you how to plant corn,’ and they did. That’s all I know and so one day I say, ‘I don’t know how to be no Indian.’ They say, ‘you know how to plant corn, you know how to be Indian.’ I say, ‘when I need to go back and look at my baby’s face, my little girl named Mary, because I need to, I’m going to go back to look at her face.’ And I did.
Mary
Mama used to come visit when I was a little girl. She was always moving with her tribe, but she’d come and see me. Then she stopped coming to visit and I heard she had died.
My colored kin had hardship. The white men liked to go after me. They would come around to where my colored town and say, “bring us out that one we like.” There would be one or two or a whole lot of them, and I would go out around the back of the house, and I wasn’t there no more. They couldn’t get to me. They got to my girl that I had by one of them, and my family’s times got hard because my little girl got crazy. After I had her by the white man, they came after her because she looked white. See how they wasn’t right?
They came and spoiled her since the time she was twelve, and she never could have no children, probably because of that. The way she had of not being right was in how she just stayed mad. I knowed who her daddy was and he knowed that they was going after her and he said something like; “you boys don’t have to do that,’ and the men stopped coming after her
Some time after she got grown, she went to town, and this one time she said, ‘I know. I look white. That’s because ain’t just a n—–. That man over there, he my daddy.’ She didn’t know no better than to say nothing more than, ‘yes suh.’ Seeing how she was touched by what had happened to her back when she was twelve, made her go a little off, and some of them came back to colored town after that, because they like to see to it that no colored ever gets anything past humiliation.
Jimmy had been sitting over by the porch that day when one of them came around. The man asked my Jimmy, “Who’s that white woman over there?”
She was taking care of little Jimmy just like his mama would. Jimmy said, “She ain’t no white lady, sur. She ain’t nothing. She’s just my auntie.” He was around about eight.
They come back around to the house at night saying, “come out of there you white looking n—- bitch!” They was outside in the yard yelling, “you look just like a white woman. We gone teach you about how to be a n—-.”
And that’s how they started bothering her again. She was married and living there with her husband. He was old and his parents had been slaves so he didn’t know nothing except to just sit there.
She say, “I ain’t coming out!” one of them come in the house and brung her outside. After that, when they came around, she just come outside of the house.
When they was messing with her, they liked to say, “We gone teach you how to be a white woman, you hear?”
And she started up saying, “I ain’t nothing, you don’t want to mess with me,” but they still all went at her bad and roughed her bad. After all of that went on, she’d sit up in the house for months before she’d start talking again.
Her husband had wet on himself when they had came inside of the house, and my little grand baby seem alright, but he was in the house seeing all of this go on. I could tell he wouldn’t be too good after that. The first time they came around, he had followed his auntie outside and they put him there on the ground, he being just eight, and one of them put a boot on his head and said, “Look at this little n—–. Hey look at him. You look just like a little white man. Look how this little n—– look just like a little white man. If you say something bout what you saw, boy, we gone cook you and eat you, you hear me you little n—-?” My little grandbaby said,
“I can’t say nothing cuz I didn’t see nothing!” and the let him up.
Mamie said, “you run on in the house,” and Jimmy said,
“I can’t leave you alone out here Auntie! I need to help you!” because two of them was fooling around with her.
My baby girl screamed at him, “now you just go on in the house, Jimmy!” You can’t stay out here!” and he ran into the house before they did something to him, but I knowed he wasn’t right after that because some of his mind went off into another direction to where it had been going.
Them white men wasn’t supposed to come inside the house like that, but one of them still did. They was supposed to say ‘y’all come out the house or we gone kill y’all.’ Anything else, they reckoned, was too much like you going to see what they saw as real folks and they had to make it like we wasn’t real. I heard about if the white folks come in the house of one of us, they was supposed go crazy from seeing us inside there. They would burn us out and string up the whole of colored town for no reason so that’s how we did what we needed to do. We went outside.
I had a little place by my daughter with some chicken and corn and pigs on the acre. After my grand baby saw all that, first he was scared. He come over to my place and he cried, but after a while, he just set his face. At first he said, “They aint gone come back, is they?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ After that Jimmy looked out the window not saying nothing.
Jimmy couldn’t say nothing later when he had grown up either, he couldn’t say nothing long as he lived, long after I died. He got to like his drink when he got a bit older. He could hold his drink like his daddy’s side from the white people’s blood from when his daddy’s mama (she was from Africans they stole long after the trade from there was supposed to have ended) had got spoiled out in the back with a white man who was more stupid than mean like them mean ones.
The white man told the African, “you liked that, didn’t you?”
And she’d just say, “yes suh.”
Then that stupid man came over to colored town one day to look at his grandson, and he say, “how come you don’t look like my lil’ n—– no more, Lil’ Jimmy?”
It had been when Jimmy had turned after seeing what happened to his auntie. Jimmy didn’t say nothing back because no white man never talked like that. Instead of saying something, Jimmy would take up a stick and beat up on the bushes growing in the yard.
I used like to take him fishing, he’d sit there quiet, just looking at his cane pole for the whole time.
And he growed up, Jimmy. He came north with my Mamie for a while. She worked in the factories building ships during the next World War. World War II, they called it, like there was gone be so many more, like that’s how it was gone be and everything in their world would keep going on with them acting like that. After the war ended, Mamie moved back home, but Jimmy couldn’t come back south to colored town.
Jimmy found a wife, because my girl Mamie told him he needed to find a woman and have kids. Mamie knew Jimmy needed something to make him alright, and marrying was what she thought up. By that time it was the nineteen fifties. It took a long time for his wife to have surviving children. She had boys, two, but they were both stillborn. Twenty something years later, somewhere around nineteen seventy-four, the two of them had a little girl and they called her Rayne. I was about eighty then, and I got to see her when I had Jimmy bring her down south to colored town. Jimmy didn’t like girl children. He didn’t never unset his face after what happened to his auntie, and he didn’t want to see any women, even though he did what he was told and married one. And he didn’t like just sitting there in that house with two of them. He couldn’t comprehend he didn’t like women, with his drinking and his mind shut off. And him being like that, he married a messed up woman. She was messed up, and I couldn’t bear to see the way she was always swatting at my great grandbaby, but Jimmy couldn’t see nothing.
Jimmy couldn’t see he was messed up, either. He left his wife and child and married another woman who was young. She wasn’t good either, but he kept going to women who were broken something like his Auntie. In nineteen seventy-nine, between her birthing two girls, his second wife finally bore Jimmy a boy called him James Junior. They lived over in a little house in the East Oakland flats. Jimmy couldn’t ever make much of himself, because of how much of his mind went to the side and stayed shut off. He kept his vow. I can’t say nothing cuz I don’t see nothing. But he did a good bit opening a car repair business and the two of them had bought them a little house. Jimmy hated his wife by always sleeping around with a lot of women, because he still wanted something he couldn’t never have.
The wife he left had it hard, but she did okay for herself in the world because she had god given talent. She had been going back to school and she became a black woman doctor even though she was fifty and there wasn’t hardly no black women doctors around at the time. She worked in the hospital moved up into the hills with Jimmy’s little girl, Rayne.
© Ann Marie Davis 2020 all rights reserved