[3 of 5] Say I'm Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love (2020) by E. Dolores Johnson, Chapters 8 - 11 - SLA at Beeber 24-25 English 3Y

Author: E. Dolores Johnson

Johnson, E. Dolores. "I Am Somebody," "Searching," "Deep South," and "A Lingering Smoky Odor," Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love, Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, IL, 2020, pp. 90-129.

8 I AM SOMEBODY

It wasn't just my ghetto upbringing I worried could make the Lewises and I unable to relate. It was how my higher education transformed me. Maybe they'll find me uppity. I consider holding back some of my story to see if we could or wanted to first just come together as people. David said I won't even get that far, since they won't accept any nigger relative, educated or not.
__________

In the fall of 1966, I hurried across campus to Howard University's Crampton Auditorium and took a seat for freshman orientation. This was the start of my journey on the road to the good life, whatever that meant. The president, a warrior from the Brown v. Board of Education NAACP strategy team, welcomed our all black and brown class from everywhere in the dia-spora, calling us the future of the race. We had been admitted, he said, in order to help raise our race. We, the talented tenth, would become all we could be, and lead our people's progress. His message was as electrifying as the fact that he, the distinguished university president, was also black. So were the deans and administrators. It amazed me to see that black people could hold such lofty positions.

In the girl's scholarship dorm, we buckled down, studying pharmacy, mathematics, and economics until the time we lived for came: Saturday night dances at the university ballroom. A girl down the hall had convinced me that "to be seen" at the dances I needed the sophisticated black-is-beautiful Afro of a Howard woman. The campus was leaning into Afrocentric everything. Girls wore kente cloth wrap skirts as we greeted each other in Swahili. Jambo! Habari gani? The school of social work was focused on the particular needs of the black community such as poverty and poor education, and the medical school was the center of research on sickle cell anemia, which afflicted mainly African Americans.

A dormmate criticized girls on the floor who straightened the natural curl and kink out of their hair as wanting to be like white people. It wasn't done at Howard, that kind of self-hating denial of your own gene pool. Trying to suppress the "good hair" spawned by my white mo-ther, I sat on the floor between my friend's knees as she rubbed alcohol-soaked cotton onto my roots and strands. My hair kinked more and blew up in volume to something worthier of hep black women. Then I hurried across campus, to show my blacker stuff in the elbow-to-armpit ballroom dance.

So began my growth as a self-aware, proud black person, the hallmark of Howard's black mecca education. Kinky hair was a statement that bolstered my place among the young, gif-ted, and black, and helped free my mind from the ghetto grids that had nearly limited me.

David did just the opposite in high school. Before he became a Righteous Black Brotha after Vietnam, he'd conked his soft hair. He worked a putrid chemical paste into his roots over the basement laundry tub until its burn made him holler and wash it out. But he was mighty pleased when he ran his hand over his patent leather straight hair, like he was one of the Temptations.

When I look back years later at our efforts to transform our hair, I see how confused we both were. We had not yet discovered how to love who we were as we were, because we wanted so badly to fit in with what black people with other kinds of hair were doing. David wanted conked white hair and I wanted black Afro hair. Our in-between hair was one of those constant reminders that while we said we were black, our biology showed we were mixed. Without the confidence to own what we were, we tried to ignore or downplay that fact around our black brethren.

By the end of my freshman year in 1967, I'd become a Howard Woman-connected, committed, and centered in the black world. It was fabulous, knowing my future was in my black community's rising strength. I gladly inhabited that insular world, building the courage and skills neither I nor my family had had in my earlier upbringing. We knew who we were at Howard, and none of us had any intention of letting white people push us aside when we graduated.

In June 1967, I walked across Howard's main quad in my red-and-white sorority hat, a confident class officer on the dean's list. Out on that wide walkway I ran into a boy I knew vaguely. With a toothy smile, he stuck out his hand and shook mine vigorously, laughing his head off.

"Congratulations," he said

"Congratulations for what?"

"Didn't you hear? You're not a bastard anymore."

"What are you talking about? I was born legit," I said, pulling my hand away.

He said no, I wasn't, not according to a bunch of states. I had been a bastard all my life, until that day. The US Supreme Court had handed down a decision to overturn anti-race mixing laws still on the state books.

"Used to be against the law in thirty, forty states at one time," he said. "But now all you high-yellas are legal."

Was he saying my parents' marriage was illegal? I thought that was only true down south in the hard-core segregation of Alabama or Mississippi.

"Thanks for the news flash," I said, turning away from him and heading straight over to Founders' Library. Up the wide center stairs and past the research desk, I went to the reading room and pulled the day's New York Times off the rack. I wanted to see for myself if this fool was even telling the truth. I stood in the middle of the floor with the newspaper pages spread wide and read the report. A white man and a black woman named Loving had been run out of the state of Virginia for the crime of being married. Instead of spending a year in jail, they could leave the state if they didn't come back for twenty-five years. They sued in a District of Columbia court to be rightfully married in Virginia. The Times declared history had been made and another part of America's segregated past abolished when the Supreme Court decided in their favor. Now any race could marry whomever they wanted.

I sat at one of the long wooden study tables to look the paper over again. What white supremacists dreamed up such a law in the first place? Somebody out to protect their racial purity, that's who. During the Loving controversy, some southerners called race-mixing unnatural and an abomination. They were talking about my family. They were talking about me.

Had people seen me as illegitimate all my life and I didn't know it? Or looked at my parents the same way, even though they were legally married in New York State? I checked the article to see if New York law was involved in the ruling. It wasn't. It was a relief that my parents never had to go through anything like the Lovings, being run out of town for being married. I sat in a chair looking out over the sunny quad, not wanting to talk about this with anybody. I was already tired of this whole antimiscegenation business and didn't want to hear it, even if it had just made headline news.
__________

The chair of Howard's economics department, a renowned champion of inner-city economic development, nominated me for a summer Rockefeller Foundation grant at Cornell University the summer before my senior year. Ten of us economics majors from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were selected for a program designed to proselytize us to apply for Cornell's economics PhD in the fall. But the overwhelmingly complex math in that program turned me off. A black Cornell grad student was sent to convince me.

"I can't do this, man," I told him. "I don't like it at all."

He asked what my minor was and whether I liked it. It was business, and I did like it. "You want to do that?"

"I want to make some money, and move on up, you understand," I said. "Not spend six more years in school."

"Then you want a master's degree in business, an MBA. People are raking up with those credentials. If you go for it, go big. Harvard's the best one."

Thanks to Howard's foundation, I did go on to Harvard Business School, on a full fel-lowship. The day the acceptance letter came, I danced my happy dance by the bank of dorm mailboxes while other students cheered. The citadel of American power and profit was going to take me straight up the ladder to my dreams.
__________

I graduated from Howard in May 1970. Thousands of families were seated on the grassy quad in brilliant sunshine. We celebrated the 103rd graduation of the university that was established in 1867 to educate newly freed blacks. In that procession were more black doctors, lawyers, engineers, and PhDs graduating than anywhere else in America. In my cap and gown, I bounced gaily with my friends past the audience to our seats. I caught a glimpse of my parents to the right, Mama on the aisle and Daddy bent down next to her, sneaking a taste from his flask.

Jesse Jackson took the podium to give the commencement address. I'd seen him a year or two before, rousing the black crowd down at the massive tent city pitched on the Washington, DC, mall. He was yelling, "Keep Hope Alive!" at the Poor People's Crusade. That live-in was a demonstration to influence government action for more jobs, fair wages, a chance to get out of poverty. I'd been proud to be in the number, honor bound to get a dose of the struggle firsthand.

I hadn't been old enough to go to southern demonstrations in earlier years. But I did sit in an empty classroom with Stokely Carmichael during my Howard years as he urged me to join the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi to register voters during Freedom Summers. While I was too scared to risk the bigots putting me in prison or killing me down there, the black power movement and Afrocentrism Howard had imprinted me with the race pride and uplift responsibility that has driven my activism ever since.

As Jesse Jackson warmed up that graduation crowd like the black Baptist minister he was, he used his ready Can-I-just-be-at-home-with-you-friends-and-speak-my-mind? approach. His message wasn't about following our dreams, like white graduates were hearing, although there was some of that. No, I got the life coaching us blacks uniquely needed to survive in white America.

I loved how Jesse told us in his charismatic, poetic cadence to raise ourselves up. "I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me." He stood in the blazing DC heat in his black honorary doctorate regalia and put his arm in the air in the black power salute. He told us newly minted degree holders and our guests to stand and chant with him, "I Am Somebody."

Some of the audience responded with a polite singsong recitation, like reciting a random slogan off some commercial. People looked at each other, half smiling, humoring him. The truth was, in 1970, black people weren't entirely sure they were somebody. But Jesse insisted, thrusting his fist up hard above his head. Sweat rolled down his face. The crowd's response grew and grew, finally into an outcry that took off into a pulsing roar of sweating, hoping, wanting black people. The pumping fists rose and fell in forceful rhythm with the ululating chant. I was euphoric, realizing Howard had turned me into somebody.
__________

The first day at Harvard, I took a seat in the amphitheater classroom designed to foster student debate. Of the ninety classmates who would have all our classes in that same room together the first year, I was one of only four blacks and three women. My confidence fell away as I overheard older white students extol their corporate experience, bandying business concepts about that I'd never heard of. I wondered how I got in.

My largely entitled, aggressive, and impressively smart classmates, including an Argentine aristocrat and sons of major American corporate presidents, had a lively discussion on what a good EPS was. I leaned over ask my neighbor what EPS was. As he told me "earnings per share," the look on his face was quizzical, like "How couldn't you know something that simple?" I felt like the same isolated black kid on my first day of high school honors classes. Sweating it among confident white people who believed it their due to belong there but thought I didn't became my life.

Some white 44-Long student I didn't know came around the curved corridor of Aldrich Hall and physically blocked me moving to my next class. That well-built preppy wanted me to know I had no business being there. What was Harvard thinking, he demanded, giving his highly qualified friend's seat to me and rejecting the friend? Affirmative action had no place at Harvard, and I was going to waste the education. He walked off as abruptly as he'd confronted me, not waiting for a reply.

His outburst made me doubt the opportunity I had, not because I couldn't learn what the business school taught, but because it gave me a glimpse of the personal price of dealing with that kind of attitude in business. It stressed me more to wonder if it would be worth it or if I should run while I had the chance.

A couple days later, a professor called on me to discuss a case on the prospects for a new type of washing machine. I tried to equate the number of loads Mama and I had gotten done over our basement washtubs against the new, improved machines that Company A planned to revolutionize the market with. After presenting my opening analysis, discussion was thrown open for comment. The class ate me alive. About forty students, intent on squeezing out more profit, not clean clothes, waved their hands and jumped out of their seats to win points by trashing my arguments. Their surprising aggression, something I had never seen in a classroom, rendered me unable to rebut. Some behavior was more one-upmanship than worthwhile contributions, just as I came to understand when working in corporations. It was part of the game. Be seen. Be dominant. Put the other guy down so you can get ahead. As classes went on, some students who even made ridiculous comments were entertained. One suggested putting police in pink uniforms to diffuse civic tensions. The aristocrat suggested financing a New York subway expansion by raising fares to twenty-five dollars.

The first six weeks ground me down. I wondered if I did fit, sitting quietly back in my third-row seat, observing the fray. Classmates with three to seven years of business expe-rience, as well as military officers and corporate managers, eagerly dove into that shark tank, harpooning each other with concepts I had yet to learn. I realized there was much more to this program than solving cases every night on how to design factories and create strategies to improve balance sheets. There were major deficits to overcome.

Perhaps the youngest person admitted out of a class of nine hundred, straight out of undergrad, one of only a couple dozen blacks, and without any business experience whate-ver, I became progressively more depressed. The white kids were having parties to which the blacks were not invited. There was no concerned black faculty to talk with as there had been at Howard.

With the first marking period, we black students compared notes and found that the same accounting professor gave every one of us a grade of "low pass." It had been a silly dream, thinking all it took to get a degree from Harvard was hard work. With no counselors or support to turn to, I decided to quit.

I left my partly filled suitcase in the middle of the dorm room floor and went to the dining hall for dinner. It was the final minutes the hall was open, when hopefully all the students had gone. As I slid my tray down the steam-table rail, the lone black employee on campus, a dark stout woman in an apron and hairnet, waited. I dithered disinterestedly over the choices.

"What's the matter tonight?" she asked. "How you feel?"

"OK, I guess." Why tell her anything? She'd never understand.

"You keep your head up, hear? Don't you let nobody, and nothing, stop you."

She defiantly put both a piece of beef and a piece of chicken on my plate, her own expression of support.

"I'm rootin' for you. Awlright?" Her stare was the tough love look my grandmother cast over us, her kind of encouragement, telling us what was expected while making clear what we had better do.

I nodded at the cafeteria lady and thanked her. My grandmother had given me $2,000 of her remaining $5,000 life savings to go to Harvard. These older black people put their hopes for the race in people like me, just as Howard University had.

Harvard had let me in and claimed they made no admissions mistakes. I went back to my room and put my sweaters back in the drawer. Across the hall, I told the two black guys rooming together that I'd thought of quitting. They laughed like Richard Pryor had delivered the punch line in a new stand-up act.

"Fool," one said, "we're all struggling. But ain't none of us quitting. Not us and not you." We talked for hours about our frustrations and what it took to succeed, even if the whites had shut us out of their study groups and never invited us to their parties. Those two men became lifelong brothers to me.

In the next two years, the notion that being educated meant the polite recitation of facts or correct calculations evaporated. Day after day we ground through complex business case studies, sharpening the analytical arguments and decisions that could cost or make hundreds of millions of dollars. It seemed like Monopoly money at first, yet in our daily cases, we were taught that we would be the people making those decisions in our careers. It was like nothing I'd ever thought of, and certainly nothing I'd ever heard black people talk about.

I was uncomfortable with my weak presentations. Other students who were born to lea-dership, like the heir to a dairy fortune or the son of the president of a major luggage company, were smooth and poised. I took notes on the polished code of the executive suite flowing out of their mouths, their casual mastery of the game.

That was a critical part of where I wanted to go. My success would depend on me coming to the conference table with solidly analyzed ideas, convincingly delivered in business proto-col. Even if you can read music, you can't have the solo if you can't sing. I quit marveling and got in the mirror, practicing the prescribed code of my business-savvy classmates: "Cut the level three features and price as a loss leader so we can beat the competition to market." I'd come too far not to play the game that would get me out of my old less-than life.

Two years later, I walked behind top-hatted marshals in the graduation procession at Harvard's outdoor Tercentenary Theatre. The tinny sound of the student orchestra wafted over us. I caught a glimpse of the day's speaker, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer who exposed Russia's forced labor camps and gulags.

The throng of guests we filed past captivated me. Hundreds of America's elite were assembled in that campus audience. They were the white parents and families of my jeans-and-snea-kered classmates who, save my Jewish roommate, had never invited me to anything in our two years together. I saw their self-assurance, tanned and dressed in custom clothes, especially the athletically built white man in a pale lemon sports jacket with gold trimmed heels on his shoes. He chatted in modulated pleasantries through thin lips and straight white teeth, tilting his salt-and-pepper head toward his elegant wife.

Sitting among them, the program went on as printed, though not much of what was said and done that day stays with me now. My mind was somewhere else, thinking about where I came from and where I was going. Howard had taught me I was somebody who had a chance. Harvard had taught me I should expect success managing major businesses.

That sunny morning of grandeur was my graduation from so much more than Harvard. I'd earned my ticket out of the ghetto and into a life with the same choices white people had. Or so it seemed.

What I remember most about that day was thinking about my high school guidance coun-selor. The one who flipped that black hair behind her ear and wrote the sewing school phone number for me, because "colored girls don't go to college."

If only she could see me now, I thought, the colored girl that impeached her null-and-void, past-its-expiration-date, bankrupt guidance.

9 SEARCHING

The clerk in the polyester dress at Vital Records in the Marion County, Indiana, courthouse handed some forms over the counter. "Fill these out, one for each person you're looking for," she said without looking up.

I only had five days to find Mama's family before getting back to New Jersey. Earlier that morning, I'd read through the yellowing pages of annual city directories at the main library, starting with the year Mama left, 1943. My grandparents, Henry and Mildred Lewis, were listed right there, the first place I looked. A tinge of some connection to these relatives was short lived, as Mildred's name disappeared four years later, and Henry's in six, in 1949. There was no sister Dorothy listed at all.

Now, I cooled my heels at the Vital Records Office until the clerk said there was no documentation on Mildred. There were only spotty records kept back then, she explained. Mildred must have died of consumption in 1947, like Mama predicted.

But the clerk did have Henry Lewis's death certificate. My grandfather was dead? But Mama expected him to be alive, and so I had too. In fact, Mama had told me to look him over good and tell her exactly how he was doing. And though I hadn't considered it, he had died of a heart attack in 1949, thirty years before I got to Indy.

I leaned against a wall. So, I wouldn't be able to look for familiar features in my grandfather's face, or search his eyes for the goodness in his soul? I'd never find out what he'd say about Mama's marriage? Or whether he'd receive me as his own?

The end of the search for my grandparents was over before lunchtime on the first day. Maybe this was a fool's errand, to think I could find the other half of my family, those whose blood ran in my veins. I never knew them. Now I never would.

The smell of somebody's menthol cigarette wafted over me. Delicious Kool Filters, like I used to smoke. I inhaled that lovely secondhand smoke for a moment. It was the only comfort available in that moment, so I paused to float there because I didn't know what to do next.

I went to Mama's old house at 635 Woodlawn Avenue in the morning. Maybe Dorothy was still there. If not, somebody else might remember the fa-mily. Using directions from the hotel desk clerk, the old quiet neighborhood of modest single-family houses was easy to find. I searched Woodlawn Avenue to find number 635, with the front porch where Mama had entertained callers.

There was no such address. Where her house should have been was only broken sidewalks fronting an empty lot and a few unkempt city trees. The neighbor's house across the street with the four daughters all named Mary was gone like the rest. I'd expected to talk with them, to see what they knew. Up at the end of the street it dead-ended in a cement barrier, and a highway ran nearby. Good old urban planning.

St. Patrick's, Mama's Catholic parish, was just a few blocks away. The genealogy class emphasized using the marriage, funeral, and baptism records kept by houses of worship. But the main door, which Mama must have gone through for mass every Sunday, was locked. So was the back. At the adjacent stone rectory, no priest in a cassock or housekeeper in an apron answered the bell either. I called back later and left a message requesting a search for Lewis family records.

The only person left to look for was Dorothy. Figuring she must have married I went down to the basement of the Marion County records office to search for her license. At a small wooden table, I read through handwritten ledgers with every bride's name from 1943 to 1953. No Dorothy.

Maybe she never did get married. She would have been an old maid by then, at thirty-four. Or maybe she married outside Marion County. How the devil was I supposed to figure out all the marriage records in Indiana, or the whole United States? There was no telling where she could be.

She might still be in town under her maiden name. The next day, using the entire set of phone books borrowed from the front desk, I called every permutation of her name I could think of. Men, women, and children ans-wered, young sounding, country sounding, annoyed sounding people. Some were wrong numbers, disconnected numbers, or answering machines. None of them were my aunt.

On my last night I sat in the chair by my hotel window with the lights turned off, looking out at Indianapolis. Was she out there somewhere? I scanned the horizon dully, out of ideas. My family search had gone nowhere-no grandparents, no aunt, no house, no neighbors, no priest. No family. And I had to get back to New Jersey in the morning. A sob burst out of me. My lungs heaved to refill. In defeat, I cried, much too loudly for a hotel room.

As was my habit, I went to the airport way ahead of time. While waiting at the gate, all the steps of my week's search ran through my mind. That priest had never called back. What was his deal anyway, when I'd mentioned how important the church records were to me? I decided to call him one more time to see if anything had turned up. Not that he'd answer. In the phone booth across from the gate, I juggled my briefcase and purse on my lap, got a piece of paper and a pen at the ready, then dialed.

The good father answered. He'd found my aunt's marriage recorded at St Patrick's in 1944. Apparently, the marriage license clerk hadn't recorded everybody's nuptials downtown. Dorothy Lewis had married a soldier stationed in California during WWII.

"Do you have his name?"

"Name of Anthony Boehle."

"Can you spell that, please?"

"B-o-e-h-1-e. BO-LEE, I think you'd say. That's all we've got. No address."

"Thank you so much. This is great."

"You're welcome. Good luck finding her. Now, don't forget to send us a donation."

I hung up and pulled the directory that hung from a chain beneath the phone up onto the metal counter. Paging under the Bs, I found Anthony Boehle, the only Boehle in the book.

I put change in the phone and dialed immediately. The noise in the busy airport was so loud I cupped my hand over the receiver. The phone rang four times.

A lady answered

"Is this Mrs. Anthony Bo-lee?"

"Yes," she answered. Her heavy voice was put-upon, the kind people use for solicitations.

"Well, you don't know me, but I think we might be related. Would you mind answering some questions to see if you are the person I'm looking for?" I asked.

"Uh, OK, I'll answer a few."

"You grew up at 635 Woodlawn Avenue in Indianapolis?"

"Yes." Her voice became guarded.

"Your family attended St. Patrick's Catholic Church?"

"Yes, yes we did."

"Your father was named Henry Lewis?"

"Yes."

I stood up in the booth, excited now, but trying not to rush, not to scare her off.

"He was an electrician?"

"Yes, he was," she said slowly.

"He worked on the first lighting system at the Indianapolis 500 Speedway?"

"Yes."

I paused, to get the next part right.

"You had a sister who disappeared in the early 1940s?" A chair scraped the floor on her end. Silence, then, "Yes."

"Her name was Merna Elizabeth."

"Uh, no. That wasn't my sister's name."

We were both quiet. How to clarify what made no sense? She had to be the one, but what else could I say? I stared across the flow of passengers in the concourse. My fellow travelers were milling about, ready to begin boarding. There wasn't much time.

I started over with Mrs. Boehle, double-checking the same questions about her father's name, occupation, address.

She replied yes to all of them over again. "That's right. Yes, yes."

"Your name is Dorothy Lewis Boehle, right?"

"It is." Then I was back to my mother's name.

"Your sister was called Ella?" I asked her. That was Mama's nickname, the one I thought Daddy had given her.

"Yes, oh yes, that was my sister. Ella Lewis," she said.

"Her given name was Merna Elizabeth, right?"

"I don't know that name. She was always Ella to us. Now tell me. Who are you?" Her anxiety colored every word.

"I am Ella's daughter."

"Ella's daughter? You are Ella's daughter?"

"Yes, I am your sister's daughter. I've been in Indianapolis for a week looking for you, uh, my family." I was excited but held my tongue, waiting.

"Oh, my Lord! Ella's daughter? How can that be? We thought she must be dead."

"I realize this comes as a shock after so many years, but yes, I can assure you I am Ella Lewis's daughter, the youngest of her three children."

"She was married and had three children?"

"Yes, she was."

"Where has she been all this time?"

"Buffalo. We were raised in Buffalo, New York."

"Buffalo? We never knew she was in Buffalo. After she left Indy, we never heard from her again."

"Yes, I know. But I'm reaching out to you now, hoping to meet you if you are willing, after all these years. Are you?"

"Where are you now? Still in Indy?"

"Yes, at the airport, about to catch a flight home." As I looked over at the gate again, unbelievably, the agent posted a two-hour delay on the departure board. Relief rushed through me. I wouldn't have to go home only imagining who my white people were. We'd have time to talk, if they didn't reject my race right off. I just wanted to see what their background was with my own eyes. Because of the way my parents ran to get married, and the fear of trouble if her family knew, I had no expectations beyond just saying hello. "It takes off in two hours," was all I got out before Dorothy cut in.

"Stay there. I'm coming out to you now. I want to meet you too."

"You do? Good, I'll wait for you. I'm heavyset, with glasses."

She hung up without telling me how she looked. Neither of us had thought to say what airline, what flight, or what gate we'd meet at. Stuck to the phone booth seat, I closed my eyes to picture the sweet-faced eighteen-year-old girl in the only photo of Dorothy Mama had. She was slender, standing in their yard in a full-length dress for some occasion.

The first man in line to use the phone knocked on the glass and jerked his head to the side. I moved to a wall across from my gate, to search the faces of older white women. For the next forty-five minutes, none of the swarm of people who flowed by or waited for friends and families were for me. Then I a spotted a gray-haired, stout white woman dressed in pastel pants like Mama would wear. She stumbled toward me from way down the concourse, moving intently toward my crowded gate. With her eyes glued on mine, she staggered up to me.

"It's you, isn't it?" She studied my features like a mother with her newborn. "I see my sister in your face," she said.

That old prickling cold shocked my back, like in all my most anxious mo-ments. When my back froze, I lost the ability to respond in critical situations. And here I couldn't speak either. She kept peering at me, confident in her identification. Nobody had ever said I looked like Mama. But she saw it. It was her all right. Had to be.

She didn't share any of Mama's features, and all resemblance to the photo when she was slim and fresh-faced was gone. She was heavy, while Mama was thin. But they were half sisters, something I had forgotten when imagining her looks. The one thing she did share with Mama and me was height, at around five foot one.

"Yes, I'm Dolores Johnson," I finally managed. "Ella Lewis's daughter." I extended my hand and put a pleasant expression on my face as we shook for-mally, the way I did business colleagues. "Good to meet you."

She gestured to her husband, Tony, a short, no-nonsense looking man with gray hair. He stood back from her, watching me. Tony removed the pipe from his mouth and shook my hand.

"Hello," he said. I'd have some explaining to do to satisfy a man with sharp eyes like his.

Everything in that crowded, noisy airport disappeared except for this unassuming, working-class white aunt and uncle. So, this was who my white family was.

Dorothy talked fast. "You gave me the shock of my life. I left the meal half cooked and rushed straight out here. I had to meet you, but now that we're here, I hardly know what to say."

"That's two of us," I said. We got a table in the coffee shop where we could talk.

We stirred our coffee, each staring into the steaming dark wells of our confusion in a pregnant silence. I'd been so intent on the search to just find these people I hadn't given an iota of thought to what to say if I found them.

Dorothy looked up first. "You must know we all thought Ella died in the '40s. Your showing up is absolutely unbelievable. Why, to think she got married and had a family, and didn't let us know. What I don't understand is why would my sister have run away from her family without a word all these years?"

I kept her gaze and just laid it out. "She married a Negro. Somebody you didn't know. Back then, 1943, was a time when race mixing wasn't allowed in Indiana."

I barreled on to get the story out before they said anything. "She thought the family wouldn't accept it and would suffer for her decision." They stared at me with incomprehension.

"Like your dad wouldn't get work, the family might be shunned, even that your marriage prospects would be hurt."

Tony grunted, watching me closely. Did he believe me? Or maybe he was considering whether he'd have married Dorothy if he'd known her sister was married to a black man.

"See," I said, "she didn't want to ruin your lives. She didn't want to leave you either, but it was dangerous for my dad to be with a white woman in Indiana and illegal for them to intermarry."

"Illegal?"

Dorothy was apparently as ignorant of the laws when it came to "Negro business" as Mama had been. After what happened in my life, I found it incomprehensible that she was that removed from what we black people had gone through.

"So, as painful as it was," I said, "my mother thought it best for all of you if you never knew what she did or where she went."

Dorothy and Tony went back to stirring their coffee again. I braced for them to get up and walk out, scandalized or disgusted with what my mother had done. I half expected them to say something ugly and racist like David had predicted, or to reject me personally. I was ready. Plenty of white folks had already toughened me up.

I'd only wanted to see them. Find out if they existed. Know what type of people they were. Mission accomplished. I studied both their downturned faces, trying to read their reaction.

After what seemed like forever, Dorothy said, "She was probably right. Mother especially. She would turn in her grave."

Tony kept his head bowed.

I opened my wallet to the family photo I carried. They held it up close to see the five of us together, taken on the day Charles Nathan graduated high school in his black gown and I graduated eighth grade in my white crinoline dress. I pointed out Mama, Daddy, my brothers, and myself, giving our ages.

"Well, I'll be." Dorothy leaned into her husband. "That's my sister. That is Ella." She looked into Tony's eyes, and he nodded. "Look how beautiful she is here with her family." Her eyes flashed and she scooted closer to me. "Where is my sister now?"

I put on as sincere a face as I could before saying Mama had passed away. My back tingled as the bald-faced lie slipped through my lips. Here I was trying to relate to people I'd gone to all this trouble to meet and was ruining my chances with Mama's deception. But what else could I do? A waitress bumped the back of my chair as she hoisted a tray of drinks, breaking into my dithering conscience. My loyalty was to my mother, and she'd made me pro-mise. I rationalized that I didn't even know this lady.

"Dead?" Dorothy cried. "Ella's dead? How did she die?"

I hadn't thought ahead about any explanations. I searched for more lies to make this trusting soul believe. My tingles turned to ice.

"Well, she had a sudden heart attack," I mumbled, "and died on the spot."

"When, when did my sister die?"

"Two years ago. She's buried in Buffalo," I said, wondering if it sounded true.

"To think we missed all those years of being together," she said. "Only to find out too late she's already gone." Her shoulders slumped. She spoke so softly I could hardly hear her amid all the conversation at tables around us.

"What I would have given to see her again."

Was she saying she was OK with Mama marrying a black man? That she loved Mama even now? That had to be her meaning, if she wanted to see Mama again. My mind was blown; I couldn't put an answer together.

She said the last communication from Ella was a postcard from New York the week after she left to visit a friend in Massachusetts. When they didn't hear from her, they got worried.

"Dad scraped together the money and went to New York to search in the last place she was ever heard from. The police opened a missing person's case and they searched ever' where, in Indianapolis and New York. But they couldn't find any trace of her, and her body was never found. The police declared her a victim of foul play."

"How awful for all of you," I said, thinking how Mama would cry to know they suffered so trying to find her.

"It surely was. Dad never got over it. She was his favorite, you know."

I'd expected to defend myself against a racist, but instead here I was teary eyed over these people's pain, my own relative's pain. Everybody had suffe-red, in both Indiana and Buffalo. I'd been so shortsighted about stirring this pot I hadn't imagined how it could burn those involved. Dorothy was as stunned now as Mama had been when I said I wanted to search for her family. So now I was responsible for Dorothy's feelings too, even as I told her one lie after another. Why hadn't I thought this through?

Dorothy brought out a photo of her four daughters, born in the same time as my brothers and me. All of them were in Indianapolis except one who lived in Florida with her family. Dorothy confirmed that her dad died in 1949 and her mother in 1947 from consumption.

We talked about how both the sisters had been nurses' aides, just as I had, how Daddy was a welder and Tony had worked at a GM factory. How the sisters had lived similar blue-collar, middle-class lives and raised families in the same years without ever knowing it.

As I readied to board the plane, I asked if they wanted to exchange contact information. We did, and agreed to talk again, although neither of us suggested a specific plan. We shook hands good-bye. It wasn't jubilant and it wasn't hostile. We were daunted, two shocked parties, newly related but not knowing what to do about it.
__________

When Luther picked me up at Newark Airport, he'd only heard the blow-by-blow each night on the phone, not what happened that final day. He hugged me and said, "I'm so sorry it didn't work out after all the hopes and work you put into it."

I pushed back a bit from him and laughed.

"What?"

"It did work out. Today, I met my aunt at the Indianapolis airport." The day's events tumbled out of me on the drive home, Luther whistling and grunting with every reveal.

We sat together on our brown Naugahyde couch in the den that evening, talking through my highs and lows in Indy. We drank white wine late into that night until I ran out of steam.

Luther asked, "So now, tell me, does all this help you know better who you are?"

The triumph was I got to see Mama's family. But what he asked was big-ger: did that clear up the questions about my own identity? How did finding out my white half had lots of people hanging on my tree change my being black? I realized that was as murky as before.

"Honestly, I don't know what this means."

"What now?" Luther asked.

"I don't know. It's just been a few hours. Maybe I'll get back in touch with them someday."

"But how can you, when you've said your mother is dead?"

"Huh?"

"You think they'll trust you when they find out she's not? Those lies cannot stand, and you know it." Luther got into bed, telling me to straighten that out with Mama. "Com' on now, gimme that wing, and let's get some sleep" he said, turning onto his side.

I climbed in with him, wondering if I'd found and then lost Mama's family in a single day by telling that lie. He just might be right.

The next morning, I called Mama to report, with both Daddy and Luther on their respective extensions.

"What happened?" she said with a hint of ready tears. "Did you find them?"

She took the news of Mildred's death with a soft, "Oh, no," then finally said, "None of us thought she would live long back then. Her consumption was bad." All four of us fell quiet while she digested this.

"What about Dad? Did you see him?" Her voice was so anxious.

"No, no. I didn't. I'm so sorry to tell you he died in 1949, thirty years ago."

"Dad's dead? Been dead all those years? Are you sure?" She acted like she'd seen him yesterday and here I was calling to say her father dropped dead last night. She burst out crying.

I read the death certificate in front of me, which listed a heart attack as the cause.

She wanted to know if he'd been sick a long time, and if he suffered. I wished I could tell her more.

"I'm an orphan now," Mama said, her voice like glass shattering.

Children could be orphaned, but hearing a senior citizen say that was puzzling. Apparently, Mama had buried her loving attachment to the younger father she left behind, and now when death suddenly stole him from her, she responded like a child.

Daddy tried to comfort her from his bedroom extension, but then went downstairs and stayed beside her in the kitchen. The whole rest of the call, I could hear him in the background asking her, "What's she saying now, Ella?" Mama would stop talking to me to tell details to him, and then his reactions back to me.

"What about Dorothy?" Mama asked.

"I found her, Mama. I met her."

"Charles, oh, Charles." She was offline again, telling him, "She met her," repeating herself, crying.

Once she quieted, I described having coffee with Dorothy and her hus-band, Tony, for about an hour, and how they were nice to me. She wanted to know everything.

I explained we were all in shock, sitting at one of those plastic airport tables, trying to understand who each other was. It had been cautious; a polite feeling out of a stranger you had to reveal a life-changing secret to. With each explanation about Dorothy's daughters and her parents' deaths, Mama sifted through the details as if panning for gold.

"Now," Mama asked, "what did you tell Dorothy about me?"

"They know you married a black man. And why you didn't get in touch.

They seemed to have understood it some."

"What did she say?"

I said once it sunk in, what her staying in Indy with Daddy would have done to the family, that Dorothy said Mama was probably right. And how Dorothy was sad and disappointed, but not mad. Not mad at all.

"Dorothy wanted to know where you are now," I said.

"Did you say what we agreed on?"

"Yes, I said you were dead, like you told me to. And they believed me."

"So, I don't have to face her?"

"No, you don't. Dorothy thinks you're dead." Then I took my chance and suggested we had to decide what to do next.

"What do you mean, next? You found them, like you said you wanted to. That's IT."

Luther came in the kitchen, sweeping his index finger across his throat.

"I felt bad saying you were dead, telling lies to someone who regretted missing all those years you were alive."

Mama said there wasn't going to be any next step. She was angry, a feeling she so rarely expressed, I didn't reply. She was my mother, after all.

"Look, Dolores, finding Dorothy was a blessing," she whispered. "Some-thing I'll always be grateful to you for. But we agreed you'd say I was dead. I expect you to stick to your word."

"OK, Mama, OK." I hung up, knowing that was the end of it.

10 DEEP SOUTH

Back in 1973, I spent the Fourth of July weekend upstate with my best friend Valerie and her new husband. It felt good to get out of New York City's noise and dirt, where I lived and managed a large call center. They didn't tell me, but her husband had arranged for his best friend to escort me for the long weekend. Luther, a delicious African American gentleman, was like me, a first-generation college graduate with a new master's degree. He was six years older and six inches taller, with a Chevron mustache of thick hair. Smart, fine, and sincere.

After just the first evening, his moon-shaped eyes shimmered in pursuit. He and I stayed up late talking, long after his IBM guys' Friday night poker game ended in my host's rec room. We shared our dreams of climbing the corporate ladder with the right partner at our side, me in marketing and Luther in engineering, where he hoped to be promoted soon.

He came back each day, to teach me to bowl (a ruse to put his hands around my waist), to play badminton with me at an afternoon BBQ, and to show me his moves at a late-night party.

That Monday night, rather than take the bus back to Manhattan as plan-ned, Luther drove me the three hours home. Then he turned around to drive the three hours back so he could get to work the next morning. After that, our romance was a runaway train.

We partied with our best-friends' couple, learned to dance the rock at New York's Copacabana night club, and went to civil rights leader Wyatt T. Walker's Baptist church in Harlem, where talents from Broadway shows played and sang the real, real gospel music.

When the promotion he wanted at IBM didn't come through, Luther applied elsewhere. An attractive offer was made, but it was in South Carolina. Rather than live apart, he asked me to marry him and move down there together. After six months of dating I said yes, and our parents gave us their blessing.

Our decision was still secret at work the night Luther accompanied me to my office party. We sat with my boss on wooden stools, watching the stream of red taillights inching forward on the crowded street outside while the two men made small talk. When the boss asked about his work, Luther said he was moving out of state for a better job and taking me with him. I scrunched my forehead at him, unprepared to tell yet. Not only did the boss enthusiastically congratulate us, he and Luther immediately began strategizing on how to get me a company transfer to the South Carolina office.

We took our vows under a floral arch in the church where I grew up, then moved to Greenville, South Carolina. Despite the beautiful weather and more relaxed southern lifestyle that allowed us newlyweds to sneak out of work and be together for an hour during the day, we were regularly confronted with racist situations. My new management banned me from calling on Bob Jones University because they did not want African Americas on their campus, nor, for that matter, did several other large accounts. The owner of a large car dealership who was my customer motioned for me to sit and wait while he finished a phone call. Putting his hand over the receiver, he winked and whispered, "It's a nigger. You know they can't afford a car." He was only one of many to reveal what whites said about blacks behind our backs because he mistook my identity. Local blacks were reluctant, or maybe afraid, to go with us to a new "white" nightclub where we heard the prime rib was good. A gas station attendant stuck his face in my car window to obnoxiously study my skin and demand to know, "What are you?"

We only stayed in South Carolina long enough for Luther to discover his new job was not a fit. Just long enough to figure out how far "yonder" was and that the supermarket bag boy was talking to my twenty-six-year-old self when he said, "Ma'am." In less than a year, Luther got another offer at a prominent company and I got another company transfer, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

However, when we called my parents, jubilant with the news that we both had management jobs and were moving there, they said we'd lost our minds.

Mama said it was a mistake to move that far from family, where we didn't know anybody. Daddy said, "But, it's the Deep South. Not the South, but the Deep South. There's a difference."

"What's the difference?" I asked.

"It's not as safe as South Carolina, or even North Carolina where they desegregated lunch counters without anybody getting killed. You know Louisiana was one of the big plantation states, one of them that never got over losing their slaves. Hell, it is right next to Mississippi. And you know what they did in Mississippi."

Of course, I did. Every black person knew Mississippi was the most lethally racist place in the United States. Medgar Evers and two other black men were murdered because they urged our people to register and vote. Three young volunteers disappeared, and their bodies were found buried in a dam wall one Freedom Summer. And deep-voiced Nina Simone channeled our incredulity and disgust at such hate in her song, "Mississippi Goddamn."

"Don't forget Emmett Till," Daddy said. "It's dangerous, I say dangerous, in the Deep South."

The ghoulish evil of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till's murder in 1955 Mississippi had been captured in a photo printed in JET, the black-owned weekly. The boy lay in his open casket, both eyes gouged out, cheeks and temples smashed in, the body swollen from drowning, disfigured nearly beyond human resemblance. He was killed while visiting from Chicago, for supposedly saying something to a white woman. Two accused white men were acquitted by an all-white jury in a sham trial. Later they admitted to killing Emmett when they were beyond the statute of limitations.

"Some of those crackers are still down there," Daddy said.

"Emmett Till was twenty years ago," I said. "It's 1975. Things are different now. We've got the civil rights bills passed. Everything is integrated."

"Well, daughter, since they killed that child, I get on my knees every day and thank God we live in the North."

Luther and I figured Daddy was out of step with the times. We weren't going to Louisiana as uneducated, disenfranchised field workers like Daddy's family had been on a backwoods Georgia farm. They'd fled to Buffalo for a better chance way back in the 1930s and hadn't been back to see what it's like now. And Emmett Till was just a child who grown men could easily take advantage of. Now it was the 1970s and Luther and I both held master's degrees. It was more than a decade since the New York Times pronounced the new 1964-65 civil rights laws the death knell of segregation. And since we expected that to be true, we went on and moved to Louisiana. We told Daddy we would watch out for troublemakers, sure, but we would be accepted on the merit of who we were.

Once the moving van was loaded and on its way to Baton Rouge, Luther flew ahead to start his position. I set out driving early in the morning to allow enough sunlight to go straight through the thirteen-hour trip across the South. I was a good enough driver to handle the trip. It was being a young black woman driving alone through former Confederate states that made me nervous. What if the car broke down somewhere in my father's version of the Deep South, leaving me at the mercy of the crackers he said could get me?

I'd prepared to avoid all that. Changed the oil, had the mechanic check the car for road worthiness, bought jumper cables. The TripTik map from AAA was on the front seat with the route highlighted in yellow. My own food was packed so there would be no need to go into a restaurant. And if it got dark and I had to get a room, I had the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide assembled by black postmen listing places Negroes could sleep or get a meal without trouble.

On my quest to get to Luther as quickly as possible, I drove directly through South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Then, as I neared the border where Alabama meets Mississippi, I filled up my gas tank and went to the bathroom on the Alabama side, and made it my business not to stop for any reason in Mississippi.

When I arrived that same day at Luther's Baton Rouge hotel room, after dark, I don't know which of us was more relieved that I'd made it without incident. We talked a little, and because it was late, he went on to bed while I took my time winding down in the shower.

While hot water beat on my back, the geography I'd sped past rolled by in my mind. It was such a shame not to have stopped along the way to enjoy places in my country I would have loved to see. Across miles and miles of Georgia and Alabama, I'd longed to get out and smell the magnificently laden red, pink, and white azalea bushes and to examine the stately magnolia trees' creamy blossoms and grand old trunks. As road signs announced the way to the storied Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, I thought how wonderful it would be to see Howard's sister HBCU and check out what a country campus was like. There had to be a museum there showcasing George Washington Carver's many peanut inventions, accomplishments that would have made me proud to learn about. I had slowed down but reluctantly went on past the Tuskegee exit sign. Not too far afterward, a second sign appeared, giving me another chance to see the institute. But no, I told myself, it was best to press on down the interstate as planned.

At a gas stop, I hesitated over the impulse to take the TripTik option to detour onto a longer way through Mississippi, down along the scenic Biloxi and Gulfport beach coast on the Gulf of Mexico. But I didn't make that choice either. Those places probably weren't for me, or any African Americans, even if I stayed in the car and just looked through the window. I wasn't fool enough to risk getting caught in the dark in Mississippi. And the extra time it took might mean being too exhausted to get to Baton Rouge that night. No way would I sleep in Mississippi. So, I plowed on straight to Baton Rouge, missing all the sights that called to me, because I was afraid. As life would have it, there has never been another chance for me to see any of those places.
__________

Luther and I got off to a good start in Baton Rouge, learning the layout of the town with very helpful assistance from the pleasant hotel staff. They pointed out landmarks, marked routes to our jobs on maps, told us how the Louisiana State University (LSU) football games took over the town. And they sent us down the Airline Highway to Ralph & Kacoo's restaurant, where we were made comfortable by the smiling white hostess who welcomed us with chatty charm. That Cajun food was so delicious we went back again and again, each time eating the whole bowl of hot hushpuppies with fried fish from the Mississippi, Atchafalaya crawfish tails in thick étouffée sauce, seafood gumbo, and shrimp stew, but never the alligator bites. The famed southern hospitality we encountered everywhere was so lovely after New York's brusqueness, we questioned what my father had been talking about.

Luther found a black colleague at the plant who also lived in Baton Rouge, and they began carpooling for the forty-five-mile commute. We were invited over to meet his wife and small children, where we were taken in warmly. It felt good to make that early connection, to know somebody black in town we could visit with, and to look forward to others they planned to introduce us to. The easy way we newcomers were welcomed as members of the tribe made the move feel comfortable.

My first day in the company sales office, I wore a sleeveless black-and-white dress and black patent pumps to make a good first impression. There would be the day in the office and later, a management dinner with higher ups from New Orleans and regional management from Birmingham.

My boss, a district manager in his mid-thirties, received me in his corner office. We hadn't met before, so we got acquainted before he discussed my role. Then he took me on a tour of the office, introducing me to the all-white staff. Men in white shirts and ties and a few women in dresses shook my hand as we visited row after row of cubicles. A few offered their help as I settled in. In the break room, there was no way to miss the string bean of a white man in a seersucker suit and white shoes tasting coffee from the fifty-cup metal percolator. He shouted, "Who made this turkey piss?" which I learned was his ritual complaint about needing more chicory.

A tall older man with thinning black hair came to hang over the top of my cubicle. His lugubrious grin conflicted with his beady eyes. They were hard, like a rat caught in the night. "Hey, heard you was here," he started, as lightly as an old friend. "Got a joke for you, heh, heh. What do you call a nigger on a stick?"

"What did you say?"

"A fudgsicle. A nigger on a stick's a fudgsicle. Git it?" He slapped his thigh and walked away laughing.

People around me kept their heads down, working like nothing happened. Should I say something back or ignore an intentional insult? I'd only been on the job a few hours. I kept quiet, wondering what planet I'd landed on.

Later that evening, in a private dining room of a nice restaurant, I was seated near the ranking official from Birmingham at a long banquet table. In what was apparently another southern gesture, he presented a long-stem-med red rose to me and to the other woman attending, with a courtly grace. I'd certainly never seen such from businessmen in New York.

I introduced myself as the new sales manager to colleagues seated to my left.

"Oh my," the other female said, and laughed. She'd tried to get into sales a few years before, the first woman to do so. But she didn't get the job. During the interview, the man in charge told her why.

"What if we had to send a nice lady like you to call on some nigger bar?" she imitated, amused. "He was right," she said. "Who would want to be put in that position?"

The suit and ties laughed in agreement, one tilting his glass toward her in a salute. My mouth went as dry as crumbled plaster. I wanted to tell them, with the anger I felt, about all the respectable black businesspeople I knew, the folly of forfeiting the buying power of black America, and to ask how they could disrespect me to my face.

As I stewed, those people chattered on, the moment nothing to them. The official on my right had missed the whole thing, talking to people on his other side. I rose to my feet slowly and deliberately, my face flushed. A few seats away to my right, my boss caught my eye. He searched my face anxiously, and I knew he'd heard it. His lips were parted as he waited to see what I would do.

"Excuse me," I said, walking behind the laughing people's chairs and out of the restaurant into the gravel parking lot. My boss was right on my heels.

"I can't work like this," I said, the words scalding like boiling soup

"No, wait," he said, and tried to explain. He said she didn't know I was black. I was so light she mistook me. His right hand splayed open in a pleading gesture. I studied the cleft in his chin, framed by lantern light on a white fence behind him. He said after the New York boss told him I was African American, he held a meeting last Friday to tell everyone in our office there would be a black manager, so they'd be ready. These managers from other departments probably hadn't been told, he said.

Don't leave, he kept saying. He'd see they were spoken to. The company's affirmative action policy would be enforced. It's just that I was the first black employee, let alone manager, in Baton Rouge. He saw it would take some doing to get it right. "I'm sorry." he said. "Please, come back in."

If I did, that meant plowing through their invisible rules of white supremacy just to do the work I was qualified and ready to do. Whites were the insiders, the ones with assumed acceptability, trustworthiness, and the right to be their unfiltered selves. So, who did that make me? The exhausted outsider doing my management assignments, yoked to a team of bigots?

"If you make it clear to them that this is unacceptable, I will go back in," I said.

The next morning, that woman called first thing. She said she wouldn't have said it if she had known I was black. I let her know how offended I was for myself and for black businesses. She was very sorry. I didn't believe her, but I had to accept the apology if I wanted to stay on that job. I thanked her for calling to say so, noting to myself that she as much as admitted she would have said that exact thing if I had been white.

A colleague named Donna, a put-together white woman about my age, invited us to dinner at her place. She had a lovely apartment on the second floor of a new complex in a convenient location. Over dessert, she offered the place to us. She was going to Alabama for six weeks and needed a house sitter. Would we like to stay in her apartment during that time while we found our own place?

Donna was a white southerner who not only trusted us African American newcomers with her things but also became a good friend. We were so grateful for the comforts of her apartment; the terms were worked out that evening.

Other whites were friendly, including neighbors in the building and several of my white thirtysomething office mates. I hung out with my management peers and one of them became a regular tennis partner of Luther's.

But it was hard for us Yankees to read the racial tea leaves in Baton Rouge. On the one hand were the white friends we made and the sugarcoated southern hospitality most people heaped on their greetings. On the other was the bald-faced prejudice other whites felt licensed to spew. We decided that dichotomy was the ambiguity that comes with any changing times and changing ways. So, we would not take on the jerks but would focus on our fit with the best of the South's progress. The proof that it had progressed was in our socializing with whites, something Daddy would never have dreamed of forty years ago back in Georgia.

On the hunt for a house to buy, I found new construction in a subdivision that buzzed with crews framing, painting, and unloading plumbing fix-tures. There, a house was in our price range, with ideal size, amenities, and proximity to the interstate for commuting. The developer's on-site salesman eagerly promoted its features to me, pointing out the wide roof overhang that blunted the searing sun, the upgraded carpeting and tile, and the extra storage in the laundry room. He opened doors for me and pumped my interest by suggesting ways to include whatever I wanted. Back in his office, he said to bring my husband to see the place. His houses were selling fast.

"Y'all going to come today, after he gets off work?" he asked.

"Yes, when he gets home, we'll be back."

Luther and I skipped dinner to go straight to the house that had been left open for us. We bypassed the sales office in case he didn't like the property. That way, we wouldn't have to go through a hard sell with the agent.

I drove slowly through the newly made streets so Luther could look around. It seemed a mini town was under construction, with everything from several pristinely painted and landscaped new houses, to the cement slab foundations of others, with piles of lumber, roof shingles, and rolls of grassy sod on many plots.

We walked through the chosen house and admired the good-sized rooms, the kitchen's avocado self-cleaning oven, and the prospects of having a cement patio for outdoor living.

"I love how it's all new," Luther said. "Sparkling and state of the art. This boy from the projects is going to own a house with a lawn, backyard, and extra bedrooms." We decided to figure out an offer and go up to the office to talk with the agent right then. We sat on the floor in the sunny living room as Luther ran some numbers on his pocket calculator. We'd seen enough houses to know there wasn't much bargaining room in this hot market, so we decided on a strategy with a starting bid and a final bid.

We pulled up in the office driveway in the same car the salesman saw me in earlier. When I stepped out, he rubbed his hands together and smiled broadly. Then his eyes darted in alarm from me to my milk-chocolate husband getting out, then back to me.

"No, no, NO. Is that your husband?" he said, running backward into the office. He closed the door before we got there. Then we heard the lock catch. His eyes bugged out at us through the glass top half of the door. "I'm not selling to you," he called through the glass.

"We have the money, no problem," Luther called back.

"Naw, I cain't sell to no niggers. If I do, I cain't sell none of these other houses. Go on, now, git!" He yanked the shade down.

Luther's lips stuck out, pressed together like a platypus.

"That's illegal," I said. "He can't do that."

"Of course it's illegal. He invited you back because he thought you were white. Now get in the car, please." He wasn't waiting around to see what else might happen. Luther kept his eye on that office door until he pulled away.

"Just forget it," he said.

"We could sue," I persisted.

"No, we're not going to do that. Let's find something else. I'm not getting into a battle with these white people down here. Clearly this isn't New York where you might win."

We sought out a white real estate agent to negotiate for us and bought an existing home in an established neighborhood without incident. Our neighbors were white, but right across the road was another development with all African American residents. They lived in tiny houses smaller than any I'd ever seen. Up the road was a fancier all-black development. Like where I grew up in the North, de facto segregation defined these neighborhoods. But unlike Buffalo's redlining that kept us out, Baton Rouge had entire black subdivisions where people intentionally chose to build or buy. Because they were barred in other ways, they stayed with their own to be spared the grief of dealing with white people in their home neighborhoods, a concept we transplants had failed to grasp.

11 A LINGERING SMOKY ODOR

When Luther got home from his newjob, he went to see how the citrus plaid couch, delivered that day, looked with the Baton Rouge sunshine streaming through the window. Pleased, he slipped his arm around my waist. "You've made our house mighty nice, baby. It's beginning to feel like home."

Our consolation prize house was a three-bedroom ranch in an older neighborhood of small quarter-acre lots, the nicest we could comfortably afford. The day we closed, Luther had planted a palm tree in the backyard where we could see it from the dining room, a flag planting of our conversion to southerners.

After dinner, we snuggled up on our new couch, watching TV, me in my nightgown. About halfway through the program, an insistent banging started on the front door, so loud Luther and I both jumped. He approached the door cautiously while I ran back to the bedroom to pull a dress over my head. I heard the door latch open, then nothing.

"Come out here," Luther said

He stood just inside the threshold, looking ahead like he was nailed in place. Standing beside him, I saw nobody was out there, anywhere. The street was silent and dark, except for the blaze illuminating the night sky. On our front lawn, flames jumped off a burning wooden cross, hammered into our lawn near a tree.

"Good God Almighty," I said, a sharp tingle electrifying my spine.

We took in that symbol of hate, scared to go out. Scanning our hundred-foot frontage and then the street, we couldn't see anybody moving. It was eerie, how still the night was, no neighbor coming outside when a fire crackled on a crucifix. Luther stepped out a few feet, and when no one appeared or spoke, he ran for the garden hose and tried to subdue the flames.

"Do you think they're going to kill us?" I whispered.

He hesitated. "Not tonight, I don't. There's no mob in sheets out here. Otherwise we'd already be hurt, or dead."

I called the police on the dining room wall phone, pulling the curly cord to the window to see if anybody was hiding out back.

"What's the nature of your emergency?" the responder asked

"There's a cross burning on our lawn," I shouted.

"Anybody hurt?"

"No."

He took the address and said, "Do not go outside. We're on our way." I lit up the property with all the outdoor lights and told Luther to let the hose go and come back in. Inside, he pulled me down to the floor and put his finger to his lips. Somebody might still be out there, he said. And there we crouched, listening and watching, pressing our fears into the wall we braced against.

Blue lights flashed as squad cars sped up to the house, stopping sharply at crazy angles in the street. Uniformed policemen waited beside their cars until the ranking officer stepped out, dressed in a wide-brimmed hat with a thick band around it, the kind a Canadian Mountie would wear. We turned on the dining room light and let him in the carport door. His men headed over to the cross.

"Y'all sit down here to the table," he said, without introduction, and began to interview us. What were we doing when the knock came on the door? Did we see anybody? Had we had arguments with anyone? Who did we think did this? Where were we from? What were we doing in Baton Rouge? How long had we been in this house?

"Y'all stay there and don't come out," he said, walking toward the curb. In the blue lights, his all-white officers gathered around for instructions. Then, one guarded the front of our house while the others fanned out in the dark. One moved slowly through the backyard with a flashlight.

Luther shook his head, his lips pressed into a flat line. We waited at our table, the one where we ate our meals and admired the palm tree, the table where we got up extra early in the morning to play three games of Scrabble before work. "Best two out of three," Luther always said, "so we have an undisputed champion of the day."

I squeezed his hand as the minutes crawled by, my mind running wild with scenarios from Luther swinging from a tree to a court conviction that sent those bastards to prison. But with Luther's stern eyes doing the talking, I knew not to up the ante by saying those things out loud. So, we waited, steeped in our impotent fright.

The uniforms returned to talk with the chief, who stood wide-legged in the street, his arms crossed. I couldn't hear, so I tried to interpret what was going on by their gestures. One shook his head, another pointed down the street. A third hunched his shoulders like "I don't know." Their talk was too calm; nobody running around or shouting like they meant to catch somebody.

When the chief came inside, he motioned for us to sit down at the table while he stood over us. "Well," he said, "you must be some good nigras." Luther shot a hard look at me when I opened my mouth. With one small nod of his head left, he told me to keep quiet. His men had talked to our neighbors, the chief went on, and nobody had any complaints about us. It was impossible to process much of what he said after that, something about not finding any suspects.

"Call if you have more trouble," he said.

Luther raised his hand to shake, but the chief had already turned to go. When he was a few steps away, the click of Luther's tongue was as loud as a soda can popping.

I clutched a handful of his shirt and asked, "Are we safe?"

He led me to the couch and held me, rocking gently. "Shhh," he said, "shhh," then reached under the coffee table for the phone directory. "I'm calling the builder," Luther said. "He's the only one in this town we can trust."

It was true. We hardly knew anybody in Baton Rouge when that black contractor had invited us to Thanksgiving. A generation older than us, that six foot three manly man had sprinkled stories of the legion atrocities perpetrated against Baton Rouge blacks between showings of his too-expensive houses. He said we Yankees must be crazy, moving south to a place like Baton Rouge.

Luther's call the night of the cross burning woke the builder up. His tone went from foggy to furious when he understood what happened to us. Minutes later he parked his pickup in our driveway and strode through with a warlike gait and a piercing focus, a rifle gripped in his right hand. There was a power in him born of a burning rage.

Without saying hello, the builder started. "We been fighting these goddamned peckerwoods down here for years. But I got something right here for 'em." His belligerence was one with the big gun he set upright on its wooden butt right beside him at the table. He turned to me. "Get me something to drink, darlin', would you? Bourbon if you have it."

When I brought back the bottle and glasses, he poured a double and threw it back. Leaning in, he said he was going to take over our "situation." Luther pulled his chair closer.

"Now, listen," he said. "Y'all have to stop wearing your fear. It's in your eyes, your backs, your voices. They're like wild dogs," he said. "You show fear, they attack. Understand?"

He wanted us to know what happened to other black families who moved into white neighborhoods. They all got death threats. One got a handwritten note in their curbside mailbox when their kid brought in the mail. "MOVE OR DIE," it said. They left the house, sold at a loss, and went somewhere else. He didn't know where.

Another hadn't even unpacked when the phone calls started. The phone rang off the hook at all hours and whoever answered, man, woman, or child, was called a dead nigger. The wife and kids went to stay with her family. But the man stood on his front lawn and howled, "I am a man! I am a man!" The builder and other black men in town made a show of their guns on his pro-perty, which put a stop to the harassment. But that family moved away, too.

"The peckerwoods won back then," the builder said. "But we gonna put a stop to this."

"Were those men going to shoot somebody?" Luther asked

"If they had to."

"What about the police?" Luther asked.

The builder snorted. "You mean the police okeydoke? Half of them are in the Klan, don't you know? They could've sent the people who set your fire."

He said since we were from up north, we didn't understand how it was. He saw how naive we were when we asked about building in white subdivisions, before he showed us the black ones. Did we even know we were smack dab in the middle of Klan country where David Duke, the Grand Wizard, held huge cross-burning rallies for the faithful in white robes and hoods?

"Don't expect to get justice in Louseyanna. Down here blacks only get Just-Us," he said. "Those same freedom fighters are still 'round here. They'll bring their guns tonight and camp out here 'til this bull crap stops. The white man will know we're not afraid of no crackers if we shoot one of 'em."

"What do you mean, shoot?" Luther asked, eying the big man.

The builder poured another shot. It would go like this. Some men would guard the house around the clock, in shifts. They would stay until they were sure no more white folks were coming back. If they had to, they'd shoot-to make it plain we would not be run off.

"Wait now," Luther said, shaking his head. "I'm not down with shooting folks."

"Might not have to shoot them cowards, once they see our threat and we make some noise. But if we have to, we will shoot."

He sat back in his chair, locking eyes with Luther. "OK?" Luther stroked his moustache a few times. "Can't do it, man. It's too violent."

"Me neither," I said, shaking my head. A race war in my living room? I didn't know which was crazier, the white racists or the black freedom fighters.

Luther put his hand on the builder's shoulder. "Man, I'm grateful. But see, the only gun I ever held was when my pop drug me hunting one time. Just like I couldn't shoot the deer in front of us, I can't be part of shooting people."

"Then what you gonna do?"

"I don't know, but I'm gonna take my chances 'til I figure something out."

The builder grunted and stood silent for a moment. Then he poured us each a shot. "I'll be here if you change your mind," he said, and raised his glass. "No matter what, take care of this gal here."

Their handshake was a brothers' pact, one we knew would stand whenever needed. He moved down the driveway, peering closely around our property. He rustled the monkey grass border curled over its own long blades like cotton pickers, poking with the barrel of his rifle like a western lawman.

I looked over to see what the cross looked like up close, but it was gone. The police had taken it. Instead, I saw they'd pulled us back into their time warp, tried to negate all we'd worked for, and left us with only a lingering smoky odor, the hole in our lawn, and their slap in our face.

The next day Luther and I went to see Larry, a more mild-mannered black man than the builder, to tell him about the cross burning. He gave us his advice in his family room, where his collection of long guns and handguns were locked inside a glass wall display that centered the room.

"You gotta defend yourself against these rednecks," Larry said. "Most everybody down here carries something. You should too."

We didn't say so, but of course we had no intention of getting a gun. Nobody in New York we knew carried a gun, or thought one was necessary. As far as I knew, guns were for criminals, hunters, and crazies. Not for people like us.

Our black friends from Luther's job asked if we weren't going to move. Their concern palpable, one asked, "Is staying in that house worth it?"

In the next days, our house was egged, then another morning we found garbage strewn on the lawn: coffee grounds and dirty diapers, empty soup cans and newspapers, leftover chili and chicken bones. Luther called the po-lice, who said they couldn't do anything about it after the fact. So, we cleaned it up and hosed down the house and grass.

We were just sick, sitting on that citrus couch. The barrage of racism in housing, schools, jobs, and just common decency we'd endured earlier in our lives now looked like mere waystations on the road to hate this big. But as weary as that made us, we were angry and insulted too. Enough so that it was plain we had to straighten our backs and not let these white people take us down.

DMU Timestamp: October 17, 2024 20:24