[4 of 5] Say I'm Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love (2020)- by E. Dolores Johnson, Chapters 12 - 16

Author: E. Dolores Johnson

Johnson, E. Dolores. "Too Through," "Just Listen," "The Visit," "Indiana Chronicles," and "The Guard Tower," Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love, Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, IL, 2020, pp. 130-175.

12 TOO THROUGH

Luther woke up that Sunday morning, his knees and ankles so stiff he couldn't move them. His face had erupted overnight into a raw rash, his skin flaking like scales off a fish. When I tried to move his legs toward the edge of the bed, he moaned. "Stop. You're killing me."

Tylenol and the heating pad didn't help, so the doctor said to meet him at the hospital. Luther got into his loosest clothes and house slippers, us both straining in the already ridiculous heat. He hobbled to the car, leaning on me as I held him up by the back of his pants. We didn't shower, but once in the car I regretted it as the smell of my ripe sweat filled the space.

The doctor examined Luther, signed admission papers, and ordered tests before leaving. Luther lay on a gurney in a dingy hall, waiting for his room. After a long while, I had to squat to rest my legs. When way too much time had passed, I went to the desk.

"Excuse me," I said, "Luther Johnson hasn't been transferred to his room yet. Do you know what we're waiting for?"

The attendant didn't look up from her papers. But she did sniff loudly. "There's no room for a black man now," she said flatly. As if it was obvious that Luther should continue to lay there without treatment just so a white man didn't have to be in the same room with him. Humiliated and angry, I chose to bite my Yankee tongue and feign submissiveness like other blacks waiting in the emergency room. Arguing with her could sabotage his care further.

Once in his room, Luther fell asleep, moaning when he tried to move. He stayed like that as the days dragged by in a medical mire of misdiagnoses, from malaria to a spinal disorder, and back to a barrage of tests that turned up nothing. Then one morning Luther lay catatonic, suspended in a coma-like state, with only his steady breath to show he was alive. And there he lay in that netherland without me, for so many more days than I can now measure.

My only respite from the hell my life had become was clearing the weeds from our front flower beds. In that humid heat, they grew thick and deep, yielding only when I avenged my demons on them. On a late afternoon while wrangling a batch out, I hardly registered a motorcycle's vrooming up the street. Suddenly something exploded in my face, it's singeing heat too near my eyes. Clusters of firecrackers pop-pop-popped with their smoke plumes rising, long after the perpetrator rode away.

I ran inside and closed the drapes, thinking they could have blinded me. I lay on my bed crying, afraid and exhausted from the constant dread of what else might happen. Depression overtook me as I unbuttoned my shorts to loosen the waistband that cut deep welts into my middle. I'd probably gained thirty pounds since the trouble started, looking for comfort in bakeries and fried chicken joints. But just as eating hadn't saved me, Luther couldn't save me, the police wouldn't save me, and I wouldn't let the builder save me. I drifted into a fitful sleep, not knowing what would save me.
__________

Luther was awake the next morning, frantically straining against gauze restraints that tied his wrists and ankles to the bed. He begged me, incohe-rently, to get him loose while the staff insisted the restraints kept him from getting hurt. The doctor came in with no explanation for Luther's swollen joints, rash, catatonia, misdiagnoses, or state of mind. What he recommended was best for my husband was to transfer him upstate to the Louisiana State psychiatric hospital. He handed me the already prepared committal papers to sign, apparently expecting compliance. Luther wasn't mentally ill, he was sick. Yet this white man was ready to leave him indefinitely in some waste pile of Negro neglect and probable abuse. I said we needed a cure, not a warehouse, and would look for other options. At the hallway payphone, I called the builder for an opinion.

"Naw, no ma'am," he said. "Don't even think about signing that mess. Black people who go in there never come out."

I called Luther's pop in Harlem.

"Sounds like that there lupus he had back in his twenties," Pop said, "when he was so sick for all those months. Physical and mental."

How could that be? When we'd gotten engaged, Luther told me he'd had a blood disease called lupus, but that it was behind him. So I never investigated lupus before we stood under the flowered arch in my family church and said our vows. Now Pop gave me the number of the New York lupus specialist who had treated Luther a decade before.

That doctor told me lupus was never "behind" you. It is an incurable disease often found in blacks that destroys vital organs and can be fatal. Pop got on the next flight to Baton Rouge, then escorted Luther on the transfer up to New York to be treated by that specialist.

I had to stay behind in that house by myself to keep my job's medical insurance, the only one we had. A frightening pile of medical bills on the dining table had already reached well into six figures, and now there was just my one salary coming in instead of two. I could afford to visit Luther in New York only one weekend a month. In those few days I'd see Luther, discuss his case with doctors, and try to figure out a future with his family's support.

Back at work in Baton Rouge, I did my best to keep managing a team that sold new technology to local businesses. That focus was the one sane part of my day. We strategized on prospective sales, and I took turns accompanying each of my team members on calls, assessing opportunities and debriefing afterward. When it was the big fifty-something man's turn, the one whose resentment for my black young female Yankee self was obvious, he glared over his glasses and said, "I don't need you to go."

Because I was twenty-six and stupidly wanted to assert my authority, I said we would go. He drove us in the company car out of town to a small business with a basic system we could upgrade. Once there, he and the older white owner did a lot of back slapping and coffee drinking but negligible business. Back in the car, I explained what products he could have proposed and what he might have done differently. Red faced, he refused to engage.

He started the engine and drove down a sparsely populated road for ten minutes, ignoring me. Bulging blood vessels pulsed in his neck before he turned for what I expected to be the next customer call. Instead it was a small dirt road bordered by tall tangled weeds that dead-ended out of sight. He killed the engine and turned to me, his eyes boring into mine. And I saw it in him, the bone-deep hate that could kill me. Like Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner whom the Klan buried in a dam wall in Mississippi, nobody would be able to find me. With my thighs frying on the scorching upholstery, I forced myself to glare back, even as I prayed to be forgiven my sins.

I don't know how long we tried to stare down each other's souls on that day in the Louisiana backwoods where my father warned me not to go. I tried to break his threat by turning away and looking out the front window. The pull of his eyes burned into my cheeks, but I would not look back. Alert to any move that big man might make, my every muscle was ready to jump out. We sat there, silent and seething, before he finally turned the engine on and hea ded back to the city.

On the way, we drove past the state capitol, where all too fittingly a Confederate flag flew prominently. Its message was the same as the salesman's: white people could get away with hurting blacks in Louisiana. Maybe that salesman had been the one who already tried, burning that cross on our lawn.

That night, several helmeted men raced up on my front lawn on roaring motorcycles. They leaned side to side until the smooth carpet of our mowed and edged grass was ripped up. I called the police to come right then, to catch them in the act.

"We can't make it over there," the officer said. "There's a football game at LSU. Every thang in town and ever'body is tied up."

I walked in circles in the living room, peeping out from behind the drapes at the vandals nobody would stop. They must have known I was alone in the house. Luther's car hadn't moved from the carport the whole time he was hospitalized. What was I going to do when the evildoers came back? Next time they might do their worst. Beat me. Rape me. Kill me. I could call Mama and Daddy again, fifteen-hundred miles away up in Buffalo, and give them another sanitized version of what was going on. All Daddy would say is to run, like he and Grandma did when they escaped from Georgia in the 1930s. But I had to stay to keep our medical insurance, so why tell them anything?

With nobody to help me, I had to do something to take care of myself. I had Larry take me shopping for a gun.

The one-story building stood alone on a nearly deserted street with a large GuNs sign across the front. Inside, we were the only customers. A hefty white clerk smiled; the glasses set on top of his head glinting in the very bright lights. Larry said we needed some protection for the lady.

"Why sure," the clerk said, sweeping his arm across a mind-boggling array of weaponry. Behind him, long rifles and shotguns were mounted on the wall in rows. Farther down were more elaborate automatics that I associated with soldiers and criminals. And in front of me were locked glass display cases, the type you'd find in a jewelry store. There, black handguns lay on their sides, with barrel lengths ranging from snub nosed to arm's length. Their handles were black, with a few fancier ones in brown wood or what looked like mo-ther-of-pearl. Was I supposed to pick one I liked, like a piece of jewelry?

"Let's see a lady's handgun," Larry said. "It's her first."

The clerk put a few guns on top of the case. "Ma'am, let's find you one that fits your hand so you can handle it. See, the right fit gives less recoil and a more enjoyable shoot."

Enjoyable? Here I was scared to death I'd have to shoot somebody to keep from getting shot myself, and he thought this was fun? We found a couple I could wrap my hand around easily. Larry steered me to those with long barrels because the longer the bullet rode in the barrel, the more accurate hit I'd make.

"But those are not so good for a concealed carry," the salesmen offered, "less you got a big handbag or a holster."

I saw how to pull back the hammer, then press the trigger fast with the same hand. In fifteen minutes, I had a right-sized six-shooter I could aim at a spot on the wall and use to blow a Baton Rouge bigot to kingdom come.

I learned to use my gun in an open country field set up for target practice. Out there, I bumbled through the first steps-getting the feel of the unloaded weapon, picking it up and pointing in one fast move, until I got comfortable. Next, I aimed at empty beer and soda cans set on a chopped-off tree stump When I first used ammunition, my bullets went wide, into the woods and the ground. But one sunlit evening out in that field, I planted my feet, held still, and let the bullet clear the barrel for a straight shot and sent those cans jumping. When I had enough skill to hit a good spot on the circular target mounted on a tripod, I was miserable. I could make anybody sorry who attacked me, with a gun I wanted no part of.

The revolver stayed on my nightstand. It was fully loaded and cocked, with the handle positioned for a fast grab. And there it stayed until the night a noise in the kitchen woke me up. I sat up in bed and listened. Was that something creaking? Somebody was inside the house, moving toward the bedrooms. I pushed the covers back and put my bare feet on the floor. I was not about to let them kill me in my own bed. Adrenaline poured through me as I reached for the gun. It felt good in my hand as I threaded my finger onto the trigger. At the bedroom doorway, I stopped to listen.

CLACK. Somebody had cocked their trigger.

I inched down the dark hallway toward the living room, squinting in every corner since I'd forgotten to put on my glasses. Pretty sure nobody was in the living room, I set my feet wide apart to steady me, and lifted the revolver to my good eye. Aiming through the dining room and into the open kitchen behind it, I stroked the trigger with my finger, searching for the intruder.

CLACK.

Suddenly, I recognized the clack was my refrigerator's thermostat adjus-ting. There was nobody in my house after all. They weren't coming after all this time. Luther had been right the night the cross was burned. If they wanted to kill us, we'd have already been dead.

I wiped sweat off my brow with the loaded gun still in my hand. In that moment, I saw myself—a crazed black person ready to shoot a white man in a state where I could never be acquitted.

I fixed a two-finger Jack and ginger with plenty of ice and sat in the dark on Luther's living room recliner. When I calmed down, another time somebody's pride in homeownership was trampled on came to mind... my parents, when they bought their first and only house in 1958.
__________

I was ten then. As the pile of cardboard boxes in the living room grew higher, Mama hummed on. "Que Sera, Sera" came from the back hall by the coal bin.

We were moving from our backlot apartment with its potbelly stove and the amped voices of choirs and preachers at the church next door. Daddy and Mama had saved for fifteen years so we could move into our own house across town, in the beautiful Cold Spring neighborhood. There we would own, not rent, and live in it all by ourselves.

That place on Florida Street cost my parents $8,000, financed with a thirty-year mortgage and monthly payments of $89. An NAACP man from church had talked to Daddy about moving to Cold Spring. He said not to worry about moving out there because when his family had integrated that part of Buffalo, they had no trouble at all buying, or when they moved in. In fact, our house on Florida Street was surrounded by white families like the Siegrists and Gagliones, neighbors on either side of us.

The night we moved in, Daddy poured champagne from the gift bottle the sellers left, even giving a little to each of us three kids.

"Here's to our American dream come true," he said, raising his cup.

I didn't like the sour wine that fizzed all over my nose but understood what a big deal that house was. My parents clicked pink plastic cups and linked arms to drink. When they kissed, Daddy's eyes were wet as he smiled down at Mama. He had more pride in his eyes at that moment than any other time I can remember. And I was as proud of him as I can ever remember being-the black man at the head of our family, the breadwinner who got us a house, the father who loved my mama.

What Mama loved most about the new neighborhood was Humboldt Parkway. That green space, just two blocks from the house, was where she would stroll among the sprawling canopies of maples and elms planted in lines down the mall. Humboldt joined a string of other public landscaped parks meandering through Buffalo, forming another of Olmstead's curated Emerald Necklaces through American cities. We had been to those green spaces many times, when Mama had driven miles to enjoy them when we were younger.

"Some people want to live by the lake," Mama said. "But the parkway is my oasis, with its grass and trees, where we can breathe." Once the house was set up, we started walking over there. The boys ran free while the two of us, neither with an athletic bone in our bodies, walked in the fresh air of the grounds.

Unbeknownst to us, the realtors were blockbusting. They scared white owners who feared losing value by living near Negroes into selling while selling those houses to more blacks. The white exodus flipped our predominantly white neighborhood to black within a couple years after we moved in. Realtors got paid plenty, sacrificing our black dreams to earn commissions on sales to us, as well as from the new suburban homes purchased by the fleeing whites. If I'd internalized that lesson and not been so sure access to housing in white neighborhoods was open to me in Baton Rouge, that cocked gun wouldn't have been in my lap right then.

My parents watched the evening news one night, noting a traffic jam with streams of red taillights barely inching along. Some official said the traffic on local roads had built to untenable messes every morning and night from the new suburban commuters trying to get back and forth to downtown jobs. The congestion had to be relieved, and the solution was to build a new expressway.

Daddy sat on the living room couch, talking back to the TV. "Those white commuters just left Cold Spring and moved to those suburbs. That's why. Report that."

"There's no place to put a highway," Mama said. "All the land between the suburbs and downtown is residential. It's talk, that's all."

"No, babe," Daddy said. "Those politicians downtown will put it right through Cold Spring." He said downtown didn't care about us. Our neighborhood had become a pain in the ass for the white people who had to waste time crossing it on the way to work.

"Since none of them live here anymore," he said, "we'll be targeted for that road. Watch and see."

The expressway route ran straight down Humboldt Parkway.

When construction started, twelve-year-old David and I walked up to Humboldt to see what was going on, even though we'd been told not to because it was too dangerous. We heard the deafening boom from bulldozers driven straight into those statuesque elms before we got there. We saw a tree pushed up and out of the serene grove, its enormous root system thundering onto the dirt.

Boom! Another tree thudded to the ground. Boom! Then another and another toppled over. An army of men in safety glasses with power tools sawed off branches from felled trees. The high-pitched squeal of woodchippers ground the smaller limbs into sawdust as bulky trucks grunted into a start and hauled away the trunks.

"What are they doing?" I yelled over the noise.

"Destroying it, just like Daddy said they would."

"They can't do that!"

"Wake up, my sister," David said. "White people never run out of ways to mess us up."

Weeks later I went back to see what the project looked like. Thick mud caked over my shoes and socks up in front of St. Francis de Sales church. Men in hard hats operated a battlefield of earthmovers, digging deep underneath where the parkway had been, hauling away dirt and boulders in loud, chugging trucks spewing black soot. Down at the corner of Delavan Avenue, the hole they were making seemed big enough to drop in the entire Peace Bridge from Buffalo over the Niagara River to Canada.

A fork was taking shape in the road. One branch turned right about where Humboldt ended and the other swung a little left. The design saved all of Delaware Park, the next link in the Emerald Necklace, over in the neighborhood where white people lived. But on our black side there was that mammoth hole and dirt floating thickly in the air, covering the houses and church. And making me feel filthy.

I reached down and plucked a wood chip the size of an apple wedge from the dirt and put it my pocket, a souvenir of how helpless we were to stop the destruction. It sat on the little wooden desk Daddy had made for my room, a daily reminder of ruination.

When the work was done, Daddy drove us on the new expressway. Giant walls banked the sunken road, holding back the gutted earth behind them, topped with ugly chain-link fencing. Litter had already collected at their bottoms. Not one living green thing remained. Not anywhere. And the city had divided us from friends on the other side. Only three cross streets were left above, meaning we had to walk many blocks out of the way to get over there.

"Our community was raped," Daddy said, driving on. "You see, it's every bit as prejudiced up here in the North as it is down South. They're just slicker about it. You don't realize they're going to dig your grave 'til the mayor signs off on the shovels."

"But we have our own home and garden," Mama said. "They can't take that away from us. We're going to be happy with what we do have." She kept on making flower beds in the backyard from bushes and bulbs and bags of manure, working in bone meal and ground eggshells to feed them. Mama would have her green space, even if it was small. She got on her knees in that dirt for the next thirty years, wearing the girdle she would not be seen without, planting roses and peonies, snap dragons, poppies, and gladiolas outside our back door. The luscious fragrance from her purple lilac bushes was so powerful I could smell them coming up the driveway.
__________

My drink finished, I got up from my Baton Rouge recliner and went into the bedroom closet to fish out a shoebox of old souvenirs. Pushing aside ticket stubs and expired student ID cards, I felt the rough edges of that wood chip from Humboldt Parkway at the bottom. I pulled it out and rolled it around the palms of my hands.

No way would Luther and I stay in our first house the way my parents did theirs. No, I was through-too through with black life in the South. We had to get out of Baton Rouge. I laid the wood chip beside the cocked revolver on the nightstand and kept it there. It symbolized my mission, to make a new life for us while Luther got well.

Of the several jobs on the East Coast I'd applied for, a great marketing position in New Jersey was offered. We'd be an hour from Luther's family and the lupus specialist in New York, whose continual care was essential. "Mr. Johnson," he'd said, "if only you had come to us sooner, we could have prevented some of the irreversible damage done to your vital organs."

We sold the Baton Rouge house and moved to a bigger one in a tiny central Jersey town in 1978. Luther came home after ten months in the hospital and landed the government engineering job he held for the rest of his short life.

As we got in bed one night, he said, "C'mon, baby. Give me that wing and spoon me." For the first time in a year we lay there happily snuggling as a soft breeze floated through the sheers at our bedroom window.

It had taken that long for us to reconcile to America's truth, that racism is embedded in the country's fabric, down in the marrow of the malicious, the unaware, and the disinterested. It was true in Louisiana or New York, that despite the changed national narrative and law, white people, including the neighborhood children chanting "Nigger, nigger, nigger," behind our new hedges, could not be trusted to do right by us.

At least, we hoped New Jersey was a better chance to live safely.

13 JUST LISTEN

I picked apart that surreal hour with my white people at the airport a million times. No longer able to focus on those endless slides presented in conference rooms or where I left my basket in the supermarket aisles, that fleeting connection to my mother's sister haunted me.

Because Dorothy turned off her cooking and rushed to come meet me that day. Because she seemed thoughtful about Mama running away, apparently weighing the reasons she did so. Because she hadn't shown outrage or rejection or any of the devastating reactions Mama feared. The truth was out. Well, all but Mama not being dead, and the Boehles were decent about it.

I needed another chance to really talk with them about what it meant to be related. Yet Mama was so traumatized that they knew about me, she wouldn't agree to any more contact.

"What about me?" I complained to Luther as we wandered through a hardware store. How was I going to understand my white blood, the reason I went looking for Mama's family in the first place? That one measly cup of coffee with Dorothy wasn't enough to understand squat.

He asked me what else I wanted to know.

"Well, for one thing, do the Boehles mean anything to my identity?" Understanding their lives and family tree would give me a truer sense of my-self, like when old Aunt Willie laid out Daddy's black family photos. Would I be able understand those relatives from an all-white world? Was their kind of white different from Mama's sort-of white, bred in her ghetto life? Did any part of them fit in my soul? "I don't understand what having a white family means," I said. "But I have to."

"I see you're not going to quit," Luther said. "You're talking about spending time with the Boehles, having a lot of frank conversation with them. Just how you gonna pull that off?" He wandered away to the screw bins, scrutinizing each in his engineer's paradise.

"First you were on fire to go find them," he said in the car. "Just to look at them, to prove they existed. You dropped out of the sky and rewrote Dorothy's life for her. She gave you the civilized conversation you wanted. But now you want more."

The meeting with Dorothy had been all about Mama's disappearing. So, I didn't find out who the Boehles really were. For me. I didn't even know if they were prejudiced, or if Dorothy would acknowledge me as a niece. Or if I wanted to acknowledge them. That's what would make them a real part of me. Not just some random bloodline like my black grandma's raping white father somewhere in Lee County plantation Georgia.

I was sure Mama wanted to know more too; she just didn't think she could handle it. Just the night before she asked if any of Dorothy's girls in that picture looked like her. There had to be a way to move forward-hopefully with her, but without if she couldn't be convinced.
__________

I buckled up for my work commute over two interstates. Out on that ra-cetrack, I moved between cars from Pennsylvania going seventy miles per hour, bumper-to-bumper in a beat-the-clock melee through New Jersey to New York. Gray overcast skies matched my mood as I obsessed about getting Mama to be in touch with Aunt Dorothy.

Squeezing into the leftmost passing lane of four, I hugged the bumper in front of me. I became one with that unforgiving high-speed lane next to the cement barricade separating eastbound from westbound traffic.

Without warning, my steering wheel pulled sharply to the right where other speeding cars rode beside me. The car spun around, jerking my neck, to face oncoming traffic. I took my foot off the gas, gritted my teeth, and strained to reverse the wheel and get the car turned back, facing east again. The wheel moved on its own, frozen out of place. It pulled my shoulder so hard I thought it would come out of the socket. With no possibility of control, I had to let go.

"Oh God," I said, stomping on the useless, locked brakes. The car skidded on its own across the four-lane racetrack toward the other shoulder. A blur of cars swerved past me on both sides, in the din of their blaring horns.

As the certain collision barreled toward me, I locked eyes with the driver of an eighteen-wheeler facing me head-on. He was close enough, up in his cab, that I could see his green plaid shirt and dark moustache. The vision of all that weight and power slamming into my little Toyota made me close my eyes and give in to fate.

The car jerked sharply again, whiplashing my head as it skidded back across the highway toward the passing lane. But on that return slide the momentum slowed, and the car petered to a stop in the second lane. My eyes flew open to meet the trucker's, which were still locked on mine.

I sat still, trying to grasp what happened. Cars were scattered all over New Jersey I-80 eastbound. They faced New York, and I faced Pennsylvania. The racetrack was at a standstill, cars stopped as far as I could see. The lanes behind me were empty. In the height of rush hour, those cars had driven on, out of danger.

I scanned the highway slowly for crashes. An eerie confusion enveloped me when I realized all the cars were intact. I took off my seatbelt and gingerly examined my limbs while the whole interstate idled in wait. My arms and legs worked. There was no blood on me or the floor.

Shakily opening my door, I pushed myself out onto a still, quiet highway, leaned on the car, and tried to get my wits about me.

The truck driver climbed down and came to me. "You all right?"

"I think so."

"Black ice," he said. "You hit a patch of black ice. You can't hardly see it, but this time of year you got to watch for it, little lady." He pointed to some on the highway, nodded knowingly, and walked back to his truck. Cars toot-tooted their horns in celebration that our lives would go on.

The car started up OK. I made a U-turn to face New York and got off the highway at the next exit. Too shaken to drive farther, I went back home. At the house, I dropped my briefcase and purse at the door, went straight to the bedroom, and got in bed with my suit on. I called in sick and scooted down under the electric blanket.

I was lucky to be alive. Escaping that truck slamming into me was proof that tomorrow is not promised. So there, in the safety of my bed, I made up my mind: I was going to talk to my secret white family again, with or without Mama's permission.

That Saturday morning, I called David to enlist him in my plan. He was the sibling who held sway with my parents. He'd earned it, stopping by often, bringing them things, and taking them out. As the popular chairman of Buffalo's Juneteenth Freedom Festival, he made sure folks in the 'hood respected and helped our parents. During the blizzard of '78, he took his National Guard unit to dig out my parents, along with the priority municipal sites they'd been assigned to.

"What's happening, Jody," he boomed in his always too loud voice. He called me by my little sister horse-tending stooge name from the cowboys and Indians games he and Charles Nathan starred in when we were kids. I always got run out of Dodge or arrested while they rode into the sunset.

I asked him how he thought Mama was handling the Dorothy news.

It meant a lot to her, he said. She talked about it all the time. And even though he wasn't much for finding the white people at first, he had to admit Mama was excited to hear about Dorothy and her kids.

"She could be even more excited," I said.

"How?"

"Since the Boehles didn't act the fool like you predicted, and they gave me their address, maybe if I told them Mama was still alive, they might take her back."

"You out of your mind, Sapphire?" he asked, putting me in my black place, as he loved to do.

"I want you to help me convince Mama it's worth a try."

"Tell you what I'm going do," he said. "I'm going send Roto-Rooter right over to snake out your Harvard brain. Didn't you have box seats when Mama said she didn't want any more to do with this?"

"Can't you just get her to consider it? So I won't be out here all by myself, trying to find out about the Boehles? They're your relatives too."

"Naw, little sis, I'm out. This is your thing and yours alone."

After fixing my coffee, I turned right around and called Mama to discuss my new proposition. Since she made me lie to her lost sister when I found her, Mama had stonewalled every idea I had to undo the lie. But I needed to tell Dorothy that Mama hadn't been dead all these years. So I could find out the truth about the white people whose blood ran in my own veins.

"No," leaked out of her. "Not again."

I explained she could just listen on the phone while I talked to Dorothy on a three-way call. Dorothy would be in Indianapolis, Mama in Buffalo, and me in New Jersey.

"You can do that?" she asked, unable to keep up with even the smallest technology changes.

I'd place the call from my office. Mama would stay completely quiet but could hear everything Dorothy had to say. I'd tell her sister the truth, that Mama was alive. Then Mama could judge for herself where Dorothy's heart was. After we hung up, then Mama could decide what to do.

"Why do you keep this up?" Mama asked. "When she finds out I'm living, she won't want me. It's been thirty-five years since I disappeared."

I told her if Dorothy was happy she was still alive, maybe they could get back together. If she wasn't, we'd hang up and forget about her. My own questions about my missing white people and what they had to do with my mixed identity would be written off and forever irrelevant. But was Mama's fear enough reason to miss this chance to see if she could get her family back? It didn't make sense to me, not for a woman with the guts to have run off with a black man to avoid lynching or prison in 1942.

Daddy was the one to persuade her. When they called back, for once he did the talking. He had told Mama he knew leaving her family hurt her deep down, even though she never said so. But he was the reason she left them. And he carried that burden all these years too. She had vowed not to ever look back, and she hadn't. At least not out loud. But he could see it. Like when Mama planned to name me Dorothy had I been born on her sister's birthday.

"I told your mother straight up," Daddy said, "I'd be relieved if marrying me didn't mean she was cut off from her sister her whole life. That's what changed her mind."

All my thirty-odd years I'd been mad about Daddy's drinking. But after facing my own life-altering bigots as an adult, I knew his Four Roses was his only escape from the racist injustices, disrespect, and fears he raged about as soon as he came through our door every night. And here he'd also carried this deep regret for his wife having to give up her people. I loved him then for convincing Mama to hear what Dorothy had to say. How could I not get over his drinking when he was the father who bore all those black burdens on our behalf the only way he knew how?

We went over the plan. I would do all the talking and Mama would remain silent. There would be with no coughing, no striking matches for Camels, no radio or TV in the background. Daddy would listen on the extension, then we would compare notes after we hung up with Dorothy.

On a day my boss was on a business trip, I locked my office door and asked the secretary not to disturb me. I stared at the phone sitting on my credenza. Would Dorothy be angry or reject Mama? Was I on crack? I took a deep breath and called Mama, then added Dorothy.

"Hi, Dorothy. It's Dolores." I intentionally left off Aunt until she had earned it. We went through pleasantries before I told her my purpose. "I hope to straighten out something I told you when we met. Because, well, I must apo-logize. I told you a lie."

"You lied to me?" She was incredulous, maybe accusing. "What lie? We aren't related?"

My back began to seize up with those cold stings, like hail pounding bare skin. The accompanying panic stressed me out, even as I pretended it didn't.

"Oh, we're related all right. But the lie was about my mother. See, she's still living. But she's scared to death to face you."

"She's alive? You say Ella is still living? Is that right?"

"Yes, she is living. That is right."

"Why would you lie about a thing like that?"

"I'm sorry, but before I came to Indiana my mother made me promise to say she was dead." I braced for her rebuke.

"But why? What possible reason could she have to say that?"

"She thinks you will hate her for running away so long ago without a word. But after the things you said to me, I thought you might feel otherwise. That you don't hate her."

"Hate my only sister? No! I could never hate my sister. If Ella is alive, I want to see her. I love her. Please, tell her there isn't anything to be afraid of."

A pitiful, thick wail drowned Dorothy out.

"That's your sister crying," I said. "I'm sorry, Dorothy, for not telling you she is on the line. Mama was supposed to only listen."

"What did you say?"

"You two are here on the same phone line together right now. Maybe one of you wants to say something to the other?"

"Ella, is it really you?" Dorothy said. "I love you, Ella. I've missed you so much. Don't be afraid. Oh, please, say something."

Through her sobs, Mama stuttered, "Yes, Dot... it's me ... I love you too."

Dorothy cried as hard as Mama. Then suddenly I was crying too, about the thirty-six years of tears heaving up out of them. Dorothy said again she loved Mama. She forgave Mama. Forget about the past. She had an inconceivable, saintly kind of compassion and love, a kind I never knew existed. One I couldn't have given if I were in Dorothy's shoes.

For a few minutes we had a three-way breakdown. Sure, Mama and her sister were crying, but my executive facade crumbled too. The tough ghetto girl turned corporate badass bawled with them. I slumped in my ergonomic chair, wiping my tears on my good silk blouse.

"I want to see you, Ella, as soon as possible," Dorothy said. "We have to."

"I don't know," Mama said, barely able to speak, "after what I did."

"Forget about all that, Ella," Dorothy said. "Either I'll come to you or you come back home. Either way you want."

Mama said she needed time to think about that. Hearing Dorothy's voice was such a shock, she couldn't think straight. Mama didn't know if she could get past her guilt enough to face Dorothy. "Give me a chance, please, to get it in my head that you could still love me."

"I do love you," Dorothy said. "And I'll be waiting for you when you're ready."
__________

Now that the door to my white family was open, I needed to figure out how to best explore my identity and talk about it with them. Over dinner with Luther, I asked his advice.

"You will have to open your heart," he said. "You've got some work to do." He asked if I could get past that cross burning and the suspicion that white folks don't mean us any good. They deserved a fair chance on their own merits. "If you can't, you will never know any more about your identity than you do today."

But what about keeping my guard up, I argued, to protect against any trouble? Did he mean to just open up to these unknown Boehles, who lived in the conservative heartland my parents had to flee in fear for their lives? If black people didn't like my white part, would these white people accept my black part?

Luther scraped the dishes slowly. "Just see if you find a sense of family between you, in your heart."
__________

A few days later, Mama came around. She wanted to see her sister. But she was worried Dot's husband and kids might not feel kindly toward her. I promised to be with her during the visit, to make sure it went OK.

"She sure can't come to Buffalo," Mama said. Dorothy probably hadn't been around any Negroes, so visiting Mama's ghetto neighborhood might make her too scared. Mama didn't want the kind of problems her Clique Club friend Angela had when her sister Connie visited

"Her sister came to Buffalo?" I asked. I thought her racist white family in Ohio didn't know about her black family in Buffalo.

Angela had confided to her closest sister that she had a black husband and three children in Buffalo. She begged Connie to come meet them and spend time all together, just once. When Connie finally agreed, she made some pretext to her own family and set out driving from Smalltown, Ohio.

Connie pulled up in front of the two-family house where Angela rented a flat, but she didn't get out. Angela and her black daughter, Sandra, dressed in their Sunday best, ran outside to greet her. Angela called to her excitedly to come on, but Connie didn't move. Instead she rolled her window down and motioned frantically for Angela to come around to the driver's side. Angela later said she had the clothes and hairdo of a princess, and the eyes of a crazy woman.

Connie was scared out of her mind around all the Negroes she saw. "They're all over your neighborhood," she said frantically. "Something bad is going to happen."

"But, but.." Angela started. Connie made a U-turn and sped off, straight back to Smalltown, without even waving good-bye.

Who were these white people, I wondered, and what was their problem? Could Dorothy pull a stunt like that? David thought anything was possible but wanted Mama to invite Dorothy to the 'hood, to prove she accepted black folks. Daddy thought Dot coming to stay in the ghetto was too much stress for everybody. Instead, Mama should go visit Dorothy back in her hometown. But Daddy said flatly he wasn't going.

"My being a black man will complicate the situation. They may not accept me, but that's not the point. The point is for your mother to get straight with her sister, and I don't want to spoil that. Maybe later, if the coast is clear. But I'm not going this first time."

We decided I would go to Indy with Mama, to help her, yes, but just as much, I reminded my family, because I wanted to get to know the Boehles for my own reasons. We had another three-way phone call with Dorothy to make arrangements.

When Mama and I boarded the plane in Buffalo, I smelled her Jean Nate, something she wore on special occasions. As soon as she settled into her seatbelt, her rosary beads clicked against each other. She told me twice the prayers would protect us. I told her twice I would, too. Midflight, tears started rolling down her face.

"Nothing's ever been harder than this," she said. She blew her nose so loudly and often that people across the aisle leaned in to see what was going on.

I gently told her to pull herself together. "This is the day you get your life back. It's the day you will also give me the missing part of mine. C'mon, be strong."

She nodded, and I ordered us each a ginger ale and one Jack Daniels mini. Mama drank her glass of soda with a splash of liquor without protest, even though she didn't drink. Then she handed me a box of Tic Tacs. "We can't smell like drunks when we meet Dorothy," she said.

When the plane landed, Mama waited until everybody else was off. After everyone deplaned, she still hadn't gotten up. The stewardess came back to our seats to help get us going.

"We're coming," Mama said, moving at a turtle's pace across the row. She stood in the aisle with her sixty-nine-year-old stooped shoulders, shrunken six inches from osteoporosis. She pulled herself up to her full height, now the size of a twelve-year-old boy. Mama tugged on the new wig that hid her thin hair to center it and checked that her good white enamel necklace was on straight.

Mama went down the aisle with steady determination, looked straight ahead, then stepped into the jetway.

14 THE VISIT

With her chin lifted and my arm through hers, Mama stopped at the exit to the gate. "You can let go now. I'm going out on my own. But please stay right behind me."

Glancing over her four-foot-eight frame as we stepped into the building, I spotted Dorothy watching our door. Most people had already left the area, so she was nearly alone. Mama had asked that nobody else come to the airport except Dorothy and her husband, so she wouldn't be overwhelmed.

Dorothy was dressed in just-plain-folks' polyester slacks and a wide cut overblouse. I couldn't tell if it was her intense eyes or her girth that made her seem so much taller than her five feet, one inch. Maybe my nerves were making her bigger.

She swayed forward slightly onto her toes, watching Mama emerge, examining her sister like a true believer in a divine moment. Then Dorothy rocked back, regained her balance, and started slowly toward Mama.

Mama walked too, straight to Dorothy, and I fell back to watch. Neither spoke. With unblinking eyes, they advanced toward each other in slow old lady steps. When they got toe-to-toe, trembling and mute, the sisters leaned in, their foreheads resting together like brain-conjoined twins. As they wrapped their arms around each other, foreheads glued, Dorothy said, "I love you." They looked out of the tops of their eyes at each other, their contented faces awash in tears.

Hardly able to collect herself, Mama mumbled, "I've missed you... terribly ... all these years, Dot." She sucked in a deep enough breath to say, "I'm ... so sorry. I love you. Do you forgive me?"

"Shush now, Ella. You're home. Don't worry about being forgiven any-more." Dorothy stepped back a bit and gave Mama a gossamer sweet kiss on her lips. They lingered a moment, their eyes closed as if in a first kiss. When they moved back, the two wrinkled women's eyes shone, a flush of color risen in their cheeks.

Mama stretched her hand out for me to come. She stood steady then, the take-my-medicine worry on her face replaced with wonderment. Dorothy turned to me with a soft smile and I smiled back. Would she hug me too, Mama's black daughter? Or was I just the escort to bring my mother to her? Mama took my hand. Then Dorothy reached over and took the other, squeezing it hard.

"I never thought I'd see my sister again," she said. "How can I ever thank you?"

"You're welcome," I said, squeezing her hand back. She put her arms around me, and we hugged too.

Dorothy introduced Mama to Tony, who'd waited, motionless and watch-ful, all this time. As he came forward, his keen eyes smiled. "I'm glad to know you, Ella. You and Dolores are welcome here. All right now, let's go on home." He was a man on task, the one in charge of this flock. He'd perfected the role raising four daughters and being the only male in the house.

The two sisters, one thin and one stout, were lost in talk as they ambled through the corridors, oblivious to newsstands and eateries on their way to baggage claim. Tony and I followed, making small talk about the trip and watching them.

"We've been pretty nervous about coming out here," I said in my gentlest voice.

"I know, so have we. But lookit them two," he said, fetching our suitcases off the moving belt. "Now, I just bet they're going to try to talk about every single thing that happened the last thirty-six years in this one week. I think Dot's planning on it."

Tony guided us out to the curb and into the car. While Dorothy talked a mile a minute from the front seat, Mama watched along the route for the buildings and areas she recognized. Dorothy narrated all the changes in town from decades gone by as Mama leaned forward and talked to her through the gap by their doors.

We wound down a thoroughfare, passing the midsized downtown of an urban Indianapolis being revitalized from the impact of rust belt decline and the apparent white flight. Dorothy pointed out all the buildings the city fathers had put up in recent years. Mama craned her neck to see the new convention center, and the I-65 highway that led to their old neighborhood. That was the road that caused their old home to be torn down. We headed out of the city into an area where houses sat on lawns and land, finally arriving in Dorothy's town of Greenwood. That semirural suburb of houses was nothing like the sardine-lot, fifty-year-old houses in the city where we'd lived. Mama, ever the gardener, admired the beds of blue hydrangeas and red geraniums while everyone avoided the scorched earth of her thirty-six years in hiding.

I wasn't looking for flowers. I was looking for people of color. But there wasn't a one, anywhere. Not just no blacks, but no Hispanics, Asians, or Native Americans. It was a world tilted out of balance, skewed to all white. Was that the way the Boehles wanted it? Were they way out here to get away from minorities, like our neighbors in Cold Spring did when we moved onto Florida Street?

In their newish ranch house, we entered an airy living room that opened to a veranda overlooking a patch of green farmland. The homemade quilted decorations and jars of vegetables put up in mason jars announced a midwestern life I'd only read about. Like our old house, they had three tidy bedrooms, including a twin-bedded guest room where we'd sleep. And they had a second bathroom, something Mama never had.

We women went out on the canopied veranda for lemonade. Tony changed into overalls to work the fields with the John Deere equipment sitting out there. I asked him if you'd call his place a farm. Not like it used to be, Tony told me, when he and his brothers kept cows, chickens, and crops enough to feed their families.

"I don't know a thing about farming," I said. "Did your girls work outside too?"

"Naw, they mostly helped their ma put the food up. Except the time Antoinette, our oldest, had to deliver a calf all by herself." She was the only one home when the cow began bellowing, so his daughter stuck her arm inside the cow, all the way up to her shoulder to ease the calf out.

"Antoinette had blood ever'where, all over herself," Tony said. "But we were sure proud of her, being a teenager and all." The cow and calf came through fine.

Urban creature that I was, I couldn't imagine doing any such thing. The closest I'd ever gotten to an animal was feeding lettuce leaves to our pet rabbits who lived in the back hall coal bin that supplied our potbellied stove. This life the Boehles had was more Little House on the Prairie than any place I'd lived. New York, DC, and Boston were crowded, multicultural centers of rushing people whose farm contact was limited to a cellophane tray in a grocery store.

The Boehles talked with an everyman speech, stripped of the code switching I used every day in New Jersey to survive. I had the unfiltered street slang, the self-protective black posturing that fended off haters, and the white corporate speak expected in professional settings. Mama warned me not to bring the latter home to the ghetto because it sounded like showing off. If I wanted to make a connection with my Indiana family, I had to drop all those voices and just speak plainly. From the heart, like Luther told me.

As Dorothy prepared dinner I looked at her photos on the walls and tables. Each of their four daughters' wedding photos sat out, in Catholic churches or receptions, perhaps in the parish hall. Some of the cute grandchildren pictured were blonde or blue-eyed. And every one of them in this family gallery was, of course, white, something I'd never seen. Mama followed; her awe evident at the first sight of the family love that her sister said would be ours.

Dorothy reached for another picture, a special one she'd laid out. "This is for you to keep, Ella."

"Here are your grandparents," she told me. "This is your blood grand-mother. Your mother's mother. You know we're half sisters because we had different mothers, right? Look Ella, you were a little thing." We peered at the five-by-seven black-and-white, laminated over the frame.

"I'd just about forgotten my mother's face," Mama said, holding the frame reverently. "After she died, I used to look at the moon and see her face watching over me. But then after a while I couldn't remember how she looked. What a treasure, Dot."

My mother was maybe four, with a bowl cut and a fancy dress that covered her knees. She sat between her father in his vested suit and her mother in a long, high-necked dress, around 1913, Mama guessed. I searched Henry and Florence Lewis's features for clues as to who I was. He seemed tall, though he was seated, had dark hair combed straight back, and a pronounced nose unlike any of ours. My grandmother's delicate skin was offset with deeply waved hair braided and curled into balls behind either ear. I tried to feel them, to be a part of them. But nothing connected. Not until my grandmother's eyes drew me in. She looked directly into the camera, full of strength. Her look was like my mother's and my eyes in our own high school portraits. And I knew it, this white grandmother was a part of me.

We ate baked chicken seated in kitchen chairs that swiveled and filled in get-acquainted stories as twilight neared. At the end of the meal Dorothy turned sober. "We're just sorry your Charles couldn't come out this trip. You know he was welcome, too." I wondered if she would really welcome the black man who took her sister away.

"Well," Mama said. "He wanted us to have time alone first, but he's looking forward to seeing you another time." She must have rehearsed that. I felt badly for Mama, because I knew she'd sanitize her secret—that the man she gave up her family for had been an alcoholic for much of their marriage. He'd functioned for the most part, working every day, and drinking only at home. But still, here was my mother hiding it from her sister with the familiar charade we played outside the family. Mama had been clear she didn't want me to say anything about it.

We were polishing off our chicken when Mama cleared her throat. "Uh, tonight while it's just us, can we talk about when I left back in '43? Pick up the pieces?" She wiped her mouth with the napkin, twice.

"All right, I'm glad you want to," Dorothy said. "I do too."

This is why we came. If Dorothy had any long-brewed bitterness toward Mama or racist remarks about Daddy and me, it would come out now. A pain jammed my mostly dormant old stomach ulcer, and Tony's eyes focused on Mama. Dorothy cleared the plates and set a box of Kleenex in the middle of the table, where the salt and pepper sat.

"Dot, can you understand that Charles and I were scared to death to stay here in Indianapolis?" Mama started. "People were so prejudiced, we were bound to get hurt. I wanted to get married and have a family like everybody else. But who here was going to marry me after I divorced Alan?"

"Charles gave you a family, but," Dorothy opened out both palms, "why didn't you talk to Dad before you left? He might've understood, Ella."

"But not Mother. You know she wouldn't have it. Remember how she refused to let Tony, my first boyfriend, in the house because he drank beer and drove too fast?"

"I surely do," Dorothy said. She told us he'd found the perfect job for his wild streak, in a pit crew at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. A natural fit for the boy riding Mama on the back of his motorcycle, outpacing cops who chased them down alleys. Dorothy said Mama was some hot ticket in her day, sneaking out on dates and waking her up when she climbed over Dot and into bed late.

One look at the expression on my face and Mama started laughing. "You talk about fun! We used to slip out and go hot-rodding around in his roadster too. A 1929 cream-colored dream! I even rode on the hood one time, posing like Miss America on a float. But we hit a bump and I fell forward off the car. It was lucky I fell between the tires, because he couldn't stop in time. The wheels rolled right past me on both sides."

Dorothy got up and went to her bedroom to get a newspaper obituary. Mama chuckled as she read how Tony became a riding mechanic and a crewman at the speedway, with his picture hanging on their wall of fame. "And Mother said he wouldn't amount to anything," Mama said, as she and Dorothy giggled like teenagers.

No wonder Mama married a black man in Klan country. She was a rebel all along.

15 INDIANA CHRONICLES

The family hadn't known what to think when Dad didn't hear from Ella within a couple of days of leaving Indy. He called long distance to the girlfriend she was supposed to visit in Worcester, Massachusetts. But she hadn't heard from Ella in years and didn't know anything about her coming to visit.

The Indianapolis police came over to talk with the family. They asked about Ella's state of mind when she left on the train. Was she nervous or scared? No, Ella was looking forward to a vacation. The officer questioned Dorothy, the little sister who might know what the parents didn't. Had Ella confided in her? Maybe she was running away? No, Ella had been fine as far as Dot knew.

Dad told the police to question the ex-husband because of the divorce. Or maybe she'd gone back to that hot-rodder Tony, the one she wanted to marry before Mother put the kibosh on it. Between Mother's consumptive coughing spells, she suggested the woman Ella rented from. "Dad's hand shook when he handed the police officer your picture, Ella," Dorothy said.

Dad hardly slept during those days, dragging himself to work, while Dorothy sat beside Mother's bed, praying the rosary, until the police called Dad to come downtown.

Sitting across the desk from Dad, the officer said they'd cleared all the people mentioned and checked at Holcomb's but had not uncovered any leads or signs of Ella around Indy. So the search had started in Worcester. The Massachusetts police interviewed the girlfriend who was supposedly hosting Ella. His daughter hadn't been to her house, nor to the city or state as far as the authorities could tell. Ella wasn't in any of the nearby hotels or hospitals.

"She's in New York," Dad said, handing the officer a postcard. Dorothy had found it that same day, the hotel postcard from Ella in their mailbox. Dad told the officer that Ella must have stopped in New York along the way. She was having a time seeing New York and sent her love.

The police contacted the hotel, but Ella was gone. So, the New York City police opened a missing person's report and began their own search. And there was something else: the police said since Ella's train went from Indiana across Ohio and New York, her case was now considered an interstate concern. The FBI had been called in.

They confirmed that Ella's train made all its scheduled stops without incident along the entire route. They would make further inquiries to see if anyone had seen her at those stops. But they were racing the clock, because Ella had been missing several days, which made it more unlikely they'd find her.

Dad said as her father, he had to do something. So he boarded the same train Ella had taken to New York to find her himself. When he arrived during rush hour, Grand Central Terminal and the madness of Forty-Second Street overwhelmed him. Though he knew nothing of huge cities, he made his way to the Times Square hotel from Ella's postcard. But she wasn't registered. He insisted the clerk check in the back office. Yes, she had been there, and the police already knew she'd checked out days ago. Paid her bill and disappeared out into the crowded street, like all their guests did every day. He roamed the streets, hoping to see her at some bus stop or restaurant, but didn't.

He asked the NYPD to let him go with them door-to-door, showing Times Square shopkeepers Ella's picture, but they couldn't allow it. They checked hospitals and morgues but did not find any trace of Ella. Not her; not her body. When an NYPD detective sat Dad down and rifled through Ella's file, he shook his head. The sad truth was that several hundred girls went missing in New York City every year, he said. They're victims of rape, kidnapping, and murder. Some are forced into the sex trade or sold into white slavery. He looked Dad in the eye and said New York was no place for a well-brought-up girl to come alone. He was sorry, but the case was closed.

"We are declaring your daughter a victim of foul play," the detective said.

"That's not murder, because no body was found. But we can't do anything else, unless there's new evidence."

Dorothy's story hurt to hear, as I imagined Mama's father stumbling out of the precinct alone amid impossibly tall skyscrapers. His daughter disappeared into nothingness like the steam rising from the subway grates under his worn-out shoes. I hoped he had let out some feral cry.

Back home, Dorothy went on, Dad was met with hysteria. Dorothy and Mother spent their days rehashing the investigation. Was Ella really dead if there was no body? Where did they have white slavery? Was she taken out of this country? Couldn't somebody check further? Dad contacted a private detec-tive, but the price was out of the question-they already barely had enough to cover Mother's medical expenses. There was nothing else they could do.

The house sagged with grief. Dad said there would be no funeral if there was no body. There was no more listening to favorite radio stories. No more playing with the dog. No more outside jobs to supplement their income. No more light in Dad's eyes.

Dorothy woke up about 5:00 Am that first Christmas to the sound of Dad sobbing and moaning such as she'd never thought was in any man. She waited a while, hoping he'd stop. But when she finally went to her parents' room, Dad asked over and over, incoherently, what happened to his wonderful girl. Mother sat wrapped in her wool blankets in the side chair, coughing up thick yellow phlegm in that room where the shades were never raised. They stayed in that tomb the entire day, not knowing if Ella was dead on this, her favorite day, or living in shame in some God forsaken place. Dad never got up. Not for coffee, not to open presents, not to eat dinner. By six o'clock that night, Dorothy said, she'd gone back to bed, relieved to make Christmas go away.

Mama's eyes were fixed on her lap. "I feel so small knowing how I hurt you."

I was hollowed out, too. The anguish Mama had put them through was the pile of hurt Luther warned me I'd set off when I went looking for them. It made me ashamed too. We sat at the Boehles' kitchen table writhing, each in our own way, from the wound Mama had made and the scab I'd torn off it. Yet I wondered if she had ever worried about how her family would be devastated when she disappeared.

Like some saint, Dorothy answered, "Ella, God answered my prayer and sent you back. I love you no matter what."

The sisters petted each other for several minutes, Mama repeating her humble contrition while Dorothy lovingly pardoned her. How could my aunt be so forgiving? Her response was so foreign to the acting out and arguing David, Daddy, and I would have done if this kind of drama were happening in Buffalo. That's what I had feared would go on here. But we weren't in Buffalo. Here there was no carrying on, no raised voices, and no accusations.

Hearing the Indianapolis side of the story and the world Mama had erased put my mother in a new light. She had been a reckless young woman joy riding on the back of a motorcycle in the 1920s and '30s until her mother put a stop to it. Then she was a Catholic divorcee in the 1930s and the runaway wife of a Negro in the '40s, when it was a social abomination. But had she ever considered the consequences for the rest of us? Had she ever considered the long view? Had she gone into my father's black arms because she was naively color-blind? Did she ever see the hurt that would come to her family as a result?

"And what about your kids' lives, Mama?" I wanted to say. What about the sort-of race her reinvented life left my brothers and me to figure out? David tried to be the blackest of race advocates while Charles Nathan was on the white side of town where his porcelain skin could pass. And I straddled the racial divide, studying and practicing white ways to be accepted in white corporations while dying to rip off the mask and be black me. We three kids were caught in the middle of two races, although our parents had assigned our lives wholly to the black one. Mama had always thought race shouldn't matter. Yet we siblings were fossilized in the amber of our parents' decision to mix races and hide at a time when 96 percent of Americans were against it.

Yet I loved Mama dearly, something that would never change. As she and Dorothy leaned into their embrace, I realized Mama never had any idea of what she was getting into when she married Daddy. By coming to Indy, I stumbled into my younger mother, the one I never knew existed.

In our bedroom, Mama took off her wig and slipped on her nightgown. I asked if, during all those years, she'd ever thought about contacting Dorothy. After the antimiscegenation laws were changed by the Supreme Court, had she thought of trying to get in touch with her family or bringing us all together?

"Not at all," she said. "I'd been married to your father twenty-five years when they changed those laws, and we had you kids. I closed that door and learned to live with it. Do you think I could just turn up in Indy with a black man and three colored children?"

The next morning both sisters came in the kitchen looking as if their mother had dressed them alike, in floral sweaters and pastel pants. Dorothy poured rich-smelling coffee in the mugs waiting on the plastic placemats and brought out a box of old-fashioned cake donuts—plain, heavy ones. She and Mama each took one and, at the same time, broke them in half and dunked an end into the coffee, the same way Mama had done for years in Buffalo. Before the second bite, they touched their donut halves together like a champagne toast and dunked again.

Mama looked out over the back field, like she didn't want to face Dorothy when she asked how Mother and Dad had died. Of course, she knew consumption killed Mother and a heart attack took Dad, before either of them turned fifty. But, did they suffer much?

Before Mother died, she was bone thin and bedridden. Dorothy quit college to tend her in the bedroom, kept roasting hot against her chills. Mother couldn't take even baby spoons of puree or bouillon. Rather, all her thin energy was used struggling for breath. Each time she tried to suck in air, a mass of phlegm that sounded thick as sludge pulled up through Mother's chest. It traveled a half inch or so, then dropped back down in her upper ca-vity. Settling in. Thickening. Clogging her airways.

"You should know what her last words were," Dorothy told Mama. "She said, 'I wanted to see Ella before I went.'"

Mama's mouth fell open. "She said that? Why, I didn't think she loved me."

"Oh, she surely did, Ella," Dorothy said. "Mother did love you."

The confounded look on Mama's face bore out her belief that her stepmother only loved Dorothy, her natural born daughter, not Ella, her obligation. Had there been so many miscues between stepmother and stepdaughter that they had misspent their lives together? So many that Mama had yoked herself to an unfounded resentment for sixty-some years? Believed she and Daddy could never make peace with Mother because she didn't know Mother loved her?

After Mother died, Dad moved in with Dorothy and Tony. He piddled around on little electrical projects occasionally, only perking up a bit around Antoinette, a toddler at the time. He survived the loss of both wives and Ella for only two more years before he too passed away.

Dad was dressed in his good suit and laid out in the casket when Dorothy put a rosary in each of the side pockets of his jacket. One was Mother's and the other was Ella's. The family gathered for a private viewing at the undertaker's, saying prayers with the parish priest before others came to pay respects.

All the while people were coming with garden bouquets and kind words, Dorothy listened above the din for Ella's voice. But she didn't hear it. Once the place emptied out, she went to check the guest register for Ella's name. It wasn't there.

Dorothy asked Tony to take Antoinette home and let her have time alone with her dad. She put a folding chair at the head of the casket for herself and an empty one at its foot. She waited in silence several hours into the night, having made it safe for Ella to come when nobody else was there. That way, she wouldn't have to explain herself to anybody. Ella had been Dad's favorite, so Dorothy expected her sister to show up if she was still alive. But she never came.

"I thought we'd sit, the two of us alone with Dad," Dorothy said, reaching for Mama's hand, "before he was gone forever."

Dorothy went back in the morning, to check the guest book again to see if Ella had slipped in. But neither Ella's name nor any other name in Ella's handwriting was listed.

At Dad's gravesite that morning, Dorothy took the first fistful of dirt and threw it on the casket down in the grave. Then she threw a second. That was her good-bye to both Dad and Ella. "I knew you must be dead. It wasn't possible you were alive and hadn't come for Dad," Dorothy said.

Mama broke down into mourner's tears like he'd just been lowered into the grave. By the way she buckled over in her chair, she must have felt both grief and shame. My own eyes misted for the grandfather I never met, and for Mama's anguish, soaking into the wet tissues she squeezed with fingers bent from arthritis.

"I'm glad I didn't know he died back then," Mama said. "It would have been miserable not being able to come home. He stayed healthy in my mind all these years, thank God."

"Would you like to go to the cemetery and see them?" Dorothy asked.

In a half hour we were in the car, looking for a florist. Mama bought a fresh bouquet tied with a white ribbon, and Dorothy drove straight to the place where their parents were buried. Mildred and Henry Lewis lay side by side in a grassy double plot marked with a joint grey marble headstone. The air was thick with the smell of freshly mowed grass. A nearby tree blew gently in the bright morning sun, casting shade over Mama's stony face. She laid the flowers midway across the two graves.

"Will you pray with me?" she asked.

We stood on either side of her, reciting the Our Father and the Hail Mary for the parents who raised my mother. My white people.

As Mama prayed, my quickened heartbeat confused me. I hadn't expected to feel anything for these dead people. They'd only been names to me. "Idiot," I thought, understanding my white ancestors had been good people, parents devastated over losing their precious daughter. Their pull from the grave brought a growing sense of connection. The mutual love we shared for my mother came over me. That bond was undeniable. I owed these white grandparents my honor.

16 THE GUARD TOWER

We drove back to Dorothy's house to meet her daughters that afternoon. There was a schedule set up, as Mama requested, so she could meet them one at a time and not be overwhelmed. While Dorothy said her girls were excited to meet us, I wondered if my cousins would be as open to me as they were to Mama. Just because Dorothy and Tony seemed accepting of my blackness didn't mean their kids would be. Dorothy got her sister back, after all, but those daughters might not have a stake in their black cousin. With a lifelong barrage of white mistreatment behind me, I couldn't muster the wide-open trust Mama was ready to give them. Instead, I sat up in my guard tower, ready to be pleasant but watchful for any weasel-waffling, to see whether we wanted to be related

First came Toni-she, as they called Antoinette, to distinguish her from her father Tony. The eldest, she was a thirty-something with a mane of black curls who lived next door. Later, Judy, the vivacious youngest with spiked hair and her husband in tow, came through the door kissing and hugging both Mama and me. They surprised me, because our conversations were easy and open. As if Mama and I were the relatives they had been missing.

"This is the most beautiful moment," Judy said. "You two have made us so happy."

Darlene came last, with her two little blonde girls. She was quieter than her sisters and very Midwestern-nice. She gave us an invitation to come see a show at the country-and-western lounge she owned with her husband-an invitation for us to be seen out in public, as her guests. Mama's eyes sparkled. She was all for a night on the town with the local cowboys. My little hunched-over mother, who called rock'n' roll noise, was excited to go to a honky-tonk. Maybe she wanted to relive the heydays she and Dorothy had revealed earlier.

But while the invitation was generously offered, it made me uncomfor-table. I never listened to country music, something black people associate with the racist South and rednecks. Weren't the southern country singers from the states that had never gotten over the Confederacy losing the Civil War? Weren't they the ones with the Confederate flag on their shirts and porches to signify their love for those good old slavery and Jim Crow days? Indianapolis was the former headquarters of the Klan, and I worried about the leftover haters who I suspected were in plain sight around town. Probably neither Dorothy nor Darlene had thought of that, since race was never a part of their lives. But what would I do if Darlene's bar was full of those flags and songs about the beauty of pure white girls? That kind of fear had forever kept my radio dial turned away from "country" everything and my feet safely marching away from such places.

However, after all that afternoon's talk about kids, houses, schools, church, and jobs, I had to admit that none of my white cousins seemed to give a gnat's eyelash about my race. After the last one left, Mama, Dorothy, and I sat in the living room. While they discussed dinner plans, I pretended to watch TV as I drew inside myself.

The way the whole family tried to make Mama and me comfortable rattled me. I still couldn't believe that they were opening up their one-hundred-percent white world to me. It couldn't be that simple, could it? Like our country hadn't been through race riots and federal troops escorting little black kids into white schools. Like people hadn't tried to deny me an education or burned a cross on my lawn or tried to consign me to a sort-of, invisible life. I held back, feeling the prejudice I'd carried on my back for thirty years. Careful to respond appropriately to the casual warmth offered, I wasn't sure if I could let it all go and let them in.

Later in the week, Dorothy and Mama sat on the light blue and mauve sofa watching As the World Turns when they decided to make a surprise visit to their cousin Vivian. They'd been childhood playmates all those years ago, and Mama thought it would be great to see her again. Dorothy and Vivian kept up sometimes, but she hadn't told her about Mama resurfacing or coming to visit Indy.

After dinner, in the twilight, we drove over to another part of greater Indianapolis to Vivian's. The sisters chattered about the things they all did together as girls as Dorothy drove. They laughed, wondering excitedly if they'd get away with a fast one or if Vivian would recognize Mama with no prompting.

She lived in a white wood-frame house on a quiet working-class street. A small light was on when we pulled up. Mama and Dorothy arranged themselves side by side in front of the door for maximum impact, and I stood behind them. Dot rang the bell, and they elbowed each other in anticipation.

After ringing twice, Dorothy knocked. We waited on the front porch a little longer. Finally, a woman opened the door a crack and peeped out, her thin lips as hard set as plaster. In her cotton housedress, she studied Dorothy first, who said hello nonchalantly, part of the little ruse. The woman shifted her eyes to Mama, who looked back expectantly. Vivian did a quick double take at the sis-ters. Then she punched the door open and her eyes popped wide at Mama.

"Ella, where in the hell have you been?"

I watched as the tired-looking woman put a foot forward, her hip slung into the door to hold it open. Before Mama could answer, Dorothy stepped aside and gestured to me with a smile. "This is Ella's daughter."

I moved forward and took Vivian's limp dishcloth hand. It was hard to tell if she wasn't used to shaking hands, as some women weren't, or if her response was something uninviting. I suspected the latter, since she didn't say anything to me.

Vivian remained listless, said she couldn't invite us in because her husband had gone to bed early and she didn't want to wake him. It was late for her, too, and she was about to go to bed. Mama smiled weakly. Without ever offering her missing-person story, which Vivian obviously had no interest in, she was the first to say good-bye and head down the stairs. I heard the door close before we got to the bottom.

"No more surprises, Dot," Mama said, holding up her finger in a warning.

Dorothy and Tony took us to a cafeteria across town for dinner later that week. As we waited our turn to be served, the all-white clientele lined up: men in open collars and hands in their slacks pockets, a man in overalls with his family, a teased-up blonde flashing her prom queen smile at a man speaking with a twang. The servers called me ma'am, the way people had in Louisiana. I got back in my guard tower, ready to defend my out-of-place self in this rural white world. I clenched my hand and released it over and over, waiting for that racial comment or gesture made just for me, the only black in sight.

We put crispy fried fish and steaming chicken potpies on our plastic trays and went through the crowd to an empty table with a checkered tablecloth in the middle of the dining room. We bought one of their huge strawberry short-cakes, with its suspect red goo holding the berries together over a sugared biscuit, like Mama made. After the hot food, we scooted up to the table with our four forks to dig into it together.

Our interracial family sat together, right out in the open, talking over Jimmy Carter, gas shortages, and when the summer corn would be ready. We sipped coffee and scraped red goo until it hit me that there was nothing awkward between us. I was having a good time, without the undercurrent that always ran through me around white people I didn't know or trust. What we cared about at our table was our own fun and nobody else. Out in that restaurant crowded with customers, not one person looked at us, or cared who we were or what was going on at our table. Surprised as I was not to be treated as an outsider, I couldn't explain how that could be true. But it was clear I needed to understand it.

When we got back to the house in Greenwood, as everyone was taking off jackets, I just said it straight out. "Can we sit down and talk? It's about something I hope won't spoil our reunion."

"OK," they agreed, automatically heading to their places at the kitchen table. Dorothy looked quizzically at Mama as she turned on the light and removed the plastic place mats. Mama shrugged her shoulders when she thought I couldn't see her, signaling Dorothy that she didn't know what I was going to say. Mama wasn't going to like it, but if I didn't speak up now, I'd go home without knowing if we fit as a family.

They sat waiting for me to speak while the round wall clock seemed to tick-tick-tick too doggone loud. With the taste of fear on my tongue, I broached what had, and maybe still would, separate us.

"Can we talk about race? None of us can afford to ignore white and black issues after what happened to this family."

"OK," Dorothy said. "Maybe it's time we did."

I intentionally didn't look at Mama, whose disapproving eyes I'd already caught a glimpse of. We hadn't discussed me dumping my life's baggage in the middle of her redemption week, but Mama had such a different take on race than mine. She took it in stride and approached it in common sense terms, without the emotional outrage Daddy, David, and I did. Like how she said people were just people, and all that racist foolishness was ridiculous. Like how she never talked with us about pride in our mixed heritage. Like how she said the civil rights movement was black people's business, even as she had a black family sitting right in front of her. Like how she'd let her own white blood be nullified by the black-only box my brothers and I occupied.

But race was my business. Ever since I was transformed by my Howard experience of black power, it always had been.

I sat on the edge of my swivel chair, so my feet touched the floor. "See, I've been discriminated against by white people all along. So, it's important that we be open about race. In fact, I came out here with questions about you, relative to who I am."

Mama cleared her throat. I kept looking at Dorothy, whose eyes were calm and kind.

"What kind of questions do you have?" she asked. She folded her hands, resting them on the table.

"Well, how do you feel about black people in general?" I asked. Dorothy hardly knew any. Both she and Tony had worked alongside a few blacks, her as a nurses' aide and him at the GM factory. They were decent people. But after work, they went to their black families and neighborhoods, and whites went to theirs. They didn't socialize outside of work, but they all got along and got the work done.

The idea was foreign to me, them living their whole lives without any black relationships. They'd just stayed in their white world, physically and emotionally detached from the continual struggles black people, including me, had lived in. Could they ever understand what we had been through?

Would they ever really see us for who we were?

"But you live in this state where the law used to forbid intermarriage," I said. "Where my parents had to run from. How do you and the family feel about that kind of thinking?"

"Biggest damned fool law I ever heard of," Tony said. He tapped his pipe on the table edge, struck a match, and puffed the tobacco in its bowl. They had never even known about that law. Probably because nobody they knew ever fraternized across races. Or because no black news ever appeared in the mainstream newspapers they read. But yes, Tony said, Indiana did have prejudiced people back then and yes, now too. Of course he'd heard about the Klan and some of what they were capable of. Tony looked me in the eye. "But that wasn't ever part of our life. That's not what we believe in."

"So then, how do you feel about my mixed race?" I asked. "My real question is whether I am seen here the same way as Mama. Because I'm not white." Mama folded a napkin into smaller and smaller triangles, fussing to ensure all the edges aligned. She didn't look up.

"Oh, Dolores," Dorothy said, leaning toward me. She opened her hands. "Your race is not important. You are our niece, period. We love you every bit as much as your mother."

"We don't care about any of that," Tony said. "What we do care about is family. We have always wanted to have everybody together, including the girls' in-laws and their families, distant cousins, and now you."

"Even though I consider myself black?"

Dorothy said she could see why I wanted to clear this up, and maybe they didn't understand race the way I did, but she did not want race to make any difference among us. "We'd love you if you were polka dot," she said.

That was the answer I hoped to hear, of course. But as sincere as they seemed, I could only hope they wouldn't hurt me, even if unintentionally. Confusion wormed through me. Would my wholehearted embrace of this white family be selling out my race, or be complicit in taking my light-skin privilege to a higher level? This was all new ground. Being half white in this sense was something neither American society nor I understood in 1979.

"Well that is great," I said, with a smile on my face and a softer tone. "But what about my father and Luther? They're darker, not light like me and my brothers. Do you accept them too?" I didn't ask but wondered if they were willing to be seen in public with obviously black men.

Mama abandoned the napkin that was beyond further folding and rubbed her temples with her fingertips.

"Yes, of course we accept them," Dorothy said. "Because they are your loved ones and are part of the family too. That's why you're here. There's nothing more important than your being part of the family, all of you."

She told us the story about when she was twelve and Mother told her Ella was her half sister, because they had different mothers. She was devastated, thinking that separated them somehow.

"I cried all day, because I wanted Ella to be my whole sister, just like I want all of you to be my whole family. Now I know that halves and steps and blacks and whites don't count in this family." She came around to me, and I stood up to hug her. We had been strong enough to look into each other's worlds and speak honestly. And now we had arrived at a meaningful understanding. I went off to bed relieved, with a genuine affection for them.

In our twin bedroom, Mama sat in the armchair unlacing her orthotic shoes and rolling down her knee-high stockings. As she rubbed her hammer toes, bent up at the joint, she looked up over the tops of her square glasses at me. "I didn't like you bringing that race stuff up, Dolores. The way you were questioning them as if they're not sincere. I was wondering if you have forgotten that racism goes both ways? Or if you saw that you were part of that."

I asked her what she meant.

"Black people were mean to me because I'm white, too, you know. But we can't lay the misdeeds of some at the feet of everybody else, and you know it. Why would you question the Boehles like that after they've opened their hearts and home to us?"

"Let me explain."

She kept right on talking. "Remember the black conventioneers who refused to stay with us because I'm white?"

I did remember that hateful hallelujah woman in the pink feathered church hat that had a hissy fit about Mama.

"It still hurts me to remember her insulting me in my own home, simply because of my race. I don't want even a whiff of that here. You're not to press Dorothy and Tony any further about race. How could you do that in their own home? Here they are making a way out of no way and you question their integrity. The very i-dea."

Mama tugged her nightgown over her head, wiggling her stiff shoulders to get it on. "Even though some black people mistreated me, I don't go around suspecting black people who are kind to me." Her voice quaked. "I expect you to be bigger than that. She invited you here."

"I didn't mean it like that, Mama. I'm sorry if I handled it wrong, but you don't know how worried I've been about this. I didn't want to set myself up and get hurt later." I felt lower than dirt. For all my degrees, I hadn't known how to determine

the humanity of my relatives in some better way. Being dressed down by Mama was like being seven years old again, facing the kitchen corner for talking back. "Nice girls are polite," she'd told me so many times.

I was still awake long after Mama fell asleep. Each of her open-mouthed snores rattled loudly at the back of her nasal cavity, making sleep impossible. Worse, my twin-sized bed was not next to a wall I could lean against. It made me nervous I'd fall out in my sleep like I'd done at other people's houses. So, I bundled all the bed covers around me in a nest on the floor. That's where you got the best sleep, according to Daddy, who often slept like a baby in the middle of the living room floor after too much beer and baseball.

Laying on my back in the dark, I turned over what I knew about family love. In Buffalo, Grandma was the only family member who loved us without reservation. My little family of five had long accepted the fact that many other black relatives excluded us from their daily lives and celebrations. The close extended family experience these Boehles seemed to live was only somewhat replicated by our made-up, mixed-race Clique Club family. There our unacceptability was accepted. Because they, like us, were people with poor or no relations with their blood families based on their unthinkable black and white family makeup. The Boehle family's open acceptance and bloodline loyalty existed on a different plane from the fragmented, conditional, catch-as-catch-can family relationships I knew.

How could I live my white people's offer to love one another when even my nuclear family had such a long a history of running away instead of fostering kinship? Mama ran off with Daddy, leaving her family to think she was sold into white slavery or some such evil. Charles Nathan secretly joined the army and ran away to serve the morning after high school graduation; when he came back from Korea, he ran to a white wife on the other side of town. I ran off to college and far-flung cities for jobs without a thought of going home. And Daddy ran into his Four Roses bottle so he wouldn't be present when he was.

There on that bedroom floor, I considered whether I even knew how to connect, let alone with my white family. And, to be honest, could I release my all-black identity and give my white half a real life? Was that what my roots search boiled down to?

Headlights from a passing car shone in the window and Mama snored on. I sat on that guest room floor and saw a familiar figure in the room. My boogeyman lurked on the opposite wall. The one I'd given my life over to so long ago. The one whose warning burned like a Klansman's cross every time racism blocked my path. He'd taught me that whites could not be trusted. That I had to be ready for whatever grief they might gin up for black people, because they always did. He was not only my truth, but every African American's protector and boogeyman. The one who kept us on alert and saved us from being surprised when whites hurt us.

We sat there together in my white people's bedroom. I'd held that boogeyman's hand ever since that white cab company wouldn't come to take my four-year-old self, burned on the potbellied stove, to the hospital. I'd let him run my life ever since.

And now with a white family who believed race had no part in the love we could share, I had to decide whether to let them in. It meant putting my boogeyman out.

As I tried to tuck the tangled blanket under my cold feet, finally, it came clear. My identity and what life to live was my own choice, not society's or the government's or my boogeyman's. I could choose to expand my identity to fully embrace my white heritage and love my white family or let my own prejudice keep me in an all-black box.

I looked over at Mama, asleep in her bed next to me, and saw the exemplarof knowing who she was while loving both races.
__________

Our last night in town, Dorothy, Tony, Mama, and I went to Darlene and Wayne's country-and-western nightclub, The Outside Inn. They met us at the front door and showed us to a reserved table with the best view, situated away from the stage where revved-up partiers were rocking to a live band.

Waitresses hustled drinks to a good crowd, some wearing cowboy boots and bandanas at the neck. We ordered beer all around, and Mama was laughing it up after a few sips. The all-white crowd danced steps I didn't know to the band's somebody-done-somebody-wrong songs. I felt like a certified shape-shifter being in such a place. If it wasn't for the family invitation, I wouldn't be caught dead in a country bar for fear of rednecks. But Mama and I were special guests in a club where people were simply enjoying themselves. My boogeyman and I looked the place over closely while Mama and Dorothy talked, but we didn't find a single Confederate flag. Nobody called for "Dixie" to be played; there were no good ole boys looking for trouble. When Darlene came by to check on us, Mama and I complimented the successful business she had.

When a familiar slow tune started, I caught myself easing up. My white family brought us out for fun, so I clapped along as they did. A couple danced romantically around the perimeter of the dance floor, the young woman's face resting on the broad chest of her partner. Mama gave me a soft smile. I was glad she couldn't see inside me, the narrow-minded one who had stereotyped this place and these people without reason.

With the romancing couple in front of me and the loving family beside me, I climbed down out of my guard tower. These relatives had no problem with my blackness. They had done everything to show me love, and I'd be a fool not to accept them. When I smiled into Dorothy's happy face, the tension in my muscles released. I did have room inside for my white heritage. I did have room for the family love offered. There would be plenty good room for all of us to mix and meld

I smiled back at Mama, who had joined the crowd in singing that familiar song. Now that she had drunk her rare half glass of beer, she raised her arm in the air and shouted, "Yee-ha!"

DMU Timestamp: October 17, 2024 20:24