by Roxane Gay
The town hall is held in the library’s rotunda. The evening has been devised as an open mic, moderated by the Vice Dean of Diversity and the Dean of Students. People who do not wish to speak may make comments on notecards and drop them in boxes at the end of each row. The cards will be periodically collected and read aloud. Robert has provided Claire with an annotated list of episodes of Confederate valor or sacrifice, anything she might say the flag stands for, to her. She scans it for highlights: Albert Johnson, who sent his personal doctors to treat the injured Union soldiers while he bled out on the battlefield—don’t mention that he probably didn’t know he was shot—the point is a crueler man might have lived. 3,200 African-American Confederate veterans. Such a young army; so many dead boys.
Claire is wearing a dress marked with yellow flowers. The first person to speak is a weepy white sophomore boy, who expresses how distraught he is to be on a campus that has been touched by hate and personally apologizes to the black students on campus, which apology takes the full remaining three minutes of his allotted time. Claire watches Carmen, who does not look in her direction. Carmen is surrounded by two full rows of black students, more black people than Claire has ever seen on campus before—maybe, it occurs to her, more black people than Claire has ever seen at once in her life. None of them stand to speak. A boy in a vest and fedora approaches the microphone and dramatically reads the lyrics of “Sweet Home Alabama.” No one can determine whether or not he is being ironic.
Robert has told Claire to wait for as close to the end as possible, to let everyone rage against her and then win with the last word. Claire waits.
She is only supposed to talk about Aaron if somebody asks. She is supposed to say accident as many times as she possibly can. She is supposed to say that he was one of her best friends and she is insulted by any speculation to the contrary. She has practiced saying these things as truths and saying them as lies. I killed someone. I loved him. I walked away. A warped version of that icebreaker game. Two truths and a lie, or two lies and a truth.
After the boy in the fedora finishes, two other white students speak, and then the microphone stands unattended. None of the black students move. At first Claire thinks their silence is hesitation, but everyone remains still long beyond awkwardness—ten minutes, exactly. One by one the black students stand. They hand their notecards to the Dean of Students, and then they leave. The Dean turns over card after card after card; all of them are blank. Handfuls of white students begin to stand, gather their things, and file out behind them. Robert is scribbling a note.
Claire has come prepared for an argument. She does not know how to resist this enveloping silence. It is strategic. It hums in her head. But the room is still half full. The microphone is still on. There are three reporters from the student paper, and ten from national news outlets. There are still ten feet between her and the echoing sound of her own voice, telling her she can still be anybody she wants to.
Carolyn Ferrell
A History of China
from Ploughshares: Solos Omnibus
Dixie
Every year at the family reunion—before Cousin Monique comes to your rescue—the uncles sit back in their folding chairs and napkin-necks and ask about your father. They take you in with age-soggy eyes, as you stand before them in a floppy blouson and skirt. You look different now than you did in 1970 or 1981 or 1997—though you still have what lyrical Aunt Vitrine calls your swan quality. Cousin Monique had wanted to ditch the reunion for the shopping mall in Auntsville; she has always been your wings and, as such, was born to ignore the uncles: in 1970, she set fire to the truck belonging to one uncle and claimed it was lightning; in 1981, she put Ex-Lax in their pound cake frosting. Now she is nowhere to be seen. There’s no reason we can’t have fun at the reunion, you told her the night before, when she picked you up at Raleigh Airport. You’re right, Monique replied, grinning in the dark, the car pulling faster and faster along the blind curves of the road. Slave food and rockheads. I don’t see why that would in any way be an obstacle to fun, cousin.
Your blouson sticks to your skin. The uncles lean forward as if to smell you—girls here only wear that kind of top if they are in trouble—but gradually their eyes drift over the dirt hills across the street, behind the Baptist church. They don’t care if you’re like every other girl down here: fast Monique and her sisters Mae and Wanita and Tarnisha and Lynette. Her cousins Meggie and Mercy and Shawnelle and Winsome. Their kids LaDonna and Kelly and Juan and Quanasia and Cedric and Colin. Tons more. Monique’s mom had given her a fancy name in the hopes that she would be better than the rest. But look what happened, your father once remarked. 1981? 1982?
The uncles want news about him. Word on the road is that their nephew wants to return to his roots in North Carolina. The prodigal son returning—what a laugh, the uncles concur.
You stretch your eyes across the property, exasperating because it is huge and small at the same time and fills you with a familiar hopelessness. Monique and a friend were supposed to meet you at dawn. You all were supposed to slip out of your respective houses (you are staying with Aunt Nephronia, and Monique and Kate are, of course, staying with Monique’s mom, Vitrine, two houses down; as a child, this road of relatives fascinated you)—but you overslept, in part due to the brutally hot North Carolina night, in part due to your tears. Can a dead person ever change? Can time remove a tiger’s stripes? Those foolish questions made you weep in your sleep last night; in the days before your father died, you’d been too stingy to say goodbye.
The uncles look at you and say, Your daddy ain’t set foot here in near twenty years. But tell him we forgive him if he wants.
You need to tell them that he somehow finagled all the land from Great-Grandma Elldine and left it all to you in a will. Something about an unpaid loan, the land not being worth spit. The letter actually read, But why not enjoy it as your own, Sasha Jean. I utterly wish I could give you more.
The uncles are suddenly worked up in clammy anger.
How come he don’t answer when Vitrine call? That ain’t no way to be treating your one sister on this earth!
He always thought he was the best at checkers. Well, he got another thing coming.
If he thinking about parking that damn Cadillac in my yard again, he even crazier.
That sucker!
You’d had a dream, coming back to the folks in North Carolina: that you’d get a chance to talk smoothly after they all finished eating and were in good spirits; that you’d lay out everything Bobby Lee’s scribbled will said, though in reality it was vague, not more than four sentences. The sun wouldn’t be too hot and the children wouldn’t be too unruly. Dogs, as they happened to wander back and forth from each house, would not frighten you with their larva-laden ears. This was your dream. In reality, you can’t recall a single time that the uncles, in their walking days, didn’t eventually get smashed drunk and start fighting with the women. The pig, burnt to a crisp on the outside but pink as a newborn on the inside, would turn your stomach. The same gospel songs would be sung, the same protests as to who would hold the mic, who would gather the children from their hiding places and force them to sing. It’s not Sunday, one of them would say, relenting under a smack upside the head. How could your dream stand up to these details? Your dream was like a story that was told in the pages of some huge, incomprehensible book, spread out on a lemon-wax table in the only good part of someone’s house or trailer. Everyone sensed it was there but knew how to avoid it.
That and still: you want to find the right time to tell them—what better place for sad family news than at a reunion?—and you’re hoping that since it didn’t happen last night (your arrival at Nephronia’s, with glasses of Harveys Bristol Cream) or this morning (gluten-free breakfast crepes—à la the Food Network—with Vitrine), a suitable moment will come today.
Everyone is in the backyard of Grandma Elldine’s decrepit Victorian. Random picnic tables have been set out and on them, flies chill over Tupperware
s of mac salad and wings. Curlyhead, feverfew, and false foxglove dot the perimeter but everyone treats them like weeds. Already at eleven in the morning, it is 90 degrees; the relatives fan themselves with their hands until someone drags out a standing General Electric and plugs it (via two extension cords) into an unseen outlet.
I hope my brother don’t think we still in the prehistoric days, Aunt Vitrine had said at the breakfast table, her gray wig toppling. I’m learning to eat healthy, Sasha Jean. Buttermilk, no heavy cream. You go back and tell my brother that for me. We all gone live forever, like it or not.
In reality, it should be easy to tell everyone that your father died (in his armchair, surrounded only by his home healthcare aide and General Hospital playing on the tablet in her hands). Perhaps they will expect you to cry, and then for you to expect them to cry back. Ancient Hattie Mabel carries a mic (via three extension cords) out to the middle of the yard, preparing to gospel. We can forgive, the uncles say. But hell if we can forget.
You are silent; handed a plate of beans and rice by a young boy; pushed into a chair next to the uncles, in direct sunlight. You mention that your daddy plans on coming down to the reunion next year. That he misses everyone and longs for the red earth of his childhood. The uncles raise their brows and laugh. They tell you, don’t lie. Ancient Hattie Mabel removes her hand from your shoulders and starts in with “The Old Rugged Cross.” You notice that she still has on her overnight curlers, that her eyes are closed as she sways from side to side, as if in a godly stew. The fragrance of the beans and rice is heavy for this time of day, but still you lift a fork. The uncles say they’ve never known you to be untrue.
They have heard rumors all these years. Your father, the big gambler, every weekend in Las Vegas, thousands lost. Your father, owner of not one but two homes in Los Angeles. Your father, the lady’s man. He never paid child support. He called himself a minister on his tax forms and got caught by the government people. He tried talking Grandma Elldine into selling him this property just before she went into Pine Haven Home but luckily she resisted his advances. He wanted to tear down the old Victorian the first chance he got.
He got called on by the cops one time for “untoward deviousness.” He never said I’m sorry to anyone like he meant it.
The uncles tell you not to lie. Ain’t no way he’s coming back. Our Bobby Lee is gone for good.
Chinet
The will—scribbled on a yellow legal pad and witnessed by Faith Akintola, Dept. of Aging Adult Services, Los Angeles County—indicates that you’re supposed to evict them. That you’re supposed to raze everything and then build a real house here, with functioning plumbing and privacy windows. Sit on your newly built porch and look out over the chicken hills across the street and invite loads of educated folks over for drinks and perhaps to hear those “short stories” you’ve been publishing in graduate school—you can read them aloud (that is, your father last said, if they really want to sit around on a firefly night and listen to that crap). You’re supposed to recall childhood summers here, laughing in Great-Grandma Elldine’s post bed with Monique while the other children went to work tobacco. (Why not make a story out of that, he demanded. Monique and her slut self. Lazy, that’s all. Monique’s sisters and their slut selves—chasing men like firehouse dogs. Those girls belonged to nobody and look where that got them. Four kids apiece and no guardian in sight.) You’re supposed to see why he turned out the way he did, and why you will never go down that particular path. Never ever. (You belong to me. My favorite. Forgive me. Forever and ever.)
Royalton Japan Blue
In 1961, your father stood outside a small white house on a street empty of trees. He was bowing his head, quite uncharacteristic. But his mind went like: Thank you, God, for this is not Carolina red dirt or Carolina sun. Trees can be planted if people need them, and churches can be fucking avoided by simply watching the ball game on TV.
Your father rocked a carriage with one hand while looking over a brochure handed to him by the real estate agent. Pomegranate Estates, it read. Take a Bite of This Fruit.
In 1961, the real estate agent had called this Long Island neighborhood a “colored development,” shying away from words like community or housing project, as he didn’t want your father—already coming across as uppity—to get the wrong idea. These were normal houses for normal people, the agent claimed—some even had wooden shingles. People watered lawns here, drove cars into proper driveways. There would be no fists here, no spirituals or arms linked in arms or fires or Jackson Five records or Aretha Franklin passion in this part of Pomegranate Village. The agent waved his hand over the sea of three-bedroom-plus-den Cape Cods (there were actually thirty-five on this cul-de-sac) and said, If you all want something to do, think about painting the shutters a different color, or planting a little garden or something. No vegetables, no livestock, no front yard clotheslines. Just a row of marigolds or begonias.
Tell your closest friends, the brochure encouraged.
In the yard of your soon-to-be new house, your father ignored the agent. His job at that particular moment was to keep his eye on the carriage in which you lay. The sun beamed straight into your eyes, and you bawled; the carriage was a foot away from a struggling maple sapling, but your father made no attempt to wheel you into that bit of shade. He was, instead, listening for your mother.
Who was walking around the yard, wringing her hands, not believing her luck. Not only did the house have more than one bedroom and a bathtub and basement, it had all this land. Nearly a fifth of an acre. She imagined planting the gooseberries and potatoes she’d smuggled from her last trip home to Laboe. One patch here, another here, near the culvert. There was that annoying maple sapling in the front yard by the curb, but in the backyard, there was nothing. Plenty of room for German food.
In 1971, your mother announced that she hated trees.
Rosenthal
You struggle to eat the beans and rice, only to have Aunt Cathy tuck a bowl of grits and eggs into your lap. For later, she says, winking. From the corner of your eye you notice Monique, her brown skin glistening with baby oil, hurrying in a dress and bare feet. There was that one time, in 1981, when she duct-taped shut the door to the church and wouldn’t let them out for over an hour. In 1982, she stole seven dump cakes from the church basement breakfast and threw them into the branches of the tall pines.
She is flying like a pterodactyl now, large brown wings outstretched in love. She is coming for you.
Corning Centura
I love it, your mother cried, walking away from the men and the carriage toward the side of the house. There were huge lilac trees and a gutsy chain-link fence running from front to back. When can we move in, she cried, without once turning her head.
Just out of sight of the men, her hands went back into her coat pocket; she, too, began a quiet prayer. The house was a miracle—it would be her miracle. It was close to the others. It looked exactly like the others. Likely, when you opened every door, you saw the same walls, you noticed that the bathroom was in the same place, the kitchen fan made the same noise. But how fantastic was that? No useless standing out or drawing attention to the wrong things. Being the same meant being the same.
Your mother wandered back toward the front yard. I love this place, Bob, she whispered. Please say we never leave.
Elspeth, he murmured. His hand on the carriage, the baby that was you still bawling.
The real estate agent cleared his throat. It was not often that he saw a black man hold a white woman in his arms and live to tell about it. His own family was Connecticut stock by way of Georgia and New Mexico. We’ll take it, your father announced. Bring me the papers.
The agent again looked at him funny; just what did this colored man think, using a phrase like that? Bring me—what was he, the fucking King of Siam?
But still, the agent didn’t resist. That afternoon the three of them sat together in the office on Main Street in Pomegranate Village and signed the papers. In the carriag
e, you bawled even further.
Aztec Melmac
What your father has left you is a deed to these dusty thirty-seven acres, populated by fallen-down prefabs and trailers, at least seven in total, and at the end of the road, a rusted old church. Faith Akintola sent you a letter with a copy of the signed will you’ve carried in your purse; the letter (dictated, in fact, to the aide during commercials) continued:
I’m sorry for
any way you thought I might
have hurt you. I love you, Daddy.
With all my heart. Doesn’t life go on?
Monique is scowling at the uncles. Why you talking to these old skunks? she asks, yanking you toward the road. Her face is riddled with egg white, remnants of an acne cure she’d applied earlier that morning. Unlike almost everyone here, she is as slim as a model. Her skin bakes underneath your hand into pure chocolate custard.
You tell her you were just making small talk.
Small talk, Monique sighs, wincing. Those suckers don’t know nothing about no small talk. Try making BIG talk and see what happens.
Big talk?
They think they doing you a favor when in reality it’s no way to treat a baby girl they supposed to be loving. They think they doing you a favor. I wish I could kill them all.
When you get to the roadside, you vomit in an echinacea bush.
Let it out, don’t be afraid, Monique whispers, lifting your sweaty hair from your shoulder. She giggles, but the pulse of her hand is soothing. You knocked up, Sasha Jean? I would be so happy. You don’t know how long I been waiting to say to you: JOIN THE CLUB.
(Re: the uncles: later she will claim what she was talking about was the time the uncles were asked to watch her oldest daughters—Monique was doing two shifts at Target—but then fell asleep and let the baby girls wander off down the road—almost two miles on their own. She wanted to kick them in the dick, hurt them so they’d stay awake forever, damn stupid talkers.)
