Lilly was right; being in the Quarters in Jean Ville was good medicine for our spirits. The Massey family had become a massive crew of nieces and nephews and first and second cousins; kids of every age from birth to twenty-one, as well as adults, lived in the now eight cabins. Catfish's four children—Sam, Tom, Tootsie, and Jesse lived in the original row of former slave cabins where they had raised their children and Marianne lived in the fifth, which had been Catfish's house. The three newer cabins, facing the old row, had siding and roofing tiles, unlike the wooden structures with tin roofs and wood planks for exterior walls.
Tom and Gloria’s youngest, Anna, was almost thirteen, a few months older than Lilly. The oldest of the Massey clan, Sam, had a married daughter named LaVergne who lived in one of the newer cabins and had a twelve-year-old named Christine who everyone called Chrissy. The three girls—Lilly, Anna, and Chrissy—had been friends since our first visit to Jean Ville when they were five. They had also been pen pals through the years and occasionally I let Lilly call them long distance.
It was like balm for my soul to watch Lilly and her dearest friends. Of course, they were actually her cousins, but I hadn't explained that to her yet. They played and stole off to the barn where I knew they shared secrets and talked about boys, school, books, and probably coming-of-age feelings like Marianne and I had done when we were twelve and thirteen. It was a slow and quiet environment, and so different from the city life Lilly and I had been living.
The second day we were in the Quarters in Jean Ville, a van from the only florist shop in town pulled up and parked in front of Marianne's cabin. I watched a young man walk up the steps of the house and give her a long white box. After he walked away she came onto the porch and put the box in my lap.
"It's for you."
"Who's it from?"
"Don't know. Same thing happened at your house in New York just about every day when I was there."
"What do you mean?"
"Every day or so someone delivered a box like this and there was one, long-stemmed white lily inside. Ruby would add it to the already full vase on your dining room table."
"Oh, I think I remember someone telling me about that. They smelled wonderful." I walked into the kitchen holding the box like someone would hold a baby—arms extended, elbows locked at my sides, the box resting across my hands like a miniature white coffin.
"Aren't you going to open it?"
"Would you do it for me?" I handed the box to Marianne and went out the door, letting the screen door slam behind me. I'm not sure what I was thinking but that box felt like a hot potato that I needed to drop. Later that day, I noticed the white lily in a large Mason jar in the middle of Marianne's kitchen table. I ignored it.
The next day I saw the florist's van pull into the Quarters and a young man got out with another long white box. I went into the bathroom, took a long bath, and came out an hour later. Marianne had gone to work and there were two lilies in the jar on the table. It was hard to ignore the fragrance that filled the small house. Every day a new lily arrived, the bouquet grew, and the house smelled like a rose garden.
It didn't escape me that I was the only white person among the clan of African Americans and that they saw me as different; yet, I loved them and felt more at home with this family than anywhere else or with anyone else. And Lilly was one of them, literally. I began to consider how and when I would tell her the truth. Joe and I had talked about it and he felt she should know at some point.
"You're her birth mother. You'll know when the time is right and you'll have the perfect words." Joe had reassured me, but I didn't feel like such a competent mother. I wasn't afraid to tell her I was her mother. I was afraid of the questions she would have about her biological father and I wasn't ready to answer those. Emalene would know exactly what to say. So would Josh.
A wave of grief washed over me and I cried for the next hour. It was like that—I'd be doing fine, and then a wave would hit me and knock me down a deep, dark hole. I'd feel like I was being washed up in a tsunami of grief and couldn't breathe, like the day I discovered Emalene wasn't breathing and the day the men came to tell me about Josh.
I felt guilty about Josh’s death since I had pressured him to bring Hernando home to me. Had he not taken that helicopter to the boy’s village, he would have flown home with the other doctors and would still be with me. My guilt was complicated by the way I started to question whether I'd really loved him the way I thought I did—the way I'd once loved Rodney.
As months passed, I noticed that the time between grief and guilt tsunamis was longer and the depth of the hole more shallow, but the waves kept coming, and for the first year, it felt almost murderous at times.
*
I sat on Tootsie's porch that evening, drinking sweet tea and watched Lilly and the girls jump rope. Tootsie was mending something, pulling a needle through fabric.
She had taught me to sew when I was a little girl and I'd become pretty good at it. I'd bought a used Singer sewing machine in New York and made baby doll clothes for Lilly when she was younger. We'd go to the fabric shop and choose materials, buttons, lace and other items and go back to my apartment and make dresses, aprons, and bonnets, even shoes for her dolls. Tootsie had taught me most of the important things I had learned growing up, and I looked at her tenderly, with gratitude.
"I love you, Toot. You've been such a good mother to me."
"I love you, Susie. You were easy to raise." She laughed and rocked and pulled that needle and thread through the fabric.
"Who taught you to sew?"
"My Mama. She was something, now; could do anything—pick cotton, hoe a row, ride a horse, strap a buggy together, cook any meal you yearned for, sew up clothes and curtains that looked store-bought. And she could gossip, too. I loved to sit right here and listen to her tell stories about those people who lived in the plantation house before my time, even before her time.
"I remember Mama telling the story about Mr. Henry Van." Tootsie stared at the darkening sky and sighed. "Now he was Mr. Gordon's only chile and Mr. Henry's mama done run off so it was just them two men in that big house. I guess you could say Maureen, Lizzie, Bessie, and even Anna Lee, was that boy's mama.
The Hoodoo: by Tootsie
1860-1935
Now, Mr. Henry, he was in college, then he went off to Europe and some other places. He came back to the plantation when he was about thirty and Sammy was somewhere in the teenage years, about fifteen or sixteen, I believe. And they took a liking to each other. You see, Sammy, he was extra smart. He started going to his mama's school when he could barely walk. He could read anything—the newspaper, the Bible, books. And he could write like you wouldn't believe, almost like an artist.
So Mr. Van and Mr. Henry would rely on Sammy to write up some things for them, bills of sale, contracts, and such. I think Mr. Henry respected that Sammy was smart and it gave him someone he could talk to about books and history and such as that.
Now me, I didn't get past eighth grade. You know I was pregnant with Marianne when I was fourteen or so. And, anyway, my mama, maybe being from Mississippi, thought learning was a waste of time for girls.
Anyways, after Mr. Gordon died, Mr. Henry took over the crops and such and my granddaddy Sammy worked for him doing everything, and Mr. Henry let Sammy sharecrop. Sammy, he invented a new kind of way to grow corn that made more corn on each stalk, and the people from LSU came here to see what he'd done and start to teach what Sammy done about growing good crops over at the college to they students. It was like he had a green hand when he planted corn and cane, and even cotton. His crops was always bigger and better than anyone's.
I know Catfish tole you about when Mr. Gordon died how he left these cabins and an acre land they's on to my granddaddy and them, and that's how we got to own our own place. And Mr. Henry, well he gave my granddaddy, Sammy, fifty acres of land through the years and now we got all this property here on Gravier Road and Jefferson Exte
nsion. And my granddaddy, he would teach all Mr. Henry's workers how to make the crops big and full, and they'd have more corn than they could use and more cotton than they could pick and more pecans—why, they was pecans big as pine cones all over the grounds. That made Mr. Henry a rich man and my granddaddy, he was successful, too, and left all that to my daddy and us. It's all up at the Confederate Bank, I guess. We never spent the money. My daddy said it was for emergencies.
Mr. Henry, he married a girl from Baton Rouge name of Catherine, and she come to live here and they had them a little girl with white hair and the bluest eyes, Catfish said. That little girl named Angela was same age as Catfish and he thought she was beautiful but he said her skin so white it glowed and made him think of the haunt.
Miss Catherine, she won't let Angela play with Catfish or the others in the Quarters, and Catfish say Angela used to watch the kids play in the Quarters through the fence Miss Catherine made the workers build to separate the whites from the coloreds. They said Mr. Henry got so mad he took a shovel and tried to break down the fence one night.
Miss Catherine got real sick when Angela was little and they sent for the doctor but he didn't know what to do and he tried everything, bleeding her, medicines, steam, but she just got worse. And she wouldn't let no coloreds go around her or her daughter, but when she got so delirious on fever that she didn't know who was in there, Mr. Henry got Maureen and Bessie up in Miss Catherine's room and they put the healing mojo on her with herbs and some medicines they make from the earth.
And it was like a miracle after a couple days that Miss Catherine start to get better. And when her fever was gone and she saw Maureen in her room she start to screaming for Mr. Henry to come get that nigress out her room 'cause she think Maureen has the witchcraft in her and she trying to make Miss Catherine have a fit.
Mr. Henry got up in that room and calmed his wife down and start to tell her that it was Maureen and Bessie what got her well, and she don't believe him and they got in a big argument. Then little Angela go and climb in her mama's bed and tell her mama that her daddy tell the truth and how she so grateful that Maureen and them save her mama's life and all.
Catfish say things changed around here after that.
Tootsie pointed to the end of the row where the field spread out towards the plantation house with the barn midway between where a fence separated the properties. I silently followed her direction with my eyes.
Well, soon after Miss Catherine start to get well, that fence came down and Angela would run and play with Catfish and the other kids here in the Quarters. Course it would happen that Angela and Sam, that was Catfish oldest brother, named after they daddy, and them, got to be friends. They was just children then. Angela was about seven and Sam, he was maybe nine or ten. But when they got to be teenagers they was starting to like each other more like boyfriend and girlfriend and that was too much for Miss Catherine.
Next thing you know, Angela got shipped off to boarding school somewhere near Lafayette. They say Sam was so upset when Miss Angela left that he registered for the draft and went in the Army during the First War. They call it the first war but it weren't the first, 'cause the war of the states that some call the Civil War, now that was the first one and it happened right here.
So, Sam, he got shipped over to France, but he didn't make it to battle 'cause he died from the Spanish flu on a ship somewhere in the ocean. They say Sammy was angry and blamed Miss Catherine for his son's death, but Miss Catherine don't care one hoot or holler, you hear. She just went about her business and Maureen say Miss Catherine was glad Sam died 'cause she didn't have to worry her daughter would have a colored baby. I don't know what happened to Angela Van. No one ever talked about her after Sam died.
When he died, that made Catfish the oldest son and he had to learn to grow crops like his daddy and them. But Catfish, he didn't like farming. He liked to draw and fish and hunt and chase girls.
When Mr. Henry died in ‘38, Catfish was in his thirties, I guess. He and my mama were married by then and I was a baby. Well, Miss Catherine, she didn't want nothing to do with staying on at Shadowland—it wasn't a plantation no more, no way—so she put everything up for sale. They sold off the land part and parcel and you can see all these houses done gone up all along Jefferson Extension since then. Why that road was just a driveway back then, now they's houses on both sides and they done paved it.
Then Miss Catherine Van sold off the big old house to some people didn't take care of it and it looked all broken down for years. A new doctor came to town and bought it and they got it all fixed up and it looks good as new.
“I hear that doctor's wife got all the new appliances and stuff and that she big society in Jean Ville.” Tootsie rocked back and forth and stared at the plantation house. “They young and have some young children I see playing in the yard sometime, but I never met them. They put up a fence where the old one was, so our children don't mix.
“Just when you think things is changing, they go back to the same.”
"What y'all talking about?" Marianne walked up the steps onto Tootsie's porch and sat on the edge, dangling her legs off the side, her feet scraping the dust.
"Tootsie's telling me stories about Catfish and the Vans." I rocked hard in the chair and patted my feet on the wood slats. Tootsie stared at that field and the barn and the fence and rocked in her chair, the needle not moving, the thread blowing slightly in the breeze.
Her stories were not so different from Catfish's, but her telling—now that was something special.
Chapter Eighteen
***
Gravier Road
Sissy insisted on talking on our way back to Jean Ville from a shopping trip in Alexandria. It was hot and humid, and we had the air conditioner on full blast, so that the whishing noise coupled with the clack-clack-clack of the tires on the concrete highway made it hard to have a conversation. The air was thick like it gets in Louisiana when it’s about to rain. She asked about Lilly.
"What about her?" My hands gripped tighter around the steering wheel.
"Tell me about her parents. How did you and Josh end up with her?"
"It's complicated." I rolled the window down a few inches to release the pressure I was feeling, but all that accomplished was a whiff from a paper mill that smelled like sewage and the extreme moist heat so familiar to south Louisiana. We were about fifteen minutes from the Quarters and I stepped on the gas, wanting to cut the conversation short.
"You realize she looks a lot like you, huh?"
"No she doesn't. She's not even white."
"Duh!" Sissy rolled her eyes and reminded me of Mama, the way she'd make that face behind Daddy's back when he talked about how colored people were just like white people. Mama knew all along that Daddy was a hypocrite, but we thought Mama was the one who was prejudiced.
"Her mother, Emalene, is black and her dad, Joe, is white. Emma was, is… was my dear friend, as close as Marianne, but older, more like a sister-mother type. She's in a nursing home and has dementia. She doesn't even know Lilly or me anymore. It's very sad."
I told Sissy about Joe being a college professor and how he went off the deep end when Emma had a double mastectomy, and took up with a young girl, one of his students. I explained how I helped out the year Emma and Joe fought the cancer, and that after Emma quit breathing and we brought her back, it damaged her brain.
“Too long without oxygen, they say.” I wanted to keep the conversation about the Franklins. “Joe needed me to help, so I said yes and kept Lilly because she'd basically lost both her parents and, well, I love her."
"She obviously loves you too."
"I came into her life when she was four. When you get down to it, I've been her surrogate mother longer than Emma was her actual mother."
"Lilly told me she was adopted."
"She told you that? She's never talked to me about it. Emma and Joe told her from the beginning that she was chosen."
"C
hosen, that's a nice way of saying it."
"Emalene Franklin had nice ways of saying all sorts of things." Sissy wouldn't give up the conversation no matter how I explained the way I'd come to have custody of Lilly. I tried changing the subject, but she kept bringing it up.
"Why are you pushing this, Sissy?" It started to rain and I turned on the windshield wipers.
"Because. She looks like you, except she's obviously part colored."
"They use the term black now, and African American."
"Okay. But Susie, there were rumors about you when you were a teenager. You know that, right?"
"I don't care about rumors."
"About you and a black guy. Ray Thibault's son."
"Rumors are just that—rumors." The rain came down harder, and I had to concentrate on the slick roads. I didn’t want to have this conversation.
"Well, I happen to believe them. I remember when I was little, maybe eight or nine, you were sitting in a car in Dr. Switzer's driveway and a tall, colored boy, maybe he was a Mulatto 'cause he was light-skinned, he was yelling at Daddy from across the street. Then y'all drove off—you and the boy. I was on the porch with Mama."
"Hmmm."
"Marianne told me that he's divorced."
"Who?"
"Rodney Thibault."
"She didn't tell me that and, anyway, it doesn't matter. History."
We drove for several miles without talking and I was thinking about Rodney, Josh, and Daddy; all the thoughts were rushing in and out of my brain.
"He told me he was sorry." I drove slowly in the pouring rain.
"Who?"
"Daddy. He told me he was afraid I wouldn't fulfill my potential." I thought about Daddy and how hard it must have been for him to admit he had handled things badly.
"He said that to you?"
"Yes. I feel like I need to try with Daddy. To forgive him."
Sissy didn't comment.
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