Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  We were across the bridge and back on Peacock’s before we spoke. Sophia sat in the front seat beside me, her feet propped up on the Cherokee’s dashboard, her head thrown far back against the seat. The sinews in her long feet stood out as she wedged them for support, and her eyes were closed. She still wore the headwrap. Her feet were dirty; somehow I liked that. In the backseat, Mark’s sleepy grizzling had subsided into the real thing.

  Finally I said, “I know you’ll have to tell Clay about this, but I wish you’d wait until after I do, okay? He’s not in good shape. It didn’t go well in Puerto Rico.”

  “I’m not going to tell him,” she said, eyes still closed.

  “Sophia…where are you on all this?”

  She opened her eyes and looked over at me.

  “I don’t know. I just…don’t know. You going to turn me in to headquarters, Caro?”

  I laughed.

  “For what? Disloyalty? I’m really the one to do that, aren’t I?”

  “‘Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!’” she said, and her voice had a rich hill of laughter in it.

  “When I first read that, in junior high, I thought it might have been written for me,” I said, laughing at her laughter. “It was just the way I felt. ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?…’”

  “‘Are you—Nobody—too?’ God, if you thought that was you, just imagine who I thought it was. A little black girl in Brooklyn Heights with a rich mama and daddy who raised her white…I didn’t fit in anywhere. They left it up to me to decide which world I would live in. As it turned out, neither one wanted me very much.”

  “And which did you?” I asked. It seemed suddenly that I could ask her anything. We had been through a great deal together, Sophia Bridges and I, whether we had perceived it like that or not. We had both lived for a time with one foot in a near-alternate universe.

  “Oh, white,” she said. “You get lots more stuff white, and you get it easier and faster. I couldn’t really pass myself; I know I don’t look white. Just real classy black. But I rammed my way into the white world at school. And I married white. You probably guessed that. You can also probably guess it didn’t last long. After the novelty wears off, white really wants white.”

  “Are you bitter about that?” She did not sound so, particularly. Not now.

  “I was, certainly. When I got down here I was bitter about almost everything that smacked of either really, really white or really, really black. I can just imagine the message I was giving Mark.”

  “Why did you come? The Lowcountry…under the surface, it’s about the blackest place I know,” I said. “You surely must have had a world of choices about a career and where you would live.”

  “I had plenty,” she said matter-of-factly. “The thing is…my people come from here, Caro. I didn’t know that; I had no idea where our family originated. If my parents did, they never said. I think, in their minds, they just sort of invented themselves and me. But when I started in cultural anthropology one of the first courses I had involved the Gullahs of the Southeastern Lowcountry. I felt an immediate…I don’t know, a connection, I guess you’d say…and I started sort of surreptitiously researching names. I know my father’s family’s was McKay. Eventually I found what looked like a link to some Mackeys on Edisto. Peacock’s was mentioned. All this time I was either pretending none of it existed or that I was merely doing fascinating research. I never told Chris…my husband…what I was studying. He loved telling his little liberal white law partners that his wife was a cultural anthropologist. I don’t think he would have loved telling them she was a Gullah Negro whose ancestors came over in the hold of a slave ship from Angola. Come to that, I had a fine time pretending mine didn’t, either. Christ, I don’t know where I thought they came from. Certainly not on the Mayflower.”

  She looked over at me obliquely.

  “You could special-order us, did you know that? I didn’t. But you could. A lot of the Charleston and Edisto planters did. Our people were known to be good agriculturists, and we were so ancestor and family besotted that we weren’t likely to run away and leave our families over here. Made to order to the rice and cotton fields, wouldn’t you say? You could specify how many of us, and what sex and what age, even what height and weight. I wouldn’t have made a good field worker, but I would have done well as a house nigger. Skinny; not a big eater. Presentable enough for the front rooms. Light enough so if the massa knocked me up the kid could probably pass…”

  I made a soft sound of pain, and she shook her head impatiently.

  “I’m not trying to lay a guilt trip on you,” she said. “I know you’re one of the good ones. It’s just that…it’s my first experience with blackness. I don’t know how I feel about it yet. I don’t know what it’s going to mean to Mark. I don’t know where the next step will take me, or what it will be. I don’t know if I can make being black work; I was white too long. And I don’t know if white will ever work for me again. I don’t even know what’s important in the long run, in the big picture. Except that I know that is, over there.” She gestured back toward the island. “I know that somehow that’s awfully important. I know that it…needs to stay whole, over there, whether or not I ever set foot there again.”

  “So, are you a double agent or what?” I grinned.

  “Or what, I guess,” she said peacefully. “I don’t seem to be in any hurry to make lifetime decisions. I don’t feel like I have to, right now. It’s been a great month or so, just being…just teasing along on the moment.”

  “Ezra’s good company,” I said.

  “Ezra’s a pain in the ass.” She smiled. “But he’s sure a whole piece of cloth, isn’t he? I never met anybody like him. He’s more things in one skin than I thought was possible.”

  “Maybe that’s what we’re all meant to be,” I said.

  “Maybe. Who knows? I guess it will emerge. For now I’m going to just let it carry me. You know, Caro, I guess I was waiting to hear what’s going to happen to Dayclear, waiting to see…what Clay will do. If he goes ahead with it, I know now that I’ll have to resign. If not…well, I’m not likely to get another job that lets me write my own ticket in my specialty and pays me like Clay does. It’s the kind of job that makes a reputation early, and that means big bucks. I want Mark to have the kind of education I did. He’s no more apt to want to live in Dayclear than I do, even if his ancestors’ names are on those grave-stones, but he needs to be able to walk back and forth between worlds as easily as he crosses a street in Manhattan. Or as easily as you go back to…wherever it is you go back to.”

  “I haven’t been back to my hometown in twenty-five years,” I said. “But I see your point. There’s nothing stopping me if I wanted to. I always meant to; my daughter, Kylie, always wanted to go so she could hear the garbage trucks in the morning. To her, that was about as exotic as you can get.”

  She put her hand over mine briefly. It was cold and rough with the dried mud of her ancestors’ resting place. I rather hoped some of it stayed under the perfect ovals of her nails.

  “You’ve never mentioned her name,” she said.

  “It’s hard to talk about her,” I said. “I’m trying to learn to make her a normal part of my life now. I think maybe I’ve enshrined her too long.”

  “I cannot even imagine what would happen to me without Mark,” she said. “I cannot imagine who or what I would be. I don’t see how you’ve gone on.”

  “Well, I have other people I love, other things,” I said. “All of us do. It’s hard to see that at first, but…we do.”

  And then I remembered that, so far as I knew, she did not, and muttered, “Sorry. I assume a lot.”

  “Oh, I have them, too,” she said. “Even if most of them are dead. I just found them. It’s a powerful feeling.”

  “Maybe not all of them are dead,” I said, thinking of Ezra’s black eyes on her.

  “Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe not.”

  We were silent again
until I pulled up in front of her condo in the harbor village. Despite the balmy weather, it was still winter, and the darkness had swept in suddenly and completely from the west. There were a number of big white yachts in the harbor, their portholes radiant with the lights of cocktails and dinners being celebrated, and the flagstone walkway around the harbor was full of tanned, sun-bleached people strolling to the shops and restaurants, or from one boat to another. In the old live oaks the tiny white lights that always reminded me of Christmas twinkled in the skeins of silvery moss. Soft rock music drifted from somewhere. It was festive and rich and quite lovely, and about as real as cotton candy. I knew suddenly that if I ever saw this over on the island I would have to leave. That day. That moment.

  We made a date for lunch the next week—I was not going to let this accessible new Sophia go—and I drove slowly back to the house. It was dark except for the light I had left in the kitchen. As I pulled into the driveway, I saw a man come out of the back door and down the steps. Before I could even feel uneasy, I saw that it was Hayes Howland and felt a sharp sting of resentment instead. I did not want Hayes going in and out of my house when I was not there. I supposed, with weary resentment, that I would have to start locking my doors after all. It was ironic to think that when I finally capitulated to that, it would be Hayes I was locking out, and not the occasional random robber or rapist.

  I met him at the back steps.

  “Are you stealing the silver?” I said, trying for lightness.

  “Looking for Clay. I haven’t been able to raise anybody on the phone all afternoon, and I got uneasy. I saw Charlie at lunch, and he said Clay was not in such hot shape. You weren’t locked, so I went on in. He’s asleep upstairs. I didn’t want to wake him.”

  “Good of you,” I said waspishly. “He’s been sleeping a lot. Charlie says he needs it. He also says he’ll be just fine once he gets enough rest, so I’m letting him do it. I expect he’ll be back at the office in a day or two. Can it wait, whatever you wanted with him?”

  “Oh, yeah. I was just being a mother hen. But now that I’m here…Caro, have you had a chance to do what we agreed on? About Dayclear?”

  I knew in that instant that that was why he had come. Not to check on Clay, but to see if I had been to Dayclear yet, to put the company’s proposal to the village. I don’t know why it made me so angry. From the beginning I had known that he was in a hurry for an answer.

  “I’ve just come from there,” I said, looking straight at him in the darkness. I could scarcely see his face, only the gleam of his pale blue eyes.

  “I told them exactly what you told me. And essentially they told me it was up to me since I owned the island, and I told them that it wasn’t going to happen. And it’s not. I’m sorry, Hayes. I know that puts you all in a bind. But you redid the plans once. Surely there’s an avenue you haven’t explored yet. In any event, I cannot let it happen, and I won’t.”

  He stood silently, looking at me, and then down at his feet.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Caro,” he said. “Clay will be, too.”

  “I know. Let me tell him, Hayes. I want him to hear it from me.”

  He shrugged. I could just make out the gesture.

  “Better do it soon,” he said, and padded away over the carpet of wet live oak leaves to the Porsche that crouched in the dark like a big cat.

  I watched him out of sight, and then walked around the house and through the front yard, over the dunes and down to the beach. I had not known I was going to do that, but this time there was no heaviness, no darkness, no prickle of panic. I merely felt still and empty and very tired. I slipped off my sneakers and padded across the silky, snake-cold sand to the firmer, icy salt-slicked sand at the fringe of the surf and sat down on the trunk of the fallen palm tree that had been Carter’s fort and Kylie’s balance bar.

  There was no moon, but the stars were huge and cold and near, and the sea itself seemed to breathe off a kind of radiance, like smoke. It made a long, infinitely gentle susurration: Hushhhhh. Hushhhhhh. There was almost no surf at all; what there was was white lace against the blackness of the beach. There was no other sound, and no one at all on the beach. I knew that if I looked behind me I would see the lights of all the other houses that fringed our stretch of shore, see their windows lit for dinner and the coming evening. But I did not look back. I looked far out into the whispering sea, and I looked up into the sky.

  “I wonder what you would make of all this?” I said to my daughter in the sky, or in the water, or wherever it was that held her. I felt her very near. “I wonder what you would do about the island if it were your decision to make.”

  But of course I knew the answer to that; she would make the decision that I had made. She was me and I was her. There had never been any question of that. It struck me then that it was time. It was, finally, time.

  “I’m going to let you go,” I said aloud. “I don’t know how to do it, but I’m going to do it tonight. You need to be your own person now. If you were still with me, I’d be doing this about now…trying to learn to let you be yourself. So this is it, kid. You’ll have to help me. I don’t know what I need to do next.”

  I wriggled off the log and stretched out against it, leaning my head back, letting it take my weight. The damp cold of the sand seeped through the seat of my blue jeans, but it seemed a point of connection to the earth, not an uncomfortable intrusion. I closed my eyes and willed myself to think of nothing at all except her. I tried to empty my mind even of the image of her, and let just her essence, the warm, secret displacement of air and space that was Kylie in my soul, fill me.

  It was a mystery, what happened then. I think everyone gets perhaps one to a lifetime. I know that I made it in my mind, but I know, too, that it was more than that, and I will always know that, no matter who tries to dissuade me. No one will, because I will never tell anyone. Not even Clay. This was my mystery, mine and Kylie’s. I lay still on that empty beach with her filling me, and behind my eyes there began to appear golden prickles of light, like the ones that always come when you hold your eyes shut hard. And then one of the pinpricks began to grow larger and larger and brighter and brighter, so that it pressed hard against my lids, and I opened them to ease the pressure and the light drifted out of me and into the air, very slowly, and up into the sky. I watched it as it grew smaller and smaller, and finally I lost it among the winter stars.

  I closed my eyes again and waited. And then I saw behind my eyelids that very slowly, infinitely slowly, it disengaged itself from the body of stars and grew larger and more golden, and began to drift down again, down and down until it hovered in front of my face and bumped at my cheeks and lips with a cool sort of frisson, like the feeling a lit sparkler makes against your skin. A kiss, a nibble. I opened my eyes and it came in. I closed them. I felt it linger there just behind my lids, warm and cool at the same time, and then it slid down and down and came to rest in my chest, in what felt to be the absolute center of me. And there it stayed, until I finally opened my eyes for good and all and said, “Yes. Okay. You’re safe and so am I. Thank you, darling. Go to sleep now.”

  And I believe that she did. And I believe that she sleeps there now and always, and will never again have to answer some sad, silly, frantic summons from me or anyone else. Wherever else she is I do not know, but I believe that the very living core, the essential flame of her, is inside me. I believe that.

  When I finally got up off the beach and went inside my house, it was to find my husband still asleep on my daybed, his face looking, finally, cool and smoothed and full again. I kissed him on the forehead, and he stirred and mumbled, and then fell back into his long sleep.

  “I just wanted to tell you that I have her home, and I think you can go back to your own bed,” I whispered.

  In the morning when I woke, I found a note on my bedside table that said, “Feel terrific for some reason & have gone into the office. Call me later. Thanks for hanging in there.”

  I lay there look
ing at the new morning on the face of the sea and thinking that if I was lucky there was time for coffee before I called him and blew his world to bits.

  12

  But I did not do that, after all, because when I finally had had enough coffee to jump-start my courage and called him at his office, it was to learn, from a Shawna whose smirk was almost visible over the wire, that he was gone again.

  “Just ran out the door,” she said happily. “Got a call about an hour ago from Atlanta and he and Hayes were out of here like scalded tomcats. He said for me to tell you when you called, and that he’d be away three or four days. The bigwigs are flying them to Texas to see some kind of Wild West theme park thing out there. Reckon we’re all going to be wearing ten-gallon hats. Oh, and he said to tell you he was just fine, felt great, and to call Charlie and tell him. That’s his doctor, isn’t it? I could do that for you. I wouldn’t mind talking to that doctor myself. I heard about Puerto Rico. Somebody needs to tell him just what’s going on, and I know Clay isn’t going to do it.…”

  “Thank you so much, Shawna,” I said through clenched teeth. It dawned on me that my head was pounding badly and my nose was stuffed up. Sinus infections are spring’s first gift to me, and if I was in for one, the last thing I needed was to listen to Shawna chirp her love and ownership of my husband to me at ten o’clock in the morning.

  “I’ll call Charlie myself,” I said. “We went over last week and saw him; he knows all he needs to know about Clay’s condition. He’s been our doctor for a long time. He was in our wedding. He would want to talk to Clay or me.”

  I heard her affronted little snort and realized that I had been cruel, and did not care. Shawna set herself up for rebuffs like a tenpin, over and over again. I wondered if she thought that if I were out of the picture Clay would sweep her into his arms? Look at her one afternoon, walk slowly to her, pull the pins out of her hair, and remove her glasses and whisper, “My God. I never realized.”

  Fat chance.