Guardian

by Julius Lester

  “Maybe it’s not a matter of what I want you to do, but a matter of who you are, of who we are.”

  “No, it’s a matter of living in peace with our neighbors and keeping a roof over our heads and food on the table.”

  “And you think that’s more important than your son having a father he can look up to, a father he admires? You think that’s more important than your son knowing his father is a liar and a coward?

  “Go on, Bert. Do it. You’ve been wanting to do that since the day we got married and you blew cigarette smoke in my face rather than kiss me.”

  Bert lets his arm drop to his side.

  There is a long and tense silence. It is as if each of them is holding his breath, that the next word, the next movement will decide the history of the world.

  It is Maureen who speaks, and when she does her voice is quiet. “You don’t have to be in Davis to put a roof over our heads and food on the table. So we would have had to leave town if you’d told the truth. So what? We could’ve gone some place and started again.”

  Bert shakes his head. “Go where? To some city up north? I’m a small-town country boy from the South. My grandparents are buried here, and so are my parents. And so will I. This is my home, Maureen. Everybody knows me here. If we moved someplace else, I’d be a nobody.”

  Maureen sighs and nods her head slowly. “I understand how you feel, Bert. Believe me. I do. Maybe it’s too late for us, but I don’t want Ansel to grow up in a town where people prefer to believe a lie and kill a man to prove the lie.”

  “What are you saying, Maureen?”

  “I don’t want my son to spend another minute in a town that would do what this town did tonight.”

  “What’re you saying?” Bert asks again, sharply this time.

  “Just telling you how I feel.”

  “I don’t give a damn how you feel. You’re not sending my boy away from here. I need him in the store; I need him to carry on the business.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you need, Bert.”

  There is a stunned silence. Neither Bert nor Ansel has ever heard a swear word from Maureen’s lips, and if they’d been asked, they would have said she didn’t know any.

  “What’s gotten into you?” Bert asks softly. “This is not like you.”

  “How would you know what I’m like? When have you ever asked me a question about myself, about what I might have done on a given day, about the books I bring back from the library? When have you shown an interest in anything besides the store?”

  Bert shakes his head. “I know what happened tonight was upsetting. You’ll feel better in the morning. It’s late and Ansel and I have to be at the store early tomorrow, well, it’s today already.”

  “I’m not going to the store,” Ansel tells his father. “I’m not going ever again. I hate that store. But don’t forget to order more rope. All we had got used to hang Willie’s papa.”

  Saturday Morning

  1.

  Bert and Maureen sit across from each other at the kitchen table. The only sounds are of his chewing the eggs, toast, and sausage she made for his breakfast, and the slurping noise as he drinks coffee.

  Maureen is not eating. She seldom eats breakfast.

  She stares at him.

  His eyes are fixed on his plate.

  They have not spoken since their argument last night.

  Bert is angry that his own family does not understand. All he is trying to do is provide for them. Why can’t they understand that? He feels bad about what happened to Big Willie, but the nigger was half-crazy anyway. They just put him out of his misery.

  Maureen knows she has reached a crossroads in her life. Until now her life has been as passive as a dead autumn leaf going wherever the wind pushes it.

  This morning she feels more like the wind, active rather than passive. Is this what it is like to be alive? Is this pain of confusion and indecision life itself?

  “It’s Saturday,” Bert says. “You not coming to the store today?”

  “I don’t think any colored people will be coming to town.”

  “You don’t think I know that? But I bet everybody else will. I can’t work the register and wait on people by myself. I need you and Ansel today.”

  Maureen has never said no to anyone. Not doing what someone wants you to is to risk losing their friendship, their love. But after last night she is not sure Bert was ever her friend, if he has ever loved her, or she him.

  “I’m sure you’ll manage,” she says quietly.

  “People are going to talk if they don’t see you and Ansel in the store today. I can’t have people thinking my family is a bunch of nigger lovers.”

  Maureen’s eyes brighten. She smiles, though her lips do not part. “After what happened last night, I think being a nigger lover is better than being white.”

  Bert angrily shoves his chair back from the table. “I don’t know what in hell has got into you, woman, but you better get it out. You stay away from Esther Davis. She’s the one been filling your head with foolish ideas. You wouldn’t be saying these things to me if it wasn’t for her. None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for her. Just because she started you reading books, you acting like you’re smarter than you are. Well, you’re not, Maureen. You’re still a dumb little piece of white trash who tricked me into marrying you. Stop trying to be something you ain’t!”

  Maureen has never seen him so angry. He does not draw back his hand as he did last night, but he does not have to. The hatred in his eyes hurts her far more than a blow to the face ever could.

  “Have I made myself clear?” he shouts.

  Maureen is trembling as she nods her head.

  “Good. I’ve changed my mind about you and Ansel coming to the store today. Both your and his sympathy for that crazy nigger would be all over your faces like a billboard. And that wouldn’t be good for business.”

  Maureen wants to ask him why what’s good for business is more important than what’s good for her, good for Ansel. Instead she says, meekly, “I’m sorry I’m not the person you’d like me to be.”

  “Just go back to being the simple girl I married. Everything will be fine then.”

  He leaves.

  Maureen does not move from the table. She is not proud of herself for telling him what she thought he wanted to hear, for apologizing for who she is. But she had to find a way to put his anger and his hatred back in the cage where he had guarded them all these years.

  But how long would they stay there? How long before the day comes when he cannot control them, and they break out of their cage, and his fist smashes into her face, again and again and again?

  There is no longer a question of what to do. She has only to work out the how.

  2.

  Ansel has not slept.

  Now it is morning. Already his bedroom at the top of the stairs is getting hotter.

  He wants to go downstairs, but hears his father shouting. His stomach tightens. He looks frantically around his room for something, for anything he can use if it sounds like his father is hitting his mother.

  When he hears the front door opening, then slamming shut, he hurries to the window to see his father getting in the car and driving away.

  Ansel’s stomach relaxes.

  From downstairs he hears the phone ring. His mother picks up before the first ring is completed. He listens to her faint, muffled voice.

  When he thinks she is off the phone, he goes downstairs.

  His mother sits at the kitchen table.

  She looks up at him standing in the doorway.

  “Do you want some breakfast?” she asks, because that is what she does. She cooks meals, washes clothes, darns socks, sews on buttons that have come loose from pants and shirts.

  Anybody could do those things. Anybody. But no one else can be his mother, and a mother is more than meals and laundry and sewing.

  “I’m not hungry,” Ansel says quietly.

  “Neither am I,” she responds
.

  Ansel looks at his father’s dirty breakfast plate. What happened last night did not affect his appetite. That is all Ansel needs to know.

  He sits down in a chair next to his mother.

  She reaches out and takes his hand in hers. “I’m proud of you, Ansel.”

  “For what?” he wants to know. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You know what’s right, which is more than I can say for your father.”

  “I hate him!”

  “You mustn’t say that, not even think it. He’s your father. You can be angry with him, but you mustn’t hate him.”

  “But what if he did something that was hateful? Is it all right to hate somebody who does hateful things?”

  Maureen does not have an answer. Was it all right for her to hate Bert because he had done something hateful when he married her?

  The phone rings.

  Maureen goes into the living room to answer it.

  “I am so sorry, Reverend Dennis,” she says. She was going to say something more, but she stops.

  After a long pause she says, “I appreciate your call,” and slowly puts the receiver back onto the cradle.

  When she returns to her chair at the table, she is crying silently.

  “What’s the matter, Ma?”

  She gets up, goes back to the living room, and returns with some facial tissue. She wipes her eyes and blows her nose. Then she looks at Ansel.

  “That was Reverend Dennis. He said…” She stops. “He said he thought it best if we didn’t come to church for a while, and that it would be better if we didn’t come to Mary Susan’s funeral.”

  “Why?” Ansel wants to know, tears coming to his eyes. “Why can’t we go to the funeral?”

  “He didn’t say. All he said was it would be better if we didn’t come.”

  “What did we do?”

  “Maybe it’s not a matter of what we did but who we are.”

  Yesterday at that time Ansel would not have understood her words. Yesterday at that time she would not have said them.

  Monday Morning

  The silence in the house has become hard.

  Reverend Dennis had come in the store Saturday, come in the store when it was crowded, and said loudly, as if he was in the pulpit giving a sermon telling people to repent or suffer hellfire for eternity, that Bert was no longer welcome at the church, that Bert’s family was not to attend Mary Susan’s funeral, that he, Reverend Luther Dennis, blamed Bert for what happened because he had put a nigger where that nigger would be around a flower of southern womanhood, and everybody knew that no matter how hard a nigger tried, he couldn’t stay away from a white girl.

  There was a long embarrassed silence when the Reverend finished. Everybody knew the truth, and they blamed the Reverend’s words on grief.

  After the Reverend left the store, everybody there told Bert they didn’t put any credence in what he’d said, that the Reverend didn’t know what he was saying.

  Even though the store experienced no drop-off in business, he took the Reverend’s words seriously, and all of his anger at Reverend Dennis, at Zeph for what he had done, at Mary Susan for getting herself killed, at that dumb nigger for telling him the truth and believing that he could do something, at Esther Davis for meddling in his life, at Maureen for getting pregnant, and at Ansel for being born came to live in the house and now sat in every chair and atop each piece of furniture; it stood in every corner of every room. But it never spoke. It did not have to.

  Anger is speech.

  Maureen and Ansel leave a room when Bert enters; they eat after he has finished; they have whispered conversations when he is not in the room.

  When he asks them what they were talking about, they say, “Nothing.”

  If it was nothing, why couldn’t they say it where he could hear it?

  On this particular morning, Maureen and Ansel sit at the breakfast table because Bert told them to. He eats his usual hearty breakfast.

  Maureen had never noticed how much she hates him chewing with his mouth open. For almost fifteen years she has listened to him chewing his breakfast and dinner, and in all that time she has never told him what she says now.

  “Can’t you chew with your mouth closed? Why do you think anybody wants to listen to you eat?”

  Bert glares at her, then chews all the louder, his mouth open wide so she can see the masticated food inside.

  As soon as he leaves, Maureen hurries into the living room and dials a number on the phone. “He just left,” she says.

  When she returns to the kitchen, she looks at Ansel. “She’s on her way.”

  Mother and son start to cry.

  “I don’t understand why you won’t come?” Ansel says to her.

  “I can’t.”

  “But why?”

  “I just can’t. What’s important is you’re getting away from here. It’s too late for me, but it’s not too late for you.”

  They do not say anything else until Esther Davis drives up in her car.

  Maureen and Ansel hug. Then she and Esther hug.

  “Please come with us,” Esther implores her. “You don’t have to do what you’re thinking about.”

  Maureen smiles, and Esther realizes it is the first genuine smile she has ever seen from Maureen.

  “It’s all right, Esther. It’s all right. I’m not strong like you. I’m not very bright, either. And I’m certainly not pretty. All I ever had were big breasts. And now that I know Ansel is going to be all right, I feel at peace. I feel like I did one good thing with my life.”

  The two women hug again.

  Having put his big suitcase in the back of the car where Big Willie’s body had been, Ansel waits in the car.

  As the car starts to move away, he turns to look at his mother. She is looking at him. He waves. She waves back.

  He knows he will never see her again.

  Epilogue

  When I came downstairs that Saturday morning, I was no longer a child. I had seen two people murdered in one evening, people who occupied places in my heart. I understood that life could be extraordinarily cruel, that life was intrinsically unfair, and that there was no justice.

  That morning I also understood Esther Davis’s words about how a person could be alive and yet dead. I had only to think of my father.

  When my mother asked me if I wanted to go to Massachusetts with Mama Esther, as I came to call her, I did not hesitate. Yes, I told her. Yes.

  When we drove away that day, I knew I would not see my mother again. When Mama Esther and I arrived at her house in Cambridge, she handed me an envelope, a letter from my mother.

  Dear Ansel,

  When you read this, I will no longer be on this earth. Please do not be angry with me. I am not a brave person. I never knew if I had a purpose in life until I understood that I had to get you out of Davis, get you to somewhere you would be safe, to somewhere you could be the kind of person I know you are, the kind of person for whom there is no place in Davis. The events of the past few days spurred me to find what little courage I had. Now that courage is all used up. I know Esther will take good care of you.

  Love,

  Your Mother

  Mama Esther knew my mother was planning to take a lot of sleeping pills, lie down on the bed in my room, and go to sleep. When my father came home that evening, I was gone and his wife was dead.

  I have never blamed her for taking her life. It was only a matter of time before my father would have lost control of his anger. That evening in the living room when he drew back his arm, I saw murder in his eyes.

  I did not go back for my mother’s funeral.

  My father did not ever get in touch, though everybody in Davis knew where I was and who I was with. But I did not get in touch with him, either. Yes, he was my father, but that did not give him a claim on my love, on my respect. Perhaps I could have loved him if I had respected him. I do not know if his telling the truth that night would have saved Willie. I doubt it. But by tell
ing the truth, he would have saved his wife, his son, and himself.

  I had finished Harvard, Harvard Law School, and was in my first year at a large firm in Boston when I received a letter from Zeph Davis the Third telling me that my father had died in a car accident. Zeph offered to buy the store from me since my father had not left a will. I knew the store was worth more than what Zeph offered, but I did not care.

  I never saw Willie again. Mama Esther told me that they buried Big Willie the night he was lynched. That same night she drove Little Willie and his mother to Atlanta. Mama Esther heard from them almost every month. She shared their letters with me. Never once did either Willie or his mother ask about me, and I knew Mama Esther had told them I was there with her.

  She died a few weeks after my father. It was as if she waited until she knew I was established in the world, waited until Willie was a doctor. She had fulfilled her life’s purpose.

  I wrote and told Willie and his mother that she was dead. They never wrote back.

  I wished Mama Esther had lived to meet my wife and my children. It would have been good if they could have known someone who knew me before. Perhaps she would have helped them understand that my silence is not a rejection of them but an inability to explain a time and a place where cruelty and hatred were as ordinary as bacon and eggs.

  I’ve only gone back to Davis once. I had to attend a bar association meeting in Atlanta. After it was over, I rented a car and went to Davis.

  When I drove into town, the Confederate soldier was still pointing up the street, except there was no rifle in his hands. I suppose it had worn out or been taken by some teenagers as a prank.

  The stores on both sides of the street were empty. I could make out a faded sign that read Anderson’s General Store, except there was no store. When the interstate highway was built, there was no exit ramp at Davis. The town died. Everyone who was able moved away.