Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  When she rode back into town in a car too wide and too long for the narrow curving streets, in a yellow Rolls-Royce with a white boy at the wheel, no one noticed the ring on her left hand; all they were looking at was her belly— it appeared flat— and the white boy. All they could hear was the sound of her voice saying she had dropped out of school.

  When they could see again people were flabbergasted to learn that Mary Hope, called Canary, had legally wed Mad, officially Madog, Morgan, coal baron and descendant of coal barons.

  The town started talking again. She had married a rich white boy. There was a big diamond on her hand and no shotgun in the picture.

  It was a moment to take in. Marriage between a Negro woman and a Caucasian wasn’t legal in West Virginia. Ohio. They had gotten married in Ohio. If it was probably true she had gotten knocked up before the tiny church wedding she wanted to tell them all about, it hardly seemed to matter.

  On one fact everyone was in agreement: the strangest things in the world happen when you send a colored daughter out of town to a white school.

  Mad Morgan fell in love with Canary Morgan the very first time he sat beside her in class and heard her talk.

  She sounded and smelled so much like home that he didn’t even notice she was black. It wasn’t until he had her in his bed, until her clothes and his clothes were lying on top of each other down on the floor, until he was kissing her chocolate nipples and kissing her pillow lips and getting his fingers stuck in her long curls, that he thought to ask if he was her first man. Too embarrassed to answer yes, she just kissed him again and answered his question with a question of her own: “Am I your first colored girl?”

  She was. He hadn’t thought he liked colored girls. He liked her. Though her nose was broad and flat, her pillow lips were narrow, like her behind. Her hair was wild with long tight, tiny curls. Her skin was the yellow color of cream. One of her eyes was the color of the sky. The other eye was the exact color of earth. All that light skin framed by all that gold but niggerish hair. All those Latin and Greek thoughts, spoken in that hillbilly accent. All this had distracted him from knowing that she was colored.

  By the time she asked her simple question, his simple desires were too urgent for verbal investigations to continue. He had to feel the inside of her. He had to feel his own surface surrounded by her. Looking into her blue eye and into her brown eye, he knew she had something to give that couldn’t be purchased or stolen, something that could only be boldly gifted; and she was ready to gift it. With his nose in the curls of her hair that smelled just like mountain roses and wild thyme, the boy was drunk on love and poontang.

  She was on her way to New York. To meet strangers. To be a painter. To have lovers and art openings. Their first night together she wanted him as her first, not her only, not her forever. She closed her eyes and opened her legs and did what she had to do to begin her great adventure. He was, she thought the night she surrendered her virginity, the best way possible of slamming closed forever the door that led back to the mountains.

  She would never return soiled where once she had ruled as virgin queen. Disgrace, even private disgrace, would propel her toward the land of strangers, toward the wider world.

  After the initial gasp, and the bit of blood, after the first time, when the kisses held longer and the touches slowed, when he got over his fear that he would hurt her and she got over her fear that she was submitting to him, the coupling became a crowning.

  He wanted her for every day and night to come and he began to convince her that she wanted it too. Two weeks after their first time, a package arrived from his bank. When they married in the little Episcopal church on the Oberlin campus, his dead mother’s immense heart-shaped yellow diamond was on her hand. She would carry her canvases back up with them to the mountain.

  They named their boy baby Madog after his daddy. From the day the boy came into the world hollering and red, he was affectionately called Mad Dog. Though no one said a word, everything about the baby, from his unfortunate nickname to his very complexion and demeanor, served to remind the aristocrats of Bramwell—where the baby had been born because the millionaire’s village was where the best doctors were—that Mad Morgan’s father had plucked his wife, Mad’s mother, out of a coal camp.

  As soon as mother and blue-eyed, redheaded white child were decreed fit for the everyday isolation of country life and for travel, they moved into a series of interconnecting glass boxes the elder Mad’s father had commissioned and abandoned overlooking the Pocahontas coalfields.

  Reading books and painting and watching the baby grow into a fine boy, dancing sometimes before breakfast, sometimes after dinner, to old jazz band records, for Canary the first years passed as good and prosperous time does: too fast.

  When the baby born in 1959 looked more than a little brown, no one said a word except that it had always been known that Mad Morgan’s mama had been a Melungeon as well as a Hat-field, and that Canary was for sure a Melungeon. Melungeons, as anyone who cared was well aware, were a mysterious people and in no way to be understood as Negro. The family was completely fine and completely white. Or so said the rich folk who wanted to attend the Morgans’ winter ball and otherwise be entertained by the Morgans.

  When the baby girl was big enough, and their big boy was eager enough, in 1960, Mad flew his family to New York in his own small plane. From New York they set sail for En gland on the SS United States. From En gland they flew commercial to Italy. In Italy he hired a chauffeur and car to move them about the countryside. As they were traveling from Rome to Florence, somewhere near Monte Oliveto, there was an accident.

  Mad Dog died by the side of a dirt road with the scent of olives or almonds, something foreign, in the air. Canary was holding him. A week after her son died, Canary followed him. Remembering something his darling had said standing at Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s grave, Morgan buried his wife and son in Rome’s American cemetery. Only the baby girl, Clementine Hope, returned with Morgan to his mountains from Italy.

  When Canary died the elite of West Virginia were shocked but were hopeful that Morgan would wipe the slate clean and just start over. With his wife and son dead, the descendants, relatives, and hangers-on of the coal barons expected that Morgan would soon entrust Clementine Hope—the baby gossip now claimed wasn’t his child at all—to the care of nurses while he looked to find himself an appropriate wife and have a real baby. Some folk said Canary had cheated. Some folk said Canary hadn’t been able to have a second child and Morgan had bought her a baby. Nobody, gossip said, in their right mind would leave all Mad Morgan had, and the more he would have when his daddy died, to a beige question mark. As far as Morgan was concerned, babies did not get more real than Clementine Hope.

  Beside his daughter’s crib he prayed for forgiveness. If God was angry at him for something, Mad for sure knew it was for stealing Canary from the Negroes.

  “So that’s how you got raised white,” said Nicholas.

  “Whitish,” said Hope.

  “Black enough,” said Mo.

  “Let me tell the rest,” said Hope.

  Mad Morgan taught his daughter to drive as soon as her feet could reach the pedals, the year she turned eleven. He taught her how to navigate the narrow and curving country roads and he taught her never to entrust the driving to anyone but herself, or him, or her cousin Hat. After that when he was too drunk to drive, he let her.

  As the years passed she drove more and more often. He pressed her hard to drive fast through the hills. When he had a belly full of corn-likker he got paranoid and believed not what he had told her—that some of his people had set up a still on the place and the revenuers believed he had something to do with it—but that the devil was chasing them.

  Mad stopped going to New York, or New Orleans, or anywhere out of West Virginia. Fearing God would punish him again if he didn’t, a few times a year he would send Clementine Hope over to Washington to visit her aunts.

  Clementine grew to be an odd
and elegant girl. She had her mother’s same wide Negro nose, pillow lips, and high forehead, but she’d been dipped into a milky-gold caramel color. If she hadn’t had the strange accent she’d picked up from constantly changing tutors and nannies, anyone anywhere would have immediately recognized her as black. With the strange accent people thought she was some peculiar white island child marooned in the mountains.

  Sometimes when just the two of them were having dinner, when there was no tutor or cook or house keeper or guest staying over, she would wear his old boyhood tuxedo, the tuxedo her father’s father had worn before her father. Old, black, hand-tailored silk looked good on all three of them, her father would attest on every such occasion.

  One particular feast day, Clementine made herself and her papa dress-shirt studs out of wildflowers and stream rocks and said she was going to be a jeweler. He said she was going to be a coal baron’s granddaughter. She said she hated coal; that it killed people. He looked at her hard. He raised his hand. He wanted her to dart away, or grab his hand, retract the idiocy, somehow break the chain of eventualities, but she didn’t. She didn’t have any idea in the world what was coming. He slapped her. She started to cry. Eventually she started blubbering. She wasn’t thinking about coal.

  “Grandpa doesn’t want me.”

  “Doesn’t want me?”

  “He doesn’t think I’m his.”

  “Little pitchers have big ears.”

  “Am I?”

  “Are you what?”

  “Yours.”

  “What do the aunts say about it?”

  “They say they hope you drink yourself to death and I can come live with them. They say you’ve got a wedding certificate and a birth certificate that say they can’t raise me.”

  “I got all of that.”

  “They say you make them mad Ohio made it legal for a black woman to marry a white man ’cause it’s only getting legal in West Virginia now and if Mama had stayed at home and gone to school like she should she’d be alive today—but I wouldn’t be and they guess God knows what he’s doing.”

  “Clementine!”

  “Answer my question, Papa.”

  “You’re mine and you may have some little half sisters and half brothers up in any of the finest families of West Virginia, but you’re the only child I’m claiming.”

  “What about my brother in Rome?”

  “You know about him?”

  “For a long time.”

  “Him too.”

  Eventually she left for boarding school, St. Paul’s. Angry that she was being banished, she refused to even consider attending his alma mater, Exeter, just down the road.

  In her third year at St. Paul’s her father decided they would spend the Thanksgiving holiday with his father, who was growing old. When her father left with all the youngish men for a morning hunt, her grandfather went to her room and said she would give him something to be grateful for, or he would shoot her favorite horse that very morning, that very hour. Looking into his eyes, she knew he would do it. While he worked his way into her, she couldn’t decide if she was being raped. She had already had a lover; she could already imagine telling her boy about this yuckiness and how sweetly he would console her. The chief violence of the thing was the words her grandfather said about her mother as he did it. He didn’t believe Clementine Hope was his grandchild.

  She told her father as he dropped her at the airport to send her back to school for the two weeks of term before the Christmas break began. A few days later she received a package containing two books, a first edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God and a paperback of Tender Is the Night. Inside the Hurston he had written, “I was your mother’s Tea Cake.” Inside the Fitzgerald he had written, “Remember it was Nicole who turned out all right at the end.”

  Clementine and Mad had a happy enough Christmas, keeping very much to themselves, with the exception of hosting the twenty-four-hour blowout between Christmas and New Year’s that had become legend. And they watched How Green Was My Valley together.

  A week after she returned to school in January her grandfather was making one of his extremely rare visits to his son’s home near Bluefield when a fire at the old house killed both men.

  Clementine immediately returned to West Virginia for the funeral. With her aunts standing beside her she buried her father next to her mother’s parents in Harper’s Ferry.

  The grandfather was cremated. His ashes, at Clementine’s request, were entrusted to some of his former miners for an appropriate burial.

  When she finally returned to school, in the large pile of mail, mostly condolence notes, she found a postcard postmarked Bramwell. Scribbled across the reverse side of a picture of a cowboy hat was a heart.

  After that, Clementine Hope started spending her time off from boarding school at the aunts’ house in Washington according to the dictates of her father’s will.

  “If Grandpa weren’t dead, I’d be fixin’ to go kill him,” said Mo.

  “My poor girl,” said Nicholas.

  “Abel was not my first strange accident,” said Hope.

  Rising from his seat, Mo wished Nicholas a safe and soon flight home. He shook Nicholas’s hand and kissed Clementine Hope. Mo had a party to work.

  Hope followed Mo out. She wanted to thank Mo again for a taste of Canary. It had been a consolation.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  HOPE WAS ON her way home. Even at rush hour, she appreciated the long drive from downtown on the river to her house on the edge of the woods with the big pot of red flowers that brightened her front step every season of the year. This winter it was the reddest purple kale she could find. She had half fallen back in love with Abel. Understanding him as having been a young soldier in the Civil Rights movement and getting convinced that he had loved the baby had done it.

  She pulled out her cell phone and punched in the numbers of the Idlewild house. Waycross answered. Ajay was sleeping. He had shot a buck. Waycross had feared that it might be, coming so quickly after Abel’s death, an unfortunate triumph, that the boy would too sadly miss being able to show his father the photograph of the properly downed, killed, and tagged deer.

  But it had been a triumph. For the first time ever, Ajay had field-dressed his own kill. He had worked slowly with knife and string and hands as Waycross had watched him tie off the rectum and carefully remove the bladder. “He pulled the innards out and didn’t spoil the meat,” Waycross boasted. Then he went on to describe how they had hung the animal upside down to let the meat begin to chill, how Ajay had insisted, when they’d left the field, that they drive to a processor who would contribute Ajay’s deer to the Michigan Sportsmen Against Hunger Project. How after they had dropped off the meat Ajay had announced he was done with hunting.

  “I think he might just be a doctor, like me,” said Waycross.

  “You mean the next time he’s in blood up to his elbows he’s going to be saving somebody’s life?” asked Hope.

  “Or trying to,” said Waycross, who was grateful his wife knew what field dressing was and he didn’t have to tell her.

  “You should tell him the story of Dr. Dan.”

  “I’ve already told him the first half, and he’s getting old enough for the second half,” said Waycross.

  “And that would be?”

  “How Dan ended up abandoned by black people and white people and alone in Idlewild after all the good he’d achieved.”

  “Ajay’s not old enough to hear that,” said Hope.

  Waycross said nothing. He didn’t lie to the woman and he knew different. There was no sweet way to say, “Today I saw your son take off his blaze-orange field jacket and hang it over our heads on a tree limb so we wouldn’t get shot and he wouldn’t get his sleeves bloody. I saw him slice from the breast bone to the anus, saw him cut around the penis and balls and get up to his elbows in gore thinking about feeding somebody hungry. We dragged a deer so heavy it could give a man as old as me a heart attack if I had dragged it alone.” He didn�
��t say any of that. He expected she remembered enough about deer hunting to understand how grown her boy was getting.

  “I’ve got to get some dinner going,” said Waycross.

  “I’m going to miss venison,” said Hope.

  “We ate our share,” said Waycross.

  As Hope had turned up the drive leading to her house, the coyotes had been yapping. She could hear them yapping again. There wasn’t much time but she would have a shower and a bath before heading out for dinner in a dress that would be as close to a robe as she could find in her closet.

  Hope was in her high soaking tub. Mo’s stories, Canary’s story, had made Hope remember lost and young. In the hot water filled with her favorite Dr. Singha’s Mustard Bath, she remembered more.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WHEN SPRING TERM and what St. Paul’s called fifth form—and most of America called junior year—was over, Hope took a cab, which she refused to share, from Milleville (the two thousand pristine acres just outside of Concord, New Hampshire, on which the campus of St. Paul’s School posed in a kind of mock bucolic true splendor) to Boston’s Logan Airport.

  She owned land in West Virginia but it was not her residence. Her residence, according to her father’s will, her aunts’ preference, and her own wish, was now at 428 U Street in Washington, D.C.

  She had felt queasy on the plane to Washington. Naked in warm bath water, Hope remembered wondering if she were pregnant then thinking that she couldn’t be. She always took her birth control pills exactly at the same hour each day. It was her new address that had her sick to her stomach.

  As much as she had always loved visiting with the aunts, as safe as she felt in their cramped, chaotic house, as sated as she got on all their good food, and as exciting as she found their neighborhood animated by noisy and sometimes nosy strangers, she wasn’t sure, with arrival imminent, exactly how she felt about their house being her house, about LeDroit or Shaw— she wasn’t even sure of what to call it (the aunts said LeDroit; the Washington friends from St. Paul’s said Shaw)—being her neighborhood. Safe, sated, and excited was no part of it.