The Butcher's Daughter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Her parents had spent a long weekend visiting old friends, but had called her long-distance daily to check in about Travis and reassure her that no news is good news.

  Her in-laws, Bob and Doris Hunter, had also called. They live here on Amelia Island, in a new split-level over by their country club and Bob’s car dealership. They aren’t the warmest people in the world. She isn’t particularly fond of them, and vice versa, she supposes.

  Still, they’d all made efforts to bond after Travis’s departure. It was evident that the awkward visits were as much a chore for the Hunters as they were for Melody, so she’d tapered off even before she’d made the awful discovery about their son. After that, she’d seen them only at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Her mother insisted on inviting them because “They’re family now,” though Honeybee doesn’t care for the Hunters, either.

  “Y’all were barely married before Travis left,” she told Melody after a painfully stilted, perfunctory visit. “When he’s back home, it’ll be different, you’ll see. And my goodness, just wait until you give them a grandbaby. Those two will be doting just like your daddy and me.”

  A car’s headlights swing past Melody, and then the brake lights go on. The driver leans out and drawls, “Well, if it ain’t Mrs. Hunter.”

  Rodney Lee Midget had gone through school with Travis, a few years ahead of Melody. Rodney Lee has always been tall and beefy, with a florid complexion and double chins, earning recess taunts about his paradoxical last name. Rodney Lee Giant, kids called him. Children can be cruel, but Melody recalls the victim as something of a schoolyard bully himself.

  “Hi, there, Rodney Lee.”

  “Any word about Travis? Been thinking about him over there fighting for our country.”

  “Nothing yet, and I wouldn’t say he’s fighting for our country. It’s not like we were attacked, like Pearl Harbor.”

  “Attacked? Now, don’t you worry none. President Johnson says victory is within our grasp, so—”

  “President Johnson doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Seeing his jaw drop, she adds, “Martin Luther King says, ‘Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace.’ That make sense to you, Rodney Lee?”

  “Martin Luther King? No, he don’t make a lick of sense to me.”

  “That’s not what I meant. It’s—”

  “Guess someone’s been putting crazy ideas into that pretty little head of yours. Unpatriotic ideas.”

  “What did I say that’s unpatriotic?”

  “You said the president’s a damned fool.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Yes, well . . . ʽpeople generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for,’” she mutters.

  “What’s that?”

  “A quote from a book.”

  “Martin Luther King write it?”

  “No, Harper Lee did.”

  “Who’s he? Another one of those Negroes tryin’ to start trouble?”

  She takes a deep breath, but thinks better of engaging. “Never mind. Forget it. I have to go. I’m heading over to have supper with my mother and daddy.”

  “Did you smash up Travis’s Camaro?”

  “What?” Something twitches in her gut, and this time, it isn’t a tiny karate foot.

  “I could’a sworn I’ve seen you drivin’ it all over creation since he’s been gone, but now here you are, walkin’ the streets at night all by your lonesome.”

  “The car’s just fine, Rodney Lee. I just like to walk when I’m here in town. It’s nice to get fresh air.”

  “Is that so.” His expression and inflection are exactly the same as before, but she notes a slight shift in his tone. “Ain’t safe for a woman to be alone out here in the night.”

  “In Fernandina?” She laughs and looks around at the empty streets. “Don’t be silly.”

  “Ain’t safe anywhere these days, what with all the hippies and Negroes runnin’ amuck. Hop in and I’ll give you a ride.”

  She stiffens, shaking her head firmly. “No, thank you. It’s just a little ways down. You have a good evening, Rodney Lee. Bye now.”

  “You, too, ma’am. You be careful.” Rodney Lee guns his engine.

  She walks on toward her parents’ house, uneasiness dogging her steps as she watches the turquoise Impala disappear into the night, taillights gleaming like the devil’s eyes.

  Barrow Island, Georgia

  Cyril knows every turn and rut in the wide sandy road that runs the length of the island. His feet scatter long pine needles and shell fragments that gleam beneath glittering stars and a fat full moon. He left Otis home tonight, but grabbed a flashlight—not in case the gleaming night sky suddenly goes pitch-dark, but because it’s heavy enough to serve as a blunt force weapon.

  He isn’t worried about the island’s natural predators. Even the gators leave you alone unless you’re fool enough to wade into the surrounding swamps. But in this modern world, human predators are plentiful. A Black man never knows when or where he might run into trouble.

  His friend Jimmy Davis has twin sons who spend every afternoon fishing on the bridge. Jimmy said they’ve seen a couple of mainland good ol’ boys on the island lately, cruising around in a blue sedan. Jimmy hadn’t believed them at first because they’d also told him they’d seen a beautiful blonde driving over in a sports car. Cyril hadn’t let on about Melody, but told Jimmy he thought folks should be on the lookout for trouble.

  A few days later, Jimmy’s brother Tommy had seen the same blue sedan. The young men weren’t vandalizing anything or threatening anyone—yet. But a lot of local folks have been sticking close to home at night, with shotguns close at hand, just in case someone decides to stir things up.

  Cyril’s not the kind of man to sleep with a gun or hide himself away behind locked doors. Nor is he the kind to go running to his mama for reassurance in troubled times. But she lives just down the road from him and tonight, that’s where he’s headed. He needs advice, and Marceline LeBlanc is the only person in the world he can trust with a secret this weighty.

  His mother’s home, like his own, had once been one of the outbuildings on a large rice plantation. The main house sits a quarter mile down the road, long abandoned and boarded up, vines snaking around the stately white pillars like gnarled fingers grasping from the marshland’s murky depths. It’s haunted by old island souls, according to his mother. Of course, she says the same about her own place, though there, it’s primarily his dead father’s spirit drifting in and out, bothering her with advice and admonishment.

  “Your daddy was boddun’ me all night long,” she’d told Cyril a few days ago. “That man doesn’t know the meanin’ of rest in peace.”

  Cyril tends to dismiss his mother’s talk of spirits, though even before Melody had come to him with her plight, he’d had his own share of sleepless nights. Not because ghosts have been boddun’ him, but because of increasing conflict between Black and white folks.

  He’s heard sketchy reports that the South Carolina Highway Patrol had opened fire on a campus where Black college kids were protesting a segregated bowling alley. Three students were killed, a couple of dozen injured.

  He’d also heard that the Klan had lynched a Black teenager somewhere on the Gulf coast, then dumped his body into the bayou. A week later, it has yet to turn up, and likely never will if the gators reduced him to chum.

  Maybe it didn’t happen at all. Maybe it wouldn’t happen here. Or now.

  As always, the island’s peaceable kingdom ignores his presence. Night birds chatter in overhead branches, and stealthy creatures rustle bordering fronds. Half a dozen wild horses graze in a clearing. One of Marceline’s many cats, a sleek, well-fed black fellow with lime-colored eyes, strolls across his path without glancing in his direction.

  He wonders whether the animals would react differently to mainland interlopers, sensing danger. He wants to think he’d be capable o
f the same response. He wonders if the Black teenager in the bayou had sensed his executioners in his midst, and then he wonders whether the boy might be a myth—fodder to fuel the racial tension.

  He turns up the lane that leads to Marceline’s place. It’s larger than his own two-room abode, framed by mossy live oaks and resurrection fern. Her front door is also blue, and her crepe myrtle tree covered in blue bottles.

  You’d be hard-pressed to find a yard on Barrow Island without a bottle tree, or a door painted any color other than haint blue, both to ward off evil spirits. The Gullah culture is alive here. Virtually every islander is of West African descent, their ancestors transported to America by wealthy Southern planters. A century ago, after the Civil War, freed slaves had populated Barrow and several other Sea Islands along the southern Atlantic coast. Some have since moved on. Marceline’s family had largely left the island to find work during the Great Depression and most had settled on the Georgia mainland. Three of her four sisters are still there, along with various extended relatives.

  But Marceline plans to live out her days on this insular island, steeped in low country tradition and lore, language and food.

  The windows are closed against the chill, and his footsteps are muffled in the grass, yet the front door opens before he reaches the house. If he asks, she’ll say she didn’t hear him coming.

  “I can always feeeeeel you,” she’s told him all his life, and taps her heart. “Right there.”

  In her world, maternal instinct is more powerful than any of the five senses.

  By day, she wears bright dresses and turbans, earrings jangling like wind chimes. Tonight, she’s barefoot in a simple white nightgown, her thick cornrows hanging long and loose.

  “’S’mattuh?” she calls from the porch—Gullah shorthand for “What’s the matter?”

  “I brought you some ham hocks from the store,” he says, holding up the package wrapped in brown paper and twine. By day, most days, he mans the counter at a small mainland butcher shop.

  She thanks him with a cursory “T’engky”—and asks again what’s wrong, why he’s here.

  She really does seem to feeeeel him. But will she understand him, and will she empathize? He suspects the answer is no. His mother isn’t just intuitive, brilliant, and resourceful—she’s fiercely opinionated.

  No turning back now. He takes a deep breath. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “You in trouble?”

  “Yes.”

  Marceline holds the door open wide. “Come.”

  He crosses the threshold into a wide little house with low beadboard ceilings, pocked wide-planked floors, and whitewashed walls.

  He’d entered this world in the back bedroom in 1938, three decades almost to the day after Marceline had been delivered in the same room, same bed. Her father, too, had been born here back in the late nineteenth century. His father, born into slavery, had expanded the place from shanty to home.

  Cyril thinks of his great-grandparents whenever he gets to fretting that Negro lives will never evolve in the South. They may have a long way to go, but they’ve come a long way in the last hundred years. Oh, how he longs to stay alive for the better part of the next hundred to witness Dr. King’s dream become reality.

  A plank propped across a pair of sawhorses holds a row of sweetgrass baskets Marceline weaves and sells to mainland vendors. She’d always hoped to get a real worktable, but could never afford it, struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table and figure out a way to further his education.

  How proud Marceline had been when he’d earned his high school diploma, hanging it in a frame on the wall above the sofa.

  At eighteen, he’d worked three jobs—as a shrimp boat fisherman, busboy, and meat cutter at a processing plant. He’d put aside his dream of enrolling at Bethune-Cookman University down in Daytona. There was no money for that, and he couldn’t leave her alone on Barrow. But he’d spent every spare moment at the Wilder Park Negro Library in Jacksonville’s Sugar Hill neighborhood. There, he rubbed shoulders with successful, educated people and got to know the fine woman who’d led him into activism. Mrs. Willye F. Dennis was the branch librarian and a driving force in the burgeoning civil rights movement.

  Predictably, his mama hadn’t approved. “Why’s that woman runnin’ around protestin’ all over creation when she got a husband and two children at home?”

  Cyril suspected that she was just jealous of his relationship with any female who wasn’t her, and that she was worried for his safety. She’d surely been beside herself eight years ago, when he and a group of fellow NAACP Youth Council demonstrators had been attacked by a mob of two hundred white men armed with makeshift clubs.

  Not just fearful, though. Outraged, and proud that he’d taken a stand. She never said as much, but he could tell. And she no longer pitches fits about his activism.

  She leads him to the kitchen. A savory supper scents the air hours after she washed the pans and plates on the drainboard.

  She turns on the overhead light, turns, and looks him up and down. “You wasting away, son. When was the last time you had supshun? I got frogmore.”

  Supshun is nutritious food; frogmore, a stew of shrimp and smoked meat, potatoes, and corn.

  Cyril shakes his head. He can’t recall the last time he sat down for a meal, but he can’t choke food into an anxiety-churned stomach.

  She fills two jelly glasses with sweet tea and sets them on the table. It’s pushed into a corner, with the pair of ladderback chairs that have been here all his life. Marceline takes her seat, closest to the stove. As Cyril sinks into his, his body remembers to distribute his weight to make up for the wobble due to one wooden leg being a hair shorter.

  Now he’s got a permanent wobble of his own, due to his broken ankle. He supposes he should be grateful that the Axe Handle Saturday injury had kept him out of ’Nam—he’d been declared 4-F when they’d tried to draft him a few years back. Though he won’t see active combat in a foreign jungle, he’s engaged in an ongoing, escalating battle just the same.

  Marceline sips her tea and gives him an expectant look. “Well?”

  “There’s a woman . . .”

  She nods. “There is aaaalways a woman. You runnin’ round with that crookety Glenda again?”

  Crookety—the Gullah insult she reserves for his on-again, off-again childhood sweetheart. Sometimes he thinks she wouldn’t like any woman in his life. The oldest of five sisters, she’d told him from an early age never to take a female at face value.

  “See, womenfolk, they always thinkin’ and plottin’ and schemin’ to outsmart you, Cyril.”

  “You are?”

  “Not me. I’m your mama. But the rest of them . . . you be careful.”

  Now her eyes are narrowed as always when Glenda enters a conversation.

  “Come on, Mama. She’s married now, and she lives in Savannah. I haven’t even seen her in years.”

  “So? She’s settlin’ for second best. If she comes around here again lookin’ for you—”

  “She hasn’t. And she won’t.”

  “Then who is this crookety woman?”

  “She’s not crookety, and you don’t know her.”

  “I know everyone.” She gestures around as if the room is crowded with people.

  “She doesn’t live on Barrow. And she’s buckruh.”

  “Buckruh!” She leans back in her chair, arms folded, eyes closed as if in prayer. “Why you go lookin’ for trouble, son?”

  “I didn’t. We met by chance, just like you and Daddy.”

  His father had come to Barrow on a shrimp boat one day with a storm bearing down.

  “That man took one look at me and was smitten,” Marceline has always said. “When the storm passed, he stayed behind. There we were, arm in arm on the beach, just smilin’ and wavin’ and the boat sailed away without him. I said, ‘What you gonna do now?’ And he said, ‘Marry you.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ Your daddy ju
st laughed and said, ‘Wait and see.’”

  It had been perhaps the only time in her life that Marceline LeBlanc had changed her mind about something. Once she gets an idea in her head, it roots and grows like a big old oak.

  “Buckruh.” Marceline shakes her head.

  “I haven’t even seen her since last summer, Mama. We only went out a couple of times.”

  Went out—as though they’d dated, in public, like any other couple. As though their skin matched, and one of them wasn’t married to someone else; as though it was legal for them to love each other.

  “Mmm-hmm. Why you got trouble with her?”

  “She’s going to have a baby.”

  She digests the news like a bad oyster and says, “Well, she can’t be aimin’ for a shotgun wedding, seein’ as that’s illegal.”

  Anti-miscegenation laws, ruled unconstitutional last summer, are still being fully enforced south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

  “She’s already got a husband.”

  “Crookety!”

  “It isn’t like that.”

  “Sounds that way to me, if she didn’t tell you she’s already married—”

  “I knew it all along. She never lied about anything.”

  Marceline’s jaw sets. “I raised you to be an honorable man.”

  “I am, and she’s an honorable woman. Young, from a good family over in Fernandina, married last February. Her husband is in Vietnam, and—”

  She slaps both hands on the table. “The husband is fighting for his country? And the wife is goin’ around—”

  “It isn’t like that. The husband is no hero, Mama.”

  “You watch your tongue! I know how you feel about this war, but you got no say in whether we’re fightin’ it, or about soldiers in combat!”

  He should have known her temper would flare at the mention of Travis Hunter’s service.

  His own daddy had been killed in action during World War II, serving with the 761st Tank Battalion. Cyril has no memory of Cyril LeBlanc, Sr., though he wears his father’s military dog tags and tiny gold baby ring on a chain around his neck.

  Whenever Marceline speaks of him, she makes it sound like he’d outshone the baseball great and outranked General Patton himself.