Sarah Phillips

by Andrea Lee

  Just then Aunt Bessie gave me a little shake and whispered sharply, “Go on up and accept Jesus!”

  I stiffened and dug my bitten fingernails into my palms. The last clash of wills I had had with Aunt Bessie had been when she, crazily set in her old southern attitudes, had tried to make me wear an enormous straw hat, as her “white children” did, when I played outside in the sun. The old woman had driven me to madness, and I had ended up spanked and sullen, crouching moodily under the dining-room table. But this was different, outrageous, none of her business, I thought. I shook my head violently and she took advantage of the darkness in the church to seize both of my shoulders and jounce me with considerable roughness, whispering, “Now, listen, young lady! Your daddy up there is calling you to Christ. Your big brother has already offered his soul to the Lord. Now Daddy wants his little girl to step forward.”

  “No, he doesn’t.” I glanced at the baptismal pool, where my father was clasping the hand of a strange man who had come up to him. I hoped that this would distract Aunt Bessie, but she was tireless.

  “Your mama and your aunt Lily and your aunt May all want you to answer the call. You’re hurting them when you say no to Jesus.”

  “No, I’m not!” I spoke out loud and I saw the people nearby turn to look at me. At the sound of my voice, Daddy, who was a few yards away, faltered for a minute in what he was saying and glanced over in my direction.

  Aunt Bessie seemed to lose her head. She stood up abruptly, pulling me with her, and, while I was still frozen in a dreadful paralysis, tried to drag me down the aisle toward my father. The two of us began a brief struggle that could not have lasted for more than a few seconds but that seemed an endless mortal conflict—my slippery patent-leather shoes braced against the floor, my straw hat sliding cockeyed and lodging against one ear, my right arm twisting and twisting in the iron circle of the old woman’s grip, my nostrils full of the dead-leaf smell of her powder and black skirts. In an instant I had wrenched my arm free and darted up the aisle toward Mama, my aunts, and Matthew. As I slipped past the pews in the darkness, I imagined that I could feel eyes fixed on me and hear whispers. “What’d you do, dummy?” whispered Matthew, tugging on my sash as I reached our pew, but I pushed past him without answering. Although it was hot in the church, my teeth were chattering: it was the first time I had won a battle with a grownup, and the earth seemed to be about to cave in beneath me. I squeezed in between Mama and Aunt Lily just as the lights came back on in the church. In the baptismal pool, Daddy raised his arms for the last time. “The Lord bless you and keep you,” came his big voice. “The Lord be gracious unto you, and give you peace.”

  What was curious was how uncannily subdued my parents were when they heard of my skirmish with Aunt Bessie. Normally they were swift to punish Matthew and me for misbehavior in church and for breaches in politeness toward adults; this episode combined the two, and smacked of sacrilege besides. Yet once I had made an unwilling apology to the old woman (as I kissed her she shot me such a vengeful glare that I realized that forever after it was to be war to the death between the two of us), I was permitted, once we had driven home, to climb up into the green shade of the big maple tree I had dreamed of throughout the service. In those days, more than now, I fell away into a remote dimension whenever I opened a book; that afternoon, as I sat with rings of sunlight and shadow moving over my arms and legs, and winged yellow seeds plopping down on the pages of The Story of the Treasure Seekers, I felt a vague uneasiness floating in the back of my mind—a sense of having misplaced something, of being myself misplaced. I was holding myself quite aloof from considering what had happened, as I did with most serious events, but through the adventures of the Bastables I kept remembering the way my father had looked when he’d heard what had happened. He hadn’t looked severe or angry, but merely puzzled, and he had regarded me with the same puzzled expression, as if he’d just discovered that I existed and didn’t know what to do with me. “What happened, Sairy?” he asked, using an old baby nickname, and I said, “I didn’t want to go up there.” I hadn’t cried at all, and that was another curious thing.

  After that Sunday, through some adjustment in the adult spheres beyond my perception, all pressure on me to accept baptism ceased. I turned twelve, fifteen, then eighteen without being baptized, a fact that scandalized some of the congregation; however, my parents, who openly discussed everything else, never said a word to me. The issue, and the episode that had illuminated it, was surrounded by a clear ring of silence that, for our garrulous family, was something close to supernatural. I continued to go to New African—in fact, continued after Matthew, who dropped out abruptly during his freshman year in college; the ambiguousness in my relations with the old church gave me at times an inflated sense of privilege (I saw myself as a romantically isolated religious heroine, a sort of self-made Baptist martyr) and at other times a feeling of loss that I was too proud ever to acknowledge. I never went up to take my father’s hand, and he never commented upon that fact to me. It was an odd pact, one that I could never consider in the light of day; I stored it in the subchambers of my heart and mind. It was only much later, after he died, and I left New African forever, that I began to examine the peculiar gift of freedom my father—whose entire soul was in the church, and in his exuberant, bewitching tongue—had granted me through his silence.

  Mother

  In the summer my mother got up just after sunrise, so that when she called Matthew and me for breakfast, the house was filled with sounds and smells of her industrious mornings. Odors of frying scrapple or codfish cakes drifted up the back stairs, mingling sometimes with the sharp scent of mustard greens she was cooking for dinner that night. Up the laundry chute from the cellar floated whiffs of steamy air and the churning sound of the washing machine. From the dining room, where she liked to sit ironing and chatting on the telephone, came the fragrance of hot clean clothes and the sound of her voice: cheerful, resonant, reverberating a little weirdly through the high-ceilinged rooms, as if she were sitting happily at the bottom of a well.

  My father left early in the morning to visit parishioners or to attend church board meetings. Once the door had closed behind him, the house entered what I thought of as its natural state—that of the place on earth that most purely reflected my mother. It was a big suburban house, handsomer than most, built of fieldstone in a common, vaguely Georgian design; it was set among really magnificent azaleas in a garden whose too-small size gave the house a faintly incongruous look, like a dowager in a short skirt. The house seemed little different from any other in my neighborhood, but to me, in my early-acquired role as a detective, a spy, a snooper into dark corners, there were about it undeniable hints of mystery. The many closets had crooked shapes, that suggested secret passages; in the basement, the walls of the wine cellar—its racks filled by our teetotaling family with old galoshes and rusty roller skates—gave a suspicious hollow sound when rapped; and on the front doorbell, almost obliterated by the pressure of many fingers, was printed a small crescent moon.

  The house stayed cool on breathless summer days when tar oozed in the streets outside, the heat excluded by thick walls and drawn shades, and the dim rooms animated by a spirit of order and abundance. When I came dawdling down to breakfast, long after Matthew had eaten and gone plunging off on his balloon-tired Schwinn, I usually found my mother busy in the kitchen, perhaps shelling peas, or stringing beans, or peeling a basket of peaches for preserves. She would fix me with her lively, sarcastic dark eyes and say, “Here comes Miss Sarah, the cow’s tail. What, pray tell, were you doing all that time upstairs?”

  “Getting dressed.”

  What I’d been doing, in fact—what I did every summer morning—was reading. Lounging voluptuously in my underpants on the cool bare expanse of my bed, while flies banged against the screen and greenish sunlight glowed through the shades, I would read with the kind of ferocious appetite that belongs only to garden shrews, bookish children, and other small creatures who n
eed double their weight in nourishment daily. With impartial gluttony I plunged into fairy tales, adult novels, murder mysteries, poetry, and magazines while my mother moved about downstairs. The sense of her presence, of, even, a sort of tacit complicity, was always a background at these chaotic feasts of the imagination.

  “You were reading,” Mama would say calmly when I stood before her in the kitchen. “You must learn not to tell obvious lies. Did you make up your bed?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Well, you’re not going outside until you’ve done something to that room of yours. It looks like a hooraw’s nest. Your place is set at the table, and the cantaloupe is over there—we’ve had such delicious cantaloupe this week! Scrape out the seeds and cut yourself a slice. No—wait a minute, come here. I want to show you how to cut up a chicken.”

  Each time she did this I would wail with disgust, but I had to watch. The chicken was a pimply yellow-white, with purplish shadows and a cavernous front opening; my mother would set her big knife to it, baring her teeth in an ogress’s grin that made fun of my squeamishness. “You saw along the backbone like this—watch carefully; it takes a strong arm—and then you crack the whole thing open!”

  In her hands the cave would burst apart, exposing its secrets to the light of day, and with another few strokes of the knife would be transformed into ordinary meat, our uncooked dinner.

  It was easy for me to think of my mother in connection with caves, with anything in the world, in fact, that was dimly lit and fantastic. Sometimes she would rivet Matthew and me with a tale from her childhood: how, at nine years old, walking home through the cobblestone streets of Philadelphia with a package of ice cream from the drugstore, she had slipped and fallen down a storm drain accidentally left uncovered by workmen. No one was around to help her; she dropped the ice cream she was carrying (something that made a deep impression on my brother and me) and managed to cling to the edge and hoist herself out of the hole. The image of the little girl—who was to become my mother—hanging in perilous darkness was one that haunted me; sometimes it showed up in my dreams.

  Perhaps her near-fatal tumble underground was responsible for my mother’s lasting attraction to the bizarre side of life. Beneath a sometimes prudish exterior, she quivered with excitement in the same way her children did over newspaper accounts of trunk murders, foreign earthquakes, Siamese twins, Mafia graves in the New Jersey pine barrens. When she commented on these subjects, she attempted a firm neutrality of tone but gave herself away in the heightened pitch of her voice and in a little breathy catch that broke the rhythm of each sentence she spoke. This was the voice she used to whisper shattering bits of gossip over the phone. “When Mr. Tillet died,” I heard her say once, with that telltale intake of breath, “the funeral parlor did such a poor job that his daughter had to wire her own father together!”

  My mother, Grace Renfrew Phillips, had been brought up with all the fussy little airs and graces of middle-class colored girls born around the time of World War I. There was about her an endearing air of a provincial maiden striving for sophistication, a sweet affectation of culture that reminded me, when I was older, of Emma Bovary. She and her cluster of pretty, light-skinned sisters grew up in a red-brick house with marble steps in South Philadelphia. They all played the piano, knew a bit of French and yards of Wordsworth, and expected to become social workers, elementary-school teachers, or simply good wives to suitable young men from their own background—sober young doctors, clergymen, and postal administrators, not too dark of complexion. Gracie Renfrew fit the pattern, but at the same time dismayed her family by attending Communist Party meetings, joining a theater group, and going off to a Quaker work camp.

  When she married my father, the prescribed young minister, my mother had become, inevitably, a schoolteacher—a beautiful one. She was full-faced, full-bodied, with an indestructible olive skin and an extraordinary forehead—high, with two handsome hollows over the temples. She had a bright, perverse gaze, accentuated by a slight squint in her left eye, and a quite unusual physical strength. She swam miles every summer at the swim club, and at the small Quaker school, where I was a student and she taught sixth grade, it was common to see her jumping rope with the girls, her large bosom bobbing and a triumphant, rather disdainful smile on her face. Her pupils adored her, probably because her nature held a touch of the barbarism that all children admire: she would quell misbehavior, for instance, by threatening in a soft, convincing voice to pull off the erring student’s ears and fry them for supper.

  At home Mama was a housekeeper in the grand old style that disdains convenience, worships thrift, and condones extravagance only in the form of massive Sunday dinners, which, like acts of God, leave family members stunned and reeling. Her kitchen, a long, dark, inconvenient room joined to a crooked pantry, was entirely unlike the cheerful kitchens I saw on television, where mothers who looked like June Cleaver unwrapped food done up in cellophane. This kitchen had more the feeling of a workshop, a laboratory in which the imperfect riches of nature were investigated and finally transformed into something near sublimity. The sink and stove were cluttered with works in progress: hot plum jelly dripping into a bowl through cheesecloth; chocolate syrup bubbling in a saucepan; string beans and ham bones hissing in the pressure cooker; cooling rice puddings flavored with almond and vanilla; cooked apples waiting to be forced through a sieve to make applesauce; in a vat, a brownish, aromatic mix for root beer.

  The instruments my mother used were a motley assemblage of blackened cast-iron pots, rusty-handled beaters, graters, strainers, and an array of mixing bowls that included the cheapest plastic variety as well as tall, archaic-looking stoneware tubs inherited from my grandmother, who had herself been a legendary cook. Mama guarded these ugly tools with jealous solicitude, suspicious of any new introductions, and she moved in her kitchen with the modest agility of a master craftsman.

  Like any genuine passion, her love of food embraced every aspect of the subject. She read cookbooks like novels, and made a businesslike note in her appointment book of the date that Wanamaker’s received its yearly shipment of chocolate-covered strawberries. Matthew and I learned from her a sort of culinary history of her side of the family: our grandfather, for instance, always asked for calf brains scrambled with his eggs on weekend mornings before he went out hunting. Grandma Renfrew, a sharp-tongued beauty from North Carolina, loved to drink clabbered milk, and was so insistent about the purity of food that once when Aunt Lily had served her margarine instead of butter, she had refused to eat at Lily’s table again for a year. My mother’s sole memory of her mother’s mother, a Meherrin Indian called Molly, was of the withered dark-faced woman scraping an apple in the corner of the kitchen, and sucking the pulp between her toothless jaws.

  Mama took most pleasure in the raw materials that became meals. She enjoyed the symmetry, the unalterable rules, and also the freaks and vagaries that nature brought to her kitchen. She showed me with equal pleasure the handsome shape of a fish backbone; the little green gallbladder in the middle of a chicken liver; and the double-yolked eggs, the triple cherries, the peculiar worm in a cob of corn. As she enjoyed most the follies, the bizarre twists of human nature and experience, so also she had a particular fondness for the odd organs and connective tissues that others disdained. “Gristle is delectable,” she would exclaim as Matthew and I groaned. “The best part of the cow!”

  I was a rather lazy and dunderheaded apprentice to my mother. She could be snappish and tyrannical, but I hung around the kitchen anyway, in quest of scrapings of batter, and because I liked to listen to her. She loved words, not as my father the minister did, for their ceremonial qualities, but with an offhanded playfulness that resulted in a combination of wit and nonsense. In her mischievous brain, the broad country imagery of her Virginia-bred mother mingled with the remains of a ladylike education that had classical pretensions. When she was annoyed at Matthew and me, we were “pestilential Pestalozzis”; we were also, from time to time, as
deaf as adders, as dumb as oysters, as woolly as sheep’s backs; we occasionally thrashed around like horses with the colic. At odd moments she addressed recitations to the family cat, whom she disliked; her favorite selections were versions of “O Captain! My Captain!” (“O Cat! my Cat! our fearful trip is done …”) and Cicero’s address to Catiline (“How long, Cat, will you abuse our patience?…”).

  On summer evenings, after the dinner dishes had been washed and as the remains of the iced tea stood growing tepid in the pitcher, my mother, dreamy and disheveled, finally would emerge from the kitchen. “Look at me,” she’d murmur, wandering into the living room and patting her hair in the mirror over the piano. “I look like a Wild Man of Borneo.”

  She would change into a pair of oxfords and take a walk with me, or with a neighbor. At that time of day June bugs hurled themselves against the screens of the house, and my father, covered with mosquito repellent and smoking cigarette after cigarette, sat reading under the maple tree. In the diffuse light after sunset, the shadows around the perfectly ordinary houses up and down the street made the unambitious details of their designs—turrets, round Victorian towers, vague half-timbering—seem for once dramatic. All the backyards of the town seemed to have melted into one darkening common where packs of kids yelled faintly and fought their last battles before bedtime. Cars pulled out of driveways and headed for movie theaters or the shopping centers along the Pike, and the air smelled like honeysuckle and onion grass. When Mama and I walked together, we would wander up and down the long blocks until the streetlights came on.

  One evening during the summer that I was six years old, we stopped to visit a neighboring family in which something sad and shocking had happened the previous winter. The father, a district judge named Roland Barber, had driven one gray afternoon to the marshland outside the airport and there had shot himself. Judge Barber, a short, grave, brown-skinned man with a curiously muted voice, had been a member of my father’s congregation and had served with him on the board of the NAACP. His suicide, with hints of further-reaching scandal, sent a tremendous shock through the staid circles of my parents’ friends, a shock that reached down even into the deep waters that normally insulated Matthew and me from adult life. For a few weeks after the suicide we held long grisly discussions on arcane, even acrobatic ways to do away with oneself.