Sarah Phillips

by Andrea Lee

  “Mrs. Burrell,” said Martha to Cousin Polly, “Matt tells me that your family comes from Virginia. What part?”

  Cousin Polly blinked and laid down her fork. In spite of her age, she was tall and erect and had a lovely length of bone in her wrists, her legs, and her gnarled fingers. The skin of her arms had a corded and wrinkled overlay that reminded me of barnacles, but her face was remarkably unlined—probably because like many colored women of her generation, she was vain of her skin and protected it from the sun. Her eyes were covered with a bluish film, and when she looked at me and spoke in her dry southern voice, I felt that I was talking to a living fossil, one of the Paleozoic creatures that are periodically discovered in deep waters.

  “I was raised in Suffolk,” she said. “That’s by the North Carolina state line. My daddy was a blacksmith, and we had a farm. Papa was born back in slavery times, but he was free and his daddy was free because his granddaddy was a white man. I didn’t come to live in Philadelphia until nineteen and twenty-two.”

  “That’s fascinating,” said Martha. “Matt, you should do a black history project on your family. It would be incredible!”

  “I don’t like that word ‘black,’ ” said Cousin Polly. “Colored folks used to think that word was an insult!”

  “It’s what kids are saying now,” said Daddy hastily. “Martha didn’t mean any insult. By the way, Cousin Polly, didn’t you have a sister named Martha?”

  The bluish, rheumed eyes grew thoughtful. “We used to call her Mattie. She married a big, stout fellow named Hubley Turner.”

  Mama had signaled to me to clear the plates, and now she was cutting into a large peach cobbler. “Martha, your name is unusual for your background, isn’t it?” she said to Martha Greenfield.

  Martha laughed. “Do you mean that Martha is an unusual name for a Jewish girl?” she said, giving my mother a mischievous, sparkling glance. “I’ll tell you the family legend about how I got it. My father’s people came here from Odessa in the twenties, and my father, who was a child, was so excited by America that he vowed to name his children after George and Martha Washington. My brother escaped, but here I am!”

  “And how does your family like the American boy you’ve chosen?”

  I groaned. Matthew threw down his fork. “Will you lay off, Ma?”

  Daddy sent Mama a warning look, but Mama’s face was set like stone under her curly dark hair. “I suppose I can ask a simple question if I want to,” she said. “I expect that Martha’s parents are probably wondering the same thing that we are: why it is that their children can’t stick to their own kind.”

  Matthew put his hands on the edge of the table and pushed his chair back so that the ice rattled in all the glasses. He was sitting directly underneath the faint water stain left on the dining-room ceiling from the time the tub in the Green Bathroom overflowed. The ceiling had been repainted so that only a shadow of the stain remained, but years before, when it was fresh, Matthew and I had lain on our backs on the dining-room rug and pretended that the wavering brownish line outlined an unknown continent, peopled with dinosaurs and comic-book heroes. We were explorers, trekking across lava fields and through swamps filled with pterodactyls.

  Matthew was talking to Mama in a fierce voice that threatened, horribly, to become a shout or a tearful howl. “I don’t believe you!” he said. “You are just incredible! You and Daddy spend all of your lives sending us to white schools and teaching us to live in a never-never land where people of all colors just get along swell, and then when the inevitable happens you start talking like a goddam Lester Maddox!”

  “Shame on you, swearing at your mother like that!” said Cousin Polly.

  “I know what I think is right,” said Mama in a wobbly voice. In fact it was clear that at that moment she knew nothing at all. The air was filled with a sense of mistakes being made right and left, and with a dreadful muddled array of passions.

  Daddy had lit a cigarette, something he usually never did during meals, and now he stubbed it out on the edge of his dessert plate—something else he never did—and leaned forward, the bald spot on his head glistening under the lights. He said, “Matthew, your mother and I are simply concerned about your happiness and Martha’s happiness. You two are very young, and the world is not what we all would like it to be.”

  “And I suppose you’d like me to wait around till it improves! You’re a fine advocate for civil rights—like to set up segregated facilities in your own house!” Matthew’s voice was cracking hideously, and he suddenly stood up from the table, looking very tall and skinny in his jeans and sweatshirt. “I was a fool to think I could get you guys to behave like human beings,” he said in a quieter voice. “You insult me, and you insult Martha, and I’m not going to take it anymore. Don’t worry, you’ll see me again. But this Sunday dinner is definitely over.”

  He walked around to where Martha was sitting, her face pale and her lips parted. In a minute they had walked out of the dining room, out the front door, and we heard the sputtering sound of the ancient white Volvo that Matthew had bought from his roommate.

  “Young jackass,” said Cousin Polly. “Why can’t he find a nice colored girl?”

  My mother, who had tears on her cheeks, let her forehead drop until it touched the tablecloth. Then she raised her head and suddenly turned to me. “Don’t sit there staring—go to your room!”

  The order was so violent that it was clearly not meant to be obeyed. I went outside and sat down on the front steps. From inside I could hear the monotonous sound of my parents’ voices in argument.

  Around me the neighborhood yards were bright green in the late afternoon sunlight, and everything was in bloom: the tough old azalea bushes my father fertilized with oak leaves every fall, the hyacinths my mother, kneeling on a stack of magazines and wearing a ragged jacket of Daddy’s, had planted the previous September. Under the azalea bushes to either side of the front steps were the dark passageways that Matthew and I had used in childhood games that never saw the light of day. Whole empires of Martians—represented by pine needles and the minute round seeds of the arborvitae—had risen and been destroyed in that leafy shadow; it was there that we brought the few cigarettes we stole from Daddy’s bureau, and there that Matthew, after swearing me to secrecy on pain of instant and horrible death, had built a fire and roasted a dead mouse.

  Peering into the darkness under the tall blossoming bushes, I could clearly picture Matthew at nine, knobby-limbed in a baggy pair of shorts and a Davy Crockett t-shirt, his head nearly shaven for summer, his eyes narrowed with diabolical excitement as he impatiently outlined a scheme to me. Sometimes he would bury a tennis ball in the leaves by the front steps and then grab me to explain hastily, “We’re saboteurs, and I just planted a deadly explosive that’s gonna blow the fort sky-high! That means it’s a bomb, dumbbell! It’s going to explode, and we have to run for it!” Then he’d be off down the tree-lined street, his face a blurred speeding star, yelling, “Come on, Sarah! Run for your life!” Often in his impatience at playing with a little sister, he would round the corner in the direction of his friend Eddie Ratcliff’s house, and I would see him no more that day. But I would keep running after him until my short legs gave out. That was the way it always went: Matthew set the explosions and ran, and I, pulled by some invisible cord, followed after because there seemed to be nothing else to do.

  The voices in the dining room had quieted, and through the screen door I heard the slight clatter that meant the table was being cleared. Daddy came outside with the roto-comic section of the Philadelphia Inquirer under his arm. “Better go help your mother,” he said in a neutral voice, and I dusted off the seat of my blue jeans and went inside. In the dining room I picked up all six of Grandma Phillips’s water glasses—the one Martha Greenfield had used, the one at Matthew’s place, and the other four—and carried them dangling loosely by the stems, three to a hand, into the kitchen. It was a gesture, I thought; if I’d had the courage, I’d have thrown them
all against the wall.

  “What in the name of common sense are you doing?” said Mama, who was helping Cousin Polly to wrap up the uneaten peach cobbler. “Put those down, and do it carefully. You kids are going to kill me!”

  I looked at her and put the glasses down slowly.

  “She’s crazy like her brother!” said Cousin Polly.

  The Days of the

  Thunderbirds

  When the Thunderbirds arrived at Camp Grayfeather, Ellen, Chen-cheu, and I were waiting for them, lounging on the splintery steps of the recreation hall. Behind us a big fly with a weary August note to its buzz banged against the screen door. In front of us, under a level evening sun, the straw-colored Delaware countryside—pointedly referred to as “Wyeth Territory” in the camp catalogue—rolled off from our own wooded hillside toward the bluish haze that was Maryland. It was a Tuesday and just after dinner, the tranquil period in a camp day when the woods are filled with the soft clanging of bells announcing evening activities and the air still holds a whiff of tuna casserole. After dinner was supposed to be journal-writing time for the three dozen or so fourteen-year-olds who made up the rank and file at Grayfeather, but Chen-cheu, Ellen, and I had slipped out of our tent in order to witness the coming of the Thunderbirds. It was an event we were awaiting with the same kind of horrified delight as that with which biblical adolescents—as deep in glandular boredom as we ourselves were—must have greeted a plague of serpents. The Thunderbirds were a black teenage gang, one of many that battled in the close brick streets of Wilmington, and through some obscure adult arrangement they were coming to spend a week with us at camp.

  “Do you think they’ll have knives, Sarah?” Chen-cheu asked me, rubbing an array of chigger bites on her ankle.

  Chen-cheu was the camp beauty, a Chinese-American girl from Oberlin, Ohio, whose solid-cheeked, suntanned face had an almost frightening exotic loveliness above her muscular swimmer’s shoulders. She had, however, a calm, practical personality that belied her thrilling looks, and she talked with a flat midwestern accent, as if she’d been brought up in a soddy.

  “Nah,” I said. “Gangs use guns these days.”

  In fact my only knowledge of the habits of gangs came from seeing the movie West Side Story, but like the other black kids at Grayfeather, most of us the overprotected or horribly spoiled products of comfortable suburban childhoods, I had been affecting an intimate knowledge of street life ever since I’d heard about the Thunderbirds.

  “Maybe we’ll end up massacred,” said Ellen in a hopeful voice, unwrapping a stick of gum.

  Ellen was always chewing gum, though it was against camp rules; she had come to Grayfeather with about a thousand packages of Wrigley’s hidden in her trunk, and even, to the derision of her bunkmates, made little chains of the wrappers. She chewed so much that her father, a Reform rabbi in Baltimore, once made her walk around a shopping mall with a wad of gum stuck to her forehead. She and Chen-cheu and I had been close friends all summer, a brisk female triumvirate who liked to think of ourselves as Maid Marians, both lawless and seductive. (In reality it was only Chen-cheu who provided the physical charms, since Ellen and I were both peaky, bookwormish types.) The three of us made a point of being on the spot whenever anything interesting or scandalous happened at the camp, and the arrival of the Thunderbirds was certainly the most riveting event of the summer.

  They were not the first visitors we’d had at Grayfeather: already we’d played host to a morose quartet of Peruvian flute players and a troop of impossibly pink-cheeked Icelandic scouts. The Thunderbirds represented, however, the most ambitious attempt to incarnate the camp motto, which was “Adventures in Understanding.” As Ellen once remarked, instead of being a tennis camp or a weight-loss camp, Grayfeather was an integration camp. The campers, most of whose fathers were professors, like Chen-cheu’s, or clergymen, like mine, had been carefully selected to form a motley collection of colors and religions, so that our massed assemblies at meals, chapel, and campfires looked like illustrations for UNICEF posters.

  It was at chapel the previous Sunday that Ned Woolworth, the camp director, had announced the coming of the Thunderbirds.

  “During the next week you’ll be more than just kids relating to kids,” he said, strolling up and down between the rows of split-log benches, scanning our dubious fourteen-year-old faces with his benign, abstracted gaze, his big gnarled knees (his nickname was Monster Legs) working below his khaki shorts. Woolworth was tall and looked like Teddy Roosevelt, and had an amazing talent for not knowing things. He ignored the generally unenthusiastic silence as his campers coldly pondered the ramifications of doubling up in tents with their comrades-to-be, and passed over the muttered lamentations of the camp misfit, a Nigerian diplomat’s son named Femi. He read us a few lines from The Prophet and then told us we would be like ambassadors, bridging a gap that society had created. It appeared that the staff had already written and gotten permission from all of our parents.

  The arrival of the Thunderbirds at Grayfeather was signaled by a grinding of gears and a confused yelling from far down the dirt road that led through six miles of woods to the camp. As Ellen, Chen-cheu, and I poked one another in excitement, a battered yellow school bus covered with a tangle of long-stemmed graffiti rattled into the clearing and swerved into the dusty parking lot beside the rec hall. The bus ground its gears once more, shuddered, and seemed to expire. The doors flew open, and the Thunderbirds poured down the steps into the evening sunlight.

  “They’re so small!” Ellen whispered to me.

  There were ten boys and seven girls—the girls forming, as we later found out, a sort of auxiliary unit to the Thunderbirds—brown-skinned teenagers with mature faces and bodies and stunted, childish legs that gave the boys, with their muscular shoulders and short thighs, the look of bantam cocks.

  One of the boys came up to Chen-cheu, Ellen, and me and stood rocking on his heels. “Hello, ladies,” he said. “My name is Marvin Jones.” He wore tight black pants and a green t-shirt that was printed with the words KING FUNK, and he had an astonishing Afro pompadour that bobbed like a cresting wave over his mobile trickster’s face. Above his left eye he had dyed a platinum streak in his hair, and down one brown cheek ran a deep scar.

  Looking at him, I had the feeling that something unbelievable was happening in front of me. “Hello,” said Chen-cheu, Ellen, and I in a faint chorus.

  In a minute Ned Woolworth and the rest of the staff were there organizing things. The sleepy little camp clearing with its square of sun-bleached turf and its cluster of low green-painted buildings seemed suddenly frantic and overcrowded. Radios weren’t allowed at Grayfeather, but one of the Thunderbirds had brought a big portable receiver that filled the air with a Motown beat. Martha and the Vandellas were singing, their shrill, sweet voices crackling with static, and the Thunderbirds were bouncing to the beat while they eyed the camp, shoved one another, picked up their abbreviated luggage, and shouted back and forth. Meanwhile, the rest of the Grayfeather campers had slipped unobtrusively, even furtively, out of the woods, like an indigenous tribe showing itself to explorers; they settled on the steps and porches of the rec hall to swing their feet and observe. Little Nick Silver, a math whiz from Toughkenamon, Pennsylvania, who at a precocious twelve years old was the youngest kid at camp, sat down next to me. “You have got to be joking,” he whispered. “They’ll eat us for breakfast!”

  With the Thunderbirds had come a counselor from the social agency that had sponsored their visit: a tall, sallow white man with thinning curly hair and a weary, skeptical way of regarding the woods, the camp buildings, the evening sky, and his charges. He talked with Ned Woolworth for a few minutes and then climbed back inside the battered school bus, turning around only once to smile sardonically at the Thunderbirds. “See you later, guys,” he called out. “Behave yourselves.” The Thunderbirds responded with a kind of roar, and then the school bus started up with another wrench of gears and rattled off through the trees.
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br />   Once the newcomers had filed down the path into the woods to put their bags away in the tents, one of the counselors rang the evening activities bell. “We’ll have introductions at campfire,” she announced. “Be friendly!”

  We campers simply looked at one another. With the Thunderbirds gone from the clearing, a powerful current of noise and energy had suddenly been shut off. Bats flitted across the darkening sky, and a breeze from the lake carried a smell of damp leaf mold. While the others were lining up, I went over to inspect a far corner of the dining hall, where I’d seen a group of the Thunderbirds clustering. There, carved deeply into the green paint, was a miniature version of the same long-stemmed, weirdly elegant graffiti that had covered the school bus, and that I had seen spray-painted on decrepit city buildings. It read: T-BIRDZ RULE.

  Marvin Jones was the leader of the Thunderbirds. At the get-acquainted campfire, it was his command that galvanized his troops into standing up and stepping forward, one by one, to give their names. (“L.T.” “LaWanda.” “Doze.” “Brother Willy.”) He himself stood in the firelight with a crazy tremor running through his body, wearing a rubber-lipped showman’s smirk, like a black Mick Jagger. (“Stretch.” “Chewy.” “Belinda.” “Guy.”) In the bright circle of hot moving light that baked our faces and knees and left our backs chilled with the damp breath of the big pine grove behind us, we campers studied the Thunderbirds and they studied us. Both groups had the same peculiar expression: not hostility, but a wary reservation of judgment. As bits of ash danced like a swarm of glowing insects in the draft of the fire—a big log-cabin fire, built specially for the occasion by the Wood Crafts class—Ned Woolworth, his cheerful freckled wife, Hannah, and the rest of the staff guided us all through a number of cheers and folk songs.

  Most of the counselors looked eager and uneasy. The near-instantaneous grapevine among the campers had already reported that the Thunderbirds had got into trouble immediately after their arrival, as they walked down the path to the boys’ tents. Marvin Jones and two others had shinnied up a tall, skinny tree—one of the birches unusual in that area, and beloved by the Nature counselors—swinging on it and pulling it down with their combined weight until it bent over and seemed likely to break. When one of the counselors asked them to stop, Marvin Jones, laughing crazily and hanging on to the birch, responded, “This is the woods, man! Ain’t no law against climbing no tree in the woods!”