I turned at the scuffling of footsteps.
It was the old woman’s Samuel, standing in front of his wife just inside the entrance to the sanctuary, leaning on a pew. The bald center of his head cleanly divided white, curly fringes on each side. He wore thick glasses that magnified his eyes into bulging eggs. His black pants hung loose on him, supported by suspenders over a white starched shirt.
He took a step closer to me, reaching for the back of the next pew for support again. His progress was almost like a baby’s learning to walk for the first time. Etta followed behind, towering over him in the aisle.
I rose, waiting for him. To walk toward him would be a disrespect of impatience.
“I knew your mama well,” Samuel said. The vitality of his baritone was such a contrast to his appearance that I found myself staring at the man’s mouth as he spoke. “From the time she was a little one.”
I took Samuel’s extended hand and gently shook it in greeting. I was afraid of hurting the delicate bones in the old man’s hand. “A pleasure to meet you, sir.”
“Pleasure’s mine. Fact is, I thought I’d see the pearly gates before I’d see you. We never thought it would have been proper to try to talk to you when you was living with the Barretts and always intended to have this talk when you was grown. But you left Charleston. . . .”
“Yes, sir, I did.” I left it at that. Either they knew about the accident or they didn’t. Either way, I was here about my mother.
I gestured at a nearby pew. “Shall we sit? I’m interested in what you might tell me about my mama. And why it is you’ve been waiting for me.”
Samuel eased himself down. Let out a sigh. “Etta, why don’t you sit opposite. You remember as much as I do.”
The old woman moved up and took a seat on the opposite side of the aisle. I turned around to face Etta and Samuel from where I sat in the pew in front of them.
“You knew my mama since she was little?” I prompted.
“She grew up just down the road,” Samuel said. “Before they put in the expressway. Sat here in this church, every Sunday, singing and praying. Couldn’t carry a tune, as I recall, the only white person amongst all us black. Her face stuck out whilst I preached, and her voice stuck out whilst all of us sang. And our good Lord knows, we loved that girl, best friends as she was with Ruby Atkins.”
“They was thick as blood,” Etta chimed in. “Ruby came from good stock. Her folks loved her, raised her to be respectful. Your mama, well let’s just say she’d have been better off if someone clubbed her daddy in the head and drowned him face first in his own bathtub.”
“That’s how he died, Etta,” Pastor Samuel snorted. “Police said it was a jealous husband what followed him home. No one ever found out exactly, but no one really cared either. He was that kind of man.”
“I was getting to that,” she told Samuel with irritation. “But he’s first got to know how it was when Ruby and her family started taking her in ’cause she wasn’t even getting fed and clothed proper.”
I listened, as much fascinated by the ebb and flow of conversation between a man and a woman who had lived together for half a century as I was by the description of my mother’s childhood. I hadn’t known much; whenever I’d asked my mother, she had found something else to talk about, and I was always left with the impression that somehow she was ashamed of it.
“Weren’t for Ruby,” Samuel said, “who knows what might have happened to your mama when she was a little girl. Carolyn’s own mama barely made ends meet and was more interested in men and whiskey than putting food on the table. Sure, your mama had an older sister that worked some and helped the family, but shortly after their daddy died in the bathtub, that girl run off. No one knew to where, and no one heard from her again. Ruby and her family, well, they took your mama in and treated her like one of their own.”
“Our good Lord blessed your mama with looks,” Etta said. “She didn’t put on airs about it, but she could turn a man’s head. When that Barrett boy saw her working as a waitress down at the grill, he didn’t care how much his family stood against him marrying a lower-class girl. He swept her off her feet.”
“We didn’t see your mama much after she left and got married,” Samuel said. “We all knew she married into old Charleston money, and we figured she was spending her Sundays in her husband’s church.”
“That’s good and proper,” Etta said. “A woman’s got to do what her husband says, unless he tells her to do something stupid or ungodly, and thank our Lord he gave women the common sense to decide when a husband’s wrong.”
Etta squinted at Samuel, waiting for him to disagree.
Samuel cleared his throat. “She always kept Ruby in her life,” he said quickly, filling in the silence. “They were best friends and the way the world was back then, seemed easiest for them to pretend Ruby was her maid. She helped your mama through some hard times too.”
Etta frowned at Samuel. “Tell him.”
“I was easing into it.”
“Tell him. We agreed it was all right to tell him. Ain’t no one else in the world who knows but us and Ruby’s sister Opal. Now that he’s come back, he’s got a right to know.”
I looked back and forth between the two of them.
Samuel sighed heavily. “Your mama ended up coming back here on a rainy night, out of the blue, the worst night of her life.”
He stopped and stared off at a stained-glass window, where sunshine sparkled on dust motes. When he resumed, face back toward mine, his voice had quiet pain.
“There ain’t no easy way to say it.” The large eyes behind the thick glasses didn’t blink. “It hurts me just to tell you. Someone had violated your mama, and she had nowhere to go but back to us.”
The words and implications of what they meant pinned me into helpless silence.
“Seems she was afraid to go to the police. She weren’t going to tell us his name, said it was to protect us, said the man what had done it was rich and powerful and owned the police. She said wasn’t nothing we could do but hold her close to us and help her get through the night.”
I bowed my head.
“She swore us to secrecy. Said if anyone found out, specially if anyone guessed who’d done it, it would break her husband’s heart. Broke our hearts, seeing her in such pain, and thinking more ’bout the man she loved than ’bout herself.”
Samuel sighed long and hard. “If she never got the chance to tell you, I’m telling you now. We saw her off and on over the first few years after you were born. People were rough on her, thinking she’d been unfaithful to her husband, a war hero who died without coming home. Every time we saw her, she told us how much she loved you, despite what it had cost her reputation. She told us time and again it didn’t matter who had fathered you, only who had mothered you. Take that to heart son; she loved you more than life.”
Samuel squinted and stared hard at me. “Son, you all right? Son?”
I was remembering.
“Yes,” I lied. “I’m all right.”
“Son, your mama was a good woman,” he said. His hand on my shoulder was a comfort. “When she started to show in the months after that rainy night, it was far too late to tell the world it weren’t her fault, that she’d been violated. She held her head high, even with folks in Charleston saying she was white trash, just like where she’d come from. It was only here in this church that she was welcomed. We loved your mama. You was baptized here.”
She held her head high, even with folks in Charleston saying she was white trash. I dropped my head to hide my eyes from this gentle preacher in front of me.
“It’s all right, son. It’s all right.”
It wasn’t all right. To discover now she’d been raped, not unfaithful. To discover I was the product of an act of her helplessness, not betrayal.
Pastor Samuel had no idea of my last words to her.
**
“Why did you hit Pendleton?” my mother asked four hours after I had punched my cousin with
all the might of my ten-year-old biceps and forearm and fist. “His mother tells me you were standing on the beach and hit him for no reason at all. But I can’t believe that.”
This was Wednesday. The day before my mother abandoned me and left a scandal in her wake.
My mother’s question had not been a surprise. Nor her entrance into the upstairs bedroom of the beach house, with its westward inland view of Folly Island and the one road that ran down its narrow length past all the houses that lined the beach. I had seen my mother’s Chevrolet approach the Barrett house, shadows of palmettos falling across its hood as she turned into the drive. I had heard the angry murmuring of adults below as my mother first faced the Barrett wrath before trekking up the stairs, had smelled my mother’s perfume as the door opened with a swoosh of air drawn to the screen of the open window in front of me.
Lost in the confusion and pain and doubt that had tortured me since punching Pendleton in the face for calling her a tramp, I refused to turn to face her.
“Why?” She repeated her question softly, moving closer to me and resting her hands on my shoulders. “I know you must have had a good reason.”
When Pendleton’s mother had first demanded I explain why I had punched her dearly beloved son, I had refused to answer, unable to repeat the horrible accusations that now pushed down on my heart like anvils of dread. As for Pendleton, he had enough political sense to realize it would not play well if the adults in his world knew what had prompted my spectacular punch. We both held our silence for the day, something that was mistakenly interpreted in our favor as an honorable code of brotherhood.
Still, my deed could not go unpunished. I’d been banished to upstairs solitude until my mother, summoned for this emergency, could arrive at the Folly Island beach house after her shift at the museum.
By the time she arrived, Pendleton had returned from the hospital. He chose to sit in a living-room recliner, head leaned back, ice bag on his forehead, where his dramatic pose ensured that his aunt would be forced to acknowledge the plaster on his nose and his noble fight against pain caused by her son.
“Talk to me, my love,” my mother said to me in the bedroom. “What’s the matter?”
I could not bear to look at her face, as if I might for the first time see the betrayal that had lain waiting for me all along.
She turned my head gently and lifted my chin. A tear trickled down alongside my nose. She wiped it away.
The last rays of sunset cast soft yellow light across her face. It was a beauty that I ached to touch. I wanted to throw myself into her arms. I wanted the return of innocence that would allow me to sob away my fear and sadness as I clung to her for comfort. But if what Pendleton said was true, how could there be any comfort from her again?
The cold emptiness that gave me strength all afternoon grew as I fought against my love for her; I flinched at her touch and pushed away her embrace, something she pretended not to notice.
The silver chain with a cross that has always hung from my neck was clenched in my right hand. This, too, was something she pretended not to notice.
“Nick,” she said, “I believe that you believe you had good reason to hit your cousin. But it’s not right under any circumstances to hit anyone.”
For the first time since she entered the room, I looked at her squarely. I spoke bitterly. “What if someone was trying to hurt you? And the only way I could stop him was by hitting until he stopped?”
“No one was trying to hurt me. Were they? And if they were, I would be glad you protected me.”
Her sweet smile was reward for my question. My resolve to hate my mother faltered, but against the world-shattering disappointment of my new knowledge, her smile only served as scattered raindrops useless against a raging fire. I could not tell her that I was defending her, for then I would have to tell her why.
“Nick,” she said to my silence, “I am required to find a way to punish you suitably or have you apologize and make up with Pendleton.”
What she wanted to tell me was that the Barretts made the rules and that she and I either lived by them or left. And if we left, then I might never have the chance to rise out of the poverty she had faced during her own childhood. She wanted to explain to me that she had bound her soul in the silk of the Barrett riches, not for her, but for me and my future. But then, at age ten, I was too young to understand.
“I will never apologize to Pendleton. If he comes near me again, I’ll hit him harder. Maybe I’ll use a baseball bat.”
She took my clenched fists in her hands. “What happened, Nick?”
“Leave me alone.”
How could I explain that I was too afraid to tell her? I knew I’d done right, defending her. But if I told her why, I might discover that Pendleton had not lied. That would be worse, far worse, than the injustice of being punished for doing something right.
I pulled my hands away from her.
She studied the rigidness of my shoulders, the stiffness
of my neck beneath the ragged edges of my hair. Again, I would not understand until later how it filled her with sorrow that the divide had arrived. She knew, as all mothers instinctively know from the first moment of separation as the umbilical cord was cut, that the baby’s destination was to become a man, and to do so would mean rejection, small rejections sometimes, then larger rejections—slashing against the intimate bond of a mother’s fierce proprietary love with tiny cuts and escalating larger cuts—until finally the tiny creature that had depended on her very blood in the womb, depended on the milk from her breasts, depended on her love every waking moment of babyhood, depended on her stories and acceptance all through childhood, was no longer a tiny creature and would eventually walk away to find his own place in the world. But because we were so close, this moment had always seemed so far away. Until now, with me determined to keep my first real secret from her.
Worse, she could not in this moment be my friend. Because I had punched the Pendleton Barrett, she was forced to accept her role as parent.
“I know how much you like your vacation here every summer,” she said. “But Pendleton’s parents now wonder if it is suitable that you remain.”
“I don’t want to stay here,” I said. “Not if Pendleton is here too.”
“I’ll take you home then.”
“I don’t want to go home either.”
What I really wanted was the home I’d felt was mine before Pendleton’s words.
She rested her hands on my shoulders again. “Where would you like to be?”
“Away.” I pushed her hands off my shoulders. “Just away.”
A long, long silence held us, until my continued rejection forced her to speak.
“Away from me?” she asked softly.
“Yes,” I said. “Away from you.”
**
It took several moments for me to realize that Pastor Samuel had lapsed into silence.
I took a deep breath, looked up, saw tears running down the leathered black cheeks of Pastor Samuel.
“You got to know, son, your mama loved you fierce. She told me more than once it didn’t matter how you were conceived, you were still a child of God, given to her. After Ruby died, Etta and me, we might be the only two people in the world who didn’t believe she run out on you. She loved you too much.”
“Oh, God . . . ,” I said. Pastor Samuel bore the tears that should have run down my own face, but it was the first time I had uttered those words with that need.
“Yes, sir. Oh, God . . . the Lord’s the only place we can turn.”
Unasked, Pastor Samuel began to pray, giving me the answer to redemption, his baritone softly filling the peace of the church. “Lord, you sent us Jesus, just a man and much more than a man, willing to die for the message of love you placed upon his shoulders to deliver to us. Lord, through Jesus, you promised us a home beyond these tired, pained bodies of ours, to give us hope and forgiveness when things look darkest here on Earth. Thank you, Lord, for the love of your Spi
rit that fills us when we turn to you. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”
I had closed my eyes. When I opened them, I saw that Pastor Samuel had risen. He nodded at me, as if giving me permission to be alone. He made his awkward way back down the aisle.
I remained in the silence of the sanctuary for five minutes, trying to understand what I’d learned, fighting the emotions I’d spent my adult life trying to keep separate from my heart.
I forced them back and found strength to rise from the pew.
**
Pastor Samuel was waiting for me outside the church, sitting on the steps, looking over the low grass of the cemetery.
“Who?” I asked. “Who was my father?”
“If anyone knew, it was Ruby. But she died a day after your mama disappeared.” Samuel bowed his head briefly, then raised it again. “Someone run her over with a car and left her to die on the side of the road. Charleston police said it was an accident, but in my heart I knew it was murder. I always feared she was killed because she knew something she shouldn’t.”
“You talked to the police?”
“Sure ’nuff. The only time in my life I ever spoke to the chief of police himself. Big fellow. Don’t recall his name, but I do recall he was big and looked like someone had worked him over good with a stick of ugly. He hated black folks.”
“Layton,” I said. “Edgar Layton.”
“That was his name. Edgar Layton. He’s the one. Told me it was an accident and that I shouldn’t trouble him no more unless I wanted to get run over by accident someday too.”
Chapter 20
I took a taxi back to the Two Meeting Street Inn. From there, it was a short walk to the south seawall that protected the houses from the tides. The water was flat in the aftermath of the previous evening’s storm. Morning automobile traffic was light along the promenade. It gave the old houses to my right an illusion of serenity that seemed to put me into the century before, when the poor freemen would get to the seawall early and hang bait in the waters and tell stories to each other in low voices as they drew on cigarettes and discreetly handled flasks of raw whiskey.
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