Kelly left Boiling Springs in January of 1985. It was the last Saturday of the month. My bedroom was flooded with morning sunlight, but I was still in bed, eyes shut to the dust motes in the air and the whaling vessels at sea. I heard DeAnne calling my name. Then I heard, “Kellycannedpeaches is on the phonecreamcheese!” I opened my eyes, knowing something was wrong. Kelly and I rarely called each other, and when we did we exchanged verbal telegrams, short, clipped, efficient, and to the point.
“Hello,” I said.
“Lindamint?”
“Yes.”
“I have to goboiledcarrots.”
“Where?”
“Rockrawegg Hilldriedapricot.”
“To your aunt’scornbread?”
“Yes.”
“How longgrapeNehi?”
“Nine monthssaltinecracker. Well, eight now.”
“Oh, Jesusfriedchicken.”
“He had nothingtomato to dogrits with it.”
“You’ll writeFrenchfries?”
“Yes.”
Click.
“Kellycannedpeaches?”
Kelly wrote in letter #822 that she couldn’t be away from Lil’ Skywalker right now because she was breastfeeding him. Besides that, Beth Anne didn’t want her coming back to Boiling Springs until all of her pregnancy weight had been lost. “Otherwise, people would know that I had been, well, you know … fat!” When I read this, I could almost hear Kelly’s quick, sharp laugh in the room. Kelly added that she was getting the feeling that her aunt wanted her out of the house. Her aunt, a forty-year-old ex-hippie–cum–successful cat groomer, had read that breastfeeding for the first year of the baby’s life was good for the baby’s immune system, so Kelly knew that she wasn’t going anywhere soon. In the meantime, the aunt was trying with little success to downplay her growing maternal yearnings and rivalry. Plopping down on the living room couch, her aunt would say, “Well, there you two are!” as if she had no idea that mother and child were just about to engage in the most primitive form of food service. Then her aunt would hold on to some part of Lil’ Skywalker, usually one of his tiny feet, while Kelly breastfed him.
In her previous postcards and letters, Kelly hadn’t shared with me many details about her pregnancy. In #822, she did. She recalled for me how her sense of smell had become hound-dog acute at the beginning of her second trimester. She wrote that she knew what food was cooking two houses away. She discovered that even boiled potatoes or heated-up milk gave off odors that left her nauseated and weak. She wrote that by the end of her fifth month her nose and her ankles ballooned with retained fluids. Her aunt cut all salt from her diet in an effort to relieve the swelling. This only made Kelly crave the taste of it more. She made do by discovering the hidden salt in foods. Tomato juice. Caramel candy. The filling of store-bought apple pie. Instant hot cocoa mix. By the start of her third trimester, Kelly thought that she could hear the sound of her skin stretching. She cried a lot then because she could no longer recognize her own body. She slept twelve to fourteen hours a day because it was the only tranquilizer allowed a pregnant girl. Her aunt, unmarried and anxious to become a single mother, spent her free time knitting a receiving blanket, a bonnet, and a pair of booties. Sometimes Kelly and her aunt would do mothers-to-be activities together, like when they chose the baby’s name. As for the birth itself, Kelly wrote that she had no memory of it.
Kelly ended her letter to me with an ode to Lil’ Skywalker’s fingernails and toenails. They were the color of wax paper and almost as thin, she wrote. They were more insect wings than human body. They grew longer by the hour. They made her understand why we painted our nails with bright polish when we grew older. We were disappointed in what they had become. Thick and ridged, more carapace than human body. Kelly had bought a pair of small, round-tipped nail scissors for Lil’ Skywalker, but her aunt had read that it was better to trim the nails by biting them off gently with your teeth. Kelly wouldn’t do it, so her aunt did it for her. Kelly wrote that when she saw Lil’ Skywalker’s tiny fingers and then his tender toes in her aunt’s mouth, she felt sick to her stomach. She wrote that he was so helpless. What Kelly meant was that she was so helpless.
After Lil’ Skywalker’s first birthday, Kelly was asked to leave the Rock Hill household. Her aunt promised that they would keep in regular contact, and they have. The arrangement was simple. The aunt telephoned Kelly every month. Kelly never telephoned the aunt. These calls, in addition to photographs of Luke on his birthdays and most holidays, except Mother’s Day, were the extent of their interaction. The aunt proposed the following arrangement: If and when Luke asked about his birth mother, he would be told Kelly’s name and contact information. As far as I know, Luke to this day has yet to ask. He doesn’t know, then, that he has a secret middle name, Skywalker, or that for the first year of his life two seventeen-year-old girls exchanged letters referring to him by its diminutive. According to Kelly, he now looks exactly like his father. That was probably why she has never shown me a photograph of Luke. Her secret would be clearly written on his face.
After Kelly’s aunt legally adopted Luke, the cat groomer left the lucrative world of feline fanciers behind to open the first yoga studio in Rock Hill, if not the very first one in the state of South Carolina. She learned hatha yoga through a video correspondence course offered by an enterprising commune in Northern California, located in an area now more commonly known as Silicon Valley. Yoga proved to be an inspired profit-generating enterprise for the commune and for Kelly’s aunt. She and Luke moved into a larger house and took yearly trips to India, where she continued her studies with a yogi, and young Luke learned Hindi as a second language from his native nanny.
Kelly’s aunt, who was Beth Anne’s youngest sister, had never been close to their family. By the time Kelly was fourteen, her aunt was already limiting her appearances at their family gatherings to every other year. Her few visits with them were enough for Kelly to size her up. Her aunt was the only one on her mother’s side of the family who had lived outside of the Bible Belt. Her aunt didn’t have a college degree but did have a vocabulary of multisyllabic and sometimes foreign-sounding words. Kelly was smart enough to know that sometimes her aunt didn’t really understand the meanings of these words but used them anyway. I remembered Kelly describing her aunt to me as “asspirational.” I wrote back to Kelly that I didn’t think that was a word. Kelly responded that it should be one in order to emphasize the dumb ass lurking inside of such people. Nonetheless, when Kelly found herself pregnant, the first telephone call she made was to this woman.
When Kelly’s aunt became Luke’s legal mother, she ceased all contact with their extended family, who were frankly relieved, as the family embarrassment was now harboring another family embarrassment. Two disappearances for the price of one. A bargain, they thought. The family had long made it clear to Kelly’s aunt that they were horrified by all of her life decisions, which they would list by the state followed by a brief description of what she “had gotten herself into” while there. California: commune. New Mexico: Indians. Arizona: cats. South Carolina: cats and yoga. In retrospect, the family realized that cat grooming was by far the most “normal” of the communities that this woman had thrown herself into.
Kelly’s aunt had a name of course, but from the moment that Kelly went to live with her I never wanted to use it. Birth mothers were too often anonymous. I wanted the adoptive mother, for once, to be the nameless one.
As I read Kelly’s letter with its full and detail-rich account of her baby’s life to date, I remembered being infuriated. There wasn’t another word about my father’s passing. I couldn’t believe how her maternity had changed her, dulled her regard for those around her except for the Breastfeeding One, and that she had thought it appropriate to share her lack of consideration with me. These sentiments were collapsed into one rhetorical question: What fucking world is she living in? The borders of my world were clear to me. My father was in an open coffin that was now closed and in the ground.
DeAnne was in their bed, alone. My grandmother Iris was an overweight, vengeful diabetic with a taste for fire, and one of these traits would surely make her the next in our family to die. My great-uncle Harper, my dear singing-talker, was speechless with grief. What I needed from my best friend was sympathy, an acknowledgment of my loss, a shoulder to cry on. A baby named Lil’ Skywalker was there instead.
At the farthest edge of the familiar city, there is a blue and gray ranch house. Kelly’s letter waits for me there on the hallway table. Next to it is the ghost of the very first letter that she ever wrote to me. The postmaster general’s sudden absence has left everything at risk of being undelivered and unread. I return there to examine and reexamine the body of letter #822. How many readings did it take before I found within it what Kelly, the new mother, already understood back then? I have lost count. After Iris passed away, I still didn’t see it. Baby Harper, as his last gift to me, had made me see the sentence that Kelly never wrote but that informed her every word: Life trumps death.
The floodwater is rising. You have two hands and one heart (breaking, because you are witnessing your world disappearing). There is a crying baby and a corpse. Which do you embrace and take with you to higher ground? Whether the baby is your blood relation shouldn’t change the answer.
Kelly, the new mother, understood that what had happened to me would happen to her baby much too soon. Because what difference was there between death and absence to the ones who were left behind?
ON A PLANTATION LOCATED ON THE BANKS OF THE ROANOKE River near the Virginia border but firmly on North Carolina soil, a baby boy was born into slavery. Someone, because we can’t be certain that it was his father or mother, called him George, middle name Moses. The plantation owner who owned him was named William (undoubtedly chosen for him by his own father and mother), family name Horton. Therefore the baby’s last name was also Horton, and it was the first of his shackles. George Moses Horton’s earliest memory was of his mother’s back bent over rows of tobacco as he clung to her, mesmerized by the up-and-down rhythm of hard labor. When George Moses was still a young child, William Horton moved his possessions—the china cabinet, the plantation desk, the silver candlesticks, the slaves, the horses, and the cows—to a parcel of land near the town of Chapel Hill. There, far from the sounds of the river, George Moses grew up and learned that his mother found comfort in the sounds of worship. She taught him the prayers, the hymns, all the words that could float out of their mouths in praise of God. George Moses took them all in, and one day he moved them around in his head and created something new, “Rise up, my soul, and let us go.” He repeated these words to himself and rejoiced in the meaning, clear and stark, of what was to be the first line of a poem, a thing of his own creation that would belong only to him. More words sang themselves inside of his head and the poem was completed. The initial call-to-freedom thrust was by then disguised within a devotional message.
Rise up, my soul, and let us go
Up to the gospel feast;
Gird on the garment white as snow,
To join and be a guest.
George Moses’s mother had taught him well. Words, he understood, were beautiful because they could reveal the truth and hide it at the same time. George Moses, when he was twenty years old, had a book’s worth of his own poems hidden inside of him. He shared them with no one in order to keep them safe, especially from James Horton, son of William, who owned George Moses now and who would want to own his words too. A product of Horton’s property was his property. Milk from his cows, tobacco from his land, child from his slave. George Moses knew the rules of the plantation. Within its confines he knew the boundaries, the invisible riverbanks, the state lines.
James Horton looked at George Moses one day and saw what he wanted to see, a tall young man with a calm, mild temperament who could be relied upon. George Moses was from then on sent to Chapel Hill on Sundays to sell the plantation’s surplus fruits and vegetables. The Horton family couldn’t possibly consume all those tomatoes and snap peas and strawberries and plums.
Chapel Hill was a sad new world for George Moses. All the same rules applied there, plus new ones that his mother couldn’t have educated him about. The town was home to the University of North Carolina, and its streets were filled with young men George Moses’s age. When these students visited the market, they did so for entertainment and occasionally for the purchase of foodstuff. George Moses was commanded to perform a trick—Come on now! Sing us a song. Dance a little. Your momma taught you a jig, didn’t she?—before they would buy from him. George Moses’s pride gave him away. He opened up his mouth, and a poem poured out. The young men thought it was a fine trick. A slave who had memorized a poem! They slapped their knees and laughed. George Moses’s pride was by now in full bloom. He told them in a low voice that the poem belonged to him. Of course, the moment those words were released into the open air the poem was no longer his.
My great-uncle Harper was sixty-six years old, and he was about to take his first flight. To calm his nerves, he hummed Patsy Cline’s “You Belong to Me” while waiting in the terminal of the Charlotte airport—Fly the ocean in a silver plane. See the jungle when it’s wet with rain—until he remembered that Patsy had died in a plane crash. That and the fact that there was no ocean or jungle between the state of North Carolina and the state of Connecticut made him change his tune. Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me” then kept him company until the boarding call. Let’s fly, let’s fly away … Once I get you up there where the air is rarefied. We’ll just glide, starry-eyed. Baby Harper had thought about driving up to New Haven, but then he decided that he wanted to experience the journey as I had experienced it. He wanted to feel the ground beneath him slipping away, to see North Carolina getting smaller, its fields and towns becoming abstract, and finally disappearing below him. I told him it wasn’t the sense of loss that dominated the experience of flight but the sense of momentum, a lifting up and away. That promise decided it for him.
It was May of 1990 and I was graduating from Yale. Baby Harper was my family, the only member who was there to see me receive my diploma. Baby Harper assured me that my father and my grandmother Iris would be watching from Heaven. He didn’t mention my mother, DeAnne, who wasn’t dead but whom I hadn’t invited.
My great-uncle showed up to my graduation ceremony wearing a white linen suit with a cut that was slim and sharp, which he probably last wore when Eisenhower was first elected, an equally white oxford shirt, and a blue (for Yale) bow tie embroidered with cardinals (for the Old North State). He looked like a mix of Colonel Sanders, Tom Wolfe, and Pee Wee Herman. In other words, he looked like Baby Harper. I smiled widely and openly and without hesitation, something that I hadn’t done during those past four years, when I saw him walking across the courtyard of Pierson, the residential college where I lived at Yale.
As a legacy, I had been assigned to the same residential college as my father and his forefathers. When I first saw Pierson, I had to laugh. Pierson was a green-shuttered colonial, albeit much grander in scale than Iris and Walter Wendell’s house on Piedmont Street. There was often-repeated lore (both false and true, like the rest of the Yale campus) that before the Civil War Pierson was the sole residential college to provide living accommodations for those Southern gentlemen who had brought their property-valets up North with them. It was an apocryphal story. The residential college system at Yale didn’t begin until 1933. That exculpatory fact, however, never explained another fact: why there was a wing of Pierson—whitewashed brick and festooned on the outside with decorative iron railings and stairs—known as the “Slave Quarters.” Perhaps it was the inability to reconcile one true thing, the year of construction, with another true thing, the name of the wing, that made the antebellum myth necessary. A lie to create a more comprehensible truth, as it were. Actual slave quarters could be understood as the bones of history, reluctantly preserved. Fanciful, imagined slave quarters were, on the other hand, a pornography of history. I wonde
red what my father must have thought when he first saw the Slave Quarters of Pierson, how he must have felt traveling hundreds of miles due north only to be confronted with an ersatz South, and whether it had made him feel even farther away from home.
I glanced down from my great-uncle’s face and suit and saw my father’s shoes walking toward me. Wing tips, brown leather, handsome left heel worn on the outside edge, a deep crease across the charismatic right toe. I knew then that Baby Harper had tried to bring all that he could of Boiling Springs with him.
It had been almost five years since my father’s passing and more than three since my grandmother’s. DeAnne and I hadn’t spoken since Iris’s funeral. The last letter I had sent to DeAnne was at the end of my sophomore year. I assumed the next time I saw her would be at another funeral. I was hoping it wouldn’t be Baby Harper’s. That left us with only one other possibility. So be it, I thought.
Missing Baby Harper was the worst part of not going back to Boiling Springs. We spoke on the phone every week. He did most of the talking. I listened with the receiver pressed close to my ear. Every month, he sent me a check for “incidentals.” That was what he wrote on the check’s memo line. I used the money for cigarettes, which had become the opposite of that for me. “Integrals” were more like it. On my birthday and on every holiday that was printed on his wall calendar, he sent me a box of chocolates. He was partial to Whitman’s Samplers. Me too. Since the fifth grade, I had begun the slow and methodical project of renaming the pieces inside of those trompe l’oeil cross-stitched boxes after the words that triggered their flavors. The Samplers proved to be an eclectic collection of words. I identified Cashew Cluster first, which was from then on “Russia.” Dark Chocolate Molasses Chew turned out to be “Static.” Cherry Cordial was “Neanderthal.” Along with the chocolates, Baby Harper sent me photographs that he had taken in my absence, and they were of people I didn’t know. He said that he had to branch out now, as there were so few of us left.
Bitter in the Mouth Page 14
