Against the Ruins

by Linda Lightsey Rice

  Desegregation was dominating the news. The South Carolina governor had just tried to punish civil-rights activists by ordering the State Board of Education to rescind accreditation of Allen College—a black school then. Allen’s students began applying to the all-white University of South Carolina. One week after my conversation with Ed, dark-skinned patrons began lining up at the “Whites Only” ticket windows of downtown movie theaters. Each was refused a ticket and went to the back of the line to try again. No one of any color saw The Bridge on the River Kwai that day. Just a few blocks from Laidlaw, at a Main Street café owned by a wealthy Columbia businessman, enlarged newspaper photos appeared on the plate-glass windows: in each, a black demonstrator was being arrested, handcuffed, or dragged across concrete by a policeman. To make matters worse, a sunken Confederate ship was discovered two miles out from Charleston harbor, with the remains of Confederate soldiers aboard. A Navy vessel hoisted it up and towed it by the Charleston battery, where hundreds of white people stood on the boardwalk and cheered. The governor was planning state burials for the remains.

  The world we lived in then seems bizarre now. It wasn’t just separate water fountains and bathrooms and seats on the bus, it was also stairs, doorways, pay windows, public benches. All kinds of things you’d never think of. Sometimes I’m amazed that South Carolina’s founding fathers didn’t build two sets of sidewalks.

  Your father objected to my teaching an integrated classroom, which shocked me, given that he was studying to be a man of God “You shouldn’t get mixed up in this, putting yourself in the limelight,” he said. “You have no idea the trouble you could get into.”

  “The principal has asked me to do this. We’ll be specially trained.”

  “You can tell the principal your husband has forbidden it.”

  He got up and left the table. I stared at the dishes. Forbidden? I’m not a child.

  While I cleared the table, William went outside to change the oil in the car, which he did every two weeks. No cleaner oil in America, I’ll warrant. After I did the dishes, I wandered into the living room and gazed out the front window as evening began shadowing our old houses. William was on his knees in the front yard, several saplings beside him. He was transplanting them along the sidewalk. Someday they would completely hide the house. Separate us from everyone.

  Every day in 1957 seemed up and down, an erratic emotional seesaw. One afternoon, unasked, William took sandpaper and wood stain and repaired the scratches on the dining-room table—it looked beautiful afterward. A day later he answered questions in a monotone or not at all. I can’t recall much of what I felt—I wasn’t accustomed to thinking about my feelings. Women of my generation had been taught that emphasis on the self led to no good thing. Relieved that the flu was under control, I ignored my other fears. It was such a lovely time—a glorious autumn. Crimson and yellow stole across green leaves day by day, the air soft and sharp all at once. As chromatic leaves whirled and dipped, I told you that heaven’s colors were falling from the sky, maybe from your real grandmother’s paint box, and I was about to say that colored leaves were music’s lovely accidentals but stopped myself, said well, really, it was science, you’d better understand that so you didn’t say something incorrect in school.

  Rosa was busier than ever that fall, her patrons getting in their time (Rosa said their licks) before winter and family holidays. To return Rosa’s Tupperware bowl, I had finally made ladyfingers and after a slight hesitation on our porch, I strode over to Rosa’s praying to high heaven that I was not arriving during “working hours.” Rosa, to my relief, was fully dressed, chipped coffee cup in hand, bracelets jangling. She invited me in. I said I had wet laundry waiting to be hung out. Which was true.

  When she peeked under the dishtowel, she whistled softly, “Uhmm—ladyfingers. Nothing I love better than tasty fingers.”

  I—for lack of anything better—said Rosa was looking well. She leaned forward and whispered, “Exercise wards off old age, you know.”

  Did she just like making me uncomfortable? She did have the devil in her.

  I said I’d best get to our laundry. Rosa stared at me for a moment. “Listen, Louise, I know you don’t approve of me, that’s why you won’t let Lyra play over here. Nothing happens to kids in this house.”

  “What you do is your own business,” I said stiffly. What about what children see? Who protects them from that?

  “Yes it is my business. So I won’t mention that your old man has a screw loose. Maybe two or three. He yells at Lyra too much.”

  I said I had to go and stalked across the street.

  Don’t we always bristle over what we fear may be true? On Lincoln Street we all considered ourselves the one normal brick in a wall of misfit mortar.

  Your father told me almost nothing about his studies that summer and fall. I didn’t know he skipped classes, didn’t know he believed two professors hated him. Sometimes even now I imagine William sitting on a wooden bench on the seminary grounds—maybe he’s staring at the main building, solid granite with arched Gothic entrance, classrooms on the lower level, dormitory on the upper floors. Chapel on the second floor, stained-glass windows glowing greens and gold in the Indian summer sunlight. Beside William might be his books, copious marginal comments in his tiny, slanted hand. Much later I found odd notes in his theology textbook about the burning of Columbia. I forget the exact words but something like: It’s night, suddenly I smell smoke, I see flames in the distance, they hung a man at the mill, women are screaming, people are running past me bleeding, the buildings are falling, people running to the state hospital and onto the seminary grounds—devastation is coming—”

  Things began going downhill for him after the first seminary service he conducted, though I didn’t know this until much later. I picture William robing in the hallway, going down the steep stone steps to enter the chapel through its arched wooden doors, up the old oak stairway, walking to the lectern, wearing the gold vestments for the first time, his classmates in reverent quiet, his professors in the back watching. But as he reads the Gospel, almost whispering, he starts coughing. When he looks at the congregation he chokes and can’t stop coughing—his nerves can’t handle the spotlight. He coughs and coughs, clears his throat and stumbles on, his voice hoarse, nearly inaudible as he labors through his sermon, mumbling the final prayers, swallowing the benediction.

  Many days that fall he didn’t come straight home after his classes. He went first to Elmwood Cemetery. Likely he paused beside the cemetery’s new white brick carillon tower, which didn’t yet have its bell installed, then headed to the section containing the graves of Confederate soldiers. I secretly followed him there once, saw him survey the rows of ten-inch concrete markers, many reading “Unknown CSA Soldier.” He stared at a small faded Confederate flag lying on the ground and walked over, apparently to replant it, but abruptly froze, gazed around warily, then looked at his feet with relief—remember how dried magnolia leaves crackle sharply when stepped on? William walked on, clearly at home amid rusted wrought-iron fences and leaning tombstones.

  I didn’t understand his civil war.

  When he didn’t return home at the usual time one night, I grabbed your hand and said, “Let’s go find your daddy,” and we skipped down Lincoln Street, whipping up clouds of leaves. Near Logan School we passed the bedraggled woman with the red wagon; as we went by, she shrank sideways and hissed, “Don’t come over here!” I pulled you close. After she was gone, I explained that the lady was not well. I gazed over my shoulder to see if she was still making her way down the street. I remembered seeing a frightening picture-show set in a mental hospital—The Snake Pit—and wondered what kind of person she’d been before being sent to Bull Street. I kept thinking I should do something for her but I hadn’t a clue what. And to be truthful, the wild look of her frightened me.

  We turned into the cemetery. You hesitated at a magno
lia tree to pick up its oblong pods, and I said something inane about how I’d always thought cemeteries were restful, that was why your father took long walks here. Elmwood Cemetery sat—still sits—on that picturesque bluff above the Broad River; somewhere on its two hundred acres, according to Uta, lies the man mauled to death by an elephant. You and I passed obelisk gravestones, an angel with spread wings, and you ran a hand along the pearly smooth bark of the mimosa trees. Atop a waist-high tombstone sat a stone boy of about seven; he had a plastic yellow rose in his hand. Eventually we headed down a one-lane path and reached the Confederate soldier section. No sign of William, but two other men down the hill stood beside an open grave. One was singing: a clear tenor voice rang out the second verse of the spiritual “He Will Carry You Through.”

  Arrested by the song, I nonetheless took your hand and headed for the road—an open grave was too much reality for a child.

  “Mrs. Copeland?”

  I turned around. A short man in overalls was coming up the hill carrying a shovel.

  When Max reached us, he said it was a truly fine evening. He looked at you and said, “Hello, Lady Lyra.” He mock-bowed and you giggled.

  He leaned his shovel against a tree. “You know, I don’t mind digging graves because I right enjoy the quiet of a cemetery. Good place to think on things.”

  I gazed at the concrete markers. He was digging a grave in the Confederate cemetery.

  He read my look. “It’s for the bodies they took off that ship they found down to Charleston. It don’t bother me none. Everybody should get a decent burial.” A breeze rustled the magnolia leaves and they clacked against each other. “Everybody should get to leave this world with dignity,” he said. “Used to be a Columbia insurance man that poor colored folk paid pennies to every year to get a fancy carriage for their funeral. My granddaddy wanted a big funeral in the worst way. Saved for it for years. Pullin’ his carriage was the grandest white horses you ever seen in your whole born days.”

  I smiled, told you it was okay if you picked up colored leaves, just don’t go where I couldn’t see you. I looked back at Max. “Who was singing?”

  “I confess I do that sometimes.”

  “You have a lovely voice. And what a beautiful song. I remember when gospel music first came on the radio—I was about ten. I loved those songs, I used to go around humming them.” Until an aunt told my stepmother someone should make me stop singing “nigger music.”

  “That tune is very special. Saved my soul, you might say.”

  Max scanned the deepening-purple horizon. “That song came to me in Depression times, when I worked collectin’ bills for a furniture store. One day—times were gettin’ powerful awful—the man what owned the store told me to go get the money owed him or to take people’s things. Or my job was gone. He gave me a list of all these poor folks who didn’t have enough to eat them days, and he wants me to go take their settee and dinner table?”

  “That’s truly terrible.”

  “Yes ma’am, it were. People was living in the city dump behind this very cemetery then, and this fella had some white folks owing him that had lots more money. But I went on down to the Bottom to tell the poor ones—colored and white—that if they didn’t get the money, their things was gone. Were gone, I mean. I was a-walkin’ down the dirt road and I heard this woman singin’, real beautiful, and I saw her in a yard directly, she’s wearin’ an old rag of a dress and hangin’ clothes on the line—them was rags too, you could tell they’d lost everythin’, but her voice was as pure and sweet a thing as I’ll ever know in this world. She had joy all right, she had joy.”

  He smiled. “You’ll never guess in a thousand years what I did. I waited until a big party was comin’ up in a white folks’ house, I’d read in the newspaper when one was gonna be, and I’d go to the rich part of town and march up the steps of a big house. I’d show up all spic and span and tell the man of the house we needed him to pay his bills. The big shots, you shoulda’ seen their faces, they so embarrassed in front of the ladies and gents they’d right away give me their balance in full. When I did this enough, we didn’t need any money from the ones who never knew where their dinner was comin’ from.”

  “Weren’t you afraid someone would tell your boss?”

  “No ma’am, I was not. Like the song says, ‘He will carry you through.’”

  “You’re a very special man, Max. You remind me of people I grew up with.”

  “Well thank you for sayin’ that.” He reached for his shovel again. “If you’ll excuse me, I gotta finish up down there.”

  “I was wondering—you haven’t seen my husband here this evening?”

  “Yes ma’am, I shore did. He walked through here, looked like he was headin’ over to the canal.”

  “The canal? Why would he go there?”

  “If you don’t mind my sayin’ so—Mr. Copeland, he seems like a troubled man. I guess I shouldn’t be sayin’ this, but he needs somethin’, I don’t rightly know what, but somethin’.”

  My shoulders collapsed, I covered my face with my hands. “I don’t know what’s happening anymore,” I sobbed. “Oh dear, forgive me, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be acting this way.”

  “Oh that’s fine enough. It’s a good thing to let your worry go sometimes. My mama—God rest her soul—used to say that when she got an ache in her uneasy place it was best to set to cryin’ about it for a spell. She’d say, my heart’s fallin’ over, Max. But after she cried for a spell, her birdsong always come on back.” Max smiled. “She was fair smart woman.”

  I gazed at him for a second. “She must have been very proud of you.”

  “I don’t know, I can’t remember that she said.”

  “Sometimes people forget to say what they feel. But she was. Trust me.”

  Max looked down for a second; when he looked back up, his eyes moist, he said, “I do odd jobs in Elmwood Park now and again. You need somethin’, no problem for me to stop by. Anytime. No charge, ‘cept you tell me what other books I need to read.”

  I was thanking him just as you came running over brandishing a handful of yellow leaves. Max wiped his hands on his trousers and took your hand and said you were a credit to nature’s loveliness. Then he hobbled back down the hill, singing softly into the autumn breeze, slowly fading into the darkening night.

  Sometimes late at night the history of Elmwood Park rose like steam into the old floorboards of our house and floated into my dreams. Emanations from another time, perhaps warnings. I heard carousel music and brightly painted wooden ponies went round and round, women in large hats perched atop them, scarlet ribbons like kites trailing behind. And yet. Beneath the colored hats and men in stiff collars languished dead bodies. Then history turned round again in my mind and men in 1860s gray uniforms were learning to kill in fairground buildings. Many returned when the buildings were a hospital, men wounded from learning to kill. Later on, medicine for the soldiers was made in those buildings, and then men made munitions, the acrid smell of niter hanging heavy in the oak trees. Guns explode, my God, the buildings are on fire, men are running from war flames, women are running, children—when that February night ends the city is rubble. More bodies slip beneath this soil, the fairground is finally silent in my night flights. Soil is turned by years, by the slow Reconstructive hell, and in time the fairground is rebuilt. And yet. Hidden bodies everywhere you step.

  In my nightmares I saw well-dressed men and women in nineteenth-century clothes walking atop potter’s-field bodies, stepping on hands, faces, legs. Night after night I dreamed Elmwood’s history and woke up with my heart racing. As the days shortened, it sometimes felt like the earth below the house might open and swallow me.

  Many of those darkening fall afternoons you and I visited Uta before William came home. One afternoon I hesitated in her hallway and ran my hand along the closed keyboard of her dusty m
ahogany piano.

  “Louise, I’ve been waiting for you to play this thing.”

  “Oh I couldn’t.”

  You piped up, “Please.”

  I pulled out the piano bench and lifted the keyboard cover. A Stieff piano, known as the poor man’s Steinway. “I haven’t played in a long time.”

  Uta said, “I’d love to hear anything at all, dear. Though the thing’s probably dreadfully out of tune.”

  The piano was out of tune, but when I touched the keys they sang anyway. I played some Mozart and Bach’s “Jesu” and the sentimental love songs from my college days, my fingers tentative at first, but then I began to feel the music as I once had, all those days sitting at the piano underneath my mother’s paintings, drawing circles of light in the air with notes. I loved it that music has no right and wrong—bad and good sound, yes, but no rule about what one should do or what was expected. Here was freedom, escape, this rollicking roll down a childhood hill with shards of dead grass all over my skirt and no one to notice or care that maybe I was too old to roll down hills. In music I was again that teenage girl in baggy pants out in the fields picking pole beans with my cousins, or maybe I was in the glorious deep of a cathedral I’d never seen, where I sat amid sculptures of kindly saints, and there were lighted candles in Gothic wall sconces, this was where I went at that piano, everywhere, a surprise every single—

  I stopped. “I didn’t mean to go on so long.”

  You begged me to keep playing, so I played another melody, paused, said, “I don’t know what that is. My father used to whistle it.”

  “I know,” Uta said thoughtfully. “A mountain song from the 1850s that people started singing in the bad times of the ’30s.” She looked at me. “It’s called ‘I’m Sad and I’m Lonely.’”

  Soon Uta served us “tea,” which in her house was often a small afternoon meal. In her sitting room she placed a tray on a glass-top table, linen cutwork under the glass, and went over to a closet and pulled out a wooden toy. Three-inch figures, a boy and a girl, and a two-foot ladder. When placed atop the ladder, the figures click-clacked and somersaulted to the bottom. Uta told you to please be careful, it was very special.