Boy, Snow, Bird(54)

Got to run, Bird—working this evening. Not porcupine hours, but I’ll finish this letter to you tomorrow.



All right, I’m back. Back with you and Aunt Clara. She grew up in Biloxi; Great-aunt Effie was a live-in cook for a white family called the Adairs, and Aunt Clara laundered their sheets and scrubbed floors for bed and board. Great-aunt Effie would tell her stories about the Whitmans as she worked. All stories about pulling off confidence tricks and getting in with the right people and lording it over other colored folks and getting the last laugh. Aunt Clara had to ask and ask before Great-aunt Effie admitted the unhappy endings—there was Addie Whitman, who spent her life playing servant in various cousins’ houses because she was too dark and “ugly” to be allowed to marry, Addie Whitman who got herself a black tomcat for company. But even that cat, Minnaloushe, kept scratching her and hissing at her. Since Minnaloushe wouldn’t love her, Addie Whitman thought she’d better teach him to fear her, so she forced the cat into a sack and swung the sack over Perdido Pass. She was only going to give him one good dip in the mouth of the river but she lost her balance, fell in, and drowned. Minnaloushe got away and was quietly eating dinner out of a silver dish—don’t ask me why Effie remembers the color of the dish—at a neighbor’s house later on that evening. Or there’s Cass Whitman, who hung herself to show her parents and her brothers exactly what she thought of their having run her “unsuitable” fiancé out of town, or Vince Whitman, who fell in love with a white woman and proposed to her in front of a handful of his closest friends, who were shocked and terrified. She said yes, and she also said she would’ve loved him if he were purple or green or purple striped with green, and he said: “I’m so happy. That’s all I wanted to hear.” Then he led the party in a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” half singing it, half saying it. Try it for yourself, not quite singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”—it changes the words, doesn’t it? At sunset Vince and his new fiancée went for a walk in the park and he shot her dead, then himself. One clean, accurate shot each, like he’d been practicing. Aunt Clara says he must have been out of his mind, but Effie says he was a realist. According to Effie, our dad’s the only Whitman she knows of who’s dared to actually just go ahead and marry a white person. Aunt Clara and I reminded her that it’s legal where we are, and therefore not so daring, but she’s still pretty amazed by our dad, Bird.

I’ve met Great-aunt Effie enough times to go beyond first impressions, and there isn’t a bad bone in that woman’s body. But . . . that girl you mentioned, the one who feels cheated, Great-aunt Effie is like that. She thinks there are treasures that were within her reach, but her skin stole them from her. She thinks she could’ve been somebody. But she is somebody. Somebody who’s chased bullies away with broomsticks, somebody who saved for years so Aunt Clara could go to nursing school without having to ask her mother for the money. She’s somebody who’s reached out to hold Aunt Clara whenever Aunt C felt the world was about to end. She’s somebody Aunt Clara loves, somebody she couldn’t have done without. A woman like Effie Whitman thinking she could’ve been somebody . . . that pushes icicles all the way down my spine.

Great-aunt Effie knows how to make that cobbler that no one can resist, that gratin that pursues people into their dreams and has them sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night for another bite or ten, that cake that can cause a family rift over the last slice. The Adairs were paying her wages lower than any white cook of her standard would accept, but they were pretty good wages for a colored cook. But Great-aunt Effie didn’t get too bitter about that. She says that sometimes she’d stand there watching the Adairs eat and she’d think how lucky this type of white family was that they employed cooks with a proper sense of right and wrong, conscience almost heavy enough to replace a slave collar. Without that proper sense of right and wrong, a colored cook might go astray. Such a cook—ever smiling, ever respectful, ever ready to go the extra mile—such a cook might fatten her employees up . . . not in a hurry, just little by little, fatten them and fatten them, add more and yet more cream to their coffee, add butter even (they’d say the coffee tasted too rich at first, but then they’d grow to like it), vile creatures that they were, accepting the ceaseless toil of others as their birthright. And when the family was too fat to run, this cook run astray might just take a brisk, ten-minute trip around the house, shooting every member of the family dead with the firearms they kept for their own protection. Aunt Clara and I said the exact same thing when Great-aunt Effie told us this little fantasy of hers: Jesus! And Great-aunt Effie told us in a very shocked tone of voice not to take the Lord’s name in vain.

Hey—at least you’ve got the Novaks to fall back on (as you reminded me with that “N” you threw into your last letter), but the Whitmans and the Millers are the product of generations of calculated breeding, whether they’ll admit it or not. The Whitmans have married to refine a look, they keep a close eye on skin tone and hair texture. They draw strict distinctions between degrees of color—quadroon, octoroon—darkest to lightest. But they can’t stop a face like Clara’s or Effie’s rising up every now and again to confront them. And who can speak for the Millers? My other grandma, the one I don’t share with you, sometimes says a little something about the Millers being “sensible people” who’ve made certain choices in order to remain comfortable just as any other “sensible” people would and what does any of it matter now that the world’s changing? Agnes is a silly old woman, Bird, and it’s hard for me to have any respect for her or for Olivia, it’s hard for me to even stand the sound of their voices on the telephone. I’ve grown up around people whose families have lived their lives without trying to invent advantages—some of them have marched and staged sit-ins, others have just lived with their heads held high. And what about my mom? If she was alive, would she have a cabinet full of “treatments” for her hair and skin? Would she have very delicately led me to believe that there’s something about us Whitmans that isn’t quite nice, something we’ve got to keep under control? Aunt Clara’s never said anything about how my mother might have felt about me. She’s been careful not to go down the “If only your mother could see you now” path. She doesn’t need to, anyway. It just so happens that I carry my mother around in three LP records. She sings and tells me she loves me, she’s proud of me, she’s right by my side. The records are wearing out and I’m not rushing the process or trying to delay it, I’m just letting it happen. Her voice skips and squeaks; she’s started to sound unsure of what she’s saying. All I can tell from those recordings is that my mom wanted me to remember the sound of her voice. I may or may not have hated my own face sometimes. I may or may not have spent time thinking of ways to spoil it somehow. (Maybe that answers your question about being “beautiful.”) But I’m slowly coming around to the view that you can’t feel nauseated by the Whitmans and the Millers without feeling nauseated by the kind of world that’s rewarded them for adapting to it like this. In the meantime I’m letting Agnes and Olivia think I don’t visit them because I’m scared of your mom. Are they good to you? Tell me. You can tell me.