The Almost Sisters(69)

Cody Mack ignored me. Well, almost. “So here’s the white kids swimming with all these little niggers now, nigging up their nice white swimming hole.” He did not address me directly, but the repetitions were aimed at me.

One of the boys, James Beecham, said, “I don’t . . . I . . .” But his voice was quavery and soft, and Cody Mack grabbed a bottle of Dawn dish detergent and talked over him.

“Uh-oh, look! Here comes the KKK!” He blopped some Dawn into the water, and instantly the floating bits of pepper shifted in a chemical reaction, moving faster than displacement called for, zooming to the edge of the bowl. The salt sat mostly placid at the bottom.

Cody Mack and the other boys snorted and laughed, except James Beecham, who looked as green as I felt. I hated to make eye contact with him, because I knew, we both knew, that we should have done more, said more, stopped him. But James was a skinny worm of a kid with bad skin. I was a Birch, but I was only here in the summer. These were high-school sophomores who played JV baseball and who didn’t care what girls said, especially not flat-chested, dorky, middle-school ones. We neither of us spoke again. Our shared silence made it hard to meet his gaze.

I met Cody’s instead and saw a look on his face that was being echoed, twenty-five years later, on his granny’s. That donkey lip, rising in entitlement. Cody acted like he owned First Baptist, a building that my family had raised to celebrate a faith that called for love and mercy. That word and all the history behind it gave him power, though. His sneering mouth, smeared with Wattie’s fudge, had been glad to say that word in front of me, especially, just as Martina liked saying it to me now.

In this frozen moment, Birchville split in two around me. No, more than that. It wasn’t Birchville only. I saw there was a second South.

My whole life I’d only seen one. I loved my South, though I could see how it was broken, plagued still with the legacies of slavery and war and segregation. History and a thousand unseen walls divided up the territory, so that we had a black Baptist church and a white one, and the narrow aisle between the color-coded lunch tables at the high school was invisibly a chasm filled with dragons. Still, I always thought my homeland was a single place. I was wrong.

The South was like that optical-illusion drawing of the duck that is at the same time a rabbit. I’d always see the duck first, his round eye cheery and his bill seeming to smile. But if I shifted my gaze, the duck’s bill morphed into flattened, worried ears. The cheery eye, reversed, held fear, and I could see only a solemn rabbit. The Souths were like that drawing. Both existed themselves, but they were so merged that I could shift from one and find myself inside the other without moving.

The South I’d been born into was all sweet tea and decency and Jesus, and it was a real, true place. I had grown up inside it, because my family lived there. Wattie’s family owned real estate there, too. The Second South was always present, though, and in it decency was a thin, green cover over the rancid soil of our dark history. They were both always present, both truly present in every square inch, in every space, in both Baptist churches, at both tables. Martina Mack had moved me from my South into hers, and yet we stood on the same ground.

The Macks were born and raised inside the Second South, and they lived there all their lives, as if there were no other. Their gaze never shifted. They never saw the duck, or if they started to, they closed their eyes or lied about it. And me? I did not want to see that ruined, bad rabbit.

I dropped the shotgun shell because I needed both hands pressed protectively against my belly now. In the middle of this endless, moon-drenched night, I had stepped into the Second South and seen that my South was a luxury I did not know I had. I could pass through this second one on and off all day and rarely feel the difference.

For the first time, I understood that I was pregnant with a boy who would always know. Right now, secreted inside me, my son was protected by the lining of my own white hide. I could drift along, seeing only the South’s best version of itself if I so chose. But once my son was out, brown-skinned and himself? He wouldn’t have that choice.

I had known I would not want to raise this boy in Birchville, but I had not understood why. Not in this deep-down angry way that made my chin come up and kindled a righteous mother fury in my belly.

The Second South was coming after Wattie, too. Wattie who was welcomed at First Baptist by some folks, loved and valued. But there were pews, a lot of them, whose bases were planted in the second one. They tolerated Wattie as an appendage attached to Birchie. The people in those pews could never quite remember that Wattie wasn’t—had never been—Birchie’s employee. If they could shift us, draw all eyes to the place where Wattie was nothing but that word, they could take her down. Wattie could be lost.

Only I knew exactly how deep Wattie’s complicity had been sixty years ago, but everybody knew that she helped Birchie move the trunk. She had stolen my rental car and wrecked it trying to protect Birchie. Birchie was the one most in the wrong, but Wattie was vulnerable in ways Birchie had never been, that I would never be, and it was this injustice that shook me.

“Come after her, then, you racist trash,” I said now, and tilted my chin up to match Martina’s insolent angle. I thought of Wattie’s vehement insistence that her sons and their families not come back to Birchville now, juxtaposed with Martina Mack, het up enough to aim a salt-loaded shotgun at well-to-do white children. What would she aim at quick-tempered Stephen if he came to his mother’s defense? What would Cody do, with a badge to back his gun? Wattie had seen where this was headed long before I had, and she’d decided to keep her family out of the line of fire. She was placing her frail, soft body between her sixty-something, grown-ass sons and trouble. Motherhood, it seemed, was a lifelong gig, and I felt my heart swell to bursting pride at her valor. She’d meant to face the Second South alone, but now I’d been unblinded. “She’ll take you down. We all will. And don’t you dare think we’ll fight alongside Wattie because we own some piece of her. She isn’t ours. She’s us.”