Home Fires

17

A trying time is no time to quit trying.

—Jehovah Pentecostal

Cyl soon returned with Lashanda, who had a flick of meringue on the tip of her little nose. For the child, getting changed had been a simple matter of sliding a pair of yellow shorts on over her bathing suit and stepping into a pair of yellow jelly sandals. She trailed an oversized yellow T-shirt across the grass and seemed too tired to walk.

Ralph Freeman swung her up on his broad shoulders so that a leg dangled down on each side of his chest and motioned to his son, who had just stripped off his rugby shirt and was ready to follow the other kids into the pond. The boy immediately put on a typical teenage face.

“Aw, Dad” do we hafta leave now? I didn’t even get to swim yet.

I was amused to see that a preacher could be as torn as any father between the needs and desires of his children. Seven-year-old Lashanda was clearly exhausted and in bad need of a nap after such an emotional experience, while thirteen-year-old Stan was enjoying the swing of things.

“I don’t mean to interfere,” Cyl said hesitantly, “but if your son wants to stay a little longer, I could drop him off on my way home.”

Stan’s face lit up. “Can I, Dad? Please?”

“Are you sure it won’t be too much trouble?” Ralph asked her.

“Positive. Just so Stan can tell me where you live. Cotton Grove, right?”

“Right,” said Stan. “It’s only two blocks off Main Street on this side of town.”

“No problem then,” Cyl said.

With a paternal injunction to behave himself and to come as soon as Ms. DeGraffenried called, Ralph thanked Cyl for her kindness and me for my family’s hospitality. Then he headed out to the parking area with his daughter clinging drowsily to his head.

“Nice man,” I said, watching them go.

“For a black man?” Cyl asked sweetly.

Stan had gone racing down the pier and we were alone for the moment beneath the hot July sun.

I felt as if I’d been spat on. “Excuse me?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I spoke out of turn.”

“But that’s what you think?”

“I said I was sorry, Your Honor.” She turned to walk away.

“Oh, no, no, no,” I said hotly and grabbed her arm. “You’re not getting out of it like that. Forget I’m a judge. When did I ever give you a reason to lay something like that on me?”

“Woman to woman?” She looked me in the eye. “All right then. You show your prejudices almost every court session.”

“Prejudices?” I was stung by the injustice of her accusation. “I bend over backwards to be fair.”

An eyebrow lifted scornfully. “Right. You bend so far backwards when it’s a black defendant that you go looking for mitigating circumstances even where there aren’t any. You never hold black youths to the same high standard you hold whites. Oh, you’re not as blatant about it as Harrison Hobart or Perry Byrd used to be, remember? Remember how they’d give suspended sentences if one black man killed another? Black-on-black crimes never got their attention. For them, it had to be black-on-white to put the law in play and then they came down like an avalanche.”

“Now wait just a damn minute—”

She brushed past my protest. “I said you’re not as bad as they were, but it’s still condescending that you’re always tougher on white boys than black ones. You’re not doing them any favors when you don’t hold them as accountable.”

“How can you say that?” I argued. “I treat everybody the same.”

“Ha! Maybe twice a month you’ll hand out the sentences I recommend for a black offender,” she said. “But if the person’s white—”

“If anyone’s condescending here, it’s you,” I said hotly. “I don’t follow your recommendations because they’re consistently tougher than for whites. Go check your records. Look at the crime, not the color. See what you ask when it’s a black kid as opposed to a white for the same offense. I’ll bet you dinner at the Irregardless that I’m a hell of a lot more evenhanded than you are.”

“You’re on,” she said with answering heat.

I was still annoyed enough to slip the needle in. “You ever consider that maybe it’s your Uncle Isaac you’re trying to punish for running out on you?”

She glared at me. “What do you know about Isaac?”

I shrugged. “Just what people have told me. That you loved him, that he got in trouble, and that you were devastated when he left and never kept in touch.”

The belligerence suddenly went out of Cyl and she turned away. But not before I’d seen her eyes glaze with tears.

“I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly. And I really was. But Dwight and my brothers are always accusing me of nosiness and I have to admit that it was curiosity that made me add, “Did Wallace Adderly tell you how to find him?”

“You may not have noticed,” she said acidly, “but Wallace Adderly took advantage of Lashanda’s accident to leave before I could pin him down.”

I looked around blankly, but it was true. I couldn’t see him anywhere in the crowd, although I did spot Reverend Ligon’s tall figure standing in the shade of the tents with Louise Parker and Harvey Underwood, the president and major shareholder in Colleton County’s largest independently owned bank. Harvey had already personally guaranteed a low-interest loan to help rebuild the church. As Mount Olive’s treasurer, Louise had set up a special account at the bank to handle the donations that were coming in from all over the country.

“Let me ask you something,” Cyl said abruptly. “What was it like to grow up with all those brothers worshipping the ground you walked on?”

“Worshipping? My brothers?” I started to laugh and then I remembered the things Maidie had told me about Cyl’s childhood. “They didn’t worship, but I guess they did look out for me,” I said as honestly as I could. “And I guess I always knew I could count on them.”

“And what if you’d had only one brother and then he left and never came back?”

“Yeah,” I said, seeing her point.

“Okay, then.” She nodded and again started to walk away, but I followed.

“Look, Cyl, I don’t know how we got off on the wrong foot, but I meant what I said the other day—if you ever need to talk, I’m here.”

Again the skeptical eyebrow. “I could be your token black friend? As in Some Of My Best Friends Are Black?”

“If that’s what you really want. And I can play Little White Missy From De Big House if it’ll help with that chip on your shoulder.”

“Oh, spare me your do-good liberal tolerance,” she snapped. “I don’t need it.”

“Yes, you do!” I snapped back. “North Carolina may not be a black paradise but without a lot of do-good liberals trying to make things more equitable, you’d have had to take the freedom train north to get an education and you certainly wouldn’t be prosecuting white offenders in a court of law here.”

“And how long do we have to keep thanking you for letting us sit at the table?”

I’d thought—I’d hoped—things were getting better, yet here I was, looking at Cyl across a gulf that seemed to widen with every word.

“It’s a no-win situation for me, isn’t it? If I try to be friends, I’m either patronizing you or assuaging my own conscience; and if I don’t, I’m a bigot. You get to have it both ways? What’s so fair about that?”

“And you’ve been a judge how long?” she asked sardonically.

I laughed. It was the first crack in her armor.

“It started the summer I was four, when my cousins gave me the paper bag test and I flunked,” Cyl said.

We had fixed ourselves plates of barbecue and were seated at one of the back tables. The first wave of guests had crested and Daddy and the rest of my family could handle host duties while I ate.

“What’s the paper bag test?” I asked.

“Take an ordinary brown paper bag from any grocery store,” she said, pulling apart a hushpuppy with her beautifully manicured fingernails. They were painted the same shade of coral as her soft, full-skirted cotton sundress. “Is your skin lighter or darker? You’ve seen my grandmother?”

I nodded, my mouth full of barbecue.

“And heard the rhymes? ‘Light, bright—all right./Honey brown—stick around./Jet black—get back.’”

“I’ve heard similar versions, yes.”

“All of my mother’s people were as light as Grandma. All except me. And her baby brother Isaac. He said we were the only true Africans in the family and we’d have to stick together.”

She broke off. “This is crazy. Why am I telling you this?”

“My mother died when I was eighteen,” I said.

“But your father didn’t turn around the next month and marry a woman with three blond-headed Miss America daughters who sneered at your hair and put you down because your eyes are blue and not green.”

I added a little coleslaw to the barbecue already on my fork. “I take it your stepsisters could pass the paper bag test?”

“They could almost do milk,” Cyl said with a sour laugh. “I begged my dad to let me come live with Grandma, but he’d promised my mother—” She shrugged. “Just as well. While New Bern may not be the state’s center of intellectual aspirations, at least my stepmother did believe in education. Grandma tried the best she could, but she was fighting against a culture here with lower expectations than New Bern, especially for its men. Even Snake Man couldn’t get them stirred up and God knows he tried.”

“Adderly?”

“That’s what Isaac and I called him. He’d given himself a long African name that meant son of the snake god or something like that, but people kept remembering what it meant, not how to pronounce it, so by the time he got to us, it was just Snake. You should have seen him in those days. Bone skinny. Afro out to here—” Her graceful fingers sketched a balloon of hair around her own head. “—and army surplus fatigues. Don’t forget, I was just a child back then, so all this time, I never connected the Wallace Adderly you see on television with the NOISE activist who zipped into my life and right back out again. Not until he popped up again on television after that first church burned.”

“So that’s why you were so upset in my office!”

She nodded and took a sip of iced tea. “Realizing who he was brought it all back again as if it’d just happened. Adderly was here only two or three weeks when he got a message that some of the brothers were going up to Boston. A federal court had ordered desegregation of the South Boston schools by forced busing and the Klan was supposed to be there, so NOISE planned a show of strength, too.”

“And your uncle joined them?” I asked, slipping Ladybelle the second hushpuppy on my plate so I wouldn’t be tempted. She gulped it down in one swallow and turned hopeful doggy eyes to Cyl, who heartlessly finished off the last of her hushpuppies without sharing.

“It was a rough time for Isaac,” she said slowly, as she pushed her plate aside and laced her slender brown fingers around the red plastic drink cup on the table before her.

“I didn’t understand all that was going on. Grandma had to tell me some of it later. Basically what it boils down to is that a lot of his pigeons came home to roost that summer. He’d gotten a deacon’s daughter pregnant at the same time he was sneaking off to see a white girl with a mean brother.”

“Anybody I know?”

“I forget her name. His was Buck. Buck Ferguson.”

I vaguely remember a slatternly tenant family by that name that used to farm with Uncle Rufus before he got tired of bailing father and son out of jail. “Peggy Rose Ferguson?”

“I guess.”

“Didn’t her brother die in prison?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. Isaac said he saw him shoot a man in the arm over a spilled beer. You can imagine what he’d have done if he’d caught Isaac in the backseat of a car with that flower of Southern white womanhood he called his sister.”

“Not that Isaac was any symbol of pure black manhood himself.” Regret shadowed her voice. “He had a temper and he’d punched out a white boy, broke his nose. There’s still a warrant for his arrest down at the courthouse. He had so much rage in him. He wanted to marry the girl who was carrying his baby, but her parents sent her up North. They were going to make her give the baby up for adoption.”

“Did she?”

“Who knows? She never came home again. I used to fantasize that they found each other up there and ran away together.”

“Maybe they did,” I said.

Cyl shook her head. “He would never have stayed away all these years without calling or writing. No, he and Snake went to Boston and I figure he either got into another fight or was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I tried to trace him when I got out of law school, but after twenty years? And there was so much violence in Boston that summer. I used to think—”

“Hey now!” said Ellis Glover in his heartiest voice. “What’s the two prettiest ladies at this barbecue doing sitting over here with such serious faces? I’ve been challenged to a game of horseshoes and I need a partner.”

“Not me,” Cyl said and quickly stood up. “Last time I tried, I broke three fingernails. Besides, I want to talk to Mr. Ligon before he leaves.”

I could cheerfully have used Ellis’s neck as a horseshoe stake at that moment for interrupting the first real conversation I’d ever had with Cyl. Would she retreat behind her armor again, embarrassed that she’d opened up to me? Pretend it never happened?

I didn’t get a chance to find out that day. By the time Ellis and I beat two pairs of challengers and were then sat down by a third, Cyl had rounded Stan up and left.

And yeah, I broke a thumbnail.