“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
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—”
