blacks on the bottom. The evidence seems all too apparent. Yet, I dare not voice it, for fear Sarah will again tar and feather me with her own labels.
“But it was worse than that,” she insists.
“It wasn’t just stigma and forced separation in schools and in public.
They were exploited, cheated, even still being lynched in your parents’ generation.”
“True,” I concede, not wanting to argue over the details.
As I stand erect, my knees snap, and I feel dizzy. At my age, seeing my parents’ names so permanently etched in stone has made me aware of how much of my life I’ve already lived.
“But individual relationships weren’t all like that. You can care about somebody even if the relationship is based on paternalism. As soon as my mother got to know your mother, she forgot about her skin and loved her as much as I did. We weren’t as bad as it seems today.”
Leading me to the car left on the side of the road that runs through the cemetery, Sarah says over her shoulder, “Is that how you justify what your grandfather did?”
I sigh, knowing the situation is impossible.
“I don’t know what he did,” I say, catching up to her.
“That’s why we’re here.”
We drive into town, and as usual I am struck by the sad shabbiness of the buildings on Main Street. When I was a child, the town didn’t seem so poor. In a rectangular park that centers the town the most prominent structures are a statue of Robert E. Lee and a concrete platform used by politicians and musical groups. Underneath it are four separate bathrooms, an architectural reminder of segregation.
Here, almost in this exact spot, I recall seeing Governor Orval Faubus as he waited to be introduced at a campaign rally. It was after he had become famous the world over for stopping nine black children from entering Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957 and term porarily defying the federal government. Squatting on his heels with his coat slung over his shoulder, he seemed totally at ease with himself. He maintained he had acted to prevent violence. We are all politically correct, even our rascals.
“Do you want to stop and see anybody else while we’re here?” Sarah asks, inspecting my hometown carefully as if she were considering buying some property here.
“No,” I say, more abruptly than I intend.
“That won’t be necessary.”
Sarah, stopping at the first of Bear Creek’s two lights in the downtown area, says scornfully, “Would that embarrass you?”
She knows it would if I were truthful about the purpose of our visit, but not for the first time I am forced to confront my own cowardice.
“I didn’t come back to Bear Creek to be gossiped about. And that’s what would happen if I told people why we’re here, and you know it.”
“Why didn’t you say so when we were driving over?”
she asks.
She is being deliberately disingenuous.
“I thought it was understood.”
She says archly, “Being partly African myself, I’m not ashamed of what I’ll find.”
She sounds so superior and sanctimonious I want to gag.
“I wish I were worthy to be in your company,” I hiss, retreating to my usual weapons of guilt and sarcasm.
“But I haven’t quite achieved your status as a moral saint.”
My scathing comments surprise me and hush her into a shocked silence. I didn’t know I felt so edgy’ about this visit. I apologize, but my offering is understandably met with a hostile glare. Typically having left at the office the address Lucy gave me, I find a Fina station and a tele phone booth and direct Sarah to stop. Sure enough, the name of Mayola Washington is in the tiny Bear Creek phone book at #7 Terrace. I should telephone and warn her we are coming over, but if I’d had that kind of basic courage and decency, I’d have called her from home over four hours ago.
From behind her opaque sunglasses in the Blazer, Sarah protests, “You’re going to upset her just dropping in out of the blue this way.”
Why am I doing this? I can live without this family re union.
“Her granddaughter called her to say we were coming. If the story is true, our showing up at her door won’t surprise her at all.”
Accustomed to my intransigence, Sarah shrugs. Others have tried to civilize me and have failed. Why should she be successful? I turn down Utah and notice that at least the streets have been paved in the black neighborhoods.
When I was growing up, gravel was the main surface.
Separate has never meant equal in much of anything over here.
The Bear Creek housing development for the elderly is actually pleasant. Unlike Needle Park, there is no spilled trash in anyone’s yard or junked cars on the streets; I don’t see half the apartments boarded up or burned out.
Trees and flowers flourish in front of the redbrick apartments and it is possible to imagine living here. Since these are units for the elderly, there are no children about;
in Needle Park, the children play inside because of the drug dealers and violence outside.
With Sarah at my side nervously tugging at her hair (my anxiety is catching), I knock at the door, and soon a light-skinned elderly black woman opens it.
“Ma’am, I’m Gideon Page and this is my daughter, Sarah,” I introduce myself, my voice scratchy with anxiety.
“Your granddaughter, Lucy Cunningham, gave me some information I’d like to discuss with you.”
At the mention of Lucy’s name, the old lady’s face softens and she invites us in.
“Lucy said you might be callin’.” Her voice is high and fragile but not as reedy as some old folks’ get. She is wearing a flowery ironed dress, as if she might be expecting company; perhaps her great-grandchildren are coming over later to eat leftover turkey. Sarah and I are invited to sit on a green sofa while our hostess sits down on an uncomfortable-looking rocker across from us. The living room is modestly furnished but has a homey touch supplied by obvious family portraits (I recognize my client and his family in one snapshot) and needlework on the walls, and a weathered Bible on the coffee table in front of us. On a nineteen inch Sears model TV in a corner grim-faced actors battle through inane dialogue on a videotape of The Guiding Light. She offers us something to drink but I wouldn’t dream of putting this old lady to trouble and decline for both of us. Sure I wouldn’t.
“You’re the lawyer for Dade,” the old lady says softly.
“You think he done what they say?”
“He says he didn’t,” I hedge.
“He seems like a very fine young man to me.”
“That’s the truth,” she replies, chuckling mechanically.
She squints at Sarah.
“Why, this child looks like one of my nieces!”
Sarah smiles selfconsciously while I explain, “Her mother was from South America. They had slaves from Africa brought there, too.”
“South America!” she marvels as if I had announced something profound.
“Can you imagine?”
Mrs. Washington and I are barely connecting. This old lady is as nervous as I am, I realize. She is an oldfashioned Negro, one to whom the civil rights movement never was very convincing. Never mind all the speeches and legislation; white folks still have the say-so, and it is no use to pretend otherwise. What must she have been like fifty years ago? Though she is too old and wrinkled now to be called pretty, I have little doubt that she was at tractive as a girl. Even now, she has a firm chin and healthy skin. She has a Caucasian nose, no work of art it self, but preferable, at least in white eyes, to the broad nostrils characteristic of most African-Americans. Underneath the cotton dress is a bosom that seems to have defied time and logic. She has something of a stomach to go with it, but nothing that explains the mountains above it. Is this what attracted my grandfather?
