“Did you know my parents?” I ask awkwardly.
“My father owned Page Drugs.”
Mrs. Washington clears her throat.
“Mr. Calvin was a good man, ‘fore he took so sick. He sure was.”
“Sarah, here, unfortunately never knew either of them,” I say. Our mission here is a monumental invasion of her privacy. What happened half a century ago between her and a man whose memory I have little knowledge of or connection with is none of our business. Yet, my curiosity is growing. But if she clams up, I won’t pry.
“That’s too bad,” Mrs. Washington clucks automatically.
“It sure is.”
I do not think I will get a direct answer from her and ask, “Did you know my grandfather Frank Page? At one time he owned a bunch of property on Cleveland Street.”
Mrs. Washington begins to pick at a thread on her couch.
“Lucy sent you over here to as’t these questions, didn’t she?”
“She told me a story or two,” I admit. If I had a decent bone in my body, I’d get up and make us leave. This old woman is afraid of us. If this had occurred in the last twenty years, surely her attitude would be different. She could have gotten child support out of him, at least. In fact, today, the state of Arkansas would have demanded she divulge his identity and then brought suit to recoup welfare payments to her.
“You want your child to hear?” she asks, her voice low and trembling.
I glance at Sarah, who, as if I had cued her, says, “It’s all right, Mrs. Washington. If you don’t want to talk, I understand But I would like to hear if it won’t upset you. I want to know my history. I don’t know very much about my mother’s family in South America and probably never will. Daddy’s family is all I have, and all I know is that my grandfather was mentally ill and hung himself in the state hospital. I don’t know what his parents were like.
All Daddy tells me is that his grandfather owned several businesses in Bear Creek and didn’t get along with his son. I want to know more than that, and I think Daddy does, too.”
I nod, but find that I am thinking that Sarah is not quite telling her the truth. Until now, I thought her motive was to try to document a fifty-year-old case of rape in the cause of feminism. Yet, by her questions at the cemetery, she wants to know more than I gave her credit for.
The old lady smooths her dress, avoiding our eyes.
“It was such a long time ago.”
Sarah slides off the couch and places herself at Mrs.
Washington’s feet. Her voice almost a whisper, Sarah asks, “Did my great-granddaddy hurt you?”
Mrs. Washington stares over Sarah’s head at me and replies in a firm voice, “Why, Mr. Frank, he never jump on me or nothin’ like that. He’d come by and say he was checkin’ on his property or to get the rent, but I know he was comin’ by to see me. Momma be off cleanin’ white folks’ houses, and I’d be takin’ care of my little sister. We didn’t have no daddy. Least not one who lived with us.”
Sarah asks, “How old were you, ma’am?”
Mrs. Washington looks down at Sarah to gauge her answer. ““Bout sixteen when Mr. Frank started comin’ round. I was a pretty girl. Least that what folks said. Mr.
Frank, he said so, too.”
“Do you know about how old he was?” Sarah prompts.
Mrs. Washington squints at me and answers, “Mr. Frank was a full-grown man. Thirty, maybe.”
I nod but do not speak, afraid if I do, she will stop talking. Each time she uses the words, “Mr. Frank,” I feel sick. Even as a child, I was called by the man who swept the store for my father “Mr. Gideon.” Damn, underneath all that passive behavior, how they must have hated us! I wish this old woman were angry, but either she is masking it well, or time has erased the bitterness it seems she ought to have toward my grandfather.
“What was my great-grandfather like?” Sarah asks.
“He was all right. When he started visitin’ reg’lar, he’d forget to collect all the rent. Say he’d git it next time. After Calcutta was born, he never as’t for nothin’.”
“Calcutta was his daughter?” Sarah says. I realize how skillful a questioner she is. She should be the lawyer in the family, not her old man.
“Couldn’ta been another daddy,” Mrs. Washington says, a melancholy expression on her weathered face.
“My mama be real strict, but white folks kinda do what they want. I liked Mr. Frank. He never meant no harm.
Jus’ a reg’lar man.”
Sarah cuts her eyes at me to make sure I heard that last remark. For good reason my choice of women hasn’t always pleased her. I got high marks for Rainey; she will like Amy, too, if she gives her a chance.
“Did he ever acknowledge that Calcutta was his daughter?”
Mrs. Washington is silent for a long moment.
“After he seen how light Cal was,” she says, “he quit comin’ ‘round to the house. Not even to git the rent money. Mama said he got a li’l shy after that.”
Sarah begins to pull at her hair. She asks, “Where was your daughter born?”
“In the house,” Mrs. Washington says, her tone matter of-fact.
“Wudn’t no hospital in Bear Creek then.”
Sarah knows Marty and I were born in the Baptist Hospital in Memphis.
“Did you see a doctor before or after your daughter was born?”
“Never did,” Mrs. Washington says ruefully.
“Mama didn’t have no money for that. When I had a bad toothache once that wouldn’t quit. Mama took me on the train to a colored dentist over in Memphis. White dentists didn’t like the colored even if you had money.”
Her cheeks now blazing, Sarah asks, “Do you remember if the house your mother rented from him was in good condition?”
Mrs. Washington has come to terms with her life in a way Sarah will never understand. The philosophy of stoicism is not in my daughter’s bones. Patting at the back of her white head, Mrs. Washington says, “It was all right, but it didn’t have no toilet. Still had to go out back.
It was hot, too.”
I wince at the thought of the house. When I was fourteen and received my restricted driver’s license, each week I was allowed to drive a basket of laundry to a house in one of the black sections of Bear Creek. Lula Mae (I never knew her last name) did her ironing in the front room of her house, but all I really remember is the stifling heat in the room, the ironing board, and her asthmatic wheezing. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house each time the feeling was so oppressive. How could people live in such poverty? At that age I never made any connection between our lives and theirs.
Sarah has fallen silent, a sign that she has begun to brood. I will hear a sermon on the way home. Mrs. Washington volunteers that when Cal was about three, my grandfather sold their house to someone else, and she rarely saw him again. He didn’t send her money, see the child, or acknowledge them in any way. Again, she doesn’t seem perturbed about the lack of support. After some urging from me, she adds a few details about her own life. She was married when she was eighteen to a mechanic who ran off after she had four children by him.
Until five years ago when her arthritis got too bad, she cleaned houses for a living.
Mrs. Washington confirms that Calcutta is Lucy’s mother, and I calculate Frank Page became a father more than sixty years ago. Unlike many blacks who left the county to go North to find work, the family has stayed in eastern Arkansas.
“They started coming back these last few years. It ain’t no better up there now, and it be a little worse.” Though it is not warm in the house, she picks up a fan from the table by her chair and stirs the air in front of her face. She seems a little breathless now, and I suspect we have tired her out. She does not object when I announce we have to be going. As we stand to leave, Mrs.
Washington, nodding at Sarah, tells me, “She’s a pretty girl.” It sounds more like a warning than a compliment.
