“I don’t like the music they play these days,” said Mama.
“I agree with you, Grace,” said Cousin Polly. “It’s just a hooting and a carrying-on!”
“Did you visit the museum?” Daddy asked Martha.
“Unfortunately not,” said Martha. “Matt dragged me away just as I was about to dash in to see the Gauguin murals.”
“Well, I brought you to dinner here,” said Matthew. “This is a kind of museum.”
“That’s a nice thing to say about your own home,” said Mama.
“It’s true,” said Matthew.
“Mrs. Burrell,” said Martha to Cousin Polly, “Matt tells me that your family comes from Virginia. What part?”
Cousin Polly blinked and laid down her fork. In spite of her age, she was tall and erect and had a lovely length of bone in her wrists, her legs, and her gnarled fingers. The skin of her arms had a corded and wrinkled overlay that reminded me of barnacles, but her face was remarkably unlined—probably because like many colored women of her generation, she was vain of her skin and protected it from the sun. Her eyes were covered with a bluish film, and when she looked at me and spoke in her dry southern voice, I felt that I was talking to a living fossil, one of the Paleozoic creatures that are periodically discovered in deep waters.
“I was raised in Suffolk,” she said. “That’s by the North Carolina state line. My daddy was a blacksmith, and we had a farm. Papa was born back in slavery times, but he was free and his daddy was free because his granddaddy was a white man. I didn’t come to live in Philadelphia until nineteen and twenty-two.”
“That’s fascinating,” said Martha. “Matt, you should do a black history project on your family. It would be incredible!”
“I don’t like that word ‘black,’ ” said Cousin Polly. “Colored folks used to think that word was an insult!”
“It’s what kids are saying now,” said Daddy hastily. “Martha didn’t mean any insult. By the way, Cousin Polly, didn’t you have a sister named Martha?”
The bluish, rheumed eyes grew thoughtful. “We used to call her Mattie. She married a big, stout fellow named Hubley Turner.”
Mama had signaled to me to clear the plates, and now she was cutting into a large peach cobbler. “Martha, your name is unusual for your background, isn’t it?” she said to Martha Greenfield.
Martha laughed. “Do you mean that Martha is an unusual name for a Jewish girl?” she said, giving my mother a mischievous, sparkling glance. “I’ll tell you the family legend about how I got it. My father’s people came here from Odessa in the twenties, and my father, who was a child, was so excited by America that he vowed to name his children after George and Martha Washington. My brother escaped, but here I am!”
“And how does your family like the American boy you’ve chosen?”
I groaned. Matthew threw down his fork. “Will you lay off, Ma?”
Daddy sent Mama a warning look, but Mama’s face was set like stone under her curly dark hair. “I suppose I can ask a simple question if I want to,” she said. “I expect that Martha’s parents are probably wondering the same thing that we are: why it is that their children can’t stick to their own kind.”
Matthew put his hands on the edge of the table and pushed his chair back so that the ice rattled in all the glasses. He was sitting directly underneath the faint water stain left on the dining-room ceiling from the time the tub in the Green Bathroom overflowed. The ceiling had been repainted so that only a shadow of the stain remained, but years before, when it was fresh, Matthew and I had lain on our backs on the dining-room rug and pretended that the wavering brownish line outlined an unknown continent, peopled with dinosaurs and comic-book heroes. We were explorers, trekking across lava fields and through swamps filled with pterodactyls.
Matthew was talking to Mama in a fierce voice that threatened, horribly, to become a shout or a tearful howl. “I don’t believe you!” he said. “You are just incredible! You and Daddy spend all of your lives sending us to white schools and teaching us to live in a never-never land where people of all colors just get along swell, and then when the inevitable happens you start talking like a goddam Lester Maddox!”
“Shame on you, swearing at your mother like that!” said Cousin Polly.
“I know what I think is right,” said Mama in a wobbly voice. In fact it was clear that at that moment she knew nothing at all. The air was filled with a sense of mistakes being made right and left, and with a dreadful muddled array of passions.
Daddy had lit a cigarette, something he usually never did during meals, and now he stubbed it out on the edge of his dessert plate—something else he never did—and leaned forward, the bald spot on his head glistening under the lights. He said, “Matthew, your mother and I are simply concerned about your happiness and Martha’s happiness. You two are very young, and the world is not what we all would like it to be.”
“And I suppose you’d like me to wait around till it improves! You’re a fine advocate for civil rights—like to set up segregated facilities in your own house!” Matthew’s voice was
