We kept up our motor excursions even after I stopped crying in the night. It’s il egal now to drive a car with a three-year-old in your lap, her little palms on the wheel, but this stil remains one of my fondest memories. I can stil remember stretching my hands to grip the steering wheel, Daddy saying, “There you go, Buttercup. There you go.” When I was twelve, it was time to take things to the next level.
Although the state wouldn’t al ow it until I was sixteen, I was ready to drive. Daddy took me for my first lessons at the Ford factory off 1-75. We went on Sundays, when the almost three thousand union workers were home sleeping in, leaving the massive parking lot almost empty.
“You know what?” he said to me on our way to my first lesson. “Driving is the most important thing you can know how to do. When I was a boy, I used to drive for white people, the same white people that my mama cleaned for. At first, when I was fifteen, sixteen, I used to wish I was the one riding in the backseat. I could picture myself walking out of the school building and there being a man in a hat, waiting to take me somewhere.”
“Where did you want to go?” I asked him.
“I didn’t even know for sure. I guess I imagined I would have the car carry me to Atlanta. Or just to a nice restaurant where I could sit down and eat something good, like steak and a glass of sweet tea. Maybe a baked potato. A country boy like me, that was al the finery I could imagine. Sour cream on the potato. I had never even tasted it before, but I always heard white folks asking for it or saying they didn’t want it.” He shrugged and smiled over at me. “You didn’t know your daddy could be so sil y, did you?”
I smiled back at him and tried to imagine him as a boy. I had seen a couple of his old school portraits, the black-and-white tone blurring into something gray and indistinct. JIMMY WITHERSPOON was written right below the col ar of his white shirt. When I stayed with Grandma Bunny for a month each summer, that picture was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes, but I could never get my brain to accept that this Jimmy Witherspoon with the lazy eye and confident smile was my father.
“So the idea I had — to have my own driver one day — led me to thinking what kind of job I would need in order to have somebody to drive me.
My mama’s white people, they got their money because they owned the paper mil , and I knew I didn’t want to have nothing to do with the paper mil .
Just the smel alone was enough to run you away, no matter what the money was like. So I couldn’t think of nothing else, and it started making me depressed. Crazy as it was, I wanted to have a white man driving me around, to let him see what it feels like.” Daddy laughed. “My imagination was in overdrive. A black man having a chauffeur was crazy enough, but hiring a white man to drive? Absolutely insane. But this was my dream, and I didn’t tel nobody about it except Raleigh.”
“What did Uncle Raleigh say?
Daddy said, “You know how Raleigh is. He don’t like to argue. He just asked me if I was going to let my white driver use the front door or the back door when he showed up for work. I said I would go on and let him walk in the front. Then Raleigh asked me if maybe I could just use a real light-skinned black man to do the driving, that way it would look like I had a white driver, but I wouldn’t have to deal with al the problems that might come along with trying to boss a real white man. I laughed and told him that the only person in the world more uppity than an actual white man was a light-skinned nigger. I think that hurt his feelings, but I wasn’t talking about Raleigh. Your uncle is a special case, you know.”
I said I knew what he was talking about.
“Truth of the matter is that it was Raleigh who gave me the idea of starting my own business, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. This here is a good story and I want to tel it properly.
“I used to drive these white people around al the time. Me and Raleigh used to take turns with the job, but the white people didn’t like Raleigh al that much. So I took on the driving ful time, and Raleigh had to go over to the mil . He stank so bad coming back home, but me and Laverne never said anything to him about it. Didn’t need to, I guess. He got a nose. We waited on him to wash up before we ate dinner, but you could stil smel the mil on him.
“One day, I was driving the white lady somewhere. She was al dressed up, hat, gloves, pink lipstick drawn where lips would have been if she had any. I just let her in, closed the door behind her and set off. No radio, no nothing, me and her just riding along listening to each other breathing.
Anyway, I was driving and I saw a sign up on the left for the highway. I seen that sign a hundred times, but this time I real y saw it, and it occurred to me that I could just twist my arms a little bit, turn the steering wheel and go wherever I wanted to. That lady in the backseat wouldn’t have no choice but to come along for the ride. I started laughing then, laughing hard. I liked to choke on so much laughing. I could see the lady in the backseat looking scared, like she was trapped in the car with a crazy nigger. Al I had to do was like this here” — he rotated the steering wheel to the left, changing lanes — “and me and her would have been on the highway headed toward Hilton Head. You get it, don’t you, Chaurisse?
“It takes a lot of trust to let somebody drive you around. People don’t think about it — you should see them just hopping into taxicabs downtown, not knowing who they got behind the wheel. That’s why I don’t get in no airplanes, neither. I was having al these thoughts while I was driving the car and laughing like a loon. The white lady looked like she was going to throw up. Then I stopped laughing and try to seem like I had some sense. Al the time my mind was just working.
“I couldn’t wait to tel it to Raleigh. He had just come home from the mil . I usual y gave him his space when he got home, and not just because of how he was smel ing but because he didn’t like to be around people until he got his constitution together. But I just had to tel him. He was walking up the steps to the front of the house and he didn’t even get the doorknob turned good before I busted out with it.
“I said, ‘I don’t ever want nobody driving me around. Whoever is doing the driving is real y the one in control.’
“Raleigh looked at me like, ‘You just now figuring that out?’ Your uncle is a very intel igent man. He’s like Albert Einstein and George Washington Carver rol ed up into one. Then he said, ‘Can we talk about this after I got my bath?’
“I said ‘Okay.’ Your mama was in the kitchen frying some fish. We had been married about two years, maybe three, and she was just final y at last learning how to cook. She almost kil ed me and Raleigh both with food poisoning. Did I ever tel you that story? It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny at the time.
“I was just burning up with my new way of thinking. Raleigh was taking his sweet time washing up. He’s not like that now, but he used to be a pretty nigger when we was younger, rubbing baby oil on his arms to make the hair lie down. Stuff like that. So by the time he got his pretty self ready, I had already told it to your mama and she
