Daughters Page 17

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I’ll tell you as much as you want to know about it. That will be just as good.”

  “No, it won’t. I need to understand things for myself. I was going to ask you if you would go with me, but if you won’t, I’m going alone.”

  “You’re not going there alone.”

  “Why not? Maybe Karen will go with me.”

  “No. You don’t know the lay of the land. You’ll end up in the wrong places, and they’ll eat you alive.”

  “Then you’ll go with me?”

  “It’s not pretty, Marie. And it’s not safe.”

  “But you know the lay of the land and where to go and not go.”

  “You’re determined to do this.”

  “Yes.”

  She heard his sigh over the phone line. He waited several seconds before speaking. “Okay. I’ll go with you, but only because I’m afraid you’ll go alone and get into who knows what kind of trouble.”

  “Thank you, Dad.”

  “You know I love you, Marie.”

  He had never said those words before. He might have shown it, but he had never come out and said it.

  “I love you too. When can we go?”

  Two weeks later, Jonathan drove to Atchison, stayed overnight at Al & Rita’s Bed & Breakfast, and picked Marie up at her apartment bright and early the next day, exactly three years to the day Marie had left Richard. The mid-May weather was perfect for a road trip.

  “What have you done to your hair, child?” he asked Marie when she answered the door. Three years earlier, Marie had cut it short and dyed her almost-black hair to light brown when she felt she needed a change, a new beginning in her life. Now chin-length and back to it’s natural color, the style was similar to the way her mother had worn her hair.

  She spun around. “Do you like it?”

  “Maybe I just need time to get used to it.”

  “You don’t like it.”

  “No, it looks fine. Makes a big difference. I hardly recognize you.” He paused. “I never realized until now just how much you look like your mother.” He gave her a serious look. “You’re sure you want to go through with this?”

  Marie gave him a wide smile. “Oh, yes. More than anything else in the world.” Marie had given this significant thought before, during, and after asking her father to take her there. She understood the dangers, or at least she thought she did. She recognized what she was about to witness could change her way of thinking altogether, but she was ready for that. She had to know her roots in order to understand who she was…and perhaps more importantly, who she was supposed to be.

  They drove three hundred miles to St. Louis before stopping for lunch. The Missouri landscape wasn’t much different from Kansas—wheat fields, expansive pastures scattered with cattle and small fenced-in pens for pigs. Not as many horse farms.

  At lunch, Jonathan described the plantation where he had lived until he moved to St. Charles, thirty-six years earlier. “It was called Wisteria Belle, and when you see it—if it’s stayed the same, that is—you’ll know why. The main house had a huge front porch with massive two-story-high columns across the front of it and purple wisteria cascading down from the top of the columns all the way to the ground.”

  “It sounds gorgeous.”

  “It was. Of course, we never got to sit on that porch, or even go in the front yard, for that matter. It was strictly for the plantation owners and their white friends and family.” He turned toward his daughter. “I hope you’re ready for one hell of a story, my dear.”

  “Please don’t leave anything out.”

  “The main house was huge, four stories and a basement. I’m going to guess there were at least twenty rooms in that house, including a ballroom, and all decorated to the hilt. I do know there were seven bathrooms because my father used to tell the story that his mother had to clean them all, every day.”

  “Were you ever in there?”

  “The main house? Not very often. I wasn’t allowed in the house unless the family was gone for the day, and that was when I was pretty young. I don’t remember much.”

  “Didn’t all that change when slaves were freed?”

  “The way my father told it, after the slaves were freed, his family, like most of the slaves, continued to work at Wisteria Belle. They really had no other place to go. And then, like I told you before, my father was given fifty acres of land and several horses by his father. Louis Boone was his name, the plantation owner…my grandfather.”

  They finished lunch and returned to the car. “What was your father’s name?”

  “Samuel Brooks.”

  “So where did the name Brooks come from?”

  “That was my grandmother’s last name. Mariah Brooks.”

  “Did you ever meet your grandparents?”

  “Both died before I was born. My grandmother, the house slave, died when my father was a teenager. By then he was a full-fledged slave. My grandfather died just a couple of years after he gave my father the land and horses. My father always said Louis probably knew he was dying and that’s why he gave away most of his land.”

  They crossed over the Mississippi into the southern tip of Illinois and on to Kentucky.

  “So after your father was given the land… Was it on the same plantation?”

  “Yes.”

  “So then he managed his own land, with the horses, by himself?”

  “He took on some fellow former slaves who had no place to go, and they ran it together. One of those men had a half sister whom my father married when he was forty-six. She was younger, much younger.”

  “How young?”

  “In her twenties.”

  “Quite the age difference. What was her name?”

  “Minervy Gulliglove.”

  Marie shot a glance at her father. He took his eyes off the road long enough to give her a smile.

  “No one is quite sure of my mother’s background. She was a Negro, but she obviously had some other race in her background. We’re not sure. Actually she wasn’t even sure where the name Gulliglove came from.”

  “Sounds like identity crises may run in our family.”

  Jonathan chuckled. “Well, let’s hope we’ve put a stop to that once and for all. Now, going on with the story, my parents were married in 1889, and I was born the following year. I think I may have told you, I suspect she was pregnant before they got married. No one ever talked about that.”

  “What is your earliest memory?”

  “We lived on the far corner of Wisteria Belle, far away from the main house, but our little ramshackle of a house was on a rise, so you could see the main house from it. That was my earliest memory, looking down at that mansion. I must have been four or five when I asked my father who lived there. He told me it didn’t matter because we weren’t welcome in that house.”

  “So this was probably thirty some years after the Emancipation Proclamation, right?”

  “About that.”

  “But your father had relatives in that house—half brothers, you said?”

  “The Emancipation Proclamation may have made it illegal to have slaves on paper, but it didn’t change things all that much. Thirty years later, Negroes were still treated like shit. Sorry. Excuse my language. But it’s the truth. My father would have no more tried to talk to or visit anyone in that house than they would have come knocking on his door. It just wasn’t done.”

  “So how old was your mother when she died?”

  “She was thirty-seven. I was ten. Dad was in his fifties.” Jonathan pulled off the main road at the sign which read, Welcome to Frankfort, Kentucky’s State Capital. “We’ll stay here. I know a nice hotel where we can get in.” Marie raised her eyebrows. “We’re at the top of the Deep South. Still completely segregated.”

  “So what does that mean for me?”

  Jonathan didn’t answer immediately. “Segregation works both ways. Negroes aren’t allowed in some places and vice versa. I’m counting on you
being accepted in a Negro hotel, especially after I introduce you as my daughter. It’s not that unusual to see very light-skinned Negroes in this part of the country.”

  Marie’s heart raced. Up until now, ever since learning of her true ethnicity, her anxiety had stemmed from knowing she was part colored but passed for white. Looking white and trying to pass for colored was completely foreign.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Well, no, to be honest. I’m starting to feel uncomfortable. Am I overreacting?”

  “I don’t know if you’re overreacting or not. But I can tell you if I get any sense that it’s not a safe place for you, we’ll leave.” He heaved a big sigh. “Marie, you’re going to see a lot on this trip. And maybe it will bring you closer to my side of the family and maybe it won’t, but what I want to say is, never lose sight of the fact that your outward appearance shouldn’t define who you are. I know it does to other people, but it shouldn’t to you. Do you understand that?”

  “Mm-hmm. I do. But here’s the thing. When I’m with whites, I feel uncomfortable on the inside, because I know I’m not one of them, not totally anyway, but they think I am. But when I’m around Negroes, I feel uncomfortable on the outside, because they think I’m not one of them. Does that make any sense?”

  “Oh, I understand what you’re saying. It’s not easy. I know that. And I wish I had all the answers for you, but I don’t. You know who you are, and you’re confused about who you should be. And when I or anyone else tells you to just be yourself, you say, ‘But that doesn’t work very well.’ Well, you have to figure out how to make it work. No one can do that for you.”

  They approached the hotel. “I was thinking of separate rooms,” Jonathan said. “Are you okay with that?”

  She didn’t know which scenario was more daunting—being alone or with him in the same room.

  “Marie, the farther south we go, the worse it gets. I tried to prepare you for this, but…”

  “I know. I insisted. I’m sure it will be fine.” She paused. “Let’s keep separate rooms and see how that goes, okay?”

  “Welcome to the South, my dear.”

  At the hotel, Jonathan asked for a room for himself and one for his daughter. The clerk gave him a curious glance but handed him two room keys without asking any questions. Jonathan handed Marie her key with slight smile.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  That night as she lay in bed, Marie mulled over all the family history Jonathan had shared with her. She thought she had appreciated Jonathan, his family, and his life fairly well up until this point, and she harbored nothing but good feelings over it, all of it. Now she wasn’t so sure. All of a sudden she felt overwhelmed by the family history.

  One of Jonathan’s comments kept surfacing in her mind. “Segregation works both ways,” he had said. Segregation was a word Marie was learning to hate. If she lived in the South, she’d be only one shade of skin color away from not being able to use the same public restrooms as white people, get the same education, work in the same jobs, and ride in the front of the bus. Segregation. She had looked the word up in the dictionary shortly after meeting Doretha Scott. “To separate or set apart from others or from the main body or group; isolate.”

  Isolate. Like they had some contagious disease. The main body or group. They were hurtful words, ones Marie thought she would never understand. But what troubled her even more was she hadn’t thought much about segregation when she was going through life thinking she was white.

  She had heard the term “Jim Crow laws” but didn’t know what they meant, so she had gone to the library to research it. Statutes enacted in the South as far back as 1880, they were designed to legalize segregation between Negroes and whites. The name was derived from a character in a popular minstrel song of all things.

  Old Jim Crow

  Where you been baby?

  Down Mississippi and back again

  Old Jim Crow, don’t you know,

  It’s all over now

  She had read the full lyrics a few times, but didn’t fully get the connection. She read further and found the term Jim Crow originated when a white minstrel show performer blackened his face with burnt cork and danced a silly jig while singing the song. He had created the character after seeing a crippled old black slave dancing and singing a song ending with these chorus words:

  Wheel about and turn about and do jis so,

  Eb’ry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.

  So what does all this mean for me? she asked herself for the millionth time. How do you segregate someone like me?

  CHAPTER 18

  Wisteria Belle

  At breakfast the next morning, Marie asked how much farther it was to Wisteria Belle.

  “I thought we’d have lunch in Greenville, South Carolina. We should reach Chesterfield by dinner. That’s where Wisteria is. The only problem is that I’ve been away so long, I don’t know where we can have dinner or even stay, so that could be an adventure.”

  Marie had a feeling he was downplaying a potentially disquieting situation so she wouldn’t fret over it. But she did anyway.

  They reached Greenville by two o’clock and searched for a place to eat lunch. When Jonathan reached a fork in the road, he veered to the right. “We’re not going to eat in this part of town, but I want you to see it anyway.”

  Marie observed the nicely maintained homes on either side of the road. After they drove for a mile or so, the residential section turned commercial—hardware store, real estate office, clothes stores, and restaurants.

  “This looks like a nice place to stop. What’s wrong with having lunch here?”

  He slowed down. “Look closely at the signs in the windows.”

  She gasped at the first crudely made sign. Prominently displayed in the window of a restaurant, it read

  NO

  Nigger or Negro

  ALLOWED

  Inside Building

  The next one read

  Colored Served

  In Rear

  Three signs hung over the doors of a public bathroom.

  White Women White Men Coloreds

  She shook her head in disbelief.

  “I had no idea it would be like this.”

  “I know you didn’t. I tried to tell you.”

  “I know.”

  Jonathan turned the car around and drove back to the fork in the road. This time he took a left turn.

  Marie wondered how anyone could live in the tiny run-down houses, some with no front doors, and others with gaping holes in the roofs. Skinny little shoeless colored children played in the grassless yards, their clothes dirty and torn. The unmistakable aroma of cotton, mingled with the earthy smell of the dirt the children were kicking up as they ran through the yards, permeated the air and drifted up her nose. “It’s like being in a different world.”

  A dilapidated building with a car repair shop on one side and a coffee shop on the other stood at the end of the street. Jonathan slowed down the car but continued driving. “I’m not going to stop here either.” He drove back to the white section of town to the back of the restaurant with the sign directing Negroes to the rear of the building. He picked up two sandwiches to go and drove a half mile to a park they had seen on their way in.

  The sun still shone brightly, and the scent of blooming dogwoods wafted through the air. Jonathan parked the car, and they headed toward a park bench. Marie sat down, but Jonathan stayed standing, his gaze directed beyond her.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  He continued to stare past her, the look on his face soulful. She got up and followed his gaze. The sign read:

  Negroes and Dogs

  Not Allowed

  They walked back to the car in silence. Jonathan turned on the ignition but didn’t put the car in gear. Marie couldn’t look at him. She tried to conceal her reaction but didn’t have what it took to hold back her emotions. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Jonatha
n leaned over and held her until her shoulders stopped shaking. He held her face and forced her to look at him.

  “I tried to tell you.”

  “I know.”

  After eating their sandwiches in the car by the side of the road, they drove another hundred and fifty miles to Chesterfield. When they reached the middle of town, a smile crept over his face.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked him.

  “I was just thinking of when me and my friends would go to the swimming hole that was on one of the neighboring plantations. We were eight or nine I guess. One of us would stand as lookout because if we were caught, it would mean a terrible whuppin’ by the landowners.”

  “So did you ever get whipped?”

  “Caught, yes. Whipped, no. I was a spindly kid, but a very fast runner.”

  The sign for Wisteria Belle Plantation appeared to have been recently painted and held a prominent position twenty-five feet from the long driveway leading to the house. Jonathan pulled off the side of the road and parked the car by a narrow clearing where the main house was in clear view.

  Marie drew in a long breath. “It’s beautiful.” The wisteria were in full bloom—hundreds, maybe thousands of clusters of large purple flowers pouring down like a waterfall all the way to the ground from the second story balcony. Only the front door and slivers of the two-story windows peeked through the dramatic flowering drape.

  The house sat back at least two hundred yards from the road. Two rows of thirty-foot-tall live oak trees, their branches forming a perfect canopy, lined a wide path to the house. Stalactites of jade-green moss dangled from their branches halfway to the ground, causing an eerie, almost unwelcoming greeting for a visitor approaching the house.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “It was something else,” Jonathan said, his voice fraught with sadness.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s been more than thirty years since I’ve been here, and all I can think about is the life my grandmother must have had here—a slave, raped by the reprehensible owner of this place at the age of eighteen and dead by twenty-five.”