No Matter How Much You Promise Page 64

  “When she came back, my mama said we ought to be ashamed of ourselves spoiling Aunt April’s wedding, and if we kept it up God had some very unfortunate things in store for us.”

  By noon they were back at the farm and there was a barbecue since the groom’s father was originally from Texas and they’d set up great big grills and placed huge flanks of steak on them. There were also hamburgers, wieners, potato salad, fried chicken, corn bread, hush puppies, coleslaw, all kinds of pies, and the wedding cake with homemade ice cream.

  At about three o’clock the musicians began to play. They were doing things from the Kingston Trio. It sounded pretty good. After about an hour they switched to bluegrass music, and she went up to where they were performing and kept looking at this thin, red-faced man with a straw hat who was playing the fiddle, and she knew that if she stood there long enough he’d kind of point both fiddle and bow at her and ask her if she wanted to play, like people did, and then he’d be real surprised because she’d say you bet and take that old fiddle and show those folks what fiddling was all about. She was standing there when her mother took her arm and said that she ought to stop being rude and quit staring at folks that way. She made her come in the house to dry dishes, and she kept thinking how she could’ve played and then everyone would have seen how good she was. She was so annoyed that after she finished drying the dishes, she’d wandered off into the woods in back of the house, walking on a little trail, thinking that she’d walk until she could no longer hear the music, and then she’d wait there until it was dark and come back. If they were worried, too bad, because they had no right to boss her around and make her life miserable.

  She followed the trail into the pine trees until she could no longer hear the music and then it began to grow dark, not from the sun setting but from the denseness of the forest, and then, as hot as it had been, all at once she felt chilled and the air seemed charged and smelled like a storm was approaching. She came to a clearing and through it she could see a field, a couple of hundred yards wide, with a half-dozen cows and, off by itself, a mule. Beyond the field there was a hill and to the side of it another grove of trees. The sky had turned ugly, the dark clouds menacingly angry. The smell in the air frightened her and she decided she ought to return and was worried that she’d lose her way and not be able to get back to the wedding reception. As she turned to go, the sky beyond the hills was suddenly streaked with lightning and seconds later thunder exploded above, the huge clap driving her to the ground with fear.

  She stood up and brushed the pine needles off her dress and stockings; then another thunderclap boomed closer, followed by three more in quick succession, and then, seconds later, came an awful rumbling and a sprinkling of rain, the drops thick and cold. There was no use running back into the woods because it was as likely that lightning would hit in the forest as not. Her father had told her that running under trees in a lightning storm was the worst thing a person could do, so she began running across the field. Before she was halfway across, she felt the chunks of ice hitting her shoulders and then her head, pelting her so that she covered herself with her arms and continued running, the rain and hail blinding her until, her lungs burning, she reached the other side and then she saw it: a cabin, the wood weather-beaten as if it had never been painted, the pathetic brick chimney black and nearly falling in on itself.

  Out of breath, she knocked on the door, but no one answered. She pushed at the rough wood and was surprised at how easily the door gave. It didn’t occur to her that there might be a dog or perhaps an evil person lying in ambush for her. She was cold and frightened and needed someplace to sit until the storm passed. She went in, closed the door, and stood shivering against it, listening to the hailstones hitting the roof and the trees and the ground outside. It sounded like the icy pellets were the size of golf balls now and she wondered how the folks at the reception were doing with the storm. As her eyes got used to the dark she saw that she was in someone’s home. There was an old table with a checkered tablecloth on it—forever after when she went into a restaurant and saw a similar tablecloth, all she could think about was the moment she escaped the hailstorm and stepped into the strange world behind the door of that shack.

  “Who’s there?” a rough voice said. “I can’t see real good, but this shotgun will scatter buckshot fifteen feet either side of that door, and I got it aimed right at the middle of it.”

  She couldn’t tell who the voice belonged to, whether it was a man or a woman’s voice. One thing was certain, whoever owned the voice was old and not too pleased with the intrusion. As hard as she tried she couldn’t help it and began crying and saying that she was sorry, that it was hailing outside and she was just a poor, lost girl who didn’t mean no harm and wasn’t looking to cause trouble.

  “Quit sniveling and explain why you nosing around an old Negro shack in the woods.”

  “I’m lost and it got cold, ma’am.”

  “Gal, you best not be trying to fool ole Lulu, heah?”

  “Lulu, ma’am?”

  “Yeah, Lulu. You deaf too? Lulu McAlpin,” the voice growled.

  “No, ma’am. I ain’t. Honest I ain’t. I got lost and it was hailing, ma’ am.”

  “I hear it,” the voice said. “I don’t see too good anymore, but my hearing’s just fine, thank you. You know how to light a lamp?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You know how to make a fire?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then go on and light the lamp and then when you can see where you’re going so you don’t end up banging your fool self knocking into this and that, light the fire and come over here and let me take a look at you. There’s matches right there on the table if you open your eyes.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said and went about doing as she was told.

  She lit the kerosene lamp and then built a fire. She saw that she was in a one-room house with a couple of small windows, none bigger than a large book. When the fire was going, the woman said there was some chicory coffee on the stove that she could heat, and if she was hungry to open the pantry, because she was sure to find a biscuit or two in there. The old woman said if she was wet she should take off her dress and in the chest of drawers over on the other side of the room, in the bottom drawer, she could find a frock that would fit her just fine and she could even keep it if she wanted. If she wanted anything else she was out of luck. She thanked the woman and said she wasn’t hungry, that she was fine exactly as she was. She had been standing, staring at the fire, trying to warm herself.

  “And what’s your name, child?” the old woman said. “Come on over here.”

  “Lurleen, ma’am,” she said, going over to the rocker. “Lurleen Meekins.”

  When she was close enough, the old woman peered into her eyes and then touched her face, going over it as if she were blind, but squinting her eyes in the light of the kerosene lamp. The woman’s skin was white and her eyes had once been blue, but were now sort of cloudy.

  “Meekins?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You related to the Meekinses up near the Sunflower River?”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t think so.”

  “Then where you from?”

  “Tennessee, ma’am. Wilkins, Tennessee.”

  “Who’s your daddy?”

  “Donny Meekins, ma’am.”

  “And his daddy? Your grandpa?”

  “Will Meekins, ma’am.”

  “What was his mama’s name?”

  “Marie Meekins. She lives in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. She’s real old.”

  “I reckon she would be.”

  “You know her?”

  “Now, I didn’t say that, did I?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then don’t go jumping to conclusions, young lady.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You got any McAlpins in your family?”

  “Yes, ma’am. My sister is Laurel McAlpin Meekins. We have McAlpins on my mama’
s side of the family.”

  “You don’t say?” the woman cackled. “Well, I’ll be. Come a little closer and let me take a look at you again.” When she was close enough the woman laughed and touched her face. “Yep. Sure could be,” she said.

  “Could be what, ma’am?”

  “Could be the storm’s passed and you better get going before it gets too dark.”

  “It’s already dark, ma’am, and it’s raining worse than ever.”

  “Then I reckon you better bed down on the floor,” the old woman said. “You’ll find a quilt over in that chest. It’ll keep you warm enough. There’s an ole coon comes sniffing around the cabin, but he ain’t gonna get in here to harm you none. Just ignore him.”

  “Yes, ma’am. An ole coon don’t scare me none. I shot plenty of em,” she lied.

  The old woman harrumphed and snorted.

  They talked a little more, and about an hour later the woman said she was going to sleep and Lurleen ought to put the lamp out and go to sleep herself. She did as she was told. She got the quilt out, made herself a bed, and curled up with the quilt around her. In the morning, the sun shining through one of the windows and the birds chirping, she awoke to see the woman cooking breakfast in the fireplace. She got up, asked where she could pee, and then went outside to use the outhouse.

  “There’s a barrel of rainwater outside. Draw water and wash your face,” Lulu said.

  After she came back in, Lulu fed her eggs and bacon, biscuits, and black coffee with sugar. Around eight in the morning, after they’d eaten, the old woman took her outside and showed her how to get back to the Burrells’. That was when she heard dogs barking and voices coming her way. Five minutes later there were a dozen men and three bloodhounds sniffing around. The red-faced man who’d been fiddling was now wearing a sheriff’s badge. Her uncle Bobby was with them.

  She said goodbye to Lulu McAlpin and the men took her with them. When she was back in the house, she got a good thrashing from her mother, who talked about how worried everyone had been and how she had managed to spoil her aunt April’s beautiful wedding.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” she said.

  “Sorry ain’t good enough. And you ended up in an old Negro’s house.”

  “She wasn’t a Negro, Mama,” she said.

  “Don’t you sass me.”

  “She certainly is a Negro,” said an older woman. “She may look white, but she’s a Negro. Crazy as a bedbug. Living all by herself like that for years. Eating grass and bugs, I reckon.”

  On the drive back to Tennessee, all they did was talk about her getting lost in the woods and ending up in an old Negro’s shack. She fell asleep, and when they woke her up it was time to eat. Her mother was still talking about it. In the diner where they stopped to eat Lurleen spoke up. She said the old woman’s name was Lulu McAlpin and that since Laurel’s middle name was McAlpin maybe they were related, and that’s when she felt her face sting. Her mother had slapped her and told her to eat and keep her mouth shut.

  She said nothing else for the rest of the trip, but when she got back she went and saw her grandfather, William Meekins, and asked him about his own grandmother. He said her name was Lulu McAlpin. She asked if Lulu was a Negro.

  “No, she wasn’t, darling,” her grandfather laughed. “She was white, just like you and me. Had big china-blue eyes. I recall going down and visiting her and my grandpa Andrew when I was a little boy. They lived in a great big house down near the Sunflower River in Mississippi. She was a beautiful white woman who played the piano.”

  She asked when he was born and when his mother was born. He said he was born in 1893 and his mother, Marie, he believed, in 1872 and added that it was the year Susan B. Anthony tried to vote. She next asked about his grandma and he didn’t know, maybe 1845. She thanked him. He wanted to know why she was asking and she said she was just curious.

  And then Lurleen looked at Vidamía more directly, her eyes burning fiercely, and made her promise again to keep what she was about to hear to herself. Vidamía nodded several times and was silent, thinking of how to ask what seemed an obvious question.

  “Did you mean to say that the old Negro woman in the shack and you were related?”

  “That’s the way it’s always seemed to me,” Lurleen said. “That was my great-great-grandmother I met. My mother was having none of it and said it wasn’t unusual for whites and blacks to have the same name down south and that everyone she had spoken to reassured her this was a Negro woman. White or black, she was a Negro woman.”

  “How old was she?”

  “I don’t know. This was back in 1963. If she was born in 1845, she’d have been almost a hundred and twenty when I met her.”

  “How long did she live?”

  “I don’t know,” Lurleen said. “I meant to go down there when I was in college, but I never did. I don’t know. You know how you get vibes about people. For me it’s like she’s still alive.”

  “Maybe she is.”

  “She’d have to be a hundred and forty-five years old.”

  “People have lived that long.”

  “I guess.”

  “You can’t be sure she was your great-great-grandmother,” Vidamía said.

  “I’m pretty sure. Before my great-grandmother Marie Meekins died, I visited her in Cape Girardeau in Missouri and asked her about it. I was in my first year of college. She was in her nineties, but still pretty lucid.”

  “Did you ask her if her mother was black?” Vidamía asked.

  “Not in so many words. She said there was talk about it. That her husband had talked to people up around where he was from and they said Lulu McAlpin had returned to the Biloxi area and was living with Negroes off in the woods, but that they just treated her as a crazy old white woman. People had insinuated that the crazy old woman was the daughter of a New Orleans octoroon and how as a girl, Lulu, my great-grandmother’s mother, had passed as white sometime back around the Civil War.”

  “So you knew the woman you met was your great-great-grandmother.”

  “Yes siree Bob,” Lurleen said, suddenly amused. “Although I didn’t know it then.”

  “What’s it mean? Does that mean you have African blood?”

  “I guess it does,” Lurleen said.

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve written to friends in that part of Mississippi to have them look up birth records but a lot of information was lost during the Civil War. As far as I can tell from family records and photographs, maybe Lulu was one-eighth, maybe one-sixteenth. I’ve seen pictures of her when she was a young woman and there’s no way you can detect any African blood in her. She looks Spanish or Italian. She could be anything. Even English.”

  “So what does that make you? What does that make Cookie and the kids? Daddy?”

  “Oh, your daddy doesn’t enter into this. We’re related through my papa’s side of the family. The Sandersons. Anyway, if Lulu McAlpin was one-eighth, then I’m about one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth African, and the kids are one two-hundred-and-fifty-sixth African.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Vidamía said. “Does that make all of you black?”

  “I don’t know, but it sure confuses things. It shouldn’t make any difference, but it does.”

  “To you?”

  “No, not to me. I don’t want the kids confused. When they grow up, I guess I’ll tell them at some point. It’s not gonna matter much to them. They don’t have those kinds of hang-ups.”

  “No, but I do.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t. We’re your family and what color you are or where you came from doesn’t matter because we love you and that’s the important thing.”

  Vidamía was quiet awhile, absorbing further what Lurleen had said, feeling how fortunate she was to have someone like her stepmother in her life. She looked closely at her, but there was no trace of any African features, except perhaps the fact that she had full lips, something which all the children, including Cliff, shared. Having ful
l lips was almost required now in the modeling industry. And they all had them. Cookie was simply gorgeous. Like Kelly McGillis, or somebody like that. She’d read that some models and actresses had collagen injected into their lips to make them fuller. As she thought about this she began getting sleepy and they went back downstairs and said good night.

  When she was in bed with the lights out she tried to picture what a white black would look like. She imagined a very white person with African features, but that didn’t work because there were all sorts of different African people. Some had thinner lips and thinner noses than Scandinavians. In fact, when she had traveled with her parents in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden she had seen people with full lips and some with kinky hair. Some blacks in the U.S. were every different color imaginable and some were the color of ebony and had clear, almost translucent eyes. Maybe the whole country was black. The notion amused her and she thought that perhaps she would call Wyndell in the morning and tell him what she thought about the issue. She knew that she couldn’t tell him about Lurleen and the kids, but she sure would like to be able to challenge him with Lurleen’s story and ask him what he thought. Were her sisters and her brother black? Cookie, Cliff, Fawn, Caitlin, and Lurleen were all blond and blue-eyed, but by Wyndell Ross’s standards they were now supposed to call each other black. No wonder the country was so confused. She fell asleep thinking of this.

  58. People of Color

  The following day, before Vidamía had an opportunity to call Wyndell, he phoned, apologized, and explained that he was under a lot of pressure and had been thoughtless. She was equally contrite and told him she understood. They chose a place where they could have lunch, and a little after twelve they were sitting outside a restaurant in SoHo. He said he hadn’t yet had breakfast and ordered a huge brunch. She loved to watch him eat. He had perfect manners but ate vast amounts of food.