Black Is the Body Page 16

  The three of us walk slowly up and down the few streets that constitute the square, passing the post office, a place to cash checks, several law offices, and a clothing store for women. We pause to step into a shop full of antiques where, as toddlers, my daughters Giulia and Isabella admired two glass figurines shaped like ducks. I remember how they pushed the pads of their thumbs against the pointy orange beaks over and over. Behind us is a bridge whose steep arc makes it impossible to see over to the other side. I love this bridge and this particular street, whose abundance of empty storefronts reminds me of a deserted movie set for an old Western that I saw once at Universal Studios. I see Bologna, too, a city in Italy that my husband John and I visited years ago, in the rubbed, faded colors of the buildings’ facades. I love this place for the freedom it gives me to remember, and invent.

  This South is nothing like the South in which I used to live, with its manicured lawns and gated country clubs. Even that South has changed. Over the years, Nashville has gotten bigger and more complex. The relatively modest, adolescent city in which I was born has grown into an adult with a tailored suit and gym-toned thighs, all glamour and muscle. It is part of the New South. In that South, there is no place for my daydreams. My true South, this South, is old, and deep, well into the belly of the region, far below the Mason-Dixon Line.

  My mother never wanted to spend her life in either the Old South of Mississippi or the New South of Nashville, but that’s how things turned out. Returning to Hazlehurst was never an option, but she is here, in the faces and memories of my aunts, cousins, and other family members who never left. Here she is not Harold’s wife, or even my mother. She is Clara Jean, or Moochie, a childhood nickname that she loathed, and which I am free to divulge here because she is no longer alive to stop me. I don’t know where Moochie comes from or what it means, and my aunts were too young at the time of her rechristening to remember.

  I have always been greedy for stories about my mother’s family, even before she died and I became overwhelmed with the continuous sensation of being unmoored. For many years, I believed that in these stories were clues to who I was, and who I would become. This is why I decided to spend the summer of my junior year in college in Hazlehurst, and it is, ultimately, why I am here now.

  * * *

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  Aunt Julia, Warren, and I pass Town Hall and the library where, thirty years ago, I spent hours looking through old newspapers, census reports, and wills, trying to find evidence of the interracial love affair that began the Jefferson family line. My cousin dropped me off most of the time, but sometimes I would borrow my grandmother’s brown Chevy and drive right by Town Hall into downtown Hazlehurst, where I would park, walk around, and agonize over my research. My grandmother was not happy that I was looking into that old story. She worried that my project would cause trouble, that it would somehow become public and resurrect old wounds, possibly even upset race relations in town. She took me to visit family landmarks reluctantly, uneasy about my desire to take photographs and explore on foot. “You get to leave, but I have to live here,” she would remind me.

  I felt my grandmother’s eyes on me constantly. Privacy was hard to come by, so I would stay in my bedroom well into the morning. I could hear my grandmother speculating to friends and relatives who stopped by about how I would spend my day while I pretended to be asleep. My journal entries from that summer are full of longing and confusion. Here were people that I looked like and felt like, but that I was nothing like at the same time. “How did it happen?” I wrote. “They are my family.” I hated that my voice was so different from theirs, that my speech faltered when I was around them. I felt pinched and small and foreign. My grandmother sat on the porch and held court while I stayed inside and read. Anna Karenina helped me escape; the stories of Alice Walker offered a way in. But I could not enter; I could not find my way across the threshold. I wrote letters to friends up north in which I transformed Hazlehurst into Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and portrayed its citizens as the kinds of oddball characters one might find in a Eudora Welty novel. I did not write of my awkwardness and inability to connect with people with whom I shared the same genes and moods and history.

  The tension between my grandmother and me erupted into a fight about Jesse Jackson. Neither my grandmother nor I was very interested in politics, but during the summer of 1988, Jackson was in the middle of his second presidential campaign. The promise and excitement of Jackson’s message moved me. It was a reprieve from the still, hot days spent under my grandmother’s watchful eye. My wild idealism butted heads with my grandmother’s pessimism. She didn’t care for Jackson, and she didn’t care for his civil rights background. Like some other black southerners of her generation, she saw civil rights activists as outside agitators who did more harm than good to southern race relations. She had no love for the Democratic Party in general, and blamed President Carter for the cuts in her Social Security check. Her words surprised me. In my comfortable, middle-class Nashville home, Jimmy Carter was spoken of with reverence. “He was too decent for the presidency,” my parents would say and shake their heads. My mother expressed the same grim sympathy for Carter as she did for the black men on television in handcuffs who, it would turn out, had been punished for crimes they didn’t commit. “They were always out to get him,” she said. And I knew the they that hated Jimmy Carter was the same they that hated black people, hated us.

  My grandmother and I brokered a peace based upon an unspoken mutual feeling of pity. She thought I was naïve and foolish. I saw her attitudes as sad vestiges of the past. But I didn’t know anything about her particular past. I didn’t know, for instance, that among the civil rights activists who came to organize the citizens of Hazlehurst were outside agitators who wreaked havoc on her community. Today, Aunt Julia describes to me how a cadre of activists from points north landed in Hazlehurst like a tornado and shook the black world at its foundation. A central player in the drama was Rudy Shields, she says, an activist of national renown who traveled from Chicago to Mississippi in 1965 to organize strikes and boycotts. My grandfather offered to help. He had friends among whites in the community and he knew how they felt about black people. He understood the way Hazlehurst worked from the perspective of both blacks and whites, and he suggested tactics that were appropriate to the distinct culture of the place. Shields and his group ignored him.

  My grandfather, like others of his clan, like me, was proud, impulsive, quick to anger, and easy to offend. He crossed picket lines and forced his embarrassed daughters to attend boycotted schools. But his acts of rebellion notwithstanding, the black community of Hazlehurst was broken. In 1965 Hazlehurst had about thirty-four hundred residents. When the movement touched down, it was literally neighbor against neighbor, my aunt tells me. Black people shot bullets into the homes of other black people who were seen as antagonistic to the cause. Perhaps because of my grandfather’s contrariness, perhaps as a consequence of the envy the family elicited in the community, the Jeffersons proved handy targets. My grandfather was threatened with physical violence. He heard of a plan afoot to cut off his youngest daughters’ long hair. My grandfather spent many nights sitting in a rocking chair in his living room with the lights off, a rifle balanced on his lap. My grandmother carried a small hatchet in her purse whenever she took her usual shortcut through the fields that separated her from her parents.

  My aunt tells this story as we drive slowly around Hazlehurst. She points out the houses of former family enemies whose descendants she now considers friendly acquaintances. We drive up and down Extension Street, with its parade of regal, antebellum homes and languid, aristocratic willow trees decorating the front yard. Two blocks later, we pass carcasses of abandoned houses, each one held together weakly by rotting wood. The windows look as if they have been punched, shards of glass hanging from their frames, like rows of mouths with broken teeth. In this neighborhood my grandmother’s parents used to live.
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  I ask Aunt Julia about present-day class dynamics in town, the differences between the lives of the rich and the poor. Where do we fit in this picture? I ask her. She thinks for a moment. “Well, I guess we’re poor,” she says. Her answer startles us both.

  * * *

  —

  When I was a child, and the roads around my grandmother’s home were made of dirt and loose gravel, her house was easily the nicest on the block. It was certainly the proudest, distinguished by its story of origin. The house is my grandmother’s grandest achievement, her dream inscribed in its foundation like initials etched in concrete.

  My grandmother was born in Hazlehurst in 1919. My mother, her oldest child, was born in 1938. My grandmother never admitted that she was forced to marry because of the pregnancy, Aunt Julia says, but it was clear that the pregnancy was an accident. She and my grandfather married quickly and quietly, sneaking off to the local justice of the peace.

  When he was a young man, Julius Jefferson had a reputation. He came from a brood of handsome wastrels. He and his brothers had light skin and money. They were tall, charming, and lazy. Their father bought them a car and kept it filled with gas, even during the Depression. They drank, chased women, and never had to work. My grandfather’s mother looked down on my grandmother and her family. “You better find somebody else to marry,” she told my grandmother.

  The Clausells, my grandmother’s family, did not have money, but they were dignified and hardworking. Whenever I hear stories of my grandmother’s parents, Mama Tempie and Papa Ran, I always imagine them as brown-skinned versions of the couple in Grant Wood’s 1930 painting American Gothic. Mama Tempie was not impressed by the relative wealth of the Jefferson clan. She disapproved of my grandfather and warned my grandmother not to take up with him. When my grandmother left my grandfather, very soon after their hasty wedding, she returned to Mama Tempie’s house and discovered that her mother had discarded her clothes and burned all of the poetry that she had been writing since childhood.

  Dotsie Clausell did not take up with Julius Jefferson because of his money or his looks. He was a way out. Julius, whom she called Jeff, had a brother with a job on the railroad in Texas. My grandfather was set to join him, and that’s when he and Dotsie decided to get married. But Jeff’s father decided to send another brother instead. Heartbroken, Dotsie abandoned the marriage and returned home to her parents, only to have her heart broken again when she found out what her mother had done to her precious belongings.

  Dotsie was resourceful and industrious. She was determined to live a life bigger than what Hazlehurst could offer. With my mother, Clara Jean, who was then a toddler, in tow, she took a train to Chicago, where she had extended family. She didn’t have money to rent an apartment of her own. Her relatives were short on space, so she lived with one set of cousins and put my mother in the care of another. The children in the family with whom my mother lived teased her cruelly. They were jealous of her straight hair and yanked off the ribbons that my grandmother had tied at the ends of her daughter’s braids. Dotsie switched places with her daughter, but she couldn’t find work that would enable her to buy independence for her and Clara Jean.

  From Chicago, she traveled to Los Angeles, where she had other family, but again, she couldn’t find suitable work. She knew field work and enjoyed physical labor, but there were no such opportunities. For a black woman there was always domestic work, but Dotsie knew her parents would be embarrassed if she took a job cleaning the houses of white people, and she could not bring herself to shame them again.

  So, Dotsie came home. In Hazlehurst she found a job working in a factory where she spent her days making little wooden boxes for strawberries. The box factory was located near the railroad tracks. Every day, on her way to and from work, my grandmother crossed those tracks, perhaps wondering each time if there was still a chance for her to be free.

  At the time, Dotsie and Clara Jean were living with Mama Tempie and Papa Ran, but the atmosphere in the house was uncomfortable. Dotsie’s mother still disapproved of her, but she fawned over Clara Jean, whom Mama Tempie viewed as a delicate, innocent victim of the mess my grandmother had made of her life. Her mother’s judgment weighed heavily enough, but even worse was the knowledge that she and her daughter were drains on her parents’ meager resources. Dotsie decided to build a house.

  Not long after she returned to Hazlehurst, Dotsie and Jeff reunited. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant decision for my grandmother, but she didn’t have much choice. Her mother had applied the full force of her religious certitude, and reminded her daughter over and over that regardless of the legal status of her marriage, she and Jeff were still, and always would be, husband and wife in the eyes of God. And then Jeff wanted her back. He intimidated every man who showed any kind of romantic interest in his estranged wife. It was only in the factory, doing the repetitive work on the assembly line, laughing with and teasing her sister Bobbie, who worked alongside her, where Dotsie was free. Once she left that building, the strictures of her social world forced her down a single narrow corridor.

  Jeff didn’t want any part of Dotsie’s plan to build a house. His family already owned a lot of property. Why go to the trouble and expense of building a house when they could live on his parents’ land for free?

  The idea of spending her life with her in-laws, who looked down on her family and had never accepted her—that was one sacrifice Dotsie was unwilling to make. She took on more shifts. She picked beans and collected discarded glass bottles, which she washed and resold to a store in town. Day after day, month after month, boxing and bending and washing, so many hot, long walks to and from town with bags of bottles in her arms, over her shoulder. Finally, she had earned nearly enough money for the materials. What she couldn’t afford she got on credit from a lumber company, whose owners trusted her because of their friendship with Jeff. She had everything she needed, except her husband’s permission to buy the land. No bank would give a woman a mortgage without a man’s name attached.

  After months of arguments and stony silence, Jeff relented. Dotsie hired her brother Frank and a family friend, known as Shot, to build her house. Shot and Frank used wood, sheetrock, and concrete, laboring day after hot, muggy, Mississippi day. The house they built had two bedrooms, a dining room, living room, bath, kitchen, and a screened-in porch. Shot and Frank made shutters and painted them white, like the house, according to Dotsie’s instruction.

  My mother was fourteen years old when the house was completed. Aunt Julia was only three, but she remembers how Clara Jean would stand in the front yard with her hands on her hips, smiling at the house that her mother, uncle, and Shot had built.

  It took a long time for my grandmother to give up on her dreams of leaving Hazlehurst. Many years later, several years before she died, after my Aunt Julia had moved back home from California to care for her, Miss Dotsie told her second-born daughter, who was named after her husband, Julius, “If I had known I would be here all my life, I would have built a better house.”

  * * *

  —

  Aunt Julia tells us family stories as we sit around the dining room table, picking at food left over from the banquet my aunt prepared for Warren and me yesterday. I pull crunchy pieces of skin off a drumstick until the tender meat is exposed, glistening and naked. Warren leaves tonight. He is in the Jackson airport waiting for his flight back to New York to board while I lie on my back in my aunt’s childhood bed, imagining my grandmother’s wide, strong hands picking beans and writing poems made of ash. I am awakened in the night by the crack of a gunshot. I fall back to sleep visualizing fireworks trailing worms of light in the sky.

  * * *

  —

  When I wake up, I find Aunt Julia in the living room fretting over the weather. Snow is in the forecast. Newscasters make ominous predictions. I smile and imagine what is sure to be a light dusting that has the entire city of Haz
lehurst in a panic. I sit with my aunt and try to distract her. Her worried face is framed by a bevy of lush green plants. “Even the plants have plants,” I tell James when he calls again.

  This is Aunt Julia’s house now. When it sagged from termite damage, she replaced the worn carpet with smooth wood floors. She had the tiny, awkward kitchen ripped out and a new one put in. Surrounding trees sometimes dent the metal roof, which then leaks. But the roof will always be metal, because that was what her mother wanted. In a similar spirit, she maintains the two imposing cabinets of curios my grandmother treasured, and has added some knickknacks of her own.

  Even more than these practical things, Aunt Julia’s plants reveal her stake in the continuing vitality of her mother’s house. Her plants are her progeny; she has no children. She cares for her brood of African violets, snake plants, ponytails, succulents, and Christmas cactuses as faithfully as she tends to the stories her mother bequeathed to her, and that she now entrusts to me.

  The South of my aunt’s childhood was mean. She remembers how her mother had to wait quietly for white customers to be served first in the neighborhood grocery store. She tells me about Wilson’s on Highway 51, a meat store where black customers were once ignored as long as white customers were present.