I smelled the olives Dwayne had swallowed with his drinks, smelled his aftershave, heavy and musky like a thick banana grove, and nearly passed out. “I’ve never had a white black woman,” he wheezed against my ear.
That day in Mama’s house, cushioning her sobs against my chest, I cried too, for the ache in my body, for the insult Dwayne had left in me, festering, for the bad girl I could never escape. “It’s all right,” I whispered to us both. Mama held me tight. “It’s going to be all right.”
Now Bitter chews the ice from his glass. “If she weren’t happy, she on’y had herself to blame,” he says, and for an instant I think he means me. He readjusts the poultice on his neck. “I ‘member, right before she took you away up north, she got broody, keeping to herself. I’d ask her what’s wrong, she’d pull inside herself. Used to drive down to Galveston, leaving you with me, just to stare at the ocean and them big of Victorian houses near the seawall. Said she liked to imagine living in them mansions, with they gardens and the gingerbread trim ‘round the windows.” He rubs his chest some more. “Way I see it, she grew up in Hell, in the fires of Texas City, and spent her whole life running from it. Sea weren’t big enough to douse the flames.” He holds out his hand and I take it. “I wished she’d let me help her some. I wished I coulda seen her ‘fore she passed.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle Bitter.”
He sniffles. “Well, my own mama used to tell me, ‘Don’t never put your hand on a young tree just bearing fruit or the fruit’ll fall off When your mama come to us she was a young tree. Maybe we handled her wrong.”
“You saved her life.”
“Oughta sprinkled hummingbird heart on her head. Fine powder, right ‘fore she left. That woulda kept her with us. Powerful gris-gris.”
I squeeze his fingers. “Uncle, I’m worried about you. I don’t think gris-gris is enough to stop these chest pains. Something’s wrong. You need to see to it.”
“Tomorrow I get me some nutmeg. Tie it ‘round my neck.”
As though the talk of spells had summoned them out of the late-evening light, two green and purple hummingbirds flare in and around Bitter’s rose bushes. They tip their beaks at us, almost in greeting, then vanish is if through a rip in the air. Coming home, Lord, coming home. “I’ll go heat up this chicken,” I say.
“Forgive me, Seam.”
“What for, Uncle?”
“For not taking better care your mama.”
I kiss the top of his head. “You said it yourself. She wouldn’t let us near.”
In the church, someone shouts, “Praise Jesus!”
Bitter holds my hand to his shoulder. We watch the sun set behind the twisted apple trees just beyond the graveyard.
7
ARIYEH USUALLY sleeps late on Saturdays, her one day off (she’s active in church on Sundays), but today she’s agreed to come with me to the hanging field where Cletus Hayes died. She believes my interest in the place is morbid — I suppose it is — and has no desire to see it. But the time we’ll have in the car will let us catch up with each other. I pull into her driveway at eight. She lives in Montrose, an old but slowly gentrifying area of town, just two miles from her daddy’s home. “Generic house, generic furniture,” she says, laughing, showing me around. “That’s what it means to join the middle class, isn’t it — you become just like everyone else?” She’s packed turkey sandwiches and some barbecued potato chips for us. On the road, she helps navigate me through a puzzle of cloverleafs, and soon we’re on open highway, heading west toward San Antonio. I feel us both relax.
“You really are looking good,” I tell her.
“You too. For a white girl.” She chuckles. She knows she can needle me and get away with it. Already, like the marshy lands here resettling after long winter rains, we’ve reestablished our balance. I tremble with anger at Mama, denying me this lovely friendship all those years.
“I’ll tell you who I’m worried about, and that’s your father,” I say, setting the cruise control. “He’s having chest pains.”
She blanches. “Again? I caught him a few months back, feeling poorly, but he swore to me the trouble had gone away.”
“Is he afraid of doctors? Does he have insurance?”
“He’s covered on my policy, through the school.” She chews her lower lip. “But you’re right. Getting him to a clinic will be like jump-starting a mule.”
Bluebonnet fields, past blooming, blaze green all around us. The bluebonnet is the Lone Star State’s official flower; every Sunday painter in Texas has whipped out acres of bad landscapes. It’s a hackneyed sight by now, but the blossoms are beautiful, little mirrors of the sky, and I’m grateful to be reminded of them.
I seem to have depressed Ariyeh, talking about Bitter. She’s spent more years than I have, trying to find cracks in his mask — if it’s a mask. “Reggie’s energy is astonishing,” I say. “It’s a wonderful thing he’s doing with the Row Houses.”
“It is. It’s hard for me to get him to slow down. But he’s such a relief after all the frogs I dated before. Lot of lazy black men in the city. I don’t know if you know that.”
I laugh.
“What about you?” she asks. “Any men?”
“Not any good ones.” I tell her about Dwayne — it feels natural to confess to her, the way we did as girls, gossiping and laughing all night.
“Jesus, T. Did you report him?”
“Not to the cops. I knew he’d claim the sex was consensual … and I wasn’t sure it wasn’t, up to a point — ”
“Oh, don’t do that to yourself. Guilt-tripping and stuff. The man raped you, honey. And because of your skin. Sick son of a bitch. I hope you got him fired, at least.”
“Transferred to another city office. I told him I couldn’t work with him anymore.”
“He escaped lightly. And you’ve been feeling guilty about it ever since, hm?”
“Mama took a turn for the worse soon after that, so I didn’t have much time to dwell on him.”
In fact, the week of Mama’s funeral, going through her things, I found Sarah Morgan’s letter from C and began to piece together what really might have happened between my great-grandfolks. I thought the night with Dwayne, a fresh chill in my mind, would help me clarify — or at least vividly imagine — the relationship. The attraction/repulsion of forbidden skin. The fine line, sometimes, between violence and mutual passion. Surely, because of what had happened to me, I could see Cletus a little clearer, from Sarah Morgan’s perspective? But really, the opposite occurred. I felt a swell of panic whenever I considered Cletus and Sarah’s rendezvous. I knew my alarm was more about Dwayne and me than family history, but knowing this didn’t help. I couldn’t calm my anxiety, and it’s part of what set me on the run, I suspect, back to what Bitter could tell me. How do black couples behave toward one another? And why?
“So what got this bee under your bonnet, to find your family?” Ariyeh asks. “Your mama’s passing?”
“Partly. Though I’d been curious for a long time. Sounds funny, I suppose, but I got tired of being white. Tired of the ‘burbs. The thing is, I remembered Houston, you know, though Mama had tried to erase it from me. I missed you and Bitter. You were like old songs I’d hear on the radio, tugging on me from far away.”