Or from the strangeness of Chaym Smith.
Skeptically he squinted at the dilapidated house. “Anybody living in this dump?”
“Not this summer.” Amy’s brow pleated. “And it’s not a dump. Mama Pearl rents it out to kids over at the college. At her age she doesn’t like to live so far from other people. It’s furnished inside and she’s never asked for more than what she needs to pay the taxes and keep her place upstate, but it’s been empty since June. That church we passed up the road? Most of our family is buried in a cemetery there …”
Smith cut off the engine, and we unloaded the car, lugged boxes inside to dusty rooms with drop cloths covering the sparse, old-fashioned furnishings while Amy explained that her great-grandfather James, a preacher, framed each room and drove half the nails in the farmhouse as well as in the church just a quarter mile away.
Talking about her family was a natural, innocent enough thing to do, and she could not have known, nor I, how it would draw out even more of Smith’s cynicism. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Is this gonna be a long story?”
I shot him a stare to shut him up as Amy opened stiff chintz curtains in the front room, flooding it with light. “Go on,” I said, “You were saying something about your great-grandfather. What was he like?”
She was silent, looking around the room, remembering, and I was struck again by her beauty, the melic lift of her voice when Amy said she didn’t know her great-grandfather all that well, but his daughter, Mama Pearl, often invoked her father as industrious and loving and quick to load his rifle if he caught the faintest trace of discrimination directed at either his kin or himself, though as a family the Griffiths seldom came into contact with whites, no more often than did, say, the Negroes who founded the town of Allensworth in California or other all-black hamlets at the turn of the century. Whites may not have liked them, but James — her grandmother told her — never asked to be liked, only respected. And that was a matter fully within their own control. They grew their own food before and after the crash that crippled the nation in ’29. They operated a school for their children at the nearby church, one so successful in teaching metalwork that its graduates were considered the best smiths in the county and had work come rain or shine in the twenties.
Amy walked us through rooms of antique furniture — ladderbacked chairs, heavy oak tables, an old black walnut Jefferson bookstand fastened with mortise-and-tenon joinery — and for me it was like being gently led into the past, a distant, better time when black people were the moral fiber of a nation. She said that during her visits in the 1950s to Makanda nothing pleased her so much as how self-reliant her relatives and their neighbors seemed. There were inconveniences, of course. Water came from a well. Thirty paces from the back door was an outhouse she hated to visit in the middle of the night. But she loved seeing her kin making their own clothes and furniture and bartering with other black people in the area for the little they could not produce themselves. She remembered her great-grandfather, who, if he came across something he especially liked on his dinner plate, saved that portion of the meal for last; when he flipped through the newspaper and saw an item that interested him, he scanned everything else on that page first and held off satisfying his desire for that one particular news report until he’d made himself read everything around it. Throughout Jackson County her kin were known as the people black travelers should see if they were turned away from white hotels and needed a room for the night and a good meal the next morning. As might be expected, they had no tolerance for phoniness or pretense. They did not judge others by their possessions, dress, family pedigree, or how often they got their names in the newspaper. Family and friends came first. And they did not hesitate to share what little they had, whether it was food, labor, their home, or the skills each had developed in order to survive. She said they were known to hold on to a dollar until it hollered. (And James often discussed Negro entrepreneurs he admired, and urged his children to take as their example people like merchant Jean-Baptiste Du Sable, one of Chicago’s earliest settlers, Madame Walker, Philadelphia’s catering king Robert Bogle, and colored people who controlled America’s service businesses before World War II, to say nothing of owning their own banks and insurance companies.) James’s children, Mama Pearl and her two brothers, were never pampered. He insisted that from birth to age five his progeny be treated like princes and princesses, but after that they were to work like servants, even if what they did consisted in nothing more than fetching things for the other folks. (He suggested they sing as they worked to lighten the labor.) No, Amy said, he could not tolerate idleness, and it was not in his nature to ask anyone for anything.
As we traipsed through the old house, its floorboards creaking beneath our feet, Smith responded to Amy’s family history with a contemptuous pfft! from his pursed lips, which puzzled me, because I almost felt that as Amy spoke I could hear her ancestors’ day beginning with breakfast-table prayer, which did not exclude even the youngest children; they had to know chapter and verse before their twelfth birthday. There were no spirits in this household. In my mind, I saw James — a tall, dark-skinned, suspender-wearing black man — insisting that his two sons and daughter, Amy’s grandmother, acquire as many skills as they had fingers on their hands, work for everything they received, and treat whatever possessions any family member had as carefully and conscientiously as if they belonged to someone else who one day might ask for their return. The family, he told them again and again, was far more than a group bonded by blood. More even than a collective that insured the survival of its members. More than anything else, according to the Griffith patriarch, it was the finest opportunity anyone would have for practicing selflessness, for giving to others day in, day out, and for this privilege, this chance to outgrow his own petty likes and dislikes, opinions and tastes, he gave abundant thanks. If they wanted to be happy, he counseled them, the first step was to make someone else happy. Through Amy’s words I saw him demand that his children read after their chores were finished — what, he didn’t care, but he wouldn’t talk with them if two days had gone by and they’d not touched a book. (Smith was looking at his watch, frowning heavily; her story so displeased and rattled him that he entered one of the bedroom doorways at the same instant I did, and for a second we were stuck, shoulder to shoulder, our arms pinned at our sides, Chaplinesque, until I jerked free.) Eventually, she explained, the farm could not sustain itself. By the late 1950s, his sons left to find work elsewhere. Mama Pearl did the same, moving to Chicago, where she was steadily employed at Fanny’s Restaurant in the suburb of Evanston, and possession of the property came to her when her mother died in 1963.
Now we were in the kitchen. Smith glowered darkly out the window, cracking his knuckles. I tried to ignore him. I said to Amy, “Your people lived like that?”
“Yes.”