All Daddy tells me is that his grandfather owned several businesses in Bear Creek and didn’t get along with his son. I want to know more than that, and I think Daddy does, too.”
I nod, but find that I am thinking that Sarah is not quite telling her the truth. Until now, I thought her motive was to try to document a fifty-year-old case of rape in the cause of feminism. Yet, by her questions at the cemetery, she wants to know more than I gave her credit for.
The old lady smooths her dress, avoiding our eyes.
“It was such a long time ago.”
Sarah slides off the couch and places herself at Mrs.
Washington’s feet. Her voice almost a whisper, Sarah asks, “Did my great-granddaddy hurt you?”
Mrs. Washington stares over Sarah’s head at me and replies in a firm voice, “Why, Mr. Frank, he never jump on me or nothin’ like that. He’d come by and say he was checkin’ on his property or to get the rent, but I know he was comin’ by to see me. Momma be off cleanin’ white folks’ houses, and I’d be takin’ care of my little sister. We didn’t have no daddy. Least not one who lived with us.”
Sarah asks, “How old were you, ma’am?”
Mrs. Washington looks down at Sarah to gauge her answer. ““Bout sixteen when Mr. Frank started comin’ round. I was a pretty girl. Least that what folks said. Mr.
Frank, he said so, too.”
“Do you know about how old he was?” Sarah prompts.
Mrs. Washington squints at me and answers, “Mr. Frank was a full-grown man. Thirty, maybe.”
I nod but do not speak, afraid if I do, she will stop talking. Each time she uses the words, “Mr. Frank,” I feel sick. Even as a child, I was called by the man who swept the store for my father “Mr. Gideon.” Damn, underneath all that passive behavior, how they must have hated us! I wish this old woman were angry, but either she is masking it well, or time has erased the bitterness it seems she ought to have toward my grandfather.
“What was my great-grandfather like?” Sarah asks.
“He was all right. When he started visitin’ reg’lar, he’d forget to collect all the rent. Say he’d git it next time. After Calcutta was born, he never as’t for nothin’.”
“Calcutta was his daughter?” Sarah says. I realize how skillful a questioner she is. She should be the lawyer in the family, not her old man.
“Couldn’ta been another daddy,” Mrs. Washington says, a melancholy expression on her weathered face.
“My mama be real strict, but white folks kinda do what they want. I liked Mr. Frank. He never meant no harm.
Jus’ a reg’lar man.”
Sarah cuts her eyes at me to make sure I heard that last remark. For good reason my choice of women hasn’t always pleased her. I got high marks for Rainey; she will like Amy, too, if she gives her a chance.
“Did he ever acknowledge that Calcutta was his daughter?”
Mrs. Washington is silent for a long moment.
“After he seen how light Cal was,” she says, “he quit comin’ ‘round to the house. Not even to git the rent money. Mama said he got a li’l shy after that.”
Sarah begins to pull at her hair. She asks, “Where was your daughter born?”
“In the house,” Mrs. Washington says, her tone matter of-fact.
“Wudn’t no hospital in Bear Creek then.”
Sarah knows Marty and I were born in the Baptist Hospital in Memphis.
“Did you see a doctor before or after your daughter was born?”
“Never did,” Mrs. Washington says ruefully.
“Mama didn’t have no money for that. When I had a bad toothache once that wouldn’t quit. Mama took me on the train to a colored dentist over in Memphis. White dentists didn’t like the colored even if you had money.”
Her cheeks now blazing, Sarah asks, “Do you remember if the house your mother rented from him was in good condition?”
Mrs. Washington has come to terms with her life in a way Sarah will never understand. The philosophy of stoicism is not in my daughter’s bones. Patting at the back of her white head, Mrs. Washington says, “It was all right, but it didn’t have no toilet. Still had to go out back.
It was hot, too.”
I wince at the thought of the house. When I was fourteen and received my restricted driver’s license, each week I was allowed to drive a basket of laundry to a house in one of the black sections of Bear Creek. Lula Mae (I never knew her last name) did her ironing in the front room of her house, but all I really remember is the stifling heat in the room, the ironing board, and her asthmatic wheezing. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house each time the feeling was so oppressive. How could people live in such poverty? At that age I never made any connection between our lives and theirs.
Sarah has fallen silent, a sign that she has begun to brood. I will hear a sermon on the way home. Mrs. Washington volunteers that when Cal was about three, my grandfather sold their house to someone else, and she rarely saw him again. He didn’t send her money, see the child, or acknowledge them in any way. Again, she doesn’t seem perturbed about the lack of support. After some urging from me, she adds a few details about her own life. She was married when she was eighteen to a mechanic who ran off after she had four children by him.
Until five years ago when her arthritis got too bad, she cleaned houses for a living.
Mrs. Washington confirms that Calcutta is Lucy’s mother, and I calculate Frank Page became a father more than sixty years ago. Unlike many blacks who left the county to go North to find work, the family has stayed in eastern Arkansas.
“They started coming back these last few years. It ain’t no better up there now, and it be a little worse.” Though it is not warm in the house, she picks up a fan from the table by her chair and stirs the air in front of her face. She seems a little breathless now, and I suspect we have tired her out. She does not object when I announce we have to be going. As we stand to leave, Mrs.
Washington, nodding at Sarah, tells me, “She’s a pretty girl.” It sounds more like a warning than a compliment.
We thank her for talking with us, and Sarah adds, “I hope this wasn’t too hard on you.”
Mrs. Washington smiles for the first time. Talking, her expression says, hasn’t been the difficult part.
In the Blazer, Sarah complains bitterly.
“He was a terrible person! First, he rents her family probably a pigsty;
then he knocks some off the rent if she’ll have sex with him; then after she gets pregnant and has a child, he sells the property and pretends it never happened. That’s just simply evil! How could he have done such a thing?”
I direct Sarah to drive back on Highway 79 through Clarendon and Stuttgart to keep us off the interstate. As we drive past the cemetery again, I try to put the matter in some perspective.
“You need to remember that they were in the Depression then, so the housing isn’t a surprise.
And, we still don’t know if she felt coerced to have sex with him. He may have genuinely cared for her. If she hated him, I couldn’t tell it.”
Sarah passes an ancient pickup with two dogs and three black children in the back.
“How can you defend him?” she says shrilly.
“She was practically a child. He might as well have raped her for all she could do to stop him! It’s all true. Whatever white people over here can get away with, they will. I’m so glad we don’t live over here!”
“I’m not defending him, but it’s not that simple, Sarah,” I lecture her.
“Geography doesn’t have a lot to do with how much we humans rationalize our behavior.
Give any of us too much power, and we’ll abuse it.
There’s some wonderful people, black and white, living in Bear Creek. Granted, my grandfather may not have been one of them, but the older you get, the more you realize we’re pretty much all the same. You just haven’t lived long enough yet to find that out.”