Adelaide Piper (2 page)

“Maybe next summer, son,” he called to Daddy as he caught a mosquito in his fist and examined the small heap of blood and wings in the center of his palm. “Y'all come on in for supper now.”

The pink sun was sitting for a moment on top of the ocean as if it were a beach ball floating on the surface. A mullet jumped up from the gully, and Daddy squeezed my shoulder before exhaling, “Let's go in, sweetheart.”

His first steps toward the boardwalk left a shower of wet sand along the small of my back, and a newfound fury started rising inside me.

When I spotted one of my water wings flying over the dunes toward a neighbor's cottage, the fury stoked itself into a hot fire in my throat as if I had just swallowed the popping grease from Juliabelle's iron skillet.

“No!” I said.

I wanted to cry and hit something, but I knew what I had to do, and when I ran back into the gully, I tripped over the shells and splashed clumsily to the deep center.

More salt water in my throat now. A burning in my nose. But still I twitched, thrashed my arms and legs with all my might, and managed to keep my head above water for a few seconds.

Twitch. Kick. Slap. Slap. Breathe.

Kick. Slap. Reach. Breathe.

Daddy turned back to see what the commotion was about, and then he called, “Look!” to the porch, though everyone was already inside for dinner. Then he ran into the gully and stood feet in front of me as I made my way to his outstretched hand.

“That's a girl!” he said as I paddled for him. “I
knew
you could do it!”

He stepped back a few times the closer I got to him, and when I had made my way past the boardwalk and the crab trap and Papa Great's fishing lines, he caught me, lifted me up onto his shoulder with his good hand beneath one arm and his stump beneath my other, and spun me around twice before plunging us backward into the murky water.

He was a former college football tailback for the University of South Carolina, and I loved his burly horsing around, so when his shoulder hit my lip in this celebratory pitch, I didn't mind the pain or the metal tang of blood on my tongue. And I laughed the sweet laugh of victory because I had proved us both right, and because I'd believed, like when my teacher had discovered I was seeing letters backward, that I could force things back to where they belonged.

Mama handed us each a towel before we took our seats in front of two heaping plates of battered shrimp topped with two lopsided balls of fried corn bread.

“Like to have fooled me,” Papa Great said as he sucked a shrimp out of its tail and slurped his toddy.

He motioned to Mama's swelling belly and said, “Let's hope this third one's a boy. Then you'll see determination, son.”

Papa Great. Ugh. He put the “pig” in “male chauvinist pig”; he even looked like a hog with his upturned nose rooting out the weakness in everyone.

“She's been swimming all summer long,” Mae Mae said as she searched the table for the cocktail sauce.

If he was a hog, then she was a peacock, tall and here for no reason at all except to be beautiful. She had a way of looking down her beak at him, and I liked that about her.

“Somethin' for sweet in your mouth,” murmured Juliabelle under her breath as she put a Bazooka square beside my plate and patted my back.

Then Daddy, the greatest cheerleader anyone could hope for, said, “Adelaide's got determination, Papa. You watch what I tell you.”

That night, beneath the sheets of the roll-away bed that sat flush against a window opened to the porch, I watched Juliabelle smoke her pipe at the edge of the boardwalk, with a shotgun propped against the wooden rail. Spooked by the snakes and the remote possibility of a gator skulking out of the marsh and across the gravelly road, she had taken one of Daddy's old field guns and learned how to shoot it. And we all understood that no one and nothing should disrupt the pleasure of her evening smoke.

She was lanky but strong, and I loved her as much as my mama, who was going to be even farther from me now with the birth of a third child. I'd stolen a picture from Mae Mae's photo album of Juliabelle holding me as an infant and hidden it in the lining of my suitcase. How I looked forward to curling up in her bony arms on the hammock in the early mornings and smelling her sweet tobacco smell as she rocked me on the porch and hummed “Eye on the Sparrow” before anyone else was awake. Her skin was loose and darker than the coal funneled into the furnace at the Williamstown steel mill, but her palms were a chalky pink like the tip of Daddy's stump or a square of Bazooka bubble gum, and she would cup them around my cheeks in those first minutes of daylight and say, “Good morning, my Adelaide.”

I didn't want the summer to end. The guidance counselor had labeled me “learning disabled” because of the dyslexia, and I'd have to share a classroom with Averill Skaggs, the ringleader of a mean generation of mill village lowlifes, for the first years of elementary school. He'd throw spitballs at me and trip me and ask me if a bird had crapped on my forehead. My jewel.

De-ter-mi-na-tion.
I had no idea what it meant then, but over the next twelve years I came to understand that it was something I must cultivate if I had any hope of getting out of Williamstown County and the open-air asylum that we called home. I had found it that day in the gully, and I would bridle it and use it to turn the letters straight, to help Mama raise up my younger sisters, and to bodysurf in the storm tide as the hurricanes gnawed along our South Carolina coast.

On the porch I could hear Daddy singing, “Like a rhinestone cowboy . . . ,” as Mae Mae shuffled the cards and dealt out another hand of seven-card stud. He was humming the refrain to the rhythm of clinking poker chips, and I focused on his voice and the sound of the hammock creaking where its chain met the wall until my eyelids were weighted and the dull roar of the ocean nearly lulled me to sleep.

I played possum a few minutes later when Daddy popped his head through the porch window to kiss me good night.

“You're my gal,” he whispered as I pretended to sleep. He still smelled like coconut suntan lotion, but it was mixed with beer now, and the stubble from his chin tickled my cheek and nearly gave me away.

“You can do anything you set your mind to,” he added before Papa Great called him back to the game.

As he ducked out onto the porch, I turned back toward him, caught my swollen lip between my teeth, and grinned.

1

Home

Williamstown

The paper mill's
two fingers
of smoke
rise
out of the
thick gray sky.
They coat
my throat
with their stench
and when I swallow
I have sipped
the sewer.

Run your finger
across the
layer of soot
on the corner
of Main and King
and taste
the steel mill
whose furnace
devours
one ton
of coal
each week.

Look in the inlet
where the dye
is dumped
from the textile mill
and you might see
a stained brim
belly up
from what
some folks call
industry.

A poem by Miss Adelaide Piper, Grade 10,
Williamstown High School
Published in the
Palmetto State Paper
on November 5, 1987

By high school, I was a poet, if you can believe that. And the very words that had stumped me as a child became my strongest allies. I stumbled upon the art form quite by accident. I mean, I'd always loved music and the sounds of words when you put them together. But when I panicked over a creative writing assignment from Mr. Gaskins—a new and handsome English teacher I suspected was an environmental activist—I wrote the poem above to get into his good graces.

Before I knew it, he had submitted it to the state paper's student contest, and after it was published, the Williamstown Chamber of Commerce hated my teenage guts, and Papa Great (my grandfather, my father's employer, and the head of the textile mill) all but disowned me. Two years down the road it was by default that Principal Dingledine asked me to give the valedictorian address in the crumbling gymnasium one June morning in 1989. I was actually third in the Williamstown High School senior class, but the rightful valedictorian, Georgianne Mayfield, was six months pregnant, and the wouldbe salutatorian and my senior dance date, Lazarus Greene, had moved to Norfolk on account of his daddy's port transfer. So it was up to me to address the faculty and students whom, to be honest, I hoped I'd never see again.

“Pickaninny's girl,” Charlene Roe said as I made my way to the front of the class processional.

My cheap turquoise graduation gown was open at the bottom, and when I reached down to pull it closed, the first page of my speech slipped out of my folder and landed at the foot of the second-biggest Philistine in the class, Bubba Ratliff.

“Pipe down, Piper,” he said, eyeing me hard as I snatched the paper out of his hand.

Averill Skaggs, the ringleader of the bunch, had coined that catchy chant when I ran for class president our freshman year. My campaign (which focused on creating a healthier learning environment) threatened to move the smoking section to the back corner of campus so that every member of the student body wouldn't have to walk through a cloud of burning cancer sticks on the way to class.

Averill and his smoking-section hoodlums hated this idea, as well as my plan to curb the dust from the shop class, where he spent most days feeding pieces of pine through dangerous machines to build gun racks and boxes for his snuff. He had been the first to raise his hand with a question during that freshman-year campaign assembly, and if I closed my eyes, I could still see him standing at the top of the bleachers, his peach fuzz of a mustache tucked between his pursed lips as he called out, “What's that on your forehead, Piper? Bird dropping?” The freshman class had erupted with laughter.

I lost the race. And I often blamed Averill for the fact that no boy from my class ever asked me out. With one glorious exception, the only head I'd ever turned was my second cousin's, Randy Stubbs, who finagled his way into most family gatherings and tried to woo me with fishing stories, Gamecock football trivia, or his copious collection of country music.

Thankfully, I could boast of one truly romantic evening last summer at the Charleston Governor's School, where a young Italian violinist from the Spoleto Festival orchestra took me to dinner after attending my poetry reading.

Luigi Agnolucci.
Mon amore.

He bought me a palmetto frond that a black boy with a gold tooth had sculpted into a rose before pushing us on a porch swing at the end of the Water Front Park dock. And there, beneath the dull lights of Fort Sumter and the thin sliver of the Carolina moon, he cupped the back of my head with his long, gifted fingers and pulled me in for the kiss of my life . . .

Since Luigi was an ocean away and I refused to take my cousin to the senior dance, I'd bucked protocol and asked my favorite male classmate, Lazarus Greene, to be my date to the senior dance. He was the editor of the yearbook and my study partner in AP English, and he always made me laugh with his impersonation of Principal Dingledine's morning announcements, so I figured, why not?

You wouldn't have thought that in 1989 a white girl asking a black boy to a dance would have caused a stir. But Williamstown, a once-honored city of the country's Founding Fathers, had nose-dived during the industrial era into a backward village of cretins, and the mill boys made sure that all eyes were on me and my bright and handsome friend when we entered the gymnasium door five weeks ago. Me in a strapless lilac gown that Mama copied from a Jessica McClintock advertisement, and Lazarus in a white dinner jacket with a coordinating lavender bow tie and cummerbund.

Now Principal Dingledine motioned for me to hurry up and take my place behind the flag bearer who led the procession. I quickly reorganized the papers of my speech and didn't flinch when I heard Averill Skaggs call a simple “Don't brick!” from the back of the line.

Philistines. Cretins. I was so ready to be rid of them.

And I had my ticket out.

It had come in the form of a thick, gold-crested acceptance letter from Nathaniel Buxton University, an elite liberal arts college in Virginia. Ever since it arrived last March, I had pictured the redbrick buildings with their mammoth white pillars as the answer to all that I longed for: knowledge, wonder, enlightenment, and a worthy environment in which to tear open the cocoon I was in and start
living.

I took my place on the stage by my friend and Miss Williamstown High, Jif Ferguson, who kept flipping her golden bangs and asking me to look between her teeth to make sure a poppy seed from her breakfast muffin wasn't lodged somewhere in there.

“Beep.” Jif sounded her alarm. “Holy Roller alert. Beep.”

Shannon Pitts, my best childhood friend turned born-again Christian, leaned down and whispered in my ear, “God be with you, Adelaide,” before taking her place behind us.

Thanks, Miss Wear-My-Faith-on-My-Sleeve,
I thought to myself
. But this one is in the bag.

Principal Dingledine was the first to address the audience with his uninspired thank-yous and watered-down best wishes for our futures.

We had plumb worn him out, and it was common knowledge that he would retire with the class of 1990 next year.

Now, me, I was no troublemaker in the conventional sense, but I did cause a bit of a stir with my choice of a date for the senior dance.

When Averill's crew tried to pick a fight with Lazarus on his way to the parking lot the night before the dance, Principal Dingledine had called me into his office.

“I'm not saying those boys are right, Adelaide,” he'd said. “But I don't know why you have to go and throw gas on a fire.”

And then there was the pollution poem. After it hit the state paper, some of the Williamstown business executives (including Papa Great) had a sit-down meeting with Principal Dingledine, and before I knew it, the creative writing class was off the curriculum and Mr. Gaskins was teaching below-average English to Averill Skaggs and the rest of the lowlifes.