Daughters (24 page)

The car ride to the airport the next day was a solemn one. Marie kept trying to lift Rachael’s spirits, but Rachael kept sinking back into an unpleasant mood. While Marie thought she needed to snap out of it, she also had to keep reminding herself of Rachael’s troubled past and the fact she had just turned fourteen.

Once seated in the gate waiting area, Marie presented Rachael with a small white box tied with a blue ribbon, Rachael’s favorite color.

“What’s this?”

“Open it.”

She removed a gold bracelet from the box. A heart-shaped charm with her initials engraved on it dangled from the bracelet. She glanced up at Marie.

“Read the back.”

Rachael turned the charm around.

Happy 14
^th
birthday
Love, Marie

Tears welled up in Rachael’s eyes and then rolled down her cheeks. She made no attempt to swipe them away. She leaned in for a hug. Marie held her until her shoulders stopped jerking.

“No one has ever done this much for me. Not in my whole life.” She pulled herself away from Marie’s hold and gave her a sad look. “So what’s in this for you?”

Marie stared at her for several seconds. “What’s in it for me? I’ll tell you what’s in it for me. It gives me great pleasure doing something nice for someone I care about.”

Rachael stared back. “You know you just ended that sentence with a preposition.”

The stewardess announced they were ready to board the plane. Rachael wiped her eyes and got up from her seat. She turned to Marie and saluted. “Later, gator.”

On the hour-and-a-half-long drive home from the airport, Marie reflected on the past four days with Rachael. Her initial objective of merely wanting to be there for her, during a time period in her life when she so desperately needed a female adult to talk to, had been accomplished, but she hadn’t been prepared for the delicate psyche she discovered when she peeled back a few of Rachael’s layers. Most disturbing had been Rachael’s comments about how success wasn’t in the cards for someone like her.

She thought about Rachael’s moodiness and unexpected reaction to things, like when she and Karen had ordered a glass of wine with dinner, and when she’d asked if there was a lock on her bedroom door. She rehashed their conversation outside of Amelia Earhart’s home about how men knowing a lot of people was different from women knowing a lot of people, and the so-called uncles who had periodically stayed with them, men who got drunk and routinely beat up on her mother. Marie wondered what else these uncles had done.

Rachael’s mother. How could she abandon her own daughter like that? It had been eighteen months since anyone had heard from her. Even if Marie gave Judy every benefit of the doubt, unless she was dead, there could be no legitimate excuse for not getting in touch with Rachael or Ben, if for no other reason than to make sure Rachael was alright.

Marie thought about her own abandonment issue with her father, and while he at least provided for her financially while she was growing up, she still felt the consequences of his not being in her life in other ways. She could only imagine how Rachael felt.

CHAPTER 17

Segregation

The next day, worn out from craving more now than ever to someday have a family of her own and understanding the consequences of her racial identity, Marie phoned her father.

“Can I ask you a huge favor, Dad?”

“Sure. Anything.”

“I want to see the South.”

“The South?”

“Yes. I want to see where colored people live and how it differs from white people. I want to see where you and your parents and grandparents lived. I want to…”

“Hold on, daughter. Let’s talk about this. What are you really looking to gain from going there?”

“I want to be closer to you and Claire. And everybody. I want to understand your background—which is my background too.”

“Sweetheart, you don’t want to see the South firsthand, believe me.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I’ll tell you as much as you want to know about it. That will be just as good.”

“No, it won’t. I need to understand things for myself. I was going to ask you if you would go with me, but if you won’t, I’m going alone.”

“You’re not going there alone.”

“Why not? Maybe Karen will go with me.”

“No. You don’t know the lay of the land. You’ll end up in the wrong places, and they’ll eat you alive.”

“Then you’ll go with me?”

“It’s not pretty, Marie. And it’s not safe.”

“But you know the lay of the land and where to go and not go.”

“You’re determined to do this.”

“Yes.”

She heard his sigh over the phone line. He waited several seconds before speaking. “Okay. I’ll go with you, but only because I’m afraid you’ll go alone and get into who knows what kind of trouble.”

“Thank you, Dad.”

“You know I love you, Marie.”

He had never said those words before. He might have shown it, but he had never come out and said it.

“I love you too. When can we go?”

Two weeks later, Jonathan drove to Atchison, stayed overnight at Al & Rita’s Bed & Breakfast, and picked Marie up at her apartment bright and early the next day, exactly three years to the day Marie had left Richard. The mid-May weather was perfect for a road trip.

“What have you done to your hair, child?” he asked Marie when she answered the door. Three years earlier, Marie had cut it short and dyed her almost-black hair to light brown when she felt she needed a change, a new beginning in her life. Now chin-length and back to it’s natural color, the style was similar to the way her mother had worn her hair.

She spun around. “Do you like it?”

“Maybe I just need time to get used to it.”

“You don’t like it.”

“No, it looks fine. Makes a big difference. I hardly recognize you.” He paused. “I never realized until now just how much you look like your mother.” He gave her a serious look. “You’re sure you want to go through with this?”

Marie gave him a wide smile. “Oh, yes. More than anything else in the world.” Marie had given this significant thought before, during, and after asking her father to take her there. She understood the dangers, or at least she thought she did. She recognized what she was about to witness could change her way of thinking altogether, but she was ready for that. She had to know her roots in order to understand who she was…and perhaps more importantly, who she was supposed to be.

They drove three hundred miles to St. Louis before stopping for lunch. The Missouri landscape wasn’t much different from Kansas—wheat fields, expansive pastures scattered with cattle and small fenced-in pens for pigs. Not as many horse farms.

At lunch, Jonathan described the plantation where he had lived until he moved to St. Charles, thirty-six years earlier. “It was called Wisteria Belle, and when you see it—if it’s stayed the same, that is—you’ll know why. The main house had a huge front porch with massive two-story-high columns across the front of it and purple wisteria cascading down from the top of the columns all the way to the ground.”

“It sounds gorgeous.”

“It was. Of course, we never got to sit on that porch, or even go in the front yard, for that matter. It was strictly for the plantation owners and their white friends and family.” He turned toward his daughter. “I hope you’re ready for one hell of a story, my dear.”

“Please don’t leave anything out.”

“The main house was huge, four stories and a basement. I’m going to guess there were at least twenty rooms in that house, including a ballroom, and all decorated to the hilt. I do know there were seven bathrooms because my father used to tell the story that his mother had to clean them all, every day.”

“Were you ever in there?”

“The main house? Not very often. I wasn’t allowed in the house unless the family was gone for the day, and that was when I was pretty young. I don’t remember much.”

“Didn’t all that change when slaves were freed?”

“The way my father told it, after the slaves were freed, his family, like most of the slaves, continued to work at Wisteria Belle. They really had no other place to go. And then, like I told you before, my father was given fifty acres of land and several horses by his father. Louis Boone was his name, the plantation owner…my grandfather.”

They finished lunch and returned to the car. “What was your father’s name?”

“Samuel Brooks.”

“So where did the name Brooks come from?”

“That was my grandmother’s last name. Mariah Brooks.”

“Did you ever meet your grandparents?”

“Both died before I was born. My grandmother, the house slave, died when my father was a teenager. By then he was a full-fledged slave. My grandfather died just a couple of years after he gave my father the land and horses. My father always said Louis probably knew he was dying and that’s why he gave away most of his land.”

They crossed over the Mississippi into the southern tip of Illinois and on to Kentucky.

“So after your father was given the land… Was it on the same plantation?”

“Yes.”

“So then he managed his own land, with the horses, by himself?”

“He took on some fellow former slaves who had no place to go, and they ran it together. One of those men had a half sister whom my father married when he was forty-six. She was younger, much younger.”

“How young?”

“In her twenties.”

“Quite the age difference. What was her name?”

“Minervy Gulliglove.”

Marie shot a glance at her father. He took his eyes off the road long enough to give her a smile.

“No one is quite sure of my mother’s background. She was a Negro, but she obviously had some other race in her background. We’re not sure. Actually she wasn’t even sure where the name Gulliglove came from.”

“Sounds like identity crises may run in our family.”

Jonathan chuckled. “Well, let’s hope we’ve put a stop to that once and for all. Now, going on with the story, my parents were married in 1889, and I was born the following year. I think I may have told you, I suspect she was pregnant before they got married. No one ever talked about that.”

“What is your earliest memory?”

“We lived on the far corner of Wisteria Belle, far away from the main house, but our little ramshackle of a house was on a rise, so you could see the main house from it. That was my earliest memory, looking down at that mansion. I must have been four or five when I asked my father who lived there. He told me it didn’t matter because we weren’t welcome in that house.”

“So this was probably thirty some years after the Emancipation Proclamation, right?”

“About that.”

“But your father had relatives in that house—half brothers, you said?”

“The Emancipation Proclamation may have made it illegal to have slaves on paper, but it didn’t change things all that much. Thirty years later, Negroes were still treated like shit. Sorry. Excuse my language. But it’s the truth. My father would have no more tried to talk to or visit anyone in that house than they would have come knocking on his door. It just wasn’t done.”

“So how old was your mother when she died?”

“She was thirty-seven. I was ten. Dad was in his fifties.” Jonathan pulled off the main road at the sign which read,
Welcome to Frankfort, Kentucky’s State Capital
. “We’ll stay here. I know a nice hotel where we can get in.” Marie raised her eyebrows. “We’re at the top of the Deep South. Still completely segregated.”