Daughters (25 page)
Authors: Florence Osmund
“So what does that mean for me?”
Jonathan didn’t answer immediately. “Segregation works both ways. Negroes aren’t allowed in some places and vice versa. I’m counting on you being accepted in a Negro hotel, especially after I introduce you as my daughter. It’s not that unusual to see very light-skinned Negroes in this part of the country.”
Marie’s heart raced. Up until now, ever since learning of her true ethnicity, her anxiety had stemmed from knowing she was part colored but passed for white. Looking white and trying to pass for colored was completely foreign.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Well, no, to be honest. I’m starting to feel uncomfortable. Am I overreacting?”
“I don’t know if you’re overreacting or not. But I can tell you if I get any sense that it’s not a safe place for you, we’ll leave.” He heaved a big sigh. “Marie, you’re going to see a lot on this trip. And maybe it will bring you closer to my side of the family and maybe it won’t, but what I want to say is, never lose sight of the fact that your outward appearance shouldn’t define who you are. I know it does to other people, but it shouldn’t to you. Do you understand that?”
“Mm-hmm. I do. But here’s the thing. When I’m with whites, I feel uncomfortable on the inside, because I know I’m not one of them, not totally anyway, but they think I am. But when I’m around Negroes, I feel uncomfortable on the outside, because they think I’m not one of them. Does that make any sense?”
“Oh, I understand what you’re saying. It’s not easy. I know that. And I wish I had all the answers for you, but I don’t. You know who you are, and you’re confused about who you should be. And when I or anyone else tells you to just be yourself, you say, ‘But that doesn’t work very well.’ Well, you have to figure out how to make it work. No one can do that for you.”
They approached the hotel. “I was thinking of separate rooms,” Jonathan said. “Are you okay with that?”
She didn’t know which scenario was more daunting—being alone or with him in the same room.
“Marie, the farther south we go, the worse it gets. I tried to prepare you for this, but…”
“I know. I insisted. I’m sure it will be fine.” She paused. “Let’s keep separate rooms and see how that goes, okay?”
“Welcome to the South, my dear.”
At the hotel, Jonathan asked for a room for himself and one for his daughter. The clerk gave him a curious glance but handed him two room keys without asking any questions. Jonathan handed Marie her key with slight smile.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
That night as she lay in bed, Marie mulled over all the family history Jonathan had shared with her. She thought she had appreciated Jonathan, his family, and his life fairly well up until this point, and she harbored nothing but good feelings over it, all of it. Now she wasn’t so sure. All of a sudden she felt overwhelmed by the family history.
One of Jonathan’s comments kept surfacing in her mind. “Segregation works both ways,” he had said. Segregation was a word Marie was learning to hate. If she lived in the South, she’d be only one shade of skin color away from not being able to use the same public restrooms as white people, get the same education, work in the same jobs, and ride in the front of the bus. Segregation. She had looked the word up in the dictionary shortly after meeting Doretha Scott. “To separate or set apart from others or from the main body or group; isolate.”
Isolate. Like they had some contagious disease. The main body or group. They were hurtful words, ones Marie thought she would never understand. But what troubled her even more was she hadn’t thought much about segregation when she was going through life thinking she was white.
She had heard the term “Jim Crow laws” but didn’t know what they meant, so she had gone to the library to research it. Statutes enacted in the South as far back as 1880, they were designed to legalize segregation between Negroes and whites. The name was derived from a character in a popular minstrel song of all things.
Old Jim Crow
Where you been baby?
Down Mississippi and back again
Old Jim Crow, don’t you know,
It’s all over now
She had read the full lyrics a few times, but didn’t fully get the connection. She read further and found the term Jim Crow originated when a white minstrel show performer blackened his face with burnt cork and danced a silly jig while singing the song. He had created the character after seeing a crippled old black slave dancing and singing a song ending with these chorus words:
Wheel about and turn about and do jis so,
Eb’ry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.
So what does all this mean for me?
she asked herself for the millionth time.
How do you segregate someone like me?
At breakfast the next morning, Marie asked how much farther it was to Wisteria Belle.
“I thought we’d have lunch in Greenville, South Carolina. We should reach Chesterfield by dinner. That’s where Wisteria is. The only problem is that I’ve been away so long, I don’t know where we can have dinner or even stay, so that could be an adventure.”
Marie had a feeling he was downplaying a potentially disquieting situation so she wouldn’t fret over it. But she did anyway.
They reached Greenville by two o’clock and searched for a place to eat lunch. When Jonathan reached a fork in the road, he veered to the right. “We’re not going to eat in this part of town, but I want you to see it anyway.”
Marie observed the nicely maintained homes on either side of the road. After they drove for a mile or so, the residential section turned commercial—hardware store, real estate office, clothes stores, and restaurants.
“This looks like a nice place to stop. What’s wrong with having lunch here?”
He slowed down. “Look closely at the signs in the windows.”
She gasped at the first crudely made sign. Prominently displayed in the window of a restaurant, it read
NO
Nigger or Negro
ALLOWED
Inside Building
The next one read
Colored Served
In Rear
Three signs hung over the doors of a public bathroom.
White Women White Men Coloreds
She shook her head in disbelief.
“I had no idea it would be like this.”
“I know you didn’t. I tried to tell you.”
“I know.”
Jonathan turned the car around and drove back to the fork in the road. This time he took a left turn.
Marie wondered how anyone could live in the tiny run-down houses, some with no front doors, and others with gaping holes in the roofs. Skinny little shoeless colored children played in the grassless yards, their clothes dirty and torn. The unmistakable aroma of cotton, mingled with the earthy smell of the dirt the children were kicking up as they ran through the yards, permeated the air and drifted up her nose. “It’s like being in a different world.”
A dilapidated building with a car repair shop on one side and a coffee shop on the other stood at the end of the street. Jonathan slowed down the car but continued driving. “I’m not going to stop here either.” He drove back to the white section of town to the back of the restaurant with the sign directing Negroes to the rear of the building. He picked up two sandwiches to go and drove a half mile to a park they had seen on their way in.
The sun still shone brightly, and the scent of blooming dogwoods wafted through the air. Jonathan parked the car, and they headed toward a park bench. Marie sat down, but Jonathan stayed standing, his gaze directed beyond her.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
He continued to stare past her, the look on his face soulful. She got up and followed his gaze. The sign read:
Negroes and Dogs
Not Allowed
They walked back to the car in silence. Jonathan turned on the ignition but didn’t put the car in gear. Marie couldn’t look at him. She tried to conceal her reaction but didn’t have what it took to hold back her emotions. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Jonathan leaned over and held her until her shoulders stopped shaking. He held her face and forced her to look at him.
“I tried to tell you.”
“I know.”
After eating their sandwiches in the car by the side of the road, they drove another hundred and fifty miles to Chesterfield. When they reached the middle of town, a smile crept over his face.
“What are you thinking?” she asked him.
“I was just thinking of when me and my friends would go to the swimming hole that was on one of the neighboring plantations. We were eight or nine I guess. One of us would stand as lookout because if we were caught, it would mean a terrible whuppin’ by the landowners.”
“So did you ever get whipped?”
“Caught, yes. Whipped, no. I was a spindly kid, but a very fast runner.”
The sign for Wisteria Belle Plantation appeared to have been recently painted and held a prominent position twenty-five feet from the long driveway leading to the house. Jonathan pulled off the side of the road and parked the car by a narrow clearing where the main house was in clear view.
Marie drew in a long breath. “It’s beautiful.” The wisteria were in full bloom—hundreds, maybe thousands of clusters of large purple flowers pouring down like a waterfall all the way to the ground from the second story balcony. Only the front door and slivers of the two-story windows peeked through the dramatic flowering drape.
The house sat back at least two hundred yards from the road. Two rows of thirty-foot-tall live oak trees, their branches forming a perfect canopy, lined a wide path to the house. Stalactites of jade-green moss dangled from their branches halfway to the ground, causing an eerie, almost unwelcoming greeting for a visitor approaching the house.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It was something else,” Jonathan said, his voice fraught with sadness.
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s been more than thirty years since I’ve been here, and all I can think about is the life my grandmother must have had here—a slave, raped by the reprehensible owner of this place at the age of eighteen and dead by twenty-five.”
“It’s hard to believe…hard to understand.”
“And it happened all the time…I mean all the time. That’s why the woman who made that remark to you in Marshall Field’s that day said what she did. She was from the South. She’d seen people who looked just like you many times. It was very common practice.”
“Did that at least end when the slaves were freed?”
“Not entirely. You have to understand, freedom was a misnomer really. And even after they were so-called free, most Negroes didn’t think freedom was possible in reality anyway. My own people stayed here and worked after they were freed. I was the first to leave.”
“Do you think we can see where you lived?”
“Maybe.” Jonathan put the car in gear and proceeded down the road they had come in on, turning onto the first road on the right past the main house. The dirt road was wide enough for only one car. He drove for ten minutes before slowing down.
“See over there, on the rise?”
Marie looked in the direction of his gaze to a row of small unpainted houses.
“There was only one house when I lived there. I’m not sure now which one it was. They all look the same to me.”
“They look pretty small.”
“Just one room with a fireplace for cooking and cold nights. There was a small loft upstairs where I slept. And you can’t see it, but there was a rather large front porch where we sat most evenings after dinner. Looks like the outhouse is gone.” His facial expression was placid. “I see the houses still aren’t painted.”
“Why is that?”
“When I was living there, we didn’t want the owners of the big house to think we didn’t feel inferior to them, and an unpainted house helped to do that.”
“Tell me the good memories.”
“There was a swimming hole on the main property, far enough from the big house so no one could see us there. Felt pretty good on those hot, sticky summer days.”
“Did you have friends to play with?”
“A few, but most of the colored kids were working the fields during the day.”
“How young?”
“Four, five years old. If they weren’t picking cotton, they were pumping water and bringing it to their daddies or chopping wood or running errands. There were a few kids like me whose parents wouldn’t allow them to work the fields, but never enough for a good game of kickball or anything. Sometimes we could get white kids to join us, but if we were caught playing with them, we would get in big trouble.”
Jonathan turned the car around and headed toward the main road. “Let’s see if we can find a place to eat dinner and a hotel for the night.”
They had to drive to Bennettsville before finding a decent restaurant that allowed Negroes to come inside to eat. The patrons were mostly white. Before they left, Jonathan asked the colored waitress if she knew of a hotel where they would be welcomed.
The waitress glanced at Marie and then gave him a puzzled look before she said, “If she goes in alone, you can go just about anywhere.”
Marie and Jonathan faced each other and nodded. On the way out, a man’s voice blurted out, “So long, nigger lover.” The laughter was daunting.