Relics (2 page)
As they crossed the Broad River bridge and entered the Sujosa settlement, autumn passed and winter settled in. The higher elevation surely contributed to the colder weather, and so did the brisk wind whipping along the river valley, but Faye couldn’t shake her impression that there had been a change in season during the short drive. She reached into her tote bag and pulled out a black cardigan to wrap herself in.
The Sujosa settlement clustered on the riverbank, around a flat spot of ground that housed a church and a building bearing a sign that said, “Hanahan’s Grocery and Sundries.” A few houses were visible along roads that wound up the hills on either side of the church and store. They were scattered at intervals that suggested each was associated with several acres of land. Garden plots, left fallow by the fall harvest and marked only by bare soil and a few collard plants with enough guts to face winter, lay behind each one.
Following the directions she’d learned by heart, Faye drove past a tall, narrow house that gave a dignified air to the flanks of the hill to her right. It proudly sported mint-green asbestos siding, evidence that its owners had enjoyed a period of prosperity sometime during the mid-twentieth century. Dr. Andrews Raleigh, the project leader, had written to her explaining that it served as the bunkhouse for the men working on the project.
She parked the car in front of the smaller women’s bunkhouse nestled at the base of the same hill. A small, square building with a tall, peaked roof, it was the purest example of a four-square Georgian vernacular house that Faye had ever seen. Whoever had built it had enjoyed as much status as a poor community like this one could confer.
Faye turned to Joe as they got out of the car. “I guess I’m staying here. You’re back at the green house, if you want to go check it out.”
Joe nodded, and Faye headed up the steps. After a short hesitation, she went inside, surprising a statuesque brunette apparently on the way out. Setting down a large metal briefcase, the woman extended a hand.
“You must be Faye Longchamp. I’m Carmen Martinez.” She carried herself with a confidence that lent glamour to her tee-shirt and stylishly cut jeans. “I’m doing the oral histories.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Faye.
Oral historian. That was a job for someone who enjoyed going door-to-door, sitting in rocking chairs and trying to coerce old folks into telling her their tales. At first glance, Faye wasn’t sure Carmen was the right person for the job. People tend to trust people like themselves, and Faye doubted that flamboyant Carmen had much in common with folks who’d hardly left their remote settlement in—how long? Nobody knew.
“I’ll show you your room,” said Carmen. “You’re across the hall from me, and Laurel is next to you.” As Faye followed Carmen on the brief tour of the house, she thought about the task before her. The Sujosa were thought to be a tri-racial isolate group like the Melungeons of Appalachia or the Redbones of Louisiana. Common wisdom held that these relic populations were remnants of colonial America: the products of intermarriage among Native Americans, Africans imported as slaves, and Europeans who had imported themselves.
But other origin legends flourished. Some Melungeons believed that their ancestors included Turks who reached the Americas as servants or slaves on European sailing vessels. Some people thought the Sujosa descended from Portuguese sailors shipwrecked in the Gulf of Mexico. Cynical observers saw such tales as efforts to explain away the fact of dark skin without claiming the stigma of African descent. Nobody had ever known the origins of these groups for certain, and nobody had much cared, until now.
After a tour of the bedrooms, bathroom, and kitchen, Carmen led her back to the parlor. “You’ll want to come to our regular Friday team meeting tonight. We meet in the church at seven-thirty. It’ll be a good chance to get you up to speed.”
Faye wrapped one side of her unbuttoned cardigan over the other. Carmen seemed plenty comfortable in her short-sleeved tee-shirt, which made Faye feel like a wimp.
“I understand that Dr. Raleigh went ahead and began excavating while he was waiting for me to be approved for the position.”
Carmen sighed. “I don’t know why the bureaucrats sat on your application while the rest of us were out here getting started. Raleigh should have done something.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Faye cut in, not anxious to start ragging on her principal investigator before she even met him. “I was a last-minute hire. He had a lead archaeologist in place—my research advisor, Dr. Magda Stockard-McKenzie—but her health took a turn for the worse. It’s not easy being pregnant at 45.”
“Better her than me,” Carmen said, “although my
abuela
keeps telling me that I need to start making babies before she’s too old to warp them with her Cuban ghost stories.”
Faye couldn’t make out a single wrinkle in Carmen’s olive skin. “Tell your grandmother that I said you’ve got time.”
“Yeah, maybe, but my
abuela
doesn’t think she’ll live to see the day. Of course, the last time I was home, I caught her on a ladder washing her second-story windows. She’ll outlive us all. But you don’t want to hear my family stories. You want to unpack your car, then go check out your site.”
Faye had never before been invited to put professional obsessiveness over social niceties. She was going to like it here.
Responding to the sound of footsteps crossing the porch, Carmen reached for the door, saying, “That’ll be our roomie, Laurel. She’s the education specialist hired to tutor the Sujosa children. You’ll like her.” Raising her voice so she could be heard outside, she said, “Hold on! I’m coming,” then flung open the door.
Joe stood framed in the doorway with Faye’s laptop hanging from one massive shoulder and her suitcase dangling from the other. His black ponytail was caught up in the suitcase strap, but he couldn’t free it without setting down the fully loaded portable file box that he gripped with both hands. Joe’s brawny frame was perfectly relaxed under a load that, combined, weighed more than Faye herself, but the lavender taffeta toiletry bag hanging from his wrist succeeded in making him look uncomfortable in a way that his other burdens could not. It contrasted fetchingly with his green eyes.
“I see that you don’t actually
need
to unpack your car.” Carmen had the slightly dazed expression that afflicted most women upon their first good look at Joe, but she was still capable of speech. Faye chalked up a point in her favor. The woman had all the earmarks of a worthy friend.
“Since you don’t have to unpack, you’ll have time to eat. They don’t cook much at the men’s bunkhouse, so your friend…” She lifted an eyebrow at Faye.
“My assistant. His name is Joe.”
“…so Joe can eat here with you and me. I’ll open another can of soup.”
A can of soup. Faye was glad Joe’s face was hidden as he leaned over to put the laptop down. He didn’t consider canned soup to be actual food. It was obvious who would be assuming the unpaid role of project cook, and it wouldn’t be Faye. Or Can-opener Carmen, either.
***
Faye was lying belly-down in the dirt, looking deep into a mud hole. She was trying to find some evidence that a professional archaeologist was involved in making this mess. So far, she was having no luck. She was thinking something along the lines of
The NIH should sue Dr. Raleigh for malpractice
, but she wasn’t in the habit of talking to herself, so she didn’t say it out loud. This was a good thing. While her head had been hanging down below the ground surface, Raleigh had walked up behind her.
“Ms. Longchamp—I hope you’re happy with the start I’ve made in your absence.” Dr. Raleigh, department chair at the Tuscaloosa university running the Rural Assistance Project, was a short, stout man with a swagger. Faye could forgive him for being short, since that wasn’t his fault. She could even forgive him for being stout, which might not have been his fault. But she couldn’t forgive the swagger, because she knew that it was wholly within his control.
Faye was conscious of the mud on the palms of her hand and the toes of her boots. A great brown blotch of mud adorned her chest and, if she closed one eye, she could see the grimy smear across the bridge of her nose. While she would have preferred to look and smell sweeter when she met her supervisor, mud was an archaeologist’s occupational hazard.
Still, it wasn’t embarrassment over her appearance that put her at a loss for words. It was that she had not yet recovered from the shock of discovering, within her first hour at the site, that Raleigh had made an undeniable wreck of her work before she’d even arrived.
She’d once heard Magda, her research advisor and friend, refer to Andrews Raleigh as a “self-satisfied bag of detritus,” but she’d never heard her question the man’s professional competence. In the chill twilight, seeing the mud hole that he considered a professional-quality excavation, she wondered how Magda could have given Raleigh so much credit.
Instead of neatly excavated units with precisely vertical sides, square corners, and flat floors, she’d found dozens of muddy holes and a single large pit that looked like a buffalo wallow.
“You and your crew have certainly moved a lot of dirt,” she said cautiously. “I’m looking forward to managing such a hard-working team. What made you choose this site for your first excavation?”
“If I’ve chosen well, and I think I have, you’ll find what you need right here and there will be no need for any other excavations. I chose this site because aerial photos show that the area was historically used as a garbage dump. When you review the historical documents, you’ll see that I’m right. What better place to construct a history of the Sujosa, who we know have lived here for centuries?”
Faye, who had reviewed every available historical document on the Sujosa while chomping at the bit to begin work, was unimpressed by his logic. The spot where she was standing had indeed been a garbage dump—beginning in the 1940s. There was no reason to think that any information about the Sujosa’s first three hundred years in Alabama was going to be found there, and it was a waste of project money to dig for it. But her first meeting with Raleigh wasn’t the time to tell him so.
“I’m looking forward to getting started tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow. It’s Saturday, and your crew’s off. A lot of the team leaves the settlement for the weekend, anyway. You can get started Monday, but come to the meeting tonight. It will be a good chance to show you the ropes.”
Faye nodded, still trying to grasp that Raleigh had wasted a full month on a bunch of mud holes, and that he had no sense that she was dying to get to work. He seemed to expect her to say something, so she manufactured a diplomatic response.
“I can see that this is going to be a challenge.”
The church was tiny, and, unlike most congregations, the members were gathered toward the front of the sanctuary. The first pew looked to be filled with folks whose names ended in “Ph.D.” The half dozen or so technicians and support staff, Joe towering among them, lounged in the second row, where they could be seen but certainly not heard. With the exception of Faye and Joe, everyone in the room was white. Big surprise.
Plopping in the front row—a mere doctoral student amongst full professors—her soiled clothes won her a comfortable amount of breathing room. The gentlemen on either side of her each pulled a few inches away, hoping she’d keep her mud to herself. She hadn’t had time to change clothes because she’d rushed back to the bunkhouse after meeting Raleigh and placed a panicked call to Magda.
“What am I going to do? The whole time I’m waiting for approval, Raleigh’s out here screwing up the work—he’s not even excavating in a rational place. He’s the principal investigator. How do I tell him I’ve got to start over from scratch because he doesn’t know what in hell he’s doing?”
“You don’t tell him. Our department chair is his best friend. If you challenge Raleigh’s authority, he’ll pull strings down here in Tallahassee. You’ll get the dissertation committee from hell. Then you’ll rot in graduate school.” Two months of around-the-clock nausea had softened the harsh edges of Magda’s speaking voice, but pregnancy hadn’t affected her hard-nosed and practical approach to academia. “Raleigh knows all there is to know about Hispano-Moresque ceramics, but he does his best work in the basement of a museum. He probably hasn’t done a lick of field archaeology since he left school. So here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna spend a week or so pretending to finish up his work, then you’re gonna look around for another site to excavate and—surprise!—decide to work in the spot where you planned to be all along.” And with that Faye had to be content.
Raleigh entered from the rear of the church’s sanctuary, like an evangelist coming to reap the souls of the lost. “Welcome to our project team, Ms. Longchamp,” he began. “We’re glad to have you with us.” Without allowing Faye to respond, he turned to a thin man of about forty-five, whose pale skin contrasted with a dark and carefully groomed mustache and goatee.
“Perhaps Dr. Bingham can begin with a summary of his progress on determining the Sujosa’s genetic makeup.”
The thin man nodded and flipped through his notes. “Yes. Yes, blood samples have been collected from a more-than-adequate cross-section of the Sujosa community. The lab results will be available in a few weeks. I’ve got a physical anthropology student tracking the occurrence of distinguishing Sujosa traits, such as the unpigmented areas of hair and light-colored eyes. My informal observations indicate that traits common to the Sujosa are associated with stronger-than-average immune systems, but it’ll take some time to run the statistics. Our team is in the process of building on Dr. Harbison’s genealogical work—”
He looked up from his notes. “Let me go on record as saying that Brent’s work was very thorough. “He glanced at his neighbor, who Faye realized must be Dr. Harbison himself, a handsome man in his mid-thirties. He was lean and tan, and his dark hair had been streaked blonde at the hairdresser in a style that was currently fashionable among fraternity boys. He looked like a walking, talking version of Ken, Barbie’s male appendage, but Faye reflected that his head must be filled with more than plastic, given the fame he had earned from his work with the Sujosa.
Dr. Harbison nodded to acknowledge the compliment. Dr. Bingham ducked his head nervously toward the notes he didn’t need. “Since he’s a medical doctor and not trained in genealogical research methods, I’ve assigned a student to verify the family relationships that he established. We’re still looking into written documentation—birth certificates, wills, deeds, court records, and such—in an effort to expand on his excellent work. Like Dr. Harbison, we have run into what genealogists call a ‘brick wall’ in the mid-nineteenth century. Oral history goes back another hundred years before that, but the county courthouse in Alcaskaki burned in 1851, taking all its written records with it. We are currently looking for other sources that might give us tangible evidence of the Sujosa’s history.”
He paused and looked at Dr. Raleigh as if he expected a response.
Dr. Raleigh, who was not generous with eye contact, continued pacing across the front of the church, his eyes lowered and his chin tucked toward his chest, as if he were deep in an important thought. “Dr. Amory? What can you tell us about the linguistics portion of the project?” he said without looking up.
The slick-smooth salt-and-pepper hair, combed back from a receding hairline, was as precise as Dr. Amory’s reputation declared him to be. If a conclusion could not be confirmed and reconfirmed, Hal Amory would not jump to it. “As I’ve said before, the Sujosa left their place or places of origin a very long time ago. They speak perfectly idiomatic English with an accent that’s indistinguishable from the speech of non-Sujosa residents of the nearest town, Alcaskaki. I spent the first two weeks of the project in Jenny Hanahan’s grocery store, recording samples of the speech of her Sujosa and non-Sujosa customers, as well as great chunks of conversation generated by Jenny herself. I’ve had the recordings transcribed and am analyzing them for unusual speech patterns, but my instincts say I won’t find any. If you close your eyes and listen to the Sujosa speak, you could be anywhere in east central Alabama.”
Faye took advantage of the pause in Dr. Amory’s report, “While you were at the grocery store, did you notice anything about their food choices? Does the grocery stock foods or spices that are unusual for the area—foods that might be traceable to another culture?”
Dr. Raleigh graced her with his attention. “Ms. Longchamp. Dr. Amory is a linguist. If the project had needed a home economist, I would have written one into the grant proposal.”
He flicked his eyes back toward Dr. Amory, who continued:
“The word ‘Sujosa’ itself is the only term of linguistic significance that I’ve identified to date. Though th “j” is pronounced as in “jelly,” American-style, I feel certain that it derives from the Portuguese word,
sujo
, which means ‘dirt’ or ‘dirty.’”
“Do you see this as a possible indication of Portuguese ancestry?” Dr. Raleigh asked.
“Quite the contrary,” Dr. Amory said, “I should think that it contradicts the notion of a Portuguese origin for the Sujosa. Would you call yourself ‘dirty’?”
Faye saw that Dr. Raleigh did not like being the subject of that particular rhetorical question.
“In my opinion,” Dr. Amory concluded, “at some time in their history, the Sujosa lived near Portuguese-speakers who labeled them ‘dirty,’ and the name stuck.”
Since it clearly bothered Dr. Raleigh, Faye offered her opinion. “There’s precedent for that. Consider the Creek Nation, who lived in this area long before the Europeans got here. Their original name for themselves, the Muskogee, has been supplanted by an English word applied to them simply because they preferred to build their villages beside creeks. They’ve gone to a great deal of effort to keep the original name they gave themselves—and the culture that went with it—alive. Their name could easily have been lost to history, as the Sujosa’s origins have been.”
Ignoring Faye, Dr. Raleigh turned to Carmen. “Dr. Martinez, have you gleaned any pertinent information from your oral history interviews yet?”
Carmen stood. “A good number, maybe seventy-five percent, of the Sujosa I’ve approached so far were willing to be interviewed. I’ve gotten some interesting stories, but the amount of historical information they can provide is limited. We must remember that, though they may be economically disadvantaged, these are still twenty-first-century Americans. Like a lot of present-day Americans, they’re just not very interested in the past. I’ve—”
“You have no progress to report?” Dr. Raleigh interrupted. “None of your interviews have yielded anything of value?”
“As I was saying. I’ve located one important source. Mrs. Dovey Murdock, a widow in her nineties, knows everything there is to know about the Sujosa and their history. She has agreed to give me her time, because she’s afraid that a big part of the Sujosa’s heritage will die with her. I am in hopes of hearing the story behind the hog-stealing Stewarts.”
“I’ll bite,” Faye said. “There must be a good story there.”
Carmen shot her a smile. “According to Miss Dovey—that’s what she likes to be called—there’s a family of Stewarts in the settlement who spell their name with a ‘w’ in the middle, and there also is a family of Stuarts who spell their name with a ‘u’. Both families descend from a common ancestor, but one set of cousins fell out with the other about a hundred years ago over a missing hog, destined for greatness at the county fair. Somebody—it isn’t clear who—changed the spelling of their name to disassociate themselves from the criminals, but nobody in the settlement agrees on which family spawned the thieves. Thus, to this day, the Stuarts who spell their name with a ‘u’ refer to the other branch of the family as the ‘hog-stealing Stewarts,’ and, obviously, the Stewarts who spell their name with a ‘w’ have harsh words for the relatives, whom they also call the ‘hog-stealing Stuarts.’”
Dr. Bingham stroked his goatee. He delivered the obvious question—“Who stole the hog?”—with a perfectly deadpan face.
Carmen said, “Miss Dovey knows, but so far she won’t say. She says telling the story now would only hurt people who never laid a hand on anybody else’s hog.”
Dr. Amory’s mouth was twitching. This evidence of a sense of humor made Faye like him better.
“And precisely how does this relate to the hypothesis of the federal grant that is paying all our salaries?” Dr. Raleigh had not yet demonstrated evidence of a lighter side.
When Carmen wasn’t messing with the minds of over-serious scientists, she was all business. “I’ve made recordings of Miss Dovey singing songs about tremendous sailing ships and sailors who lived at sea for years on end. She knows stories about young women who were kidnapped to serve as ‘companions’ to sailors lonely for female company. Finding the truth in Miss Dovey’s tales is like decoding a staticky radio signal. The truth is buried in there somewhere, but we won’t know what it is until we filter out the noise. I have a few more interviews I want to do, but starting Monday, I will stop the general population interviews and devote all my efforts to untangling Miss Dovey’s songs and stories.”
“Had you the slightest intention of clearing this change in approach with me?”
Carmen would have taken a step back, if the pew hadn’t been in her way. “I didn’t see this as a change, more as a focusing of the approach we were already using. As far as clearing the change with you—that’s what I thought I was doing right now.”
Dr. Raleigh stopped pacing and lifted his chin off his chest. His wide-legged stance made him look more like a fly-weight boxer than a man of learning. “Well, I don’t approve the change. You can’t abandon the door-to-door canvassing of the settlement. It will compromise the project. For one thing, how do you know that there’s not another Miss Dovey in the next house, one with even more informative stories than this one?”
“The settlement isn’t that big. I’ve asked everyone I interviewed if they had elderly relatives who might remember old family stories and folk tales. They said—”
“But you just said that fully one-quarter of the Sujosa refused to speak with you. And you haven’t tried everyone yet, have you? You don’t really know who’s lurking behind those last few doors, do you?”
“No, Dr. Raleigh.”
“Then finish the survey as it was mapped out at the outset of this project before you make the unprofessional decision—without authorization—to prematurely narrow it to one person.”
Carmen sat down, and Raleigh turned to Brent Harbison.
“Anything from you, Brent?”
“Nope,” said the doctor. To Faye’s surprise, Raleigh accepted his rather succinct answer. Faye interpreted Raleigh’s unwillingness to push him further as an indication of Brent Harbison’s high status on the team and with NIH. She wondered how Raleigh felt about that.
“Very well,” said Raleigh, and after a few words about the following week’s schedule, he dismissed the meeting. Faye filed out with everyone else. The fact that Raleigh had not given a progress report on the archaeological work had not escaped her attention.