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Prince Edward

A Novel

Dennis McFarland

THE OLD COLORED WOMAN in the woods stopped speaking for such a long time, I thought maybe she’d had a stroke and died, in which case I would have got a good deal more from today’s spying session than I’d wanted. I was in my usual spot, inside a rusty oil drum sideways on the ground, my heart thumping now at the prospect of Granny Mays’s sudden death with me the only witness. I didn’t know the precise medical meaning of a stroke, but I’d heard the word often enough, and something about it—stroke, a fatal-sounding noun if there ever was one—made me envision a person stung mute and stiff as a board, shot with a ray gun. I imagined a stroke to be the exact opposite of a fit, which I’d seen in two mad dogs and three different members of my family.

It was 1959, late summer in the lower part of Virginia known as Southside, where I grew up on a farm owned by my father’s father, Cary T. Rome; noting the time of day, a little after one o’clock in the afternoon, I’d slipped into the woods about a quarter mile behind the tractor shed, taken up my hideaway inside the abandoned oil drum, and waited. Granny Mays, the old Negro woman who lived in Daddy Cary’s tenant house with her son and grandson, had lately become a fascination to me—I’d found her to have a secret identity as an orator, and I believed myself the only agent in possession of this bit of intelligence. Four months earlier, in April, I’d turned ten, a milestone that had nurtured an already developing zeal for anything even faintly clandestine. Today, the August sun had warmed the woods and caused the sap to run in the trees, filling the air with the piney scent housewives seemed to want in their cleaning products and room deodorizers but which, in my opinion, had never been successfully reproduced in the laboratory. Midafternoon on a scorcher like this, I didn’t typically worry about snakes, as they would be down at the creek cooling themselves on rocks or having a swim; but for some reason—maybe the way worry begets worry—I began to imagine a copperhead bellying into the oil drum with me, drawn by the barrel’s reddish-brown camouflage. If Granny Mays didn’t finish her speaking and move along soon, I would have to reveal myself, and though I had mixed feelings about revealing myself, I didn’t want to do it today of all days: In the hip pocket of my dungarees was a deck of cards with pictures of people having sex, which I’d found in the attic of the Big House (Daddy Cary’s house) half an hour earlier, and I knew that if Granny Mays were to see me now, she would detect guilt on my face.

Through the eye-size hole in the oil drum I viewed her: rigid, roughly the color of wet pine bark, and sitting stock-still in a ladder-back chair I’d dragged down here yesterday. The chair, which my mother was throwing out simply because it was old and scratched, had been my idea of an anonymous gift, a chance for Granny Mays to get off her feet when she came into the woods to do her speaking. I’d thought, rightly, that the old woman’s broomstick arms and legs would be at home in it, but now I feared my thoughtfulness might have boomeranged. While I knew charitable acts were permitted between the races, as long as they flowed from white to black and not the other way, I wasn’t sure about what amount of charity was acceptable and what would be too much. I didn’t understand exactly where the line was drawn, though I certainly knew there was a line, and what if, even by accident, I had crossed it? What if Granny Mays had suffered a stroke precisely because she’d tried to do her speaking sitting down instead of standing up, and this was God’s way of punishing me for overstepping the color line?

Scattered on the ground between her and me were the faded green hull of a 1939 Plymouth coupe with all the windows busted out, a set of bedsprings and a mattress, a ringer washer with a leg missing, a metal bread box with the lid hanging by one hinge, and a wide assortment of old cans, bottles, and rainwashed Look magazines. Nobody knew who’d left all this stuff here, or when, but my father had said it was the reason NO DUMPING signs had been put out on the road some years ago. Granny Mays was wearing the brown leather shoes she always wore, heavy and wide like men’s shoes, and between the rungs of the chair I could see the knobs of her spine beneath her dress, which was cotton and floral as always, expertly fashioned from a feed sack on her black-and-gold Singer sewing machine. Her hair, what you could see of it, was silvery white, bound up in a cloth that matched the pink and crimson roses of her dress. You had the impression that her hair was wild and had to be bound that way to control it. My mother—one of the family members whom I’d seen have a fit (and more than once)—sometimes said of her own dyed-blond hair that it had a mind of its own. I’d seen her sit before a vanity mirror and beat her hair angrily with a brush and then finally give up and say, “Well, my hair’s just got a mind of its own today, I guess.” But she never wrapped it in a scarf like Granny Mays’s. She wouldn’t be caught dead with anything like a handkerchief on her head. She wouldn’t wear a dress made from a feed sack either, though she wasn’t above going to Newberry’s and buying fabric that looked just like feed-sack material and then complaining about the cost. My mother, Diane Tutwiler Rome, had grown up in Richmond and hated nearly everything about her life, especially its country qualities, and she took pains to distinguish herself in small ways from the low class of people she was surrounded by. She also wouldn’t put corn bread in a glass of buttermilk or peanuts in a bottle of Coca-Cola.

Inside the oil drum, I was struck by a comforting recollection. Some several weeks earlier, I’d found Granny Mays dozing in a rocker on the porch of the tenant house, and when the scrape of my shoe on the front step caused her to open her eyes, I said, “Sorry, Granny, I guess you must’ve nodded off.”

“No, Mr. Ben, I was just stealing away,” she said, in that voice of hers that was so surprising. She appeared frail and inconsequential, but her voice was deep, solid as a locomotive; it actually frightened some people when they first encountered it.

“Stealing away?” I asked, and she said, “Stealing away to Jesus, Mr. Ben,” which didn’t clear matters up entirely, but which was enough for me to get the general idea. I’d already begun spying on her in the woods by that time—I knew her to be a great deal more than met the eye—and I was ready for any amount of mystery, even religious mystery, with which I already had some experience.

Now I peeked through the hole again and thought maybe Granny Mays was stealing away to Jesus and hadn’t had a stroke after all. Granted, I’d never seen her steal away to Jesus in this particular spot, this makeshift junkyard in the woods where she came to speak, but for a few seconds I convinced myself that it wasn’t out of the question. Then to my simultaneous relief and horror, she turned in the ladder-back chair and stared from some twenty-five or thirty feet away straight into the peephole in the side of the oil drum. I ducked down quickly, careful not to make a sound, holding my breath, and after a minute I heard her say, “Well now, ain’t the world just chock-full of a number of things. That old barrel over yonder got a eye in the middle of his brow just like the Cyclops from the storybooks.”

I didn’t move. I thought I heard thunder in the distance, though I could see perfectly well that the sun still shone. An abrupt blast of warm air swept the floor of the woods and drove a barrage of dry pine needles into the open end of the oil drum, prompting me to squeeze my eyes shut. Slowly, silently, I began to breathe again, and after another minute I heard Granny Mays say, “Amen, and now I’m gonna leave this off in my mind,” which was the way she always ended her speaking. I think what she meant by this was that she hoped not to have to return to this place, because she would have said everything she had to say, once and for all. But of course she did return, day after day, who knew how many times? Too many to count, surely, and each time she would begin, “I come to speak on the daily hardships of my people, to say for my people, justice for my people,” and she pretended that the trees were listening.

My grandfather’s farm was a four-hundred-acre triangle of land formed by the dirt road we lived on, which was called Rome Road; the paved county road that intersected it at Rome’s Comers; and the long squiggly hypotenuse of a stream that, as far as I can remember, was never referred to as anything but simply “the creek.” I would one day discover on a map that it had a name, Beulah Lee’s Creek, but I never learned who Beulah Lee was or how she came to have a wide meandering ditch of muddy water named for her. Three houses were situated on the land: the Big House, where my father had been born (as well as his two older brothers and two younger sisters) and where Daddy Cary now lived alone; our much smaller house, a quarter mile down the road toward the creek; and the tenant house, the four-room tarpaper shack where the Mayses lived. Each of these houses had sundry tales attached to it that were repeated in my youth, and of course each had its own particular atmosphere. The Big House was the oldest, alleged to have been built with Daddy Cary’s own hands, out of lumber milled from his own trees; though I may have heard some version of this fact proclaimed a dozen times by my father’s relatives, I never spoke the question it invariably raised in my mind: Did “own hands” refer to Daddy Cary’s hired help or to the red, meaty, tobacco-stained, and versatile appendages joined to his wrists? The atmosphere of the Big House was historical: brick fireplaces in the bedrooms, feather mattresses and patchwork quilts on the beds, a cooking stove fueled by wood, interior walls of plain unpainted boards, and spooky walk-through closets between some of the rooms. Since my paternal grandmother had died of bone cancer when I was a baby, her absence—signified by a small sepia photograph in an oval frame on a wall of the kitchen—was all I had of her, and her spirit didn’t much linger, certainly nothing like the odor of Daddy Cary’s Dutch Masters cigars, which pervaded every cubic inch of the house, though it was two stories and six bedrooms. A screen porch, enshrouded and darkened by scuppernong vines, flanked the kitchen and living-room end of the Big House, and across the entire front of the house was a concrete porch with six wooden columns mounted on red-brick pedestals; no stick of furniture or any other thing inhabited this porch, and its unimpeded, tunnellike quality made you want to run the length of it, back and forth, whenever you saw it.

Our house, down the road, had been acquired dirt cheap by Daddy Cary when, some twenty-five years earlier, he annexed a small farm abutting his own. The house was modest and ugly, a one-story box with sand-colored asbestos siding and a front porch of jalousie windows, always gray with dust from the road. My father, who was still buying the house from Daddy Cary with low monthly installments, had added a new bedroom and bath to it before I was born, and its atmosphere was less physical than emotional—or maybe the emotional, which was sometimes like grand opera without music, simply overwhelmed the physical. Still, the house possessed two noteworthy details. The added-on rooms had necessitated a long hallway, which was paneled in knotty pine, and the grooves between the boards produced a neat rat-a-tat sound when you dragged your knuckles along the walls. And high in one corner of my bedroom, a bullet hole blossomed like a sudden blotch on the wall, a black cavity in the Sheetrock, surrounded by an irregular aureole of white; inside my closet, two corresponding holes indicated the bullet’s trajectory through the closet as it exited the house. The original owner of the smaller farm had got drunk on white lightning one night and shot his wife, wounding her in the elbow such that she never regained full use of her arm.

When I was very young, I didn’t know what the word tenant meant, and I thought in some vague way that the rundown shack where the Mayses lived was called the tenant house because of its tin roof. What was most interesting to me about the house was its method of arrival at the farm. Daddy Cary had bought it from a Cumberland County tobacco farmer in the early 1940s, jacked it up off its cinder blocks, loaded it onto a tractor trailer, driven it home, and plopped it right out in the middle of the cornfield. From time to time, I’d seen a house or half a house wobbling slowly down the highway, and the sight never failed to confound me with conflicting sensations. It was something like being very excited and having to hold still at the same time, and I compared this odd feeling to a dream I once had in which I swallowed a fish hook on a line, and my father had to draw it out of me painstakingly, so as not to snag it on something vital. Sometimes I imagined the tenant house going down the road on wheels, and for me that was its chief atmosphere, if a mental image combined with inexplicable feelings can be called atmosphere. In the summer, the long dirt drive to the tenant house cut through the high wheezing corn, and all but the gables and sagging line of its roof were invisible from the road. In the winter, it sat out in the barren field like a lonely game piece, marooned, not quite real except for the gray cords of smoke twilling up from its stovepipe into the sky.

Our immediate family ran the farm’s egg business. My father had begun with the small henhouse and few white leghorns Daddy Cary kept for family eggs and created an enterprise that supplied a good deal of Prince Edward County, with retail deliveries to private homes and wholesale deliveries to food stores and bakeries. My father’s name was Royalton C. Rome, and the C, like the T in his father’s name, didn’t stand for anything; it was simply Royalton C. My mother and Daddy Cary were the only ones who called him Royalton (pronouncing it “Roilton”); everybody else called him R. C., and the egg business was known as R. C. Egg Farm. (Secretly, I thought of the R. C. as standing for Rabid Chicken.) My father loved trotting out the egg as nature’s most nearly perfect food, but my brother, my sister, and I were humiliated by having to reveal ourselves as chicken farmers. I thought this recurring moment of shame was connected to the abysmal stupidity of the animal who provided our livelihood. I knew far more than any child needed to know about the species, a universal symbol of cowardice, and I detested its crazy traits and habits. I believed the chicken flapped and darted about stunned and deranged because its eyes were placed on opposite sides of its head—it saw different views of the world from each eye and couldn’t blend them into anything coherent—but I felt no sympathy, as I did for nearly every other breed of animal I’d known. Why had my father chosen this life for himself and for us? My mother contended that he sought in the egg business to earn Daddy Cary’s admiration, which sadly never came. My father’s siblings had long ago fled the farm and Daddy Cary’s tyranny, but my father had remained, walking distance from the cold brutal man who seemed to dominate him with little more than an exercise of silence. Daddy Cary, by so constantly withholding his favor, had created in my father an unreasonable thirst for it. My aunts and uncles were around rarely and briefly, and I thought I noticed, even as a boy, a certain irony—that their scarcity had made Daddy Cary value them more than he did my father, who’d stayed close by; it was as if Daddy Cary respected these ordinary and wayward children for rejecting him outright, while my father had lost his respect for failing to.

When I think of 1959, an image comes to mind of my grandfather in overalls, standing in the middle of the dirt road outside the Big House; he has wet his thumb on his tongue and now holds it up to the air, a quizzical look on his face, and appears to be noting a curious change in the wind. I think this the feeble poetry of the subconscious, for though I may have actually seen my grandfather once stand in the road and test the wind this way, it certainly had nothing to do with the swell of change that was about to break over our lives. That year, the ongoing difficulties in the public schools concerning racial integration had come at long last to a head. It had been several years since the federal Supreme Court had decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and Negro students in our county who complained that their schools were inferior to the white schools had been one of the five plaintiffs in that famous case; as a result, our corner of the world had received some national attention, which a lot of white citizens resented to this day. Though Virginia had been legally obliged to desegregate its public schools for quite a while now, it had managed to delay the thing one way or another with a series of legislative maneuvers known as Massive Resistance. But lately, the state supreme court and the federal district courts had been steadily eating away at Massive Resistance, and Governor Almond, once a hero to men like my father, had caved in to the courts rather than go to jail. Locally, a kind of panic had begun to set in because some other counties in Virginia, as well as all over the South, were already starting to integrate.

According to men like my father (who belonged to the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties and to the Chamber of Commerce), the United States Supreme Court didn’t understand our way of life if it thought we were going to send our children to school with niggers. That was how they put it privately. Publicly, they talked more palatable abstractions like states’ rights and civic responsibility and quality education for all children, but what they meant, always, was that they flat-out opposed any form of mixing the races. Men like my father, who had the strongest feelings as well as power and influence—Defenders for the most part—were determined that such a fate wouldn’t befall Prince Edward, no matter what any court said, no matter how many compromises more moderate minds might propose, and no matter how many outside agitators the NAACP sent down to stir things up. They were so determined that in June the county board of supervisors had made the extraordinary decision to cut off funding to the public schools, which meant that the schools would not reopen come September.

At first, some white folks (including my mother) had been upset by the prospect of the public schools closing, but with the help of J. Barrye Wall, Sr., owner and editor of the Farmville Herald, it had been turned into a kind of call to arms, our standing fast and not submitting to federal judges who would enslave us and dictate how we must live our lives. If we were to prevail against the forces that sought to destroy everything that had made Virginia great, a private school system had to be organized in place of the public one. Mr. Roy Pearson, a school board member who had once worked overseas for the Standard Oil Company, took charge of the effort. Now, all over the county, people were in a frenzy, making their contribution to the cause of establishing the new Foundation schools (named on behalf of the group who raised the money), mostly in church buildings. Donations of all sorts came from far and near, including 250 pounds of chalk from a man in Silver Springs, Florida. Some people, my father among them, were behaving as if it were the Civil War all over again. My father, like a lot of people in the county, was a good bit influenced by Mr. Wall, who maintained that integration would result in the destruction of both races and render the American people a mongrel nation. My father was not a religious man and attended church only at Christmas and Easter, but he claimed that the Negro’s soul was as dear to God as the white man’s and we whites had a sacred duty to “take good care of our niggers.” However, like Barrye Wall he believed that integrating the schools would lead to the mixing of white and black blood, which was unnatural, a sin, and contrary to God’s will. God wanted the races kept separate, which was why He’d put us on separate continents in the first place. My father, along with many of his Defender brothers, believed something else too, a theory that by today’s lights seems paranoid and fanatical but which, in 1959, was a commonplace: that the Supreme Court’s rulings on race were part of a Communist plot to divide and conquer America.

In the earlier stretches of this time, my grasp of these events was narrow and interior. I recall a slim but critical shift in my personality; I began forming and holding more and more opinions on an increasingly wide range of topics, from the scent of artificial pine to what was the best solution to my parents’ violent and disastrous marriage. Forming an opinion and holding it inside seemed to make me count for something more than I had counted for before. I didn’t distinguish between opinions and beliefs. One was as good as the other, and I mistakenly imagined that a storehouse of opinions could steer a person in times of uncertainty, like a travel guide to a foreign country. I suppose that growing older is always, among other things, a deepening acquaintance with human mischief, and mischief had lately begun to flourish in Prince Edward—which seemed to make the world spin faster and to demand more opinions of people, even of children. Everywhere I turned, folks were taking stands of one kind or another, and I wanted to be included, because I thought it my birthright. I hadn’t yet discovered that what you believed true and fair, what you stood for, might serve as much to isolate you as to include you.

That August day when Granny Mays remarked about the Cyclopean eye in the oil drum, I felt, as I walked back home from the woods, that something in my breathing had changed and perhaps changed permanently; when the old woman had looked straight into my blinking eye behind the peephole, I’d caught my breath, and throughout the afternoon I couldn’t seem to get enough air back into my lungs. That evening, while my sister Lainie and I set the table for supper, I tried to affect a mood of idle curiosity as I asked her if she was familiar with something called a Cyclops.

“Benny boy,” Lainie said sadly, “don’t you know anything?” I did actually know a few things. Lainie was wrapping the paper napkins tight around the silverware the way they did it sometimes in restaurants, and I knew, for example, that our father would make fun of it when he came to the table. I knew that our brother Al, who was older than Lainie by two years, was coming to supper at our house to talk about the new football field he and the Jaycees were putting in next to the city dump, and he would get a good laugh out of my father’s making fun of Lainie, and then she would start to cry and have to leave the kitchen. I knew all that.

In truth, it didn’t take much to make Lainie cry these days, as she had serious cause for tears. Two months earlier, right out of high school, she’d married Claud Wayne Rivers, a big noise in the Air National Guard, and three weeks after the wedding, he was shipped off to Wiesbaden, Germany, for an indefinite period of time. (On top of everything that was going on in Virginia, there was the progress of the Cold War and the certain threat of nuclear holocaust.) Lainie had applied to Longwood College for Women, and been accepted, but then deferred her enrollment when she learned she was pregnant. She and Claud Wayne had planned to rent a place in town, close to the college and to the army surplus store where he worked as an assistant manager, but after these surprising developments—Lainie’s pregnancy, Claud Wayne’s sudden farewell—Lainie was still stuck living with us, six weeks along and a husband halfway around the world. Almost nothing had gone as she’d hoped, and really she hadn’t hoped for all that much. Nobody would have described Claud Wayne as an obvious catch—he was boastful and lacked a sense of humor—but he was good-looking in a lanky sort of way, he could whistle louder than anyone else I knew, and according to Lainie he was a good dancer. Marrying him was meant to get Lainie off the chicken farm, a mere stepping-stone to a wider departure, for she’d decided some time ago that it was her fate to see the world; she’d intended to continue her twenty-hour-a-week job in town as a dentist’s receptionist, take classes at Longwood, and ultimately lose the weight she needed to lose in order to seek employment as a stewardess on Eastern Airlines.

“It’s from the Odyssey,” she said to me now from across the red Formica table. “By an ancient Greek poet named Homer. Cyclops was a monster. You’ll get it in the seventh grade.”

“That’s if there’s a seventh grade to go to,” my mother said, without turning around from the kitchen sink, where she was using a toothbrush to clean the silk from some ears of corn.

My sister said, “Don’t worry, Mother. There’ll be a seventh grade if Daddy has anything to do with it.”

Lainie wasn’t praising our father’s efforts, but the opposite. She might not have freely chosen racial integration of the schools, but she believed it couldn’t be stopped; she also believed that what was happening to the colored children of the county was cruel and foolish. What were the colored children to do without a public school to attend, and how could it possibly benefit the county to have a whole population of uneducated Negroes running around?

“A monster?” I said, not to be derailed from my primary interest. “What kind of monster?”

Lainie sighed, letting her shoulders drop, and looked at me hopelessly, as if I were a room that needed tidying. She was wearing light-blue pedal pushers and a yellow halter top, her brown hair pulled into a ponytail; she suffered dramatically in the heat, and—another disappointment—she and Claud Wayne had intended to put air-conditioning in their place in town. We had a powerful window unit in our living room, but that was where the eggs were kept cold after they were collected; you could go in there to cool off, but there was practically nowhere to sit, and there was always at least a hint of dirty egg odor.

Lainie came around the kitchen table and tapped the middle of my forehead three times with her index finger. “Not really a monster, Ben,” she said. “A giant, with one giant eye. Right here.”

Something about this moment made me recall the deck of pornographic playing cards I’d found in my grandfather’s attic. The way Lainie stood in front of me, tapped my brow with her finger, and said eye made me shudder. I thought of my grandfather looking at me earlier that afternoon when I’d crawled out from inside the attic’s storage space where he’d sent me to look for a certain straw hat; when I said I didn’t find any hat, all he said was, “That so?” but there’d been a secret knowledge behind his eyes when he said it.

I was mostly inured to that sort of behavior; adults frequently made remarks accompanied by facial expressions that insinuated a hidden additional meaning. Not more than fifteen minutes ago, my father had come in from the henhouses, tracking mud on the linoleum, and my mother, gazing down at the sink drain, said, “You do that just to aggravate me, Royalton.” She said it with such quiet resignation, devoid of any special desire, you might have doubted that anyone had definitely spoken.

My father, who was six feet tall and weighed 255 pounds, stomped back to the porch door; I heard the coils rattle inside the toaster on the kitchen counter. He kicked off his boots and said, “I guess you should’ve got yourself somebody like what your mama married.”

Mother turned quickly from the sink, and I saw them exchange a deeply meaningful look. I was used to it. I’d noticed that adults rarely said all they knew, and they often seemed to suggest, with what they did say, that they were holding back a great amount of knowledge, even if they weren’t. This dubious skill was apparently a cardinal attribute of being an adult. By the age of ten, I’d already heard enough about the cruelty of children, but no one ever mentioned the fact that with children, cruel or not, it was a lot easier to know where you stood. I’d also learned that there was status to be gained by acquiring and controlling more and more information and then holding as much as possible close to your chest. Meanwhile, all over the world, teachers, preachers, and scoutmasters exhorted children to tell the truth—it was even a Commandment—and from the way they stressed it, you would think they were actually afraid that children might grow up to become this rare and hideous spectacle, the adult who kept secrets. But of course children could see quite early that everybody grew into an adult who kept secrets. It was why people had to put their hand on the Bible in a courtroom and swear to tell the truth so help them God. It was why no song in the schoolyard had quite the voodoo of “I know a secret, and I’m not telling.” It was why I had such a feeling of prosperity, of gaining status, crouched inside the rusty oil drum in the woods, as I listened to what Granny Mays had to say but couldn’t say anywhere else for fear of being heard. When I thought of that deck of cards, where I’d hidden it inside my carton of Lincoln Logs on the top shelf of my closet; when I thought of those funny-looking people, the women with the broad hips and spit curls, the men with handlebar mustaches and their hair parted down the middle; when I thought of them in various stages of nakedness and what they were doing with each other in pairs and groups of three and four, I didn’t recognize anything like sexual arousal—that hadn’t yet arrived. But I felt something similar to what I felt eavesdropping on old Granny Mays in the woods: the force of knowledge, previously forbidden, now attained. I was beginning to acquire some important secrets—secrets to grow up with.

But none of that was what made me shudder when my sister tapped my forehead and said the word eye. Surely it was the image of a giant with a single organ of vision, large enough by implication to see things I wanted kept unseen, and considering that my grandfather was an enormous bullying man, it made sense that I might think of him then. It made sense that I might recall him standing on the bare wood floor of the attic, the blistering heat up there so close to the roof, the odd look he gave me as I climbed down out of the wall from the dark storage space beneath the rafters. I supposed I might shudder.

Lainie, looking rather sinister, now put a hand on each of my shoulders. She said, “What you should know, Ben, is that Cyclops and the other giants were all cannibals.”

“Mary Eleanor Rome,” my mother shouted from the sink, “that’ll be just about enough of that!”

This made Lainie laugh and go kiss Mother on the cheek. It was our poor unhappy mother, at times as sweet as anybody, at times scary with overwrought emotions, now standing at the sink and applying discipline where she could, to insignificant matters: Apparently, she wanted no talk of cannibalism in her kitchen. At first she pulled away, as if she didn’t want any of Lainie’s kisses, but then she quickly kissed her right back and gave her a little shove.

The kitchen was the largest room in our house, spacious enough to accommodate all the usual appliances: the Formica table that seated six, and a white deep freeze where five-gallon cans of whole broken eggs were kept frozen until time for delivery to local bakeries. The deep freeze, about six feet long and four feet tall, opened from the top with a heavy coffinlike lid. If you climbed inside and let the lid accidentally shut, you would be trapped—in the cold, in the dark—and because of the freezer’s weight, its insulated airtightness, and the hum of its motor, your screams for help would be in vain. Round the clock, this reminder of the nearness of death purred against the wall of the room in which we did most of our living. Mother had painted the kitchen walls neon white and the abundant woodwork black, both in high-gloss enamel, and recently the color aqua had cast a kind of spell over her. She returned home regularly with household items in that color—a mop bucket, a dish drainer, a dustpan, silverware trays—and even our modern unbreakable Melmac dishes were trimmed around the edges with bands of gold and aqua. (They looked horrible on the red Formica table, which Mother hoped someday soon to replace.) She was, about her kitchen, the way my brother Al was about his car; there appeared to be no end to the breadth of detailing she could bring to the room, and the walls and counters and windowsills were riddled with knickknacks and gadgets. A brass napkin holder, styled to look like praying hands, rested on the table, clutching the napkins so tight they tore when you tried to take one. A tin match dispenser hung on a cabinet door and held a full box of kitchen matches, dispensing them one at a time in a neat tray. On the countertop, a redheaded woodpecker perched on a little hollowed-out log where toothpicks were stored; when you wanted a toothpick, you pressed the woodpecker forward on its hinge, and its needle beak speared a single toothpick from the log. There were many decorative pot holders, and on the wall behind the stove hung two pot-holder holders, colorful ceramic figures of black children, a boy and a girl, their eyes impossibly white and wide, their puffy cheeks half buried in slices of watermelon; out of the rinds of the watermelon came little gold hooks for the pot holders.

I had imagined that you furnished a room and were done with it, and I recognized Mother’s boundless decoration of the kitchen as a need to get something right that was always wrong. In the dry-goods store, coming upon vivid greenish-blue place mats, her face would suddenly glow, and she would say, “Oh, look … aqua!” She would finger the place mats hopefully, then remember the ugly red table at home and turn away, almost teary. In the simplest terms, I thought she wanted her kitchen “nice”; that was all. But I could tell that a current of disappointment flowed beneath all the decorating, and when I caught her, as I often did, slump-shouldered at the sink or stove, her head inclined in the attitude of a grieving angel on a tombstone, I knew that whatever was wrong with her life would not be corrected, nor would she be lifted up, by any color scheme.

What I made of the ceramic figures on the wall behind the kitchen range I’m not entirely sure. I was fond of the ornaments because they suggested a happy world in which children had huge portions of what they enjoyed eating, and I admired the meticulous painting of many seeds in the flesh of the melons and the way the children’s crammed brown cheeks were stained with a blush of red I’d never seen in real life. But lately when my eye happened to fall on them I felt a vague uneasiness. I had a private idea that the children, as represented, belonged to a species of colored folk who were colored folk as we would have them be, as we wished them to be. I’d seen another manifestation of this at a country restaurant we sometimes went to called The Cotton Patch, where fried chicken and biscuits and homemade pickles were served by large Negro women wearing floor-length skirts and white cotton bandannas. “Like the old days,” my father would say, obviously pleased, but I hadn’t seen any old days, and I didn’t quite believe in them.

I caught myself staring uneasily at the pot-holder holders that night Al came to supper and talked about the new football field he was helping to put in next to the city dump. He’d seemed nervous when he arrived, and I guessed it had to do with the dogs barking outside in their pen; it was his fault the dogs were making such a racket—they were happy see him—and he knew how much Daddy hated hearing them.

Daddy, as usual, sat in his chair and hid behind the Farmville Herald until Mother told him to put down the paper and eat. As he folded the Herald and let it drop to the floor, he said, in a kind of mock-pouting tone, “I was reading about Nikita Khrushchev,” and Mother said she didn’t care one iota about Nikita Khrushchev.

“He called the reporters at his press conference his sputniks,” Daddy said, and giggled appreciatively, almost as if he admired the infamous Communist leader.

At that moment, the dogs quieted down—first the mutt, Bullet; then Lady, the collie—and I noticed that a visible change came over Al’s face. He was sweating so profusely from the heat, and possibly from having been nervous about the dogs, that Mother gave him permission to eat in his undershirt, but Al, relaxed at last, pumped his eyebrows like Groucho Marx and said he was afraid Lainie might get too excited if he took his shirt off.

It turned out I was both right and wrong in my speculations about what would happen at supper. Daddy did make fun of the way Lainie had wrapped the silverware; he lifted the knife, fork, and spoon, which looked like a neat miniature mummy, rotated them this way and that, and said, “Now this here is got to be the work of Miss Priss.” The Miss Priss epithet had been a long-standing emblem of war between him and Lainie. According to him, Lainie saw herself as too good for the rest of us, which, also according to him, she came by naturally, from her mother. (According to Mother, our father came by this attitude and name-calling naturally, for when they’d first married, Daddy Cary used to call her Miss Priss.) Lainie refused to work for Daddy on the egg farm, and he sometimes called Lainie the Queen, or Queenie, for this reason. Meanest of all, he sometimes called her Piggy or Fatty-grub, when Lainie was anything but fat yet always, as he knew, about five pounds over the maximum allowed for stewardesses on Eastern Airlines. Now, since all Lainie’s future plans had fallen through and she was expecting a baby, his calling her any of those names had a kind of razor’s edge. And Al did laugh, as I knew he would, but that wasn’t what made Lainie cry and leave the kitchen. That came a bit later, after Mother had served the pineapple pudding, which she’d made because it was Al’s favorite.

Al had begun talking about the new football field that was to replace the one at the public high school; apparently, a lot of people felt that if a serious private school system was to be established—and if people were to believe in it—it had to have a regulation football field, with lights. He told of how Thornton Thomas had donated a bulldozer to level the big lot next to the dump, of how Herring Hardware had donated grass seed and fertilizer, and how the Jaycees had been tilling and planting and watering night and day to get the new field ready in time for the fall season. When Daddy asked him where he thought they would get the lights and poles, he asked it with a sly-looking smile, as if he already knew the answer, and Al smiled back and said, “You’ll see.” Al was very pleased with himself and full of chatter, and Mother kept telling him to stop talking with his mouth full. He’d turned twenty the previous March and lived in a rented house in town with a pair of twins with whom he’d gone to Farmville High, Shelby and Frank O’Bannon. These boys, as well as Al, had jobs and girlfriends and cars of their own, but because they no longer lived with their families yet otherwise hadn’t settled down, they’d earned a reputation for being wild; Mother referred to Al’s housemates as “those heathens.” Here was the kind of wild thing they were known for: Recently, they borrowed one of Daddy’s trucks, drove somewhere late on a Saturday night, and then showed up Sunday morning with a flatbed full of ripe watermelons. They parked the truck in the middle of High Street and handed out free melons to anybody who passed by. The only one to say no-thank-you was Reverend Griffin, the heavyset preacher at the Negro Baptist church; he knew, like everybody else, that those watermelons had been stolen. It could be that Mr. Griffin, a member of the NAACP, suspected they came from a colored man’s field, or it could be that he just didn’t want any handouts from white rascals like Al and the O’Bannon twins.

My father was occasionally outspoken on the subject of Mr. Griffin and his “anti-white” views and called him a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser, and the ringleader of everything that was wrong in Prince Edward today. Daddy once said that a man named Vernon Johns had lit the torch of dissatisfaction among the coloreds in the county more than a decade ago, and no sooner had we rid ourselves of him when L. Francis Griffin came along to take it up again. He said that prior to this Vernon Johns telling the coloreds they ought to be unhappy about what they didn’t have, they didn’t know they were unhappy, and my mother said it was just like herself and a mink coat: She wasn’t unhappy about not having one because she’d never known what it was to have one.

Mother scooped pudding out of a Pyrex bowl onto saucers and began passing them around, and when Lainie said she didn’t want any dessert, Mother said, “Now remember, Lainie, you’re supposed to be eating for two.”

“What I hear,” said Al, “she’s sleeping and bawling her eyes out for two.”

It was true that Lainie had been sleeping an extraordinary number of hours, at least during the daytime, which Mother said was natural during the early weeks of pregnancy; and Lainie had been doing a fair amount of crying late at night, when she should have been sleeping. But what upset Lainie now was that Mother had evidently been talking to Al about the situation, discussing with Al topics Lainie considered private. She stared a dagger at Mother from the opposite end of the table; then she turned to Al, who was on her left, and said, “You and your Jaycee buddies think you’re such big shots. You think you’re such heroes.”

She was angry and on the verge of tears about Al’s sleeping-and-crying remark, but she cloaked it in this other thing.

“I wonder what you think’s going to happen to the colored children with the schools closed,” she said. “I bet you haven’t given any thought to that, have you.”

“Well, no,” said Al, “I can’t say I have, Lainie. But tell me: Why would I?”

As if he wanted Daddy to appreciate his position, Al glanced over at him as he asked this question, smiling—which I thought was weak-looking and morally low. It pleased me that Daddy didn’t visibly pay him any mind. Our father had a way of appearing completely deaf and blind to everything going on around him, especially if he was eating or dealing with a sick chicken, and that’s what he did now, totally absorbed in his bowl of pudding. His black hair was still wet from the shower, and I noticed for the first time in my ten years how far his ears protruded from the sides of his head. He wore a white shirt with whiter stripes in the fabric, and he’d rolled the already short sleeves into two wide folds to expose the muscles in his upper arms. From time to time I thought him handsome, even harmless in a moment like this, as he ate pineapple pudding, apparently benign, apparently detached and composed, and I wanted very much to love him the way I imagined other boys might love and be loved by their fathers, but my mother had told me two years earlier—when I was eight—that he was possessed of the Devil, and this arresting little detail had lodged in my mind. I had to look away from him now, because all I could see were his enormous ears, like rats’ ears, like bats’ ears, and the few coarse black hairs growing out of each one.

Lainie said, “What do you think’s going to happen to Bogart, for example?” and suddenly it seemed she was asking the whole table, indicting us all.

Bogart, whose name was actually Burghardt, was Granny Mays’s ten-year-old grandson, the only child of Julius, Daddy Cary’s hired hand. I’m not sure if white folks referred to him as Bogart in defiance against calling him an unfamiliar (and possibly highfalutin) name, or if it was a universal misunderstanding that went uncorrected; they also sometimes called him Bogie, but I called him Burghardt, his real name, since I knew he preferred it. He and I had spent quite a bit of time together over the summer because we’d reached an age where the two of us together could be trusted to do certain tasks unsupervised, like taking toilet brushes and cleaning the waterers in the henhouses, or marking cards for the cage birds. Burghardt was taller and stronger than I was, and off and on I had the feeling when we worked together that he was actually in charge and everybody knew it, but nobody would ever say so.

I felt reproached by Lainie’s surprising question, or by the surprising way she’d aimed it at all of us. Even though I’d heard about the public schools not reopening in September, and even though I’d heard Granny Mays speak in the woods about Burghardt having no school to return to, I’d thought only one time, before that day, about how he might be affected; that one time I’d foolishly thought how lucky he was not to have to go to school anymore. I’d simply accepted it that I would be starting the fifth grade on schedule, probably in the new fellowship building at the Methodist church; I’d accepted it that colored people would not be able to do the same thing, to hold school in their churches, but now I realized I didn’t know why.

Al said, “Old Julius’s boy, Bogart? Why should I care what happens to Bogart?”

Al looked unsure of himself as he spoke, and glanced again at Daddy in that very low way. Then he turned back to Lainie and added, “That boy’s nothing to me.”

Now Lainie’s eyes were brimming with tears, and honestly, I couldn’t tell how much had to do with Burghardt and the abandoned colored children of Prince Edward and how much had to do with Mother betraying her confidence to Al about the sleeping during the day and the crying at night.

“Why can’t the colored kids just have school in their churches like us?” I said, from what suddenly felt to me like a faraway place inside my thinking. It was unusual for me to move from thinking to speaking without an appraisal of the consequences.

“Because they’re no-account, Ben, that’s why,” said Al. “Do you really think a buncha black no-accounts like the ones that live around these parts could get organized for something like a private school system?”

Lainie pushed her chair back from the table and deliberately made the legs screak on the linoleum, really loud. She sat like that for a few seconds, a good three feet away from the table, just staring at all of us with those brimming eyes. At last she looked at Al and said, “You make me sick. Do you know that you make me sick? I mean, actually, physically, ill.”

Mother groaned—“Oh, Lainie”—but Lainie snapped, “Don’t Oh-Lainie me!” and stalked out, slamming the door between the living room and the kitchen behind her. A burst of cold air entered the kitchen from the frigid living room, and then I became aware of how the skin on the backs of my thighs was stuck to the vinyl of the chair I was sitting in; this was often a problem when I wore short pants to supper in the summer, though there was something pleasant about peeling it slowly away when you stood.

Daddy was scraping the bottom of his bowl, getting the last bits of custard and meringue, evidently oblivious to Lainie’s exit and all that precipitated it. The kitchen fell silent except for the purring of the deep freeze and the clinking and clanking of Daddy’s spoon in the bowl. When he lifted his eyes, he saw Mother, Al, and me all staring at him. Mother averted her gaze and seemed to concentrate for a moment on the blue veins on the back of her own right hand, which rested on the tabletop alongside her dessert dish; she looked as if a number of things crossed her mind to say, but she rejected each one. At last she folded her paper napkin into a neat square, left the table without a word, and went to see after Lainie.

As soon as she was out of the room, my father heaved a great sigh, but it was not obviously connected to anything other than his having finished a satisfying meal. Al gripped the edge of the table with both hands and said, “Well, Benny, me and Daddy are gonna go help put up the lights at the new football field. You wanna come, or you wanna stay here with the girls and boo-hoo-hoo all night?”

Prince Edward

A Novel

Dennis McFarland

Contents

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