Esau settled down as pastor of the Thankful Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, in 1912. The poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar went on Hannah’s Index, as did tunes like “Under the Bamboo Tree,” and to dance was to taste the apple, though she was pleased to claim W. C. Handy as her husband’s friend. Instead of these pleasures, there were the glories of George Lofton’s
Biblical Thoughts and Themes for Young Men and Women
, many histories of Jesus, illustrated Scripture galleries, Tennyson, and W.E.B. Du Bois, whose every utterance was taken as an addition to the King James Version.
Nothing unpleasant ever broke through the narcotic of Grandfather’s nostalgia, though the traditional horrors actually happened. What now seems tired was then fresh. Esau came home wet with whiskey after some provincials, the parlor word for crackers, ordered him to drink and shuffle, and backed up their threats by shooting at his feet. One night Esau hid under the floorboards of a forsaken country church while the necktie party that had elected him honored guest of the hickory tree raged over the benches. Grandfather hoarded these memories. Those that he handed out freely, the gentle yarns improvised during sermons and radio talks, gave him a satisfaction not unlike watching someone who has power of attorney sift through a shoebox of Confederate dollars.
One by one Esau commended his sons to the high school attached to his alma mater, renamed Morehouse College, from which rock Grandfather and his brothers were catapulted North. Hannah in her collar and the three dazed daughters in their pegged skirts watched the caboose for a sign. This was the eve of the Great War and the Great Migration, when thousands upon thousands of black people got up and quit the South. Grandfather said that the emptying of a town like Augusta was so sudden it was like the lancing of a wound.
We have enough, but not too much
To long for more.
Grandfather enrolled in Brown University in 1917 and failed his first English essay assignment, “How to Carve a Turkey.” Everyone on College Hill wanted to be an officer. Grandfather
surrendered to the Army Training Corps. He sat in chilly alphabetical order with every other freshman in Sayles Hall, but army rules did not permit the six black students to eat or sleep among whites. During exercises they were set up as a separate squad at the foot of the column, with space left for imaginary soldiers. But no amount of serge could help him to pass muster at Sigma Phi Delta.
“Don’t go where you’re not wanted,” a handbook of etiquette published before the thaw advised black youth. Grandfather was enchanted with the Harvard Summer School before President Lowell swore to preserve the dormitories as God had intended them. He found it hard to stay away.
Ulmus procera, Ulmus hollandica, Ulmus hollandica belgica
in the Yard, the winged fruit cascading to the ground before the oval leaves opened, just as Du Bois might have seen them.
“I was desperately afraid of intruding where I was not wanted; appearing without invitation; of showing a desire for the company of those who had no desire for me,” Du Bois said. To spare the dignity of his classmates, he read with Santayana in an attic and the only teacher he could recall who asked him home was William James.
“School was joy unconfined,” Grandfather said. The shock of hearing the wireless for the first time; the falling thunder of the Army-Navy game; the stillness of the heavy Providence snowfalls; tea in Boston with the poet William Braithwaite and his wife; Roland Hayes, the great gentleman tenor, at Symphony Hall; the surprise of the college president, Dr. Faunce, offering his hand at chapel; the obscure lodgings that had the “goody” who came to sweep, the fireplace he filled with soft coals, rooms in his memory animated with cordial struggles over the Dyer
Anti-Lynching Bill and the merits of the football genius Coach Robinson.
He rushed back, in 1921, with a Bachelor of Philosophy degree, to Harvard and Thomas Nixon Carver, his gruff professor of economics. He would have remained forever in the Indian summer of graduate school had he not, between lectures on socialism and single taxism, fetched his bride from the Lucy Lane School and Hampton College, an Augusta girl with misleading Pre-Raphaelite hair, and embarked on the first of his several calamitous meditations as a businessman. “Teach us, O Lord, to know the value of money. So many of us are spending what we do not earn,” Du Bois said.
Long before white people began to jump from windows, Grandfather was broke, beating a retreat from South Station. It was the custom, back then, for black passengers to carry food; once over the Mason-Dixon line they were not invited to the dining car. Grandfather trained his young family in knee pants to ride hungry rather than see his wife tote a basket.
When the price of bread had fallen, when the breadlines were segregated, when his children were deposited at the table of his mother-in-law, the black people of Savannah asked Grandfather why he kept a box of day-old bread by his steps and received the white hobos who hated him. He said, “Christ said feed the poor.” Blacks did not take to the boxcars and roads, for fear of being picked up and sent to the chain gangs. “If someone reported you, you were gone.” But tramps walked down Route 17, the coastal highway, all night long on their way to hunt for winter work in Florida.
Grandfather reinvented himself as a gentleman farmer purified by error. Mistake number one: in 1926 he resigned after six months as principal of Booker T. Washington, the new high
school in Atlanta, to become one of the millionaire strivers fawned over in the upbeat Negro press. After speculations in steamship cargo, livestock futures, mechanical washer wringers, and asphyxiated baby chicks not a foot of top soil from what his mother and father had left him—if they had—remained to be put up as collateral. “The poor die differently from everyone else,” he said.
Grandfather resigned as superintendent of schools for a county that, in deference to his Yankee education, had paid fifteen instead of twelve dollars a week. He pushed off on a bicycle to sell life insurance for a dime. When that didn’t work, he traded in his trouser clamps for a Model T and sold policies for a quarter. They said he had just enough charm to snare quail. Then he walked out of Thunderbolt because his colleagues at Georgia State College were “teaching some ignorance.” Success didn’t like him, his brothers said.
“What is more aromatic than a pig roasting on a cold, clear morning?” Grandfather learned to farm from catalogues and almanacs. He wouldn’t say who made the down payment on the six sandy acres outside Savannah where he studied the Depression, the “siege of misery and want.” To pay for fertilizer, he taught algebra and English at Dorchester Academy, a vague Congregational church school in the sticks that was nevertheless better than the county schools.
Wanting his respect for nature to be of the transcendental variety, he suppressed the truth of how hard he worked his land. As it turned out, it took more than philosophy for a black man to dig brass out of the hills.
Figs and pomegranates, unsuitable to the climate, wilted. His brothers said that Grandfather could grow or breed everything, he just couldn’t sell anything. Vandals destroyed the plum, the pecan, the umbrella china trees, and Grandfather played, with delicate outrage, the hand he was dealt. He heard the screech owls in the persimmon and obeyed: Arise and go to the city.
The Holy Spirit, his heritage, had been waiting, like medicine on the shelf, and never mind that he pretended he had accepted a position with the family concern, much like his classmates back on Beacon or Chestnut Hill whom he could not afford to dream about. Never mind that he went into the church because, in the end, he had no place else to go.
Old Esau had been a kind of down-home
Misnagid
, but Grandfather signed on with the Congregational Church, the smallest denomination in the black South, in remembrance of what he thought of as the hale New England character and the abolitionists who had swarmed out of the North to plant schools in the red clay. The faithful beat their cardboard fans of lurid funeral-home advertisements like wings, waiting for the zeal of His house to eat up Grandfather even a little bit. “If you can’t whoop and holler you might as well do something else,” an experienced preacher with a hip flask told him. Perhaps in some cupboard of Grandfather’s mind the Congregational Church was an extension of Boston’s Somerset Club.
Back then, to belong to the Congregational Church, a black had to pass the “paper-bag test”—“bright and damn near white.” Grandfather was the darkest bag they’d ever let in. His constant worry was not that he was a black man but that he was a dark black man. Of his brothers and sisters the ones he liked least also happened to be the lightest. The condescension of high yellows hurt. He was easily riled around his wife’s family. Their almond complexions told the old Dixie story. His mother-in-law was the daughter of a governor’s son. She had seen her father only once, when he slapped her mother. She married a boy who also sprang from mustard and cracker seeds. They wore their fair skin lightly, as a trick on governor’s mansions. They could have crossed over, and that, combined with their shrewd business sense, provoked Grandfather.
He told his wife that because her mother was a bastard her
mother was no good. “Don’t ever become an educated fool,” my grandmother’s mother once told me, her blue eyes slitted with contempt for the Big Dipper pilots she had known, chief among them Grandfather, the king of spades.
She said the smartest man she ever knew, her mother’s father, could read only a little. He was also the meanest man who ever lived. He worked for the railroads. Because of the Indian in him, she said, he had a girlfriend at every stop. The whites couldn’t take away his job until they stopped using wood to fuel the engines. He never forgot that his life was a living battle and had never tried to dress it up as anything else. Great-grandmother sucked her dental bridge and said that Grandfather’s revelation, his maiden sermon ventilated before the sinners of Yamacraw, had about it, like everything else he did in those mongrel years, a touch of the psychotic.
He once gave a sermon fifty miles south of Savannah. The church in the little clearing was so rustic you could see between the slats. He told the turned-up heads that if they wanted to believe in God, they had to walk the last mile and accept those who hated them. “Write me as one that loves his fellow man.” The black people, some in overalls, said it was the most wonderful sermon they’d ever heard. Even so, the church did not ask Grandfather to hurry back. They were used to hell-raising preaching. They wanted to be told that they couldn’t be thieves, that they couldn’t be fornicators.
The schoolteacher among them had never heard of “Abou Ben Adhem.” He didn’t doubt that Grandfather loved the poem, but he suspected that Grandfather also loved his love of it, and how much this love had impressed the whites who had come just to hear him, taking it for granted that the front pews had been reserved for them. Unsuspecting, Grandfather climbed into his used Touring Hudson with the canvas top that rode like a tractor,
thinking he’d introduced them to one of the higher things in life.
Grandfather needed his history with him at all times, like an inhaler. He ran over a hunting dog in a colony of peckerwood cabins. “Come quick, this nigger done killed our dog.” In his secondhand suit from Millsby Lane & Son, Grandfather brazened an apology. A white man in yellow galoshes squinted. “You that nigger preacher? That dog wasn’t worth a damn. Let him go on.”
But Grandfather wasn’t that easy to get rid of. Drive the nail where the wood is thickest—in the hollow, motor idling, quoting Longfellow to the rednecks of Brunswick, Georgia, a pastor who would be free all his life of the moans and groans and writhings of the evangelical, appalled by the gold, by the grasping glitter of the modern usurpers of the old faith.
For all I knew as a child Grandfather Eustace came from an Oldsmobile. He rarely made the trip to see us, because we lived on the wrong side of Indianapolis, “right there with the hoi polloi.” Ours was the ugliest house on the block, Grandfather Eustace said, and for once my father didn’t hand him any backtalk. In the spring it submitted to new coats of paint, and after the wood had absorbed enough labor, the house looked even more like a wrecked boat tossed on a hill. The hawthorn bushes declined to grow, but dandelions flourished, which meant that the taciturn handyman had to come twice a week with his rotary blade mower.
The retired Baptist minister and his deaconess looked out at our patchwork yard from their apprehensive, gingerbread perfection, and who knew if the neighbor we called the Last of the Mohicans on the other side could see what we saw, that the boat’s insides were beyond hope.
When his Oldsmobile pulled up in front of our seventeen steps,
the squirrels ran, unwanted presents and my mother’s interrupted doctoral dissertation were resurrected from under our beds. Time went out the window when he came and the skies seemed to gloat and sing “We are holding back the night.” I knew from the first that I had to be on my guard, had to get my face ready for the next humiliating test, to plan on my way to the basement how to skip by him without inciting too much fuss because, like the unchained boxers on the block, Grandfather bit hard.
Imposing in manner, conditioned by an order in which the shortest distance between two points was a zigzag, Grandfather sucked up the air, left behind that carbon-dioxide feeling. He had his specialties, one of which was to remind people that if they had heeded his advice they wouldn’t have gotten into trouble. For instance, Savannah’s trade in naval stores had collapsed by 1941. The federal government wanted to build a huge troop camp. Blacks who had only scraps of paper as titles of ownership from Reconstruction days were going to have their land bought or condemned or confiscated. Grandfather out with his grub hoe spotted the planes mapping boundaries. He suggested to neighbors to take options and sell: war was war. They ignored him, because he was always telling them what to do, and were displaced. Years later he was still saying they should have listened.