Chapter 2
Our house is old, “turn of the century,” my parents say. “New England saltbox in a Miss Scar-lett petticoat,” Doto always calls it, meaning the wide screened porches that flounce around the ground floor with the kitchen, like a bustle, in the back. When my parents bought it from old Mr. Swann, the house had two big bedrooms upstairs but, after Mitchell was born, they converted the broad side porch into a downstairs bedroom for themselves, with a smaller one in the back for me.
After Mr. Swann sold it to them, he just walked out, leaving his linens, china, dining room table, his piano in the living room—everything but his clothes—behind. Said he wouldn’t need them where he was going. As it turned out, Daddy says, that piano was a lifesaver. When Daddy caught the polio, the summer I was born, playing the piano helped him regain the use of his right hand and most of his right arm. It also kept him from going nuts, he says. Still does.
Daddy glances at me when I enter the living room, but keeps on playing, nodding his okay to join him on the bench. He’s dressed for the funeral in white shirt and dark tie; his suit coat hangs off the mantel, like a strange, coal-colored Christmas stocking.
Strangeness has descended on our house like a winter fog bank, blurring the lines between the last few days:
Marvin’s
dead, gone forever,
the words singsong in my head trying to convince my heart they’re true; Doto here, finding everything in an uproar; Doc Johnny unable, or unwilling, to state the cause of death; Constable Watts shrugging it off as a jook-joint fight, stopping just short of calling Daddy a liar about Round Lake Road. “Besides,” the string-bean Cracker laughed, tall and rangy in his constable uniform, “everybody knows the Opalakee Klan don’t kill niggers like they
use
to.” Daddy came home fuming. “In the old days,” he told us, meaning before the polio, “lawman or not, I’d have pretzeled that pecker-wood.” Before I was born, they say, my father had a torrential temper, huge as a hurricane, fast and physical. But the polio, he says, taught him patience. The man I know is more circumspect, with a temper that veers toward geological. When Daddy’s upset, he turns to stone, granite-faced, flintyeyed. Now, he sits rock-like at the piano, a one-man Mount Rushmore, fingering his thoughts.
The song “I am a poor wayfaring stranger” is one of the saddest in the Mayflower Baptist hymnal. We’ll sing it on Palm Sunday, the week before we sing the happiest song, “Up from the grave He arose, with a mighty triumph o’er His foes.”
“Daddy,” I ask him, “is it true, what Doto says about Richard Warren being called the Stranger?”
“Yes, honey. On the
Mayflower,
the Pilgrims were the Saints and they called the people like Richard Warren, whose company was paying for the voyage, the Strangers.”
“When we studied them last fall, Mrs. Beacham said she never heard of such a thing.”
“True story, Roo,” Daddy says, fingertips teasing out the chorus.
“Doto says she’s afraid she jinxed you by naming you after him.”
“Maybe so, Roo. Sometimes I know exactly how he felt.”
“Will the funeral last long?”
“Several hours, I guess. There’s the service and the burial, then the gathering at Luther and Armetta’s. Afterwards, there’s a meeting with Reverend Stone and some elders.”
“What about?”
“Options, Rooster.”
“You mean about finding out who killed Marvin?”
“The Klan killed Marvin, Roo. The question is why. And what’s to be done about it.”
“But you’ve always said the Klan was nothing to be afraid of, just a bunch of good ol’ boys playing boogey-man.”
Daddy lifts his hands off the keyboard and drops them in a ball in his lap. His back, ramrod straight when he plays, curls forward, shoulders falling. The right one, his “polio shoulder,” dips lower than the left. His chin juts forward in a craggy outcrop.
“Like Doto says, we are strangers in a strange land. The Klan’s been around here for years—stupid stuff mostly, burning crosses, pestering couples parking in the dark, picking on Negroes they thought were getting uppity, whatever that means. But this week, they crossed the line.”
“But May Carol’s Daddy’s in the Klan. May Carol says it’s nothing but a card club, an excuse to play poker. And, Armetta works for them in their house!”
“Lord, Roo, it’s a complicated mess,” he says, straightening up again, chest expanding, blue eyes blazing. “I wish we’d known more about it before we bought all this property and—”
“Warren?”
Mother’s voice, the scent of her shiny, shampooed hair and the unzipped back of her black dress hush him. Daddy stands to help her. She turns with a murmured thanks, lifting a handful of dark curls off her neck. Normally playful and softly pretty, Mother’s face looks stiff and drawn today, like she’s steeling herself to get through these hours.
“Roo, make sure you finish up the breakfast dishes before Doto does,” she says. Then, leaning forward, with a glance upstairs and a flash of dimple, she whispers, “If she starts putting things away, it could easily turn into a ‘let’s clean out the cupboards’ project.”
“Okay,” I say, grateful for the reminder.
Doto is the queen of clean. Since arriving on Thursday, she’s been “spot cleaning,” a corner here, a closet there, all in the name of “helping your mother out.” Mother’s handled this with distracted grace, thankful for the help. Daddy’s accused Doto of marking her territory, like a dog does its yard.
“We should be going, don’t you think?” Mother says, checking her wristwatch.
“Yep,” he says as he grabs his coat and strides to the stairwell. “We’re leaving, Doto. Bye, Ren, Mitchell,” he calls in the direction of the boys’ upstairs whining. “I’m sure those kids have the cleanest ears in town by now,” he tells us. A wide, roguish grin gleams suddenly, whitely against his tanned face.
“You look like a pirate,” Doto told him the other day, stepping regally out of her new DeSoto.
“At your service, m’lady,” Daddy had laughed, extending his hand, bending in a low Errol Flynn-like bow.
They make a handsome couple, I think, as my parents cross the front porch and turn to call, “Bye, Reesa. Be good.”
Ears scrubbed, breakfast dishes stowed, porches swept, my brothers and I gather at the kitchen table with our grandmother, who’s investigating her wallet for “cash on hand.”
“Now, about lunch,” Doto says. “I’m thinking clam chowder might hit the spot. What do you all think?” We all know that the only place for miles around that serves such a thing is the Lakeview Inn in Mount Laura, which means huge hot fudge sundaes for everyone.
“Sure! You bet!” we say, delivering the response she’s after.
“Let’s take a little drive then, shall we?”
We pile into the big DeSoto, the boys sinking into the white leather back seat, inhaling greedily the smell of new car.
Doto fits her DeSoto like candy in a wrapper. This one, a special order, is Mediterranean blue, which looks like turquoise to me, white interior, and chrome everywhere. Doto’s glasses are cat-eyed in a shape almost identical to the DeSoto’s taillights; her hair, permed and combed in twin side waves, reminds me of the car’s back fins. Between us, in the front, is her brown leather map box, containing the Triple A’s most up-to-date routing from her home outside Chicago to Mayflower, Florida; Mayflower to Bozeman, Montana (Uncle Harry’s home); Bozeman to Baltimore (where Aunt Eleanor lives) and back again to La Grange, Illinois.
The DeSoto’s engine purrs like a happy cat as Doto backs carefully out of our driveway and noses north to the crossroad off Old Dixie Highway, then onto the Orange Blossom Trail. Unlike the larger towns of Opalakee south of us and Mount Laura to the north, Mayflower is little more than a place where the Trail picks up a couple side streets, Old Dixie on the east side and Citrus on the west. Dead center, where most places have a courthouse or a city hall, stands the Mayflower Citrus processing plant, Emmett Casselton’s giant co-op, turning most of the local fruit into trainloads of frozen Jiffy Girl juice concentrate.
Across the street, “like a wart on old Emmett’s nose,” Daddy says, is our family’s small, fancy-fruit packinghouse. “Independent Grower—Packer—Shipper” it says on tall billboards facing the traffic both ways. Passing by in the DeSoto, we see the signs Mother and Daddy put out on their way to Marvin’s funeral. “Closed for the Day” they say, blocking both entrances to the gravel parking lot. Beside the packinghouse is our Trail-side grove, which runs to Mr. Fred Turnbull’s Standard Oil station, then his grove, then the office of
“Buy a Patch of Paradise!!! J.J. Jenkins, Real Estate & Insurance.” At the north end of town is Tomasinis’, the small store run by our friends Sal and Sophia Tomasini, the only other Northerners in Mayflower, and the source of meat, milk, bread and other staples for the residents of The Quarters. Voight’s, at the south end, is where most white people shop.
Just beyond Tomasinis’ is the entrance to The Quarters, the steeple of St. John’s African Methodist Episcopal Church and the funeral assembly of old, smudge-colored cars and trucks. Our parents’ Chevy Styleline wagon is the only white-owned vehicle there.
Doto shakes her head as we pass by. “That poor young man. Such an abominable waste!”
We all fall silent, thinking our own thoughts of Marvin, his long easy stride, his wide-as-the-world grin, his love of a rhyme and a joke. He and his father have picked fruit for us forever, and since that awful morning two days ago, I’ve used my best memories of him to try to push away that picture of his body in Daddy’s truck. Marvin was the one who turned my real name, Marie Louise, and my nickname, Reesa, into “Reesa-Roo-How-Do-You-Do,” “Rooter-Tooter-Where’s-Yo’-Scooter” and, my favorite, “Rootin’-Tootin’-How’s-Yo’-Shotgun-Shootin’.” Marvin was always good about letting me in on things that everybody else seemed to know already, like the fact that Luther wasn’t his real daddy. Marvin’s real daddy died or ran off when he was little, but “that’s all right,” he told me, because “Luther’s
twice
the man mah real daddy was.” It was Marvin and Luther who gave us our German shepherd Buddy, because “nobody oughta live in the middle of an orange grove without a good dog.” When we first got Buddy, he sometimes vanished back to Luther and Armetta’s house in The Quarters. Marvin would tie a rope around Buddy’s neck and walk him home to us. “Hey-Root-Hog-Lost-A-Dog?” he’d call from our back porch.
Only Marvin could tell me when it was officially spring. “It ain’t oh-fishal ’til the granddaddy bird calls it’s time to ‘
Whip-Poor-Will!
’ and the big bull ’gator bellows back, ‘
You
leave ol’ Will alone fo’ Ah come over there, give yuh what fo’!
”
“Who’s Will and what did he do?” I’d ask each year, mock suspicious.
“I don’t know, but
whatever
it was, his wife was in on it, too,” he’d say, looking at me sideways.
“Now, how do you know that?”
“ ’Cause, Roo, the other birds cry ‘
Whip-Will’s-Widow!’
”
“Marvin, I never heard the birds say that!”
“Oh,
lots
of folks hear, but only a
few
listen,” he’d reply, dropping his chin, narrowing his eyes at me.
The sky is bright, bird’s-egg blue, cloudless; the sun March-warm, not yet summery hot. The DeSoto glides past the pure geometry of the groves. So my grandmother won’t see or say anything about my tears, I turn away, tapping out the rhythm of the green rows flying past the window, haunted by the awful singsonging inside my head:
Marvin’s
dead, gone forever.
North into Lake County, we reach the historic New England-style mansion that’s the Lakeview Inn. The Inn sits between two stands of navel trees still in full bloom, on a slight ridge above pretty Lake Laura. As we pull into the driveway, the smell of orange blossoms and fried food fills the car. The azaleas, blazing pink against the wide white porch, look like they’d smell good, too, but I know they have no scent at all.
“Your grandfather and I used to winter across the lake from here,” Doto tells four-year-old Mitchell, reaching out to rub his buzz-haired head. “The first time I brought your father here, he was a babe in arms.”
Mitchell squints up at her, knitting his pale brows at the idea of a baby Daddy in Doto’s arms. We call him our human fireplug because he’s about that high and wide, and bursting with me-too energy. Spitting image of your uncle Harry, Doto says. Eight-year-old Ren, on the other hand, is lean and lanky, with Mother’s curls and easygoing disposition except, Doto says, for the streak of the daredevil that’s pure Daddy.
The Inn’s hostess, who’s older than Doto and remembers her, greets us loudly, exclaiming over how big we’ve grown, and settles us in a booth with a view.
Outside, the lawn runs down to the lake. People stroll on white crushed-shell pathways admiring more pink azaleas, late red camellias, lavender clusters on the lolly-popped chinaberry trees and the sweet, sun-colored jessamine trained over a trellis. Beyond the lake, orderly rows of blossoming trees march up and over the rolling hills. This is the Florida the snowbirds fall for.
The menus, the size of newspapers, dwarf us. We know what we want so we slap them shut right away and order as soon as our waitress appears. Doto sips her iced tea and Ren and I carefully suck our Coke straws. Mitchell’s another story. Since our baby brother is not yet accustomed to Doto’s strong opinions on table manners, the appropriate use of a straw and napkin, she quietly lectures him. Just after the waitress delivers our food—clam chowder for Doto, fried clams and French fries for us—a loud burst of male laughter from the booth next door startles us.
“The hell of it is, they grabbed the wrong nigger!” roars one of the men.
Doto’s soup spoon freezes midair; her eyes slit at the man’s language.
“They cruised the juke joint and saw him, young buck leanin’ up against this white Caddy with New York plates. Uppity-ass burr-head smart-talked Jimmy Sims at his garage. They got the bastard, shut him up right quick and headed for a little stompin’ party at Round Lake.”