Shadows of St. Louis (7 page)

George Goodwin

George Goodwin burst through the door of his home and collapsed in a chair. For the first time in several days, he took a deep breath and relaxed.

It was three a.m. and the house was dark. His wife and his children were asleep.
All of his children, including Emma Lynn.

George stumbled to his liquor cabinet in search of his bourbon only to find barely a teaspoon left in the bottle.

"Damn it, Charles," he swore under his breath. His son had no idea just how much he needed that bourbon at just this instant.

Blindly reaching for another bottle out of the cabinet, he settled on gin and began drinking directly from the bottle. Settling in a chair, he thought about his baby girl.
His Emma Lynn.
Should he feel guilty for what he had done to her?
For making her a maid?
A second-class citizen in her own home.
If he was supposed to feel guilty, he didn't. He had protected her. He had protected her from what the world saw of her and what the world would do to her.

From time to time over the past fifteen years, pangs of guilt had entered his being, but he had pushed them aside. And based on what he had just witnessed in South Carolina, the guilt had receded permanently. He had protected Emma Lynn. He had kept her with her family and protected her from a life of pain, discrimination, and ...
lynchings
.

"George, dear, what on Earth are you doing?" Elizabeth Goodwin asked, coming down the stairs. "It's the middle of the night and
your
carrying on like a drunken elephant down here."

Instead of responding, George stood and embraced his wife.

"Are you all right?" she asked, hugging him tightly in return.

He shook his head.

"What happened? I wasn't expecting you until tomorrow." She stepped out of his embrace. "Oh God, someone recognized you, didn't they? Someone knows. I knew you shouldn't have returned to that damned plantation."

"No one knows anything," he assured her. He plopped back down in the chair and took another swig of gin once again, wishing it was his bourbon.

Elizabeth exhaled. "Good." She sat across from her husband in the settee. "Well then what is the problem? Your mother was sixty-three years old. You knew she would die eventually. I don't even know why you felt the need to go all the way back there in the first place."

George glared at his wife. "How can you be so insensitive?  I hadn't seen her in thirty years. Thirty years of living this lie.
A lie that you concocted."

"A lie that has provided you with a decent life.
With more than a decent life.
There was nothing for us in South Carolina. We didn't fit in anywhere. Would you really want to live there under the Jim Crow laws? Is that the life you want for your children?"

He didn't answer. He knew she was right. He didn't want to live that way. The fact of the matter, however, was that no one deserved to live that way.

"I saw a man die yesterday," George said, staring into the gin bottle as if it replayed the scene.

"People die every day."

"Lynched.
I witnessed a lynching."

"Oh." Elizabeth certainly understood the difference between death and lynching. There was actually no comparison. It was a horrific way to die and an even more horrific thing to witness.

"I knew him," George added.

"Did
I
know him?"

George nodded. "It was Winston Hill."

Elizabeth gasped. "No, no."

For a moment, George wasn't sure why his wife was so upset at the mention of Winston's name. Then he remembered that she'd had a childhood romance with him. They couldn't have been more than eight years old at the time, but no one forgot their first love.

"I could have stopped it and I didn't." George continued to stare into the bottle as if he was memorizing every crease and ripple in the liquid.

"What do you mean?
How?"

"As I left my mother's burial, a police car pulled alongside me. Winston was in the backseat. He looked over into my car and instantly recognized me. It had been thirty years since I'd seen him. I was sixteen when I left South Carolina. How did he even recognize me after all these years?" He took another swig of gin. "He yelled for me. He begged for my help. He said he didn't do it."

"What happened? What did you do?"

"Nothing.
I did absolutely nothing. I turned away. I was afraid the police officers in the front seat would wonder why I knew him. So I did nothing."

"Oh."

"A few hours later, though, my conscience weighed on me. I went to inquire why he was there. The police said that he resisted arrest and fired his weapon at them. I knew immediately it was a lie."

"How?"

"Winston lost his index finger when we were eleven while he was cutting firewood with his father. He wouldn't be able to pull the trigger of a gun." George paused, thinking back to that day. At the time, he thought Winston had gone through the worst type of pain imaginable. How mistaken he was. "I asked the officer why he was arrested in the first place, and do you know what he said?"

Elizabeth shook her head.

"He didn't remember. He didn't even remember."

"How did Winston end up getting lynched?" Elizabeth asked seemingly getting impatient.

"There was a public lynching planned for yesterday morning. It was in all the papers. Tickets were being sold. Food was going to be served. Amos Whitaker was to be lynched for stealing a white man's cow. But he died during the night. The town didn't want to cancel the lynching, so they lynched Winston instead."

Elizabeth pressed her eyes shut tightly. George imagined she was either trying to hold in tears or block out the images.

"I tried to get out of town. I didn't want any part of it. But the roads were blocked. I was trapped. I heard his screams. I heard the cheers from the crowd." George shook his head.
"If I had just acknowledged him.
If I had helped him when I had the chance, he might be alive."

Elizabeth stood and went over to her husband. She placed her hand on his shoulder. "There was nothing you could do."

George couldn't help thinking back to his life in South Carolina. The discrimination on both sides was unbearable. There was no way he could live the rest of his life like that. He didn't deserve it. Several times growing up he had been mistaken for white. Once his mother was almost beaten because they thought she had stolen someone else's child.

Though he looked white, George had never even considered living as such. He knew he was Negro. It wasn't until Elizabeth suggested running away together that the thought entered his mind. He still wasn't convinced, but one weekend they decided to try it out. They were just sixteen when they traveled to Savannah together then went shopping in a white's only store. No one even questioned them. That was the first time he believed it might work. That was thirty years ago.

"Did you love me?" George asked suddenly.

"Of course I love you, dear."

"No, that's not what I asked. I know you love me now. I'm asking if you loved me then.
When we left South Carolina."

Elizabeth was silent.

"Did you really love me? Or did you just love the idea of escaping poverty and racism?"

She released her husband's shoulder and sat back down across from him.

"That is an unfair question. We were sixteen. No sixteen-year-old really knows what love is."

He almost laughed out loud at that. It was a classic Elizabeth answer. She never let emotions get in the way of the rational decision. He also remembered clearly what love was like at sixteen. He had felt it toward Mary Johnson. Simply thinking of her name even thirty years later still made him weak in the knees. She was a girl perfect in every way except that her skin was too dark.

How different his life would have been if he had chosen Mary instead of Elizabeth. There would be no successful business, no fancy parties,
no
promising future for his children.
Only a life of oppression under Jim Crow laws.

He had made the right decision. He'd always wondered if Elizabeth realized he named their first daughter after her.

"I'll take that as a no," George said in response to Elizabeth's answer. He stood then took another swig of gin.

"George, dear —"

"It's all right, Elizabeth. I do not regret our decision. We did the right thing. It was the only way." He kissed the top of her head. "I'm off to bed," he said. But he didn't go toward the stairs to his bedroom. Instead, he went toward the cellar.

"There's something you should know before you go down there," Elizabeth said.

George turned and stared at his wife.

"Emma Lynn was attacked."

George sighed and pressed his eyes shut with his fingers.
"By whom?
Why?"

"Frank thought she was Rebecca Jane and kissed her. When he learned his mistake ... well, you can imagine how upset he was."

And then the doubts came swarming back. He had thought he was protecting her. But no matter what he did, she would never be safe. Not as long as she was in the skin she was in.

George sat on the edge of her bed and stared at his daughter.
His beautiful baby girl.
He knew the moment she was born that she was too dark to fit into Elizabeth's plan.  Elizabeth wanted to send her away immediately, but George convinced her otherwise. He told her that sometimes babies are born darker and lighten with time. It was completely untrue and he knew it. But the lie worked.
For a few years at least.

He still remembered the day when Elizabeth decided to send her away. He knew it was coming and he had tried to prepare himself for it mentally. They were living in Indiana at the time. George had started a successful shoe repair business and the family was living quite comfortably. But Elizabeth had correctly ascertained that everything was threatened by the presence of Emma Lynn.

The bags were packed. George was ready to drive his youngest daughter to live with his family in South Carolina. Only Charles refused to let her go. He held on to his little sister and threatened to leave with her.

A six-year-old child had proved to be more courageous than a grown man. He couldn't even stand up to his wife for the sake of his own daughter. He felt ashamed.

So many times he wanted to tell her. But Elizabeth felt that if Emma Lynn knew, it put them all in danger. Elizabeth felt Emma Lynn might tell someone purposely or accidently.

George brushed the side of his daughter's head and wondered if she would ever be able to forgive him if she found out she was really his daughter.

"Henry?" she whispered in a sleepy daze.

Who was Henry? Was he someone she had met at the Negro school? Was his youngest daughter in love? George really hadn't been paying too much attention to happenings in the house lately. Once he found out his mother was ill, he had been completely distracted.

He brushed the side of her face again and hoped that maybe one day she would be able to find happiness. And if this Henry person was the key to that happiness, he would help her in any way he could.