Dear Snow,
Yes, you’re grown up and I’m not. You’ve made that very clear. Have you forgotten how it felt when you were thirteen and people tried to humor you?
I guess you’d really like for us to have something in common, and that’s why you’re pretending you know what I mean about mirrors. But we have a father in common. That’s more than enough. I strongly recommend that you talk about something else in your next letter.
Yours respectfully,
Bird N. Whitman
4
Hi, Sis,
Here I am, talking about something else: our Aunt Clara. She’s a marvel. There’s a photo of her enclosed but she doesn’t photograph well. She won’t mind me saying that. She’s so lively in person, she’s got these bright eyes and her hair floats out every which way around her face and often looks as if it’s moving of its own accord. She thinks quick, talks slow, works porcupine hours—that’s what she calls her night shifts at the hospital because she sees porcupines along the road on her way to work. She taught me nice handwriting and how to cook. I want to make her happy and proud of me. I made her cry when I was young, Bird, and I wish so much that I hadn’t, or that either of us could simply forget it happened. It was during our first week together, one night just before she put me to bed and just before she left for work. She had a map of America on her lap and she was trying to explain to me that in some states colored people were equal to white people in the eyes of the law, and in some states they weren’t. We had to stand with the people who were still struggling until everybody had the same rights everywhere, that’s what she said. I was only eight years old (this is something I’m always telling myself in my own defense. I was only eight years old, only eight years old, Your Honor) and nobody had ever told me to my face that I’m colored, so I knew it and didn’t know it at the same time. I thought that if I accepted what Aunt Clara was saying, then that map would apply to me, that map with the hideous borders she’d drawn onto it in red and blue. So I grabbed both her hands and smiled at her, to try to get her to go along with me, and I said: “No, no, don’t say that about me. That’s awful. It can’t be true.” She wasn’t surprised, just sad. She let out this one quick breath, like she’d just been hit really hard in the stomach, and she rubbed her eyes and said she must have gotten dirt in one of them. I crept back to her in the morning with questions—what about Dad, what about my grandma, and my other grandma? Yup, them too. I remember it was very early, and she was eating her breakfast standing up, with her uniform hung up over the door behind her—when she’s not wearing it or washing it or pressing it or mending it, she keeps it in a plastic cover with a cake of lavender soap in each pocket—she was patient with me. It was Uncle John who said things like “Don’t know how I’ll go another day without boxin’ this child’s ears for her.” He used to run a home school; eight of us sat cross-legged on the carpet in Uncle J and Aunt C’s front parlor, learning Brer Anansi stories to begin with and years later reading our way through Othello and then a very interesting half-book called Peter the Great’s Blackamoor . . . (Russia’s another planet, Bird. Not only that, but the author stopped writing the book all of a sudden—nobody knows why. He lived in the nineteenth century. Maybe it just wasn’t the right time for him to tell the story. Or maybe it doesn’t matter what century it was, maybe he just didn’t like the way the story was headed and it screamed and laughed and spoke in tongues when he tried to turn it around. We’ll never know how it ends. He put it away and moved on to the next thing.) When Uncle John introduced me to the others, to my dear friends Ephraim and Laura and Abdul and Peter and Rukeih and Anita and Mouse, he told them they weren’t going to have any problems with me as long as they understood it was going to take me a while to get to know anything about anything. Uncle John was a sharecropper somewhere in North Carolina but he wound up in jail at one time—he says he was guilty, but he won’t say what it is he was guilty of, but he’s not a violent man, so I doubt he hurt anybody. Aunt Clara was dating his cousin, who let Uncle John sleep on his sofa when he got out of jail and was looking for some work to do. But Uncle John stole Aunt Clara away from his cousin. He’d had a lot of time to read while he was in jail. “Did you know England had a queen whose father had her mother executed?” he’d say. “She never married.” Aunt Clara would tell him he was making it up and he’d tell her more and more and they’d sit there talking themselves hoarse in Uncle John’s cousin’s kitchen until Uncle John’s cousin would say, “Well, I’m going to bed, y’all,” and leave them to it. He took his loss of Aunt Clara like a man and at the wedding he said he knew he could never be the encyclopedia that Aunt Clara needed. Our grandma told Aunt Clara that if she married Uncle John, she’d be disowned. Aunt Clara said: “Well, you found the excuse you were looking for, Mother.”
Got to run, Bird—working this evening. Not porcupine hours, but I’ll finish this letter to you tomorrow.
All right, I’m back. Back with you and Aunt Clara. She grew up in Biloxi; Great-aunt Effie was a live-in cook for a white family called the Adairs, and Aunt Clara laundered their sheets and scrubbed floors for bed and board. Great-aunt Effie would tell her stories about the Whitmans as she worked. All stories about pulling off confidence tricks and getting in with the right people and lording it over other colored folks and getting the last laugh. Aunt Clara had to ask and ask before Great-aunt Effie admitted the unhappy endings—there was Addie Whitman, who spent her life playing servant in various cousins’ houses because she was too dark and “ugly” to be allowed to marry, Addie Whitman who got herself a black tomcat for company. But even that cat, Minnaloushe, kept scratching her and hissing at her. Since Minnaloushe wouldn’t love her, Addie Whitman thought she’d better teach him to fear her, so she forced the cat into a sack and swung the sack over Perdido Pass. She was only going to give him one good dip in the mouth of the river but she lost her balance, fell in, and drowned. Minnaloushe got away and was quietly eating dinner out of a silver dish—don’t ask me why Effie remembers the color of the dish—at a neighbor’s house later on that evening. Or there’s Cass Whitman, who hung herself to show her parents and her brothers exactly what she thought of their having run her “unsuitable” fiancé out of town, or Vince Whitman, who fell in love with a white woman and proposed to her in front of a handful of his closest friends, who were shocked and terrified. She said yes, and she also said she would’ve loved him if he were purple or green or purple striped with green, and he said: “I’m so happy. That’s all I wanted to hear.” Then he led the party in a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” half singing it, half saying it. Try it for yourself, not quite singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”—it changes the words, doesn’t it? At sunset Vince and his new fiancée went for a walk in the park and he shot her dead, then himself. One clean, accurate shot each, like he’d been practicing. Aunt Clara says he must have been out of his mind, but Effie says he was a realist. According to Effie, our dad’s the only Whitman she knows of who’s dared to actually just go ahead and marry a white person. Aunt Clara and I reminded her that it’s legal where we are, and therefore not so daring, but she’s still pretty amazed by our dad, Bird.
I’ve met Great-aunt Effie enough times to go beyond first impressions, and there isn’t a bad bone in that woman’s body. But . . . that girl you mentioned, the one who feels cheated, Great-aunt Effie is like that. She thinks there are treasures that were within her reach, but her skin stole them from her. She thinks she could’ve been somebody. But she is somebody. Somebody who’s chased bullies away with broomsticks, somebody who saved for years so Aunt Clara could go to nursing school without having to ask her mother for the money. She’s somebody who’s reached out to hold Aunt Clara whenever Aunt C felt the world was about to end. She’s somebody Aunt Clara loves, somebody she couldn’t have done without. A woman like Effie Whitman thinking she could’ve been somebody . . . that pushes icicles all the way down my spine.
Great-aunt Effie knows how to make that cobbler that no one can resist, that gratin that pursues people into their dreams and has them sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night for another bite or ten, that cake that can cause a family rift over the last slice. The Adairs were paying her wages lower than any white cook of her standard would accept, but they were pretty good wages for a colored cook. But Great-aunt Effie didn’t get too bitter about that. She says that sometimes she’d stand there watching the Adairs eat and she’d think how lucky this type of white family was that they employed cooks with a proper sense of right and wrong, conscience almost heavy enough to replace a slave collar. Without that proper sense of right and wrong, a colored cook might go astray. Such a cook—ever smiling, ever respectful, ever ready to go the extra mile—such a cook might fatten her employees up . . . not in a hurry, just little by little, fatten them and fatten them, add more and yet more cream to their coffee, add butter even (they’d say the coffee tasted too rich at first, but then they’d grow to like it), vile creatures that they were, accepting the ceaseless toil of others as their birthright. And when the family was too fat to run, this cook run astray might just take a brisk, ten-minute trip around the house, shooting every member of the family dead with the firearms they kept for their own protection. Aunt Clara and I said the exact same thing when Great-aunt Effie told us this little fantasy of hers: Jesus! And Great-aunt Effie told us in a very shocked tone of voice not to take the Lord’s name in vain.
Hey—at least you’ve got the Novaks to fall back on (as you reminded me with that “N” you threw into your last letter), but the Whitmans and the Millers are the product of generations of calculated breeding, whether they’ll admit it or not. The Whitmans have married to refine a look, they keep a close eye on skin tone and hair texture. They draw strict distinctions between degrees of color—quadroon, octoroon—darkest to lightest. But they can’t stop a face like Clara’s or Effie’s rising up every now and again to confront them. And who can speak for the Millers? My other grandma, the one I don’t share with you, sometimes says a little something about the Millers being “sensible people” who’ve made certain choices in order to remain comfortable just as any other “sensible” people would and what does any of it matter now that the world’s changing? Agnes is a silly old woman, Bird, and it’s hard for me to have any respect for her or for Olivia, it’s hard for me to even stand the sound of their voices on the telephone. I’ve grown up around people whose families have lived their lives without trying to invent advantages—some of them have marched and staged sit-ins, others have just lived with their heads held high. And what about my mom? If she was alive, would she have a cabinet full of “treatments” for her hair and skin? Would she have very delicately led me to believe that there’s something about us Whitmans that isn’t quite nice, something we’ve got to keep under control? Aunt Clara’s never said anything about how my mother might have felt about me. She’s been careful not to go down the “If only your mother could see you now” path. She doesn’t need to, anyway. It just so happens that I carry my mother around in three LP records. She sings and tells me she loves me, she’s proud of me, she’s right by my side. The records are wearing out and I’m not rushing the process or trying to delay it, I’m just letting it happen. Her voice skips and squeaks; she’s started to sound unsure of what she’s saying. All I can tell from those recordings is that my mom wanted me to remember the sound of her voice. I may or may not have hated my own face sometimes. I may or may not have spent time thinking of ways to spoil it somehow. (Maybe that answers your question about being “beautiful.”) But I’m slowly coming around to the view that you can’t feel nauseated by the Whitmans and the Millers without feeling nauseated by the kind of world that’s rewarded them for adapting to it like this. In the meantime I’m letting Agnes and Olivia think I don’t visit them because I’m scared of your mom. Are they good to you? Tell me. You can tell me.
I thought I’d finish writing to you today, but I’ve got to go to work again. I can’t be late. More tomorrow.
We live in a little suburb called Twelve Bridges. Everything’s a little broken-down, especially the bridges. People don’t make too much money around here, but what comes with that is a different definition of what it means to be well-off. You’re chairman of the board if you need twelve dollars a week and you make twelve dollars a week. If you’ve also got someone within ten minutes’ walk who can make you laugh and someone else within a five-minute walk who can help you mourn, you’re a millionaire. If on top of all that you’ve got a buddy or three who’ll feed you delicious things and paint you pictures and dance with you, and another friend who’ll watch your kids so you can go out dancing . . . that’s the billionaire lifestyle. We’re friendly toward strangers because of a general belief (I don’t know where it comes from) that we’re born strangers and that the memory of how that feels never really leaves us. If I’m ever in any other part of the world and I pass a house that has white fairy lights strung across its porch, I’ll think it’s likely that I’d get along with the people who live there. If it’s summer and the strangers out on the porch offer me a drink of water, an apple, the time of day, anything, then I’ll have to stop and find out if they’ve ever heard of a place called Twelve Bridges.
Bird, Bird. What a long letter this has been. But that’s what you get for wanting to be written to as if you were grown up. But also . . . I have plenty of people around me to talk to, and no one to be honest with. Write back just as soon as you can, will you, please?
Snow