Boy, Snow, Bird (23 page)

Dearest Bird,

The incident of the disappearing letter is only one tenth of the mischief that gift of yours caused in my life, but thanks anyway. I wanted my kid sister back and I got her back with a vengeance. Sisters come with a lot of benefits—let me know if you’re ever in the mood for reading a really long poem and I’ll send you “Goblin Market.”

For there is no friend like a sister

In calm or stormy weather;

To cheer one on the tedious way,

To fetch one if one goes astray,

To lift one if one totters down,

To strengthen whilst one stands.

I used to think that was stuff a mom should do for you—I guess I felt I needed someone in my life to do those things and decided it should be a mom. But a sister or a friend, or a combination of both, that works too. Let’s be those kinds of sisters if we can.

In my other letter I asked if you’re aware of what happens to girls who say that they don’t always appear in mirrors. Doctors get involved, Bird. Sometimes girls like that end up in clinics out in the middle of nowhere, being forced into ice baths and other terrible things I won’t write about here. I just want you to be really sure you mean what you said. Are you sure?

AML,
Snow

Dear Snow,

Was that supposed to scare me? I’m already in the middle of nowhere. And, yes, I’m sure. It obviously bothers you, so let’s just talk about something else.

Bird

Bird,

I was only asking like that because I don’t always show up in mirrors, either. For years I wondered whether it’s all right or not, but there’s been no one to ask, so I’ve decided that I feel all right about it. It’s a relief to be able to forget about what I might or might not be mistaken for. My reflection can’t be counted on, she’s not always there but I am, so maybe she’s not really me . . .

. . . Well, what is she then? I guess we’ll find out someday, but I’m not holding my breath. I think that maybe mirrors behave differently depending on how you treat them. Treating them like clocks (as almost everybody seems to) makes them behave like clocks, but treating them as doors—does any of this make sense to you? Yes, no?

My heart used to stop dead whenever I thought someone else had noticed. But I’ve found that other people usually overlook it, or if they notice, they think it’s something the matter with them, not me. Four times in my life so far someone’s started to ask me about it . . . “You know, for a second I thought . . .” and I’ve looked at them all mystified, as if they were talking gibberish. Then they start worrying about clinics and ice baths and soon after that they dry up. So, yes, when you say that it also happens to you, and you refuse to take it back—well. That unsettles me. Of course it does.

Either you’re lying or you’re the other thing—I don’t even want to write it down. But if you’re the other thing then I am too. And why would you lie? I’ve decided to believe you. Maybe it means we’re not supposed to be apart. Or . . . there’ll be some kind of mayhem next time we’re together.

Aunt Clara and Uncle John send you greetings. And I send you love

as always,
Snow

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.