Her Own Place (19 page)

“Changed? Huh, you haven't changed a speck. You look as good now as you did when I first met you. And that's saying something. You were the prettiest girl in Rising Ridge.” And that's the Lord's truth on that, Mae Lee thought to herself, but oh, Lord, don't strike me speechless for the bald-faced lie before that.

Mae Lee picked up her meat. “No, I'm not supposed to eat it but I do,” she explained, laughing. “Dr. Bell would have a fit if he saw me loading this pork meat into my shopping cart.”

Mae Lee grew serious, her voice was tinged with sadness. “I'm sorry about the death of Church. You have my deepest sympathy.”

Liddie Granger smiled. It helped in a small way to ease the pained sadness in her face. “Thank you, Mae Lee.” There was a faraway look in Liddie Granger's eyes. “My son was alone in the house after his father died, so I decided to come back to
be here for him. But, oh, Mae Lee, the house is so lonely now. You should come and visit me when you come out to your old home place. I always think of you when I look towards the place where your old house used to stand. I used to envy you so. You seemed so free-spirited and happy. Way back then, you got a divorce and went on with your life,” she said.

Mae Lee laughed. “Those days weren't so very easy for me,” she said. She was puzzled over what Liddie had said about her divorce. She knew Liddie could have gotten a divorce if she'd wanted to. It surprised her to know that she'd apparently thought about it, even back then. It all serves to teach me a lesson or two, Mae Lee thought. Never envy someone like I envied Liddie Granger unless you know what you're envious of. They'd seemed so happy. Church loved his children. But Liddie was not his daughter, she was his wife.

Liddie Granger looked at Mae Lee. “I've made a lot of mistakes over the years.” There were tears in her eyes.

Oh, no, Mae Lee thought when she saw Liddie's eyes had misted over, don't allow yourself to get all tore up right here in the store. Everybody will see you, and you know how quick people in this town are to talk. I can't begin to put in my mind what some folks would make out of seeing you crying in front of the liver mush and fatback meat counter. “Bet she's run through all that money Church Granger left her” would be the first thing they'd say. Women and some men tend to get all teary-eyed and religious when their family fortune is gone, or as Nellie Grace would say, just before election campaigns when they or their husbands are running for some political office. She shook her head.

Liddie Granger started to ask Mae Lee about her children, and to tell about her own children almost at the same time, but she rambled, getting a little confused along the way. There she was, getting confused, and she was younger than Mae Lee. Not by much, but still younger. Mae Lee listened, her fingers digging into a loaf of Wonder wheat bread in her shopping cart. Her girls had fussed so about the calories in white bread that she'd stopped buying it altogether.

She studied Liddie Granger's face. It had that fragile haunted look that a white woman with that much money shouldn't have. I hope she isn't heading for a nervous breakdown, Mae Lee thought to herself. She watched the frail woman dab at her eyes. Liddie Granger had drawn Mae Lee into a spider's web; she was held captive.

Mae Lee held on to her bread loaf with both hands. She glanced about the busy shoppers inside the store and hoped that Liddie Granger, on the verge of tears, wouldn't break down. She half-listened as Liddie chattered on and on about earlier days on the farm; Mae Lee could only think that Liddie Granger had no business being that disturbed and sad. Mae Lee had known her mama and daddy before they passed on. Liddie was a very rich woman, was rich even before she married Church and then became richer. There shouldn't have been any reason she should have been so unhappy, unless— well, maybe there had been something awful in her life that nobody knew about.

Mae Lee tried to sort out her thoughts, but it was like picking your way through a swamp with quicksand suck holes. You just don't know what goes on behind closed doors or
what reasons somebody might have for wanting a divorce, she decided.

Liddie seemed to pull herself together. She picked up a small package of pork chops. Her sadness was still there though. “I wish so much that things had been different between Church and me. He was a good man in so many ways. Oh, God, I miss him so.”

Mae Lee breathed a sigh of relief. She didn't want her memory of Church Granger tainted.

Liddie looked at Mae Lee's loaf of bread and laughed. The loaf looked like a wrung-out heavy towel. “I heard that you're one of the hospital volunteers, Mae Lee,” Liddie said. “You probably don't have a lot of free time, but please come out to see me sometimes when you get a chance.”

“And you do the same,” Mae Lee urged. “Come by and see me anytime.”

They parted ways. At the end of the aisle, the two women turned and waved a second good-bye. Liddie disappeared behind a mountain of paper towels on sale, and Mae Lee stood staring after her. Poor Liddie, she thought. She's sleeping under the same quilt of guilt with thousands of other women. She still has husband trouble even after the man is in his grave. Mae Lee shook her head. And to think that all these years she had thought the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was in Liddie Granger's front yard.

She drew a long, heavy sigh. The wild plums are always sweeter on someone else's land, she thought.

More than two years had gone by since Mae Lee first began her volunteer work at the hospital. It was spring and she welcomed the warm days.

The ladies in the hospital volunteer group had a program of going on a tour twice each year. They chartered a bus and spent two nights away. The first several times when Mae Lee was asked whether she wanted to go she declined. But then she decided to go along the next time just to see what it was like. The tour this spring was to be along the Carolina and Georgia coast, including Charleston and Savannah, to see the old homes and plantations.

At exactly seven o'clock in the morning, ten minutes before the tour bus was scheduled to leave, Mae Lee climbed aboard and picked out her seat, in the front near the driver. She held her head high. On the outside she was just another passenger. Inside she was Rosa Parks, years earlier down in Alabama. It was a role she never tired of playing.

She watched the passengers board the bus. Most of her fellow
hospital volunteers were not really well-to-do women, she thought, but they had the money to go when and where they wanted.

The bus driver, a handsome, clean-shaven young black man, helped the last passenger get her small bag inside the bus. “I work with them two or three days a week,” she explained to the driver after he took his seat at the wheel. She leaned forward so the others couldn't hear her over the engine. “I do volunteer work at a hospital. I've been in their homes, and they've been in mine. But the thing this time is, I've never been around them in this capacity before. Know what I mean?”

“I catch your drift,” the bus driver said.

The spring was perfect for a bus tour in the Low Country of South Carolina. When the bus reached Charleston, the azaleas were in full bloom and the magnolia tree buds were swelling. The group checked into a Hampton Inn. Mae Lee thought the room rate that the others considered so reasonable was quite costly. They were only going to sleep there. Shortly after they checked in, they boarded the bus again and were off traveling across the Cooper River to view the handsome mansions and gardens and to lunch at one of the many restaurants offering the fresh daily catches brought in by the fishing fleets.

The next morning Mae Lee was up early, anxiously awaiting the trip across the Ashley River to Savannah, Georgia. At least she knew one thing about Savannah. It was not far from there that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a mechanized method of ginning seed from cotton, which was why slaves became so valuable to their owners.

Again Mae Lee was drawn to the graveyards, and the old restored
plantation homes. Just walking the grounds of a home outside Savannah that once had teemed with slave servants evoked an indescribable feeling of kinship within her. The thought that maybe her ancestors had walked on the very same soil was overwhelming. With cold chills surging through her body, she walked, her eyes searching for anything that might offer a trace of her roots. She didn't have to be on the shores of the Atlantic to do that.

She knew what she was looking for, what she hoped to find. For as long as she could remember, she had heard the story that went back to her great-grandfather, a man called Samwasi, a slave who left only a number and a drawing as the clue for his descendants to trace their heritage. Her daddy, Sam, had been named after him. His drawing showed, Mae Lee had been told, the number four and a scythe, perfectly drawn to scale, unmistakably clear. Time and time again, the story went, the slave had drawn this image in the loose dirt at his feet. “He couldn't read or write,” her daddy had told her. “This is all we know about where our people might be buried.”

In a seemingly forsaken corner at the edge of the woods in one old cemetery, the tour guide pointed out the graves of slaves. After the group moved on, Mae Lee had stood so long staring at the graves that Bethel Petty returned to see if she was all right.

The tour guide didn't explain the meaning behind the rusting chain links scattered about on a few graves, Mae Lee pointed this out to Bethel Petty. The three links joined together meant that the dead slave was born into slavery, worked and
lived as a slave, and died as a slave, Mae Lee explained. She pointed to the scattered links of a broken chain, breathed a sigh of relief, and said softly, “The broken chain shows that this slave had gained her freedom.”

Mae Lee had not been prepared for Bethel Petty's reaction when she told her that given time, she would no doubt find the number four and a scythe drawn by her great-grandfather somewhere, possibly in or near some graveyard. “A four and a scythe?” Bethel Petty's eyes narrowed, then opened wide. Her voice was edged with excitement. “Oh, Mae Lee,” the words rushed from her, “it must be Forsyth, Georgia. Forsyth County, Georgia!”

“I never heard of that place,” Mae Lee said.

“It's the county in
Gone with the Wind
. It's right outside of Atlanta.”

Maybe Bethel Petty was right, Mae Lee thought. If she went looking she might be able to find the place. But there must be hundreds of graveyards outside a big city like Atlanta. Besides, slaves weren't given granite tombstones when they died; the most they could expect would be wooden planks with their names on them, which would have long since disappeared. Still—

“Someday I'd like to go looking,” she said.

“Oh, Mae Lee, wouldn't it be exciting if you could find something?” Bethel Petty declared. “I'd love to go with you to look for it!” Her eyes beamed with the excitement of a person setting out on a treasure hunt.

Mae Lee turned for a final look. Aside from the few graves with the rusty chains, the graves were unmarked and not well
tended. But there were the lilies. According to the tour guide they voluntarily surfaced and bloomed each spring.

She wondered what great sacrifices some of the slaves had to make to save enough money to buy their freedom. She thought about how hard they must have worked, and of where they might have hidden their money. Perhaps she shared a common bond in hiding money; she hoped the habit had been passed down, from her great-grandfather Samwasi. The very idea made her feel her money was securely hidden.

Mae Lee followed along on the tour, hanging on to the tour guide's every word, never showing any signs of the pain that often brought tears to her eyes behind her sunglasses. It was the thought of the mistreatment, the forced labor, and the breakup of families that hurt most.

She remembered the torn quilt that had been handed down for generations in her daddy's family. She felt satisfaction because the torn quilt was where it should be, with her baby girl, Amberlee. Her mama, Vergie, had given her the quilt when she was fifteen. Amberlee had not known that, yet when she turned fifteen she'd begged her for the quilt. Since none of the others had asked for it, Mae Lee decided it was meant to be hers.

She had explained the strings attached. The quilt must always be kept in the family. It represented families that had been stitched together by women of many generations. If or when the quilt was torn, according to legend, it was because it needed to open up to make room for a piece of another family member's garment. A custom passed down from the days of slavery, it all started with a slave woman's prayer that perhaps
through a family patchwork quilt the memory of a piece of a garment might serve as a clue to identify and reunite a family broken apart and children sold off at an early age. It had been a mother's way of stitching a family together. It was the thread of the family heritage that bound them together.

Once her little Amberlee had clipped a picture of a black family from a magazine and put it in her little white cardboard shoebox. Mae Lee could never forget the faces of the family in the picture. The memory was like a movie that played over and over in her mind, a smiling father, mother, and children. So it shouldn't have surprised her when she discovered the picture of an elderly man, unknown to her, in her daughter's apartment. But it did hurt somewhat to learn that Amberlee had been passing him off as her paternal grandfather.

“Who is this paternal grandfather of yours, as you call him?” Mae Lee had asked.

“I don't know who the man is, Mama. I bought the portrait at an auction.”

Mae Lee had studied the equally pained look in her daughter's face. “And what kind of grandfather is that?”

Her daughter didn't turn to face her. “It means, Mama, it means,” she stammered, “I'm pretending that he is my daddy's daddy.”

Mae Lee moved closer to the elegantly framed oval picture. “So mamas don't count anymore.” She drew a deep breath, then said softly, “He is a handsome grandfather. Very handsome indeed.”