Her Own Place (8 page)

Warren pointed to the strongbox. “It's all locked in there.
It's a sad thing that the old people didn't know enough to put their money in the bank. We've come a long way, though. Little by little colored people are starting to catch up. I think you ought to get ready and let's go put it in the bank.” He picked up the strongbox. “All of this money and not a dime of it in a bank, drawing interest. It's sad, really sad,” he said.

Mae Lee turned to face him. “Maybe the reason I have the money they saved is that they
didn't
put it in a bank. Warren, don't tell me you've forgotten how poor folks down in Red Clay Valley lost every dime they had when the little bank there went under.”

Warren shook his head. “But that was a long time ago. Banking is different today. They've got regulations, and the deposits are insured. Besides, what if the house had burned down?”

“It didn't, though,” Mae Lee said, “but even if it had, it could have been just another way to lose it. If your money is gone, it's gone.” She turned to face the window again.

“Mae Lee, Mae Lee.” Warren stood up. “I'm gonna put everything under lock and key until you come to yourself, Mae Lee.”

She didn't turn to face him. “Figure up what's owed you for all you're doing, Warren, and take something for yourself. You're kinfolk.”

Warren shook his head. “I got my share a long time ago. They helped me buy my house and land. You worked to buy yours. With five children and no husband, you'll need everything you can get to put them through school.”

Before he left, Warren made one last plea for Mae Lee to put
that money in a bank. “You are right, Warren,” Mae Lee conceded, “the money should be in the bank.” She knew that very well, yet she listened to her heart. She decided she would put the insurance money and the money from the sale of the property in the bank, but she was going to keep the five thousand dollars that was in the strongbox hidden in her house. She would let Warren think she'd put everything in the bank; her daddy had once told her never to tell even her own children that there was money hidden in a house.

Mae Lee heaved a heavy, sad sigh. “Before you go back to work, Warren, if you get a chance, please take some of the money and buy a television set for my children. Maybe it'll take their minds off their granddaddy. They are too sad for young children.”

In 1963, when the schools in Rising Ridge, South Carolina, were first integrated, Mae Lee accompanied her children to school every morning. It didn't matter that there had been no violence in the area. “Things can happen so fast,” she told her younger children. “I feel better being here.”

Mae Lee felt guilty about leaving her share of the farm work for Hooker and Maycie. It was, after all, fall harvesttime. But if there was no one to hire to take her place, the peanut crop would just have to be left in the fields. The peanuts would resprout and become worthless, but the farm would still be there. She wasn't quite so sure about her children.

Within the year, she stopped going along. It was the change in her daughters that stopped her. They were moving out of her world, and the name changes they made troubled her. Her daughters hated their names. Dallace quickly became Lacey, Annie Ruth was now Ann, Nellie Grace, Nell, and even her baby Amberlee wanted to be called just plain Lee. Well, they were probably right. It was a time for change.

During the sixties Mae Lee's concerns multiplied. The civil rights movement that had started to take shape earlier down in Alabama was gathering steam and momentum. That same year, when four black children were killed in the bombing of a Baptist church in Alabama, her son, Taylor, decided churches were no longer safe, so he refused to go. A few months later Taylor watched on television along with the rest of the nation as a little boy raised his hand in a salute to the casket of his father, the slain president. Taylor turned to his mama. “I don't know if my daddy is dead or alive,” he said. “I'm going to leave to find him.”

At age fourteen Taylor was so tall, so much like his father. For a fleeting moment it seemed to Mae Lee that it was Jeff Barnes who was sitting in the chair across from her. The tone in her son's voice cut her heart to the quick. Mae Lee felt the warm tears flood her eyelids. She held her breath, her eyes wide, didn't dare blink. When the hurting within her eased, she drew a long breath, pushed her chair away from the table, and left the kitchen.

She wanted to scream out at her son, at his father, wherever he was. But she didn't. She waited until the withheld sobs no longer shook her body and then she walked back into the kitchen.

Mae Lee put her hand on her son's shoulder. “I don't know when you are planning to leave, Taylor, but let me know in time so I'll have your clothes ready and something cooked for you to take with you.” Her son burst into tears and left the room.

The next day after school, Taylor hastily pushed a little
brown paper bag in front of his mama and quickly left the room. Mae Lee opened the bag. Inside was a pretty white lace handkerchief. She smiled; the very first gift that she had received from Taylor when he was a little boy had also been a white lace-trimmed hankie. She thought of the warm early spring day when Taylor had presented it to her. She had been seated on the front porch with old man Joel Hanken. It had been a weekday, but Joel Hanken was all dressed up in his Sunday suit and necktie.

“You must have been to a funeral,” she'd said, eyeing his attire.

“Nope, nobody dead that I know of.”

“How come you so dressed up?”

“Well, sometimes there are other occasions that call for fixing up a bit.”

Mae Lee watched his eyes, his sly grin. The sunlight on his scattered gold teeth made them glow like train lights in a dark tunnel. She could see the wheels turn in his mind. Joel Hanken was trying to be a sport. He had courting on his mind. That's exactly what he had on his mind, all right.

Oh, Lordy, Lordy, she thought to herself. I thought all the old widowers in Rising Ridge had given up on me. Despite her efforts to hide her loneliness, it must have shown. She was lonely, but she sure hated for everyone to know it. It was the spring weather, she decided, that had prompted Joel Hanken. Springtime seemed to be a troubling time for a wifeless man, especially if he was a farmer. She wasn't sure if the courting idea was for love, or only in hopes of finding a woman to cook and help with the upcoming crop planting and hoeing.
For the older ones, the coming of spring was just like putting high-test gas into an old car. It sure sparked them up.

Joel Hanken was still on the front porch, with Mae Lee shifting uncomfortably under his gaze, when her son, little Taylor, had raced into the yard from school. He glanced only briefly at his mama and rushed to the edge of the yard to spit. He drew a long breath of relief.

“I held it, Mama,” he said. “I held it all the way from school. It was too awful to swallow, so I held it. I didn't spit around nobody, because you said a spitting boy and a crowing hen will always come to a bad end.”

Mae Lee's little son had turned to meet his sisters. He made no effort to go inside to change his clothes as he usually did after school.

“Mind your manners,” his mama coaxed gently. “We have a visitor.”

The little boy eyed the visitor suspiciously, then climbed the steps and reluctantly offered his little hand. “We got work to do,” he called out as his sisters approached, eager to prove that with him around, no other male was needed. Mae Lee watched her children tug and strain at an old tin washtub filled with rainwater. The tub wouldn't budge. She'd called out to them to stop before they strained their body muscles. “It's five of us, Mama,” Taylor called back, “but it's only one of you.”

Later that afternoon her son edged up to his mama holding something behind his back. In a small brown paper poke was the lace hankie.

“I bought it for you, Mama,” he grinned. “Sold my own eggs to Mr. Baker. He said if a person ever saw a sad woman all
they had to do was buy them something—and the sadness would go away, lickety-split.”

“I'm surprised you didn't bring Fred Baker's thumb home. Every time he sells a pound of something he sells a part of his thumb. I'll bet he's sold that thumb a hundred times,” she said. Then she laughed and hugged him.

Years later, Taylor told Mae Lee that when he saw Joel Hanken on the front porch that day, he'd wanted to send him away and find her somebody else who would be good enough for her.

Now Mae Lee tucked the new hankie her son gave her into the outside compartment of her pocketbook. Taylor would be certain to see it there and know it was her Sunday best. Taylor was special, always had been. She couldn't help wondering if her loneliness was showing again.

The civil rights revolution, spreading across the South, opened the way for Mae Lee Barnes's dream of educating her children beyond high school, in college. Even the small local colleges in South and North Carolina were opened up to blacks, and scholarships were made available to schools that before now had been just for whites. Yet her children chose, over the scholarships offered from across the country, to attend all-black colleges. Mae Lee felt deeply glad that they were proud of who they were, and secure enough to recognize that their educators had something of value to give as well. She also understood that her girls wanted to attend colleges where they could look forward to not just getting an education, but having some sort of social life as well.

Dallace was Mae Lee's only child to leave South Carolina to
go to college. Dallace went off to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Like all her sisters after her, she received a fine scholarship.

The English teacher at the high school encouraged some of the graduating girls to go to Fisk if they wanted to marry a doctor. “My daughter Dallace didn't marry a doctor, she became a doctor,” Mae Lee would later brag, after Dallace earned a Ph.D. in psychology.

It seemed her daughters no sooner finished college than three of them set their sights on New York. Mae Lee's cousin Warren had been responsible for that. He had started telling them about the big money-paying jobs in New York that he'd heard about while working on the train. Mae Lee was uneasy about her girls leaving home, much less the South, to work up in the North. She wished Warren hadn't put the thought into their minds, and she told him so. “I don't like the idea of young girls working in big cities like that. They might end up staying and it's too far away from home,” she said worriedly. “They've earned decent money working here in the South so far. Amberlee's always been able to always find a summer job, and after she finishes college this year, she'll find a steady job. They say there's lots of jobs in North Carolina. Now, you take Annie Ruth and the good job she's landed at A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina.”

In the end, her daughters won. Mae Lee knew Warren's widowed sister-in-law, Elsie Rae, who lived in New York, would take her girls under her wing. She could rest easy having them stay with her. Elsie Rae had been born and raised in a Christian home in Rising Ridge.

Having her daughters leave made it even harder for Mae Lee to handle her son, Taylor's, absence. It had been painful when her son was drafted for the Vietnam War, but somehow she knew he would have enlisted anyway. It was once again a troubling time for her.

But there was the farm to keep her busy. She spent long days working along with Hooker and Maycie in the fields, especially during the spring planting season.

It had been against Mae Lee's better judgment to plant so much cotton that year, but Hooker had argued that it was their most reliable cash crop. It was all well and good for him to say that. With the new two-row planter, all he had to do was drive the tractor and plant, plant. The trouble was, they had no mechanical weeder and cotton picker. They still had to handpick the cotton.

One day in late May 1971 there was an envelope in the mail without a return address written on it and with a Chicago postmark. She opened it, and unfolded a sheet of white paper on which was pasted a clipping from a newspaper:

JEFFERSON D. BARNES, 49, Elmhurst, May 4. Arrangements by Kilgore Funeral Home, Elmhurst.

That was all; there was no other information given, no signature on the paper. May 4 was three weeks ago. Perhaps it was one of her ex-husband's brothers who had sent it. Perhaps it was his wife; the chances were that he had married again. She had wondered sometimes whether Jeff had ever even known that he had been divorced; they had been unable to locate
him to serve the papers on him, and the other members of his family had been long gone from Rising Ridge. Probably his wife—current wife? had there been more than one after her? who could say?—had come across her name somewhere in his belongings, and had been kind and decent enough to think that she might want to know. But if so, she obviously hadn't wanted to hear from her, or even for her to know who she was.

Curiously, she felt little emotion, and no grief. He had disappeared from her life and her consciousness so completely that it was as if she were reading about the death of a stranger or, at most, of a distant relative that she had hardly known. She would have to tell Taylor and the girls, of course. She would do that the next time they wrote or called. That was all there was to it.

At least there were the letters from her children—weekly notes from her daughters, regular batches from Taylor in Vietnam. She started opening the letters more carefully after she mistakenly tore into a ten dollar bill. Just something to add to your bank account, her children usually wrote about the enclosed money. Mae Lee was still a little afraid of putting all her money in the bank, though. So, just as she'd done with the money in the strongbox, she hid the children's money in her house. She didn't keep the money in the strongbox itself anymore, however; if anyone were to come in and start to look for money under the floorboards or something, that would be too obvious. Instead, she put the money in an old bag and kept it hidden around the house.