When her mother first came to Lincoln from Missouri, she worked in a boardinghouse run by a Mrs. Jones, Hattie said. It was on the site of the high school — which, in the twenties, when I went there, was an old building with deep grooves in the stairs worn by generations of adolescent feet. Mrs. Jones’s establishment must have ceased to exist a very long time ago. If you have ever eaten in a boardinghouse you know every last one of them. The big oak dining-room table with all the leaves in it, and barely enough room for the thin young colored woman to squeeze between the chair backs and the sideboard. No sooner were the dishes from the midday meal washed and put back on the table and the pots and pans drying upside down in a pyramid on the kitchen range than it was time to start peeling potatoes for supper. Jesus loved her and that got her back on her feet when she was too tired to move. And before long, Alfred Dyer was waiting at the kitchen door to take her to prayer meeting.
“In looking back over the years,” Hattie said to the interviewer, “I am proud of my father and mother, who were highly regarded by all who knew them, white as well as black. Their deep religious faith has been my help and strength throughout my life.”
During one of those times when my father was searching for a housekeeper and Mrs. Dyer was in our kitchen, she stopped me as we got up from the table at the end of dinner and asked if I’d like to go to church with her to hear a choir from the South. It was a very cold night and there was a white full moon, and walking along beside Mrs. Dyer I saw the shadows of the bare branches laid out on the snow. Our footsteps made a squeaking sound and it hurt to breathe. The church was way downtown on the other side of the courthouse square. As we made our way indoors I saw that it was crammed with people, and overheated, and I was conscious of the fact that I was the only white person there. Nobody made anything of it. The men and women in the choir were of all ages, and dressed in white. For the first time in my life I heard “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “Pharaoh’s Army Got Drownded,” and “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” and “Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho.” Singing “Don’t let nobody turn you round,” the choir yanked one another around and stamped their feet (in church!). I looked at Mrs. Dyer out of the corner of my eye. She was smiling. “Not my brother, not my sister, but it’s me, O Lord!” the white-robed singers shouted. The people around me sat listening politely with their hands folded in their laps, and I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that they too were hearing these spirituals for the first time.
I COULD have asked my aunt about Hattie and she would have told me all that a white person would be likely to know, but I didn’t. More years passed. I found that I had a nagging curiosity about Hattie — about what her life had been like. Finally it occurred to me that my Cousin Tom Perry, who lives in Lincoln, might be able to learn about her. He wrote back that I had waited too long. Among white people there was nobody left who knew her, and he couldn’t get much information from the black people he talked to. He did find out that when she moved back to Lincoln, she lived in the little house on Elm Street. Tom was in high school with her son, who was an athlete, a track star. He became an undertaker and died in middle age, of cancer of the throat. Hattie spent the last years of her life in Springfield with one of her daughters. Her son was born after Hattie came back to Lincoln to live, and his last name was Brummel, so whatever the trouble with her husband was, they stayed together.
In his letter my cousin said that at the time of his death Alfred Dyer owned his own house and the houses on either side of it. This surprised me. He did not look like a property owner. All three houses were torn down recently, Tom said, and the site had not been built on.
I HAVE not been inside our house on Ninth Street since I was twelve years old. It was built in the eighteen-eighties, possibly even earlier. The last time I drove past it, five years ago, I saw that the present owners had put shutters on the front windows. Nothing looks right to me that is not the way I remember it, but it is the work of a moment, of less time than that, to do away with the shutters and bring back into existence the lavender-blue clematis on the side porch and the trellis that supported it, the big tree in the side yard that was killed by the elm blight, the house next door that burned down one night twenty-five or thirty years ago.
Though I know better, I half believe that if the front door to our house were opened to me I would find the umbrella stand by the window in the front hall and the living-room carpet would be moss green. Sometimes I put myself to sleep by going from room to room of that house, taking note of my father’s upright piano with the little hand-wound Victrola on it, Guido Rent’s Aurora over the living-room mantelpiece, the Victorian sofas and chairs. I make my way up the front stairs by the light of the gas night-light in the upstairs hall, and count the four bedroom doors. Or I go through the dining room into the pantry, where, as the door swings shut behind me and before I can push open the door to the brightly lit kitchen, I experience once more the full terror of the dark. Beyond the kitchen is the laundry, where the big iron cookstove is. Opening off this room are two smaller rooms, hardly bigger than closets. One contains jars of preserved fruit and vegetables and a grocery carton full of letters to my mother from my father. The other room is dark and has a musty odor. The dog sleeps here, on a square of old dirty carpet, and there is a toilet of an antiquated kind. Hattie is expected to use this toilet and not the one in the upstairs bathroom that we use. You could argue, I suppose, that some such arrangement would have been found in other old houses in Lincoln, and because it was usual may not have given offense — a proposition I do not find very convincing.
My mother was thirty-seven when she died. When I try to recall what she was like, I remember what a child would remember. How she bent over the bed and kissed me good night and drew the covers around my chin. How she made me hold still while she cut my bangs. If I try to see her as one adult looking at another, I realize how much there is that I don’t know. One day I heard her exclaim into the telephone “It won’t do!” and wondering what wouldn’t do I listened. After a minute or two it became clear that a colored family was on the point of buying a house on the other side of the street from ours, and that my mother was talking to somebody at the bank. This in itself was odd. If my father had been home, she would have got him to do it. She must have believed that the matter wouldn’t wait until he got home. “It won’t do!” she kept repeating into the telephone. “It just won’t do.” A few weeks later, when a moving van drew up before the house in question, it was to unload the furniture of a white family.
One of the things I didn’t understand when I was a child was the fact that grown people — not my father and mother but people who came to our house or that they stopped to talk to on the street — seemed to think they were excused from taking the feelings of colored people into consideration. When they said something derogatory about Negroes, they didn’t bother to lower their voices even though fully aware that there was a colored person within hearing distance. Quite apart from what Hattie may have overheard in Lincoln, what she saw and lived through in Chicago, including race riots, might easily have been enough to make her fear and hate all white men without exception. And so in that case it was the color of my skin — the color of my skin and the physical contact — that accounted for what happened in my Aunt Annette’s kitchen. Having arrived at this conclusion I found that I didn’t entirely believe it, because at the time I had the feeling that Hattie’s anger was not a generalized anger; it had something to do with who I was. Did somebody in our family do something unforgivable to her? My Grandmother Blinn? Not likely. My father always leaned over backward to be fair and just toward anybody who worked for him. Though I cannot bring back the words, I can hear, in a kind of replay, the sound of my mother and Hattie talking. We are in the throes of spring housecleaning. Her black hair bound up in a dish towel, my mother stands in the double doorway between the front hall and the living room and directs Hattie’s attention to a corner of the ceiling where a spider has taken refuge. With a dust mop
on the end of a very long pole, Hattie dislodges it. There is no sullenness in Hattie’s voice and no strain in my mother’s. They are simply easy with one another.
In the end I decided that I must be barking up the wrong tree, and that what happened in my aunt’s kitchen was simply the collision of two experiences. And I stopped thinking about it until I had a second letter from my cousin. “I don’t understand it,” he wrote. “The colored people in Lincoln have always been very open. If you asked one of them a question you got the answer. This is different. They don’t seem to want to talk about Hattie Dyer.” In a P.S. he added that the elderly black man who took care of his yard was reading one of my books. Miss Lucy Jane Purrington, whose yard he also looked after, had lent it to him. And in a flash I realized what the unforgivable thing was and who had done it.
FROM time to time I have published fiction that had as a background a small town very much like Lincoln, or even Lincoln itself. The fact that I had not lived there since I was fourteen years old sealed off my memories of it, and made of it a world I knew no longer existed, that seemed always available for storytelling. Once, I began to write a novel without knowing what was going to happen in it. As the details unfolded before my mind, I went on putting them down, trusting that there was a story and that I would eventually find it. The novel began with an evening party in the year 1912. I didn’t bother to make up the house where the party took place because there at hand was our house on Ninth Street and it gave me pleasure to write about it. The two main characters were an overly conscientious young lawyer named Austin King and his wife, Martha, who was pregnant. He had not been able to bring himself to say no to a letter from Mississippi relatives proposing to visit. At the beginning of the novel the relatives have arrived, the party is about to begin, and Martha King is not making things any easier for her husband by lying face down across her bed and refusing to speak to him.
Characters in fiction are seldom made out of whole cloth. A little of this person and something of that one and whatever else the novelist’s imagination suggests is how they come into being. The novelist hopes that by avoiding actual appearances and actual names (which are so much more convincing than the names he invents for them), by making tall people short and red-headed people blond, that sort of thing, the sources of the composite character will not be apparent.
We did in fact have a visit of some duration from my Grandmother Maxwell’s younger sister, who lived in Greenville, Mississippi, and her husband, their two grown sons, married daughter, son-in-law, and grandchild, a little girl of four. Remembering how their Southern sociability transformed our house, I tried to bring into existence a family with the same ability to charm, but whose ambiguous or destructive natures were partly imagined and partly derived from people not even born at the time of this visit. The little girl crossed over and became the daughter of Austin and Martha King. The young woman of the invented family was unmarried, and an early feminist, and without meaning to she whittled away at the marriage of her Northern cousin, whom she had fallen in love with. Though I did my best to change my Mississippi relatives beyond recognition, many years later my father told me that in one instance I had managed to pin the donkey’s tail on the part of the animal where it belonged. But it was wholly by accident. If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.
About fifty pages into the writing of the novel I had a dream that revealed to me the direction the story was trying to take and who the characters were stand-ins for. My father was musical, and could play by ear almost any instrument he picked up, and once had the idea of putting on a musical comedy with local talent. The rehearsals took place in our living room. He sat at the piano and played the vocal score for the singers. My mother sat on the davenport listening and I sat beside her. Things did not go well. The cast was erratic about coming to rehearsals, the tenor flagrantly so. One rainy evening only one member of the cast showed up, the pretty young woman who had the soprano lead. She and my father agreed that there was not much point in going on with it. Two and a half years after my mother’s death she became my stepmother. It is not the sort of thing that is subject to proof, but I nevertheless believe, on the strength of the dream and of the novel I had blindly embarked on, that I caught something out of the air — a whiff of physical attraction between the young woman and my father. And since it was more than I could deal with I managed not to think about it for the next twenty-seven years.
Austin King’s house was clearly our house, to anyone who had ever been in it. In 1912 Hattie was across the street at my Grandmother Blinn’s. But during the visit of my Great-Aunt Ina and her family Hattie was working in our kitchen. However, I never had it in mind to write about her. Rachel, the colored woman who worked in the Kings’ kitchen, was imaginary. Insofar as she was modeled on anyone, it was the West Indian maid of a family in New York I came to know years later. They lived in a big old-fashioned sunless but cheerful apartment off upper Madison Avenue. The front door was never locked, and I used to open it often when I was a solitary young man. I forget whether Renée came from Haiti or Guadeloupe. About her private life I knew nothing whatever and I don’t think the family she worked for did either.
In a run-down part of Lincoln I once saw a railroad caboose that had come to rest on concrete blocks, in a yard littered with cast-off objects that were picturesque but of no value: a funeral basket, a slab of marble, a broken-down glider, etc. Rachel had to live somewhere, and so why not here? Her five children were not all by the same father but they were all equally beautiful to her. She was easygoing, and perfectly able to be a member of the family one minute and a servant the next, but nobody owned her or ever would. None of this corresponds in any way with the little I know about Hattie Dyer’s life and character, but I am afraid that is beside the point. In an earlier, quasi-autobiographical novel, thinking that my father and stepmother would probably not be comfortable reading about themselves, I made the protagonist’s father a racetrack tout living far out on the rim of things, and an elderly friend of the family said disapprovingly, “Why did you make your father like that?” So perhaps there is no way to avoid or forestall identifications by a reader bent on making them.
When I was working on the novel about the Kings, it did not occur to me that Hattie would read it or even know it existed. A few women who had known me as a child would put their names on the waiting list at the Lincoln Public Library, one or two at the most might buy it, is what I thought. Men didn’t read books. The Evening Courier and the Chicago Tribune supplied them with all the reading matter they required.
Early on in the writing of the novel the characters took over, and had so much to say to one another that mostly what I did was record their conversation. The difference between this and hallucination is not all that much. One day a new character appeared, and inserted himself retroactively into the novel. He came on a slow freight train from Indianapolis. “Riding in the same boxcar with him, since noon, were an old man and a fifteen-year-old boy, and neither of them ever wanted to see him again. His eyes were bloodshot, his face and hands were gritty, his hair was matted with cinders. His huge, pink-palmed hands hung down out of the sleeves of a corduroy mackinaw that was too small for him and filthy and torn. He had thrown away his only pair of socks two days before. There was a hole in the sole of his right shoe, his belly was empty, and the police were on the lookout for him in St. Louis and Cincinnati.”
On the night of the party, while Rachel was still at the Kings’, he appeared at her house and frightened all the children, one of whom was his. Rachel was not totally surprised when she walked in on him. She had dreamt about him two nights before. When she realized he was not just after money but meant to settle down with them she took her children and fled. I was frightened of him, too, even as he took life on the page. For a week he stayed blind drunk, and as I described how he lay half undressed on a dirty unmade bed, barely able to lift the bottle to his mouth, I thought Why not? and let
the fire in the stove go out, and the outside door blew open, and in a little while he died of the cold he had stopped feeling.