NOW THEY’VE ALL SHOT the trees, except Mama who says, “Oh, I don’t want to do that,” and dismisses the whole issue. It seems to Stella that Mama has no use for guns.
But during the parade, Stella had heard her murmur, “Blessed guns, blessed boys.”
Stella had gotten bored; there were so many soldiers, all dressed in brown; one block after another, then a few tanks, more blocks of soldiers, all their legs waving forward together. “Stand up straight, children,” Mama had murmured in a voice that sounded like crying. And Stella and her brothers had lifted and squared their shoulders. Just like a flatiron, Mama’s hand had pressed right up Stella’s spine to straighten it.
Now while the pistol bullets wander forever in the wilderness of woods, Stella and her family must go back to the small old Helicon house, two rooms and a dogtrot between. Shooting trees in the woods was just to pass the time till Old Aunt Charlotte, the spirit of the house, awakens.
Shooting, down in the woods, Charlotte thinks. Yes, that was the real world Charlotte was waking to, not heaven, just like—was it almost a hundred years ago, the musket fire—when Charlotte heard it first? The shooting?
Stella raises her arms in a wide V and shakes her hands at the ends of her arms and yells, “Whooooo!” just like a ghost as she runs ahead of all of them, out of the woods.
Five-year-old Stella believes the house reappearing through the trunks of the trees is a ghost, something like a hallucination, something at least more real in her father’s memory than that—a feeble shack—standing now among the little sharp-edged stones, existing really not just in his but also in their memories. When she looks at these people, the Negroes of rural south Alabama, this world, she sees it through the lens of memory, not sharp and clear, but with a blurry uncertainty, as though she has been made to wear her daddy’s spectacles. Stella stops running;she wishes to loiter at the edge of the clearing and to think.
Charlotte raises herself on her elbows on her bed and hunches toward the headboard to be sitting up when Doctor comes in.
Stella has no doubt Old Aunt Charlotte, dark as wet coffee grounds in the percolator basket, is awake now because those four explosions in the woods were a mighty alarm clock not to be denied, though Daddy seems to think it is simply time for an old person’s nap to end, and time is something he knows all about. He keeps it in his pocket. He winds it up on the mantel.
Slowly Stella crosses the raked yard to check the dreamy structure—weak, it leans—a dwelling envisioned but possibly insubstantial. The house should stand up straight, square its shoulders. She reaches out and touches the corner of the two-room dwelling while she waits for her family to catch up.
Stella believes she could shake this house right off the stacks of rocks that hold it up at each corner. Perhaps she could pick up the little house, with them inside, and carry it to Birmingham.
But Stella does not want to stop at Birmingham where, they say, in a few months, after she starts first grade, Daddy will die; she thinks I will go to Chicago. Already she plays the cello, and in Chicago her mother learned to play the violin and the piano. Stella could ride her pint-size cello, like a horsey, all the way to Chicago. Back to Chicago, she thinks, though she has never been there. But her bones know, if Chicago was the origin of her mother’s music, then Chicago is hers as well. She can ride almost straight north—Huntsville, Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis: Chicago.
At home, in Birmingham, if the piano part is ever pitched too high to sing, then down, down, down, Mama skillfully makes the piano go as low as she likes but it is always the same tune. Transposition, her mother says when her two sons and her daughter stand around the piano in the living room, and she smiles because she does it so easily. Her fingers touch the black keys as readily as the white ones, but Stella plays the piano only in the key of C and Stella uses only the level white notes.
Touching the corner of the old house, Stella’s fingertips learn that this house is surely not made of wood but cloth, soft as worn denim with a nap. First you shoot a tree, Stella decides, then the sawing across the fibers and the piercing by nails don’t hurt. It’s Time that transforms boards into cloth. When Daddy approaches the tall mantel clock, he holds a brass key: one end of the long key is crenellated like a bit of castle wall, the other end is two stiff lobes, wings from a brass butterfly. Daddy’s clock contains time, but Mama’s music always floats free. Wisps of her mother’s music, like clouds, often float through Stella’s mind and the air around her.
One glass window, swung open like a gate by hinges on its side, exposes a square hole leading to the inside of the Helicon house. No window screen bars the entrance to flying insects or the meandering of air. In the backyard in Birmingham, Stella has a playhouse with just such a window attached only to its frame by hinges on one side. Inside the playhouse, Stella and Nancy, her beautiful best friend, pretend that dirt is flour and mix their mud pies. Stella wonders if she has remembered to hook the eye to lock the window to secure the playhouse. Do people eat mud pies here in Helicon? Once, when Nancy wasn’t looking, Stella tasted a crumb of Birmingham mud.
Now her brothers and parents have caught up with her, and the little Silver family clomps into the shanty. A faint ambiance of pride moves along with them, above their noisy feet, because her father’s people had been small land-owners, not tenants, after the war (which still means, in 1948, to many southern people the Civil War, not the recent one of Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley).
Doctor and Mrs., two boys and the little girl, Stella, hear the voice born into slavery quavering like the rattle of oak leaves refusing to let go even in winter, the voice rattling inchoate till Old Aunt Charlotte’s eyes focus on Dr. Silver-come-home, and Charlotte forces the throe of nature into words: “These hands, these were the ones, these were the first to touch him when he came into this world.”
Stella sees the hands are two-toned, like the latest cars, the palms held up, as though a young woman, not an ancient, were presenting a ghost baby, as though in her upturned palms the young woman could feel the weight of him who would become Doctor and Daddy.
Those pale palms (Stella imagines) have caught the light streaming through the little window she had noticed while she stood outside stroking the corner of the house, its colorless wood transmogrified into colorless denim. Without benefit or hindrance of wire screen or venetian blind and definitely not double-hung window frames, the open square in the wall admits light, and the light replaces the ghost baby in the palms of the old slave’s hands.
“This your wife? Lord, so pretty and stout. These children! Lord, let me touch these babies.”
Say your names. Having already instructed the children while they traveled south inside the car like a blue egg, her mother doesn’t need to repeat instructions now. Though youngest, Stella steps forward. Curious, she wants to examine Old Aunt Charlotte more closely. This woman could be the one who will die, not Daddy.
“I’m Stella. Did we wake you up with the shooting?”
From the small carved wooden woman comes a cackle that is almost strangling; a bit of drool wets the lower lip, which is not wood after all but moving flesh. “Lord, honey, can’t no shooting wake up your old great-great-great (How great Thou art!) grannie.” Old Aunt Charlotte raises her eyes to their father. “Would I got any rest these years if shooting wake me up?”
“Are you dead then?” Ruben asks.
The eyes of Old Aunt—or is it Grannie?—widen. “I don’t think so. Lord, are we all dead, Doctor?”
“I don’t believe you’ll ever die,” Queen Victoria speaks up. Everybody grown-up snickers, even Christopher Columbus over in the corner, looking down. Even Daddy, who will die (so he said privately), and soon (it’s a secret), but his laugh sounds wounded.
While she laughs, Charlotte scans the ceiling to check for large dusty wings, but she sees nothing waiting for her that resembles the Angel of Death. Because she won’t ever die, Charlotte’s glee is greatest of all, and the joke is on all of them.
“I been tried,” Charlotte says.
She sees a moth up there above her bed, but its wings are caught in a cobweb.
“Tried many a time.”
Then her father reaches out his hand to the woman on the bed whose body doesn’t even reach halfway to the footboard. When the two-toned hand and the white hand meet, she snatches his to her mouth, quick as a dog taking a bone. She kisses the back of Daddy’s hand and murmurs, “Best baby in the world. Best baby, white or black.”
Chris’s neck ratchets his chin another notch closer to his chest and Victoria’s straight-ahead stare hardens into a stone beam.
The old eyelids slide down like a window shade, then raise up. “Let me touch them—the next gen-er-a-ti-on.” The doctor’s children are nudged closer by both their parents into the reality of family-but-not-family that Dr. Silver not only thinks to be right but holds as being sacred.
The hands of Who-Was-Born-into-Slavery rest on Stella’s head.
“Blessed girl!” Old Aunt Charlotte squeaks in high-pitched surprise. Both her hands spring away from Stella’s head as though the child’s head has burned her old fingers.
Those words shock Stella, zing from her ears down the neck bones, through her body to her smallest toe bone. Blessed, blessed. Stella knows that she has been waiting to hear those words. What did it matter that they were spoken in the voice of a mouse? She feels like Samuel in the Bible, as though she should say, “Here am I; send me.” But she steps back and gives her bedside place to her brothers.
No words at all are uttered over the boys, when the brown fingers slowly muss their hair. The boys have been neglected, and she, the girl, has been selected.
Blessed girl! and the world is illumined as never before, as though sheet lightning has shimmered the dead air. In exchange for her special blessing, her scalp still tingling, though she is ignored in the little sepia room crowded with family and nonfamily, Stella intones aloud in her deepest voice: “Live forever, live forever!”
Though the whole room vibrates with laughter, Charlotte’s laughter the highest of all, a descant, Stella knows that she and the woman sitting up in bed have exchanged gifts better than birthday presents. And she knows Charlotte knows, too.
Finally Charlotte asks feebly, “Did you fire the pistol, Mrs. Doctor?”
Stella watches her mother shaking her head from side to side.
“I didn’t think so,” Charlotte says.
Mrs. Doctor would never shoot the pistol, and the world was the same as always. Charlotte closes her eyes, exhausted by her foray back into the realm of the living who could never be real. Except for Doctor. Oh, he was real from the moment he came out of the woman place, covered with white cheese.
Charlotte asks politely, “How Miss Krit and Miss Pratt?” While Doctor tells her his sisters in Birmingham are fine, Charlotte wonders, And where did Mrs. Doctor come from? She looks like a gypsy. Dark, but not colored-folks dark. Swarthy—that is the word Charlotte wants. It comes drifting up through the decades in her mind, comes to her from fifty, no sixty, maybe seventy years ago. Swarthy-complected. But all these children, fair as Doctor.
“Fairest Lord Jeeee-sus.”Once Charlotte had stood outside the Methodist church whose Sunday school and service were faithfully attended by the Silver family, and Charlotte heard the church organ swell up like the blooming of a gigantic flower, and that was what the white folks sang. “Fair are the mead-ows, Fair-er still the woodlands…. Je-susis fair-er, Je-sus is pur-er.”
Fair-er? young Charlotte had wondered, fair-er than the li-ly? And Charlotte had pictured not a lily, or Jesus, but a giant magnolia blossom, purest of whites with its overpowering fragrance, growing up from the boards of the country church, swelling bigger and bigger like organ music in their midst, suffocating their hearts.
Nostrils flare, lips clamp shut, the old woman sucks in a tremendous breath as though she would take in all the air of the room for herself. Stella hears a hound, out on the breezeway, thump its tail against the boards as though now it is satisfied. Magnolia perfumes the air.
In the distance the crack of a gun splits through the trees, the sound reverberating from the low hills again and again till Stella almost wishes it would not die but last forever in its loneliness.
“Rifle,” her father says.
Dreaming now, Charlotte sees a whole battalion of ghost soldiers step out of the trunks of trees. The boys in gray have been hiding there, and now, transparent, they march forever through the woods; facing them, other soldiers emerge from trees on other hillsides, march to close, to aim, and finally, always, to fire at one another.
Mama is humming a lullaby for Charlotte, as though they were all at home in Birmingham. All throat, she is singing a song that breaks Stella’s heart, that always breaks Stella’s heart in the same place. Just Mama’s voice in a language that sounds like Stella’s cello—Yiddish, which only Mama knows. Aye, yi, yi, yi, yih…Ah, yi, yi, yi, yih…Mama’s song becomes a violin whispering sorrow, without a syllable from any language.
ON THE WAY HOME, the blue car with the Silver family inside—a car not so much like an egg as like a nest equipped with seats—runs into bad weather. Wind and rain lash the car, and Stella’s mother sings “La Cucaracha” and “Frère Jacques” to keep their spirits up, but Stella wishes they were home sitting on the worn red rug singing while Mama played the piano—or even just played her own music—Chopin and Mozart. Instead, lightning jitters before their wide eyes, and the terrifying wind bends the trees beside the road. Like a long finger, the cyclone reaches down to tip the car and make it roll over and over, down the bank, till all those inside are broken and blood is everywhere before the car comes to rest.
After the storm passes and the highway patrolman frantically circling the crushed car calls out, “Anybody alive?” only Stella shrieks, “I am! I am!”
In the hospital, all of Stella’s desire is to go back to her own time of shooting trees.
Daddy’s arm is around her. One, two, three, four—she hears the shots they fired, all except Mama, in the woods at Helicon. And the past is real again.
One
Unleashing the Dogs, May 1963
Stella
FROM MANY PLACES IN THE VALLEY THAT CRADLED BIRMINGHAM, you could lift up your eyes, in 1963, to see the gigantic cast-iron statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge, atop his stone pedestal. Silhouetted against the pale blue skyline, atop Red Mountain, Vulcan held up a torch in one outstretched, soaring arm. In other mountain ridges surrounding the city, the ore lay hidden, but the city had honored this outcropping of iron ore named Red Mountain, as a reminder of the source of its prosperity (such as it was—most of the wealth of the steel industry was exported to magnates living in the great cities of the Northeast), by raising Vulcan high above the populace, south of the city.
Fanciful and well-educated children liked to pretend that Vulcan, who looked north, had a romance with the Statue of Liberty, also made of metal. But she was the largest such statue in the world, and he was second to her, and that violated the children’s sense of romance, for they understood hierarchy in romance to be as natural as hierarchy among whites and blacks.
Looking down from Vulcan—his pedestal housed stairs, and around the top of the tower ran an observation platform—you could see the entire city of Birmingham filling the valley between the last ridges of the Appalachian mountain chain as it stretched from high in the northeast to southwest.
In early May 1963, Stella’s freckle-faced boyfriend, a scant half inch taller (but therefore presentable as a boyfriend, if she wore flats), had persuaded her to drive from their college, across the city, avoiding the areas where Negroes were congregating for demonstrations, to Red Mountain. From the observation balcony just below Vulcan’s feet, Stella and Darl hoped for a safe overview.
I believe if outsiders would just stay out…Darl had told her. Let Birmingham solve…Don’t you?
But Stella hadn’t answered. Instead, she’d said, I’d like
to see. I’m afraid to go close.
We can go up on Vulcan, Darl had offered, for he was a man who wanted to accommodate women; a man who loved his mother. Stella had met her.
He’d brought along his bird-watching binoculars. Darl could recognize birds by their songs alone; he could imitate each sound;he kept a life list of all the birds he had ever seen. His actual name was Darling, his mother’s maiden name, and though Stella dared not call him Darling, she longed to do so.
“Do you know the average altitude for the flight of robins?” he asked.
A spurt of laughter flew from between Stella’s lips. She imagined the giggle as though it had heft and was falling rapidly down from the pedestal, down the mountain, into the valley.
“I don’t have the foggiest idea,” she said.
“About thirty inches.”
“What a waste!” she said. “To have the gift of flight and to fly so low.”
She thought Darl might laugh at her sentence—half serious, half comic—but he didn’t.
Stella glanced up the massive, shining body of Vulcan, past his classical and bare heinie, up his lifted arm to his unilluminated torch. At a distance, she had often observed that the nighttime neon “flame” made the torch resemble a Popsicle. Cherry red, if someone had died in an auto accident; lime green, otherwise. Even this close and looking up his skirt, Vulcan’s frontal parts were completely covered by his short blacksmith’s apron.
Though it was May and the police were already into short sleeves, on the open observation balcony, Darl and Stella were lifted above the heat into a layer of air with cool breezes. Stella wished she’d worn a sweater. Darl put his arm around her—just for warmth, she told herself with determined naïveté, but she thrilled at his encircling arm diagonally crossing her back. His fingers fitted the spaces between her curving ribs. They were alone up in the air; they weren’t some trashy couple smooching in public. Yes, this was what she had been wanting. Perhaps for years. Someone’s arm around her, making her safe.