Revolutionary acts became part of our everyday existence. For example, our father, the same man who lost control of himself with the terrifying velocity of an earthquake, had taken ice water and cigarettes to some chain gang workers on the Island last week when he knew it was too hot for them to be in the sun. The same irrational man, who had just now left his eight-year-old baby son in a crumpled heap, had a heart for justice and compassion in the outside world.
“Gotta get gas,” he mumbled, pulling into Buddy’s Gas Station.
He got out of the car, slammed the door and went inside the store. Timmy and I stared at each other.
“It’s safe to talk now,” I said.
“Jesus, what in the world could’ve happened?” Timmy said.
“Who knows? I hope Henry’s not bleeding all over the floor or he’ll go crazy about that too!”
“Susan, he really is crazy, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, “but he’s more unreliable than crazy.”
He came out with a beer can wrapped in a small brown bag. We watched him take a long drink and heard him ask the man at the pump to check the oil. He opened the door and got in, leaving his legs hanging outside, and drained the beer. He crushed the can with his left hand and tossed it in the trash barrel.
“Two points,” Daddy said.
We exhaled a small sigh of relief. He was calming down.
“Good one, Dad,” Timmy said.
“Your brother, Mr. Timmy and Miss Susan, is enough to drive me right out of my skull.”
“What’d he do?” I asked nonchalantly, as though this were normal behavior, which it was for him.
“Sadie quit,” he answered. “I gave him the belt.”
Sadie was our housekeeper. She was the third one to quit in a month.
“Because of Henry? What happened?” I asked, even though I was sure we’d hear anyway. I knew from experience that the faster he got it out of his system, the faster he’d get over it.
“Your brother, little Mr. Henry the entrepreneur, was selling tickets for all his juvenile delinquent friends to watch poor Miss Sadie use the outhouse through one of the loose boards.”
“Oh, Lord,” I said, “that’s not nice. Plus, it’s disgusting, if you ask me.” No one was asking, but Daddy sucked his teeth in agreement.
“Ah, man! I can’t believe he did that! I liked Sadie! She made the best red rice I ever had!” Timmy said.
“So now, we gotta go the whole way out to Snowden and find us somebody else because your momma says she can’t raise her children without help.” He made another noise with his teeth and tongue that sounded like snncck. “I gotta pay this man. You kids want a cold Coke?” He raised his eyebrows at us, half smiled and peeled a dollar bill out of his wallet, handing it to me. “Hurry up, ’cause time’s wasting.”
“Yes, sir!” I said.
The money for the Cokes was his way of apologizing for beating the daylights out of Henry. I thought that was a pretty pathetic gesture, but I grabbed the money anyway. He was relaxed now, and I scampered out of the car and ran inside. Nothing like a little alcohol to improve his disposition, I thought.
The low light in the store caught me off guard and I bumped into a man coming out.
“Watch yourself, little lady!”
“Sorry!” I said, and hurried through the stench of his beer breath and the smoke-filled room to the bar. “Two Cokes, please,” I nervously asked Buddy, the proprietor of the only bar on the Island.
Every kid on the Island knew that it was Sin City in there, even if you were only a kid buying a Coke. There was card playing and a pool table in there. The Island men went there to escape the world and no woman, save one, that I’d ever heard of, would be caught dead inside of Buddy’s. That one, Alice Simpson, happened to be our next-door neighbor. My momma said she was a disgrace to all women. I thought that was stupid; I mean, maybe she liked to play pool. And besides, why shouldn’t a sinner have a place to go besides hell?
Buddy rattled around inside his cooler and put the two bottles on the counter. While he fished around for the bottle opener, he eyed me up and down. “Getting kinda grown up, ain’t ya? Gone be asking for a Pabst Blue Ribbon pretty soon, isn’t she, fellows?”
The two old goats at the end of the counter started laughing and I felt my face flush.
“Yeah, right, very funny,” I said, not caring what they thought.
Don’t you know these old buzzards started laughing and whistling real low? God, what a bunch of jerks! I grabbed the bottles, mumbled some thanks and ran out of there as fast as I could. Daddy had the car running and waiting by the curb.
“Come on, girl! It’s hot as Hades in here!”
I jumped in the back with Timmy, slammed the door and we took off over the causeway to Mount Pleasant. When we crossed the bridge, Daddy speeded up the car to sixty-five. He liked to drive fast. The marsh air came flooding through the open windows, blowing my long hair into a mass of damp tangles. Some old geezer on the radio was crooning like a sick cat. It was Daddy’s favorite station and I wasn’t about to ask him to lower the volume. In spite of the possibility of instantaneous death, Timmy and I couldn’t resist the temptation of making faces at each other and silently imitating the singer. Daddy cut his eye at us in the rearview mirror and I could tell from his back that he was smiling by the way he shook his head. He let his arm rest on the windowsill and I knew that, for the moment, all was well.
“Y’all children!”
That was all he said until we turned down Rifle Range Road. The mood changed in an instant from the liveliness of spiky marsh, swooping birds and the deep blue of the sparkling inland waterway to the mysterious, dreamy and haunted world of the past. The Spanish moss hung in long torn pieces from the live oaks that covered the road in umbrella shade. Their long sheets looked like ghosts floating across your path when you drove this road after dark. I imagined bedraggled soldiers walking in pairs, coming home from the Revolution or the Civil War, weary and perhaps wounded, searching for home in the burned-out countryside.
I felt the spirits of freed slaves ambling along the roadside with great baskets on their heads filled with Sweetgrass and palmetto fronds for weaving more baskets to harvest rice or to hold vegetables. I saw small loads of just-picked cotton on the back of a buckboard wagon on the way to market, drawn by the slow clip-clop of a broken-down horse or mule.
When I came out here to Snowden, the hair on my arms stood up from goose bumps. Even though my family never owned a slave in all its history in the Lowcountry, my ancestors had probably condoned it. Coming here to old plantation country made me uncomfortable having white skin. In the carefree existence of Island living, I never had to think about what slavery must’ve been, but out here in the country reminders were everywhere.
When I really opened my eyes to the landscape, it wasn’t romantic plantation life before me. It was rows of tiny clapboard houses tucked under live oaks and pines, most of them needing a paint job, some of them whitewashed. Old cars were pulled up in the side yards to rest forever. Rusted bicycles propped themselves against the steps while chickens pecked around. Hound dogs, most of them too old to bark, stood on the porches filled with unmatched upholstered chairs. But the smell of burning refuse mixed with the strong scent of pine and rich black dirt worked like a voodoo charm. It was another world.
I had made this trip with Daddy so many times I could tell how close we were to Harriet Avinger’s house by the smell of the cool air and the sounds of the quiet. For as long as I could remember, Harriet had worked for Aunt Carol and Uncle Louis, Momma’s brother and his wife. I had known her since I was born, I suppose. And she acted as Daddy’s employment agency.
He pulled up in her front yard and turned off the engine. She appeared suddenly on the front porch as though she had expected our arrival.
“Wait in the car,” Daddy said and got out.
Timmy did, but I was in the mood to explore a little.
“You’re gonna get i
n trouble,” he said, when Daddy went inside Harriet’s house.
“Bump you,” I said, closing the door quietly.
Harriet had a garden in her front yard that looked like the cover of a seed catalog. Right next to the bottle tree, in an area probably thirty by sixty feet, perfect rows of lush vegetables were climbing for the sky in the summer sun. Huge melons lay like green bombs in the soft dirt.
The bottles hanging in the tree tinkled against each other in the breeze. I had always thought they were her version of a wind chime until Harriet told me they were for good luck. Some business about keeping the good spirits around and sending the bad ones away. Harriet always had some story to tell me about the things she believed and most of them were seriously weird but fascinating. I loved them all. She was a Gullah woman, and all the Gullah women had stories.
Her dogs looked up from their place under her front steps and then curled back up in their holes to sleep. They had no interest in me because they knew me pretty well.
We’d had and lost a lot of housekeepers over the years, mainly because our house was an insane asylum. If it wasn’t Henry who drove them out with his hijinks, it was Grandma Sophie with her smelliness, or Grandpa Tipa with his bad attitude or Momma with her misery. She was pregnant again and that was putting it mildly. She looked like she had swallowed one of Harriet’s watermelons and she wasn’t due for three months! Daddy thought Momma didn’t need help? Heck, she could hardly stand up!
I opened the gate of the tiny Garden of Eden and wandered between the rows. The black dirt was soft and cool under my bare feet. With soil like this to plant in, no wonder Harriet’s tomatoes were as big as softballs and her melons were green and luscious. You could tell by the way the corn was so tightly attached to the stalk that it was delicious too, ready to shuck and boil. I peeled back a husk and popped out a few kernels with my thumbnail. Sweet! I hoped that this time I’d find the courage to ask for something to take home.
I could see Timmy was all nervous and jerky about me trespassing so I tortured him with a deliberately slow but perfectly timed return. Just as I got back in the car, Harriet and Daddy reappeared on the front porch of her little house, their business completed.
Like most houses in Snowden, the frame of her front door was painted a bright blue to keep out the haints. It always gave me something to think about, coming out here and seeing how Harriet lived. I mean, any fool could see she had no money to speak of, but there was a neatness and tidiness about her whole place. Her yard was raked, her porch was swept, her dogs were fed, her chickens were all fenced in and phlox and black-eyed Susans bloomed on both sides of her front steps. I jumped out of the car again.
“Daddy? Can I say hello?” I called out to them.
“Sure, come on! But we’ve got to hurry. I don’t want you to be wasting Harriet’s time.”
Harriet smiled down at me and held out her arms. Harriet was a tall and thin woman with perfect white teeth. Her hair was plaited in neat, thick braids wrapped around her head. She wore a yellow print shirtwaist dress under her apron. When she hugged me, I smelled flowers.
“Hey now, Miss Susan! Lemme have a look at you!”
She held me back and looked hard in my face, smiling and teasing.
“Now, iffin I find y’all another lady to help y’all’s momma—and that’s a mighty big if—y’all gone let she have she privacy?”
“Harriet, I had nothing to do with it, cross my heart and hope to die! Henry pulled that one without consulting a soul! I promise!”
“Talk to them, will you, Harriet? I’m worn out from telling them how to behave,” Daddy said.
The dogs stirred from their rest. Daddy walked down the steps to scratch one of the dogs behind the ears.
“I know you wasn’t mixed up in this ’eah fool business, your daddy done told me it was that Mr. Henry, but you ain’t always been an angel yourself, have you now?”
“No, that’s true. But, shoot, Harriet, I’m thirteen now and, believe me, when the women you send us walk out on Momma, who do you think winds up having to do laundry and change beds and pull the vacuum cleaner around the house?”
“You?”
“Yeah, me! And Maggie. If you find us somebody good, I’ll make it my personal responsibility to make sure nobody messes with them. Okay?”
“Listen to you! You sure enough are growing up, Miss Susan. Soon you gone be a young lady! Getting so pretty and tall! And them blue eyes! Lawd! Y’all gone break hearts!”
“Oh, gosh, thanks.” We smiled at each other for a moment. “Harriet? Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“How do you get your vegetables to grow so good?”
“I’ll tell you a little secret.” She leaned down to me and whispered in my ear, “I sing to the earth!” When she saw my suspicion, she said it again. “Yes, I do! All us women out ’eah sing to the earth. The earth is mother and mother provides for her children. Ain’t that so?”
“Yes, but…”
“Ain’t no but about it! All you be doing is singing praise to your momma and she provides for y’all. Makes sense, now don’t it?”
“Whatever it is, it sure works. I’ve never seen watermelons like the ones you grow in my whole life!”
“Gone get yourself one for y’all to have for supper. Tell your momma I’ll be finding her somebody real quick, all right? Maybe my cousin Livvie might be crazy enough to take the job. I don’t know. Have to see.”
“All right! Thanks! Some corn too?”
“Sure enough. Take some corn and a few tomatoes for your salad.”
I heard her chuckling at my boldness. She came down the steps and stood next to my daddy. “That chile’s got a quick mind,” I heard her say as I put the vegetables and fruit on the floor of the backseat.
“And a hard head like a mule,” he answered.
We drove home, stopping at the Piggly Wiggly for a loaf of bread and a head of lettuce. Next, he stopped at Simmon’s Seafood on the causeway and bought five pounds of flounder with some hushpuppy mix.
“Reckon you and Maggie can fix hushpuppies and baked potatoes if me and the boys cook the fish? Y’all’s momma likely laid up in the bed for the night.”
“Sure, Daddy. No problem. And we have corn, tomatoes and watermelon!”
He just shook his head.
We were all deep in thought driving over the causeway. The gong started ringing, signaling that the bridge was going to open. We were right at the top of the bridge and could’ve made it across, but Daddy decided not to race the swing arm barrier like he usually did. We all got out of the car and leaned over the railing to watch the big fishing boat come down the waterway from the Isle of Palms, headed toward Charleston harbor. A man and woman waved at us from the deck and we waved back and I thought how nice it would be to float across the water, smiling to people as I passed them. I’d wear a white chiffon scarf around my neck and huge sunglasses.
Daddy was in no hurry to get home, and who could blame him? He couldn’t help it if he had a trigger temper, I just wished he wouldn’t pull the trigger so often. He was so nice to Harriet and all the women she sent us. It made me think about the way most white folks treated colored people.
“Daddy? Can I ask you something?”
“Sure, princess. What’s on your mind?”
“How come Sadie didn’t use the bathroom in the house?”
“Because your grandfather didn’t want her to,” he said.
“Because she’s colored?” I asked.
“Yep,” he answered.
“That stinks,” Timmy said.
“Sure does,” he said. “It’s stupid. I could rebuild the outhouse and make it brand-new, but I’m not doing it.”
“Why not?” I said.
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Daddy said.
“You mean, that you won’t fix the outhouse because it shouldn’t be there anyway?” I said.
“You got it,” he said. “It’s one of many things I can??
?t find a way to discuss with your grandfather. There’s too much wrong with this world.”
He was thinking about work, I guessed. The breeze was so delicious I think we could’ve stood at the railing forever but the boat had gone through and the bridge would be passable in a few minutes. I wanted some more answers before Daddy got out of the mood to talk to me.
“Daddy, why do we live with them?”
He sighed a great sigh, thinking for a minute before he replied. Then, in an uncommon moment of tenderness, he put his arm around my shoulder and the short version of the story came out.
“When I was away in the war, your momma came back home to stay with them. We were just married and didn’t have much money. Back then I was glad she had a place to live that didn’t cost me anything. Then, when I came home I realized how feeble they had become. They needed us to take care of them. Look, some things take time to change. Your grandfather is a good man, you know? I mean, his point of view on segregation is ridiculous, but other than that he’s a pretty good guy.”
“I guess so, but he’s so grumpy these days,” I said.
“Yes, well, your grandma isn’t doing well and I suppose that worries him a lot. And you children kick up such a ruckus all the time.”
“Well, maybe the next one can use the bathroom inside,” I said, “if you talk to him about it.”
“If the outhouse fell down, she’d have to,” Timmy said.
Daddy and I looked at each other, thinking the same thing, and we all started laughing.
“Don’t worry, Daddy,” I said, “the notorious Hamilton kids can handle the job!”
All the way home Timmy and I made crashing demolition noises and Daddy sang along with the radio. Even though I was scared to death of him half of the time, the other half of the time I adored him, at least I did on that night. There was nothing like a conspiracy to build loyalty.
I had a viable plan in place by Monday. Everyone had a role except Maggie, who said she wouldn’t go near the outhouse even if it was full of money. Finally, after I called her a traitor and a priss-ass coward, she reluctantly agreed to be lookout and stood guard at the back door. I had the sledgehammer, Timmy had the crowbar and Henry had a shovel. We had to wait until Tipa went to the grocery store and old Sophie was snoring. Momma was resting. I didn’t think she cared if the whole house came down, never mind the outhouse. She didn’t care about anything in those days, including us. It was so hot and she was so pregnant, she was half out of her mind.