That was the difference. And nobody complained.… But wait, they did complain. And what happened? Little Sister would simply put down her book, the broom, the garbage pail, the dish of eggs she’d fried to a crisp, and simply look at the complainers. Being compelled to come back to face them from whatever fascinating place she’d been would have had an obvious impact on her happiness. Who are you, and what are you to me, anyhow? her look said. It unnerved them. They conceded her craziness and left her alone.
The ground on which Little Sister sat was hard. It eventually became uncomfortable. Little Sister watched Big Sister stand there, and look despairingly at the barrier. Did Big Sister really wish to continue? Yes. Little Sister could see that she did. Little Sister rose, pulling herself up by her stick, and followed the thicket-covered fence to the left far enough to see they would become lost in that direction; she then beat her way across to the right, where the thicket grew over the fallen tree. On that side she thought they could wriggle through a sort of hole in the thicket. Big Sister, meanwhile, had this thought herself, but had rejected it. It had something to do with her weight, her size. Could she wriggle through? Would there be “another side” to come out on?
“Well, I say, let’s try it,” said Little Sister. But she was smaller. Not slender, but rather curvy, and had never had a problem with her weight. She could surely wriggle through, Big Sister thought bitterly. With a resentment so strong she acted quickly, against her own belief—which was that she was too fat to make it—to plunge into the leafy “hole” before her; Little Sister following close behind.
For several minutes they seemed imprisoned in leaves, branches, briers, tall prickly weeds. If there were snakes they were in for it: Trapped, they’d be unable to extricate themselves fast enough to get to a doctor.
Oh, well, Little Sister was thinking: If I die, maybe my lover will notice. Maybe he’ll leave his wife. Maybe he won’t leave his wife—which seemed more likely—but will grieve to have missed so much excitement by my early death. Still, being bitten by a snake in a thicket in the woods, miles from help, was not the way Little Sister wanted to go. Except, and here she stopped short, struck by a thought, as she watched Big Sister, as Pioneer, hack away at the bushes in front of her as if murdering someone. Except that, even though she thought Big Sister might not be exactly grief-stricken over her death, she would like to have her Big Sister with her when she died. This was not a thought she’d had before, and certainly not one she’d had on this trip. But now she let herself sink into the knowledge that yes, as children, Big Sister had always taken care of her, in sickness and in health. She had especially taken care of all of them in sickness: through measles, flu, broken limbs even. She had made of herself a service and a comfort, with a soothing bedside manner that Little Sister had loved. Big Sister would never be impatient or mean, as Little Sister felt she might be, toward a sick person. But, Little Sister thought, continuing to walk behind the broad back of Big Sister, when I am not sick, she resents me. She is murdering me while attacking those bushes, even now.
“There’s light!” said Big Sister, as they emerged once more on the path.
Little Sister hated to think of her lover now because this was obviously an important journey; one that belonged to her and to Big Sister. That was the trouble with “being in love”—the person in love was a bit deranged, not herself. Distracted, mentally harassed. Miserable and locked inside herself. They now approached an ancient oak thick with mistletoe.
“Uncle Loaf’s brother, Tarry, as in Tarry-Along, lived here,” said Big Sister with delighted assurance. “Uncle Loaf’s house is just ahead.”
Little Sister had not known about Uncle Tarry. Why had the brothers lived so close together, she wondered. For protection? Because they owned a small farm during Reconstruction that shrank around them? Because they liked each other’s company so much they enjoyed living practically in each other’s yards?
And, good God, what must it have been like, stuck way back here in the woods, off the main dirt road? Little Sister forgot her lover long enough to feel a familiar terror of the past. She could never return to the past and survive. She knew that. To be a nineteenth-century black woman; to be an eighteenth-century one. How had they stood it? To be a slave. A slave, whose every move was planned by someone else. Not to love where you wanted, who you wanted. With this thought her lover’s face returned. She moved up beside Big Sister who now stood motionless in a small clearing, facing a mass of vines and bushes, and the collapsed gray remains of what had been the kitchen and laundry of Uncle Loaf and Auntie Putt-Putt’s house.
Big Sister’s face was radiant. A condition Little Sister had rarely seen. “I’ve found it!” she said. To this place she had run to find love and dreams and freedom. Here, chewing Uncle Loaf’s tobacco, she had been a person of leisure; as Auntie Putt Putt, always puttering, as everyone said, cooked and cleaned and kept the fields going, or walked to the roadside market five miles away to buy matches, snuff and kerosene.
But they, her parents, had always come after, or sent for her. She had been dragged from behind Uncle Loaf’s chair and off the sagging porch. Uncle Loaf only mildly defending her. While she was there they treated her kindly. He gave her sticks of peppermint candy. She handed him earthen cups full of water or sweet wine. Auntie Putt-Putt told her stories. “Come back,” they’d call, as she was hustled down the path. “Come back to see us.” And yet Auntie Putt-Putt must have guessed that, though enthralled by her horrible tales, it was Uncle Loaf she really came to see.
But on their invitation, Big Sister always snuck away from the chores at home, and returned. Whippings didn’t deter her. Being kept home from school to wash the family’s dirty clothes didn’t either. In later years she would think about the imbalance of his sitting at his ease, being served like a prince, while Auntie Putt-Putt worked so hard. But she could not have complained, or even noticed, at the time. Because sitting at his ease was how she wanted him. His sitting there, daring to do nothing, was what assured her a sense of freedom, of escape.
Now she saw it. They dragged her home where she became … Auntie Putt-Putt.
“Don’t go in,” she called to Little Sister, who was poking around the kitchen ruins.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I thought I might unearth some crockery that you’d recognize.”
Little Sister thought: If I had run off here I would have roamed the woods, hung out in the trees. Nature is notoriously more spacious than front porches. But Big Sister had come to sit and then to hide behind Uncle Loaf’s chair, and he had known each time that they would come for her. Never did he say: Don’t take her.
They were jubilant with success on the way home, looking at the instant photographs that verified their adventure. They pulled into the curved road that led to the cabin in a squall of giggles and gossip, and of bragging. Little Sister was driving and thinking very little of her lover, except to regret his absence from the fun. At the cabin she suggested a swim, and they threw off their clothes and plunged into the lake wearing only their underwear; Little Sister’s a bikini-like set by Lily of France, bronze against her deep brown skin; and Big Sister in a more matronly Maidenform. Black, with a good deal of lace.
Blaze
Little Sister dreamed frequently of her lover’s wife. “I dreamed,” she said to Big Sister, as they lay drying off beside the lake, “that she, that is, her parents and she, had a maid when she was little. A black woman. I dreamed this woman spanked her, but also cared for her, as black maids do. And that that is why she is longing to reconnect with black women. She misses them.”
“Them?”
“Well, the experience of them that could be embodied in one.”
Little Sister remembered her own childhood and one of her best friends, a white girl named Blaze. Remembered the day her parents brought her to play with Blaze as usual, while her mother cleaned house for Blaze’s mother, and Blaze’s father had said: “Miss Blaze isn’t here today. She’ll be back.…” But s
he never came back for Little Sister or for her parents, who understood perfectly what they were being told: No more equality. No more friendship. “Miss” Blaze. And Blaze, like Little Sister, was only twelve years old.
For the life of her Little Sister couldn’t recall anything she and Blaze had done together. They must have waded in the creek behind the house, caught tadpoles, made baskets out of willow rushes. Climbed trees. Played on the swing. She’d blocked the memories, of course. It was all, the experience of being demoted, turned away, blocked by rage. She had thought Blaze had decided it was time her friend called her “Miss” Blaze, but now that seemed unlikely. What child could have been perverse enough to think like that? At twelve or thirteen would it have seemed so important? It might. Because there had been white society, such as it was in those parts, to think of. Her white friends would have been her true peers. They would have been at an age to begin to understand it was possible that their mothers bought the friendliness and compliance of the black women who appeared magically at the back door of their invariably white houses each morning.
There was the rage, a shut door that seemed to be made of iron; but then way behind it, in the fields that encompassed her childhood, under a blue sky that was endless and magnificent, was the friendship, right in there with all the other good things of life. A time of mutual trust and happiness. And an unaware-ness of inequality, only the enjoyment of mutual sweetness. The barely worn dresses Blaze’s mother, and Blaze herself, insisted she take for school, and the firewood, walnuts, handmade rocking chairs her parents gave to Blaze’s family. But Little Sister refused to remember this emotionally. Refused to permit it any validation in her feelings. Because to do so, she felt, would be to become complicit in her own betrayal. And she felt she had been betrayed. No “good ole days” could ever exist for her, once she understood that even her happiest days rested on a foundation of inherited evil. An evil that said, when she least expected it: “Miss” Blaze.…
And yet.
Now she began to understand that the dream was about her own longings, not about her lover’s wife’s. For though she blocked any feelings except rage and contempt for Blaze, of course their friendship, or, rather, relationship, remained unresolved. Unfinished. It was as if they’d been playing an engrossing game of chess and someone unconnected to the game, they had thought, had suddenly snatched away the board. There they sat, startled, unprepared to continue without a structure, on opposite sides of an empty table. Nothing connected them anymore.
She would pretend later that her only girlfriends growing up were black. Blaze, no doubt, had pretended her only friends were white. And they had each gone to bed at night determined to forget and forget and forget. She had never set foot in Blaze’s house again, after her father’s comment. She wondered if anyone had explained to Blaze what had happened. Now she could imagine the cruelty of it, from Blaze’s point of view. To return home, expecting to see the bright face of your friend, someone you loved, and to have that bright face, without explanation, never again appear.
What is not remembered emotionally, Little Sister had thought, is not remembered. But look at her adult friends. They were so often Blaze all over again. And in fact, it was through these white women who were her friends as an adult that she discovered what Blaze was like. She no longer remembered Blaze herself at all, but these women were invariably timid, sweet, docile, confused, morally lazy, loving and generous. They would not stand up for themselves, however, and she would soon feel the rage—because if they could not stand up for themselves, and they at least had the power of whiteness in a white supremacist society—they would certainly never stand up for her, or for real friendship or sisterhood with her. Yet, seeking to complete the “game” with Blaze, she picked these women again and again. Whereas her black women friends were chosen primarily for their challenging spirits, however envious, competitive, flighty, or, yes, confused and morally lazy they might be. The ones she really adored would stand toe to toe with the devil himself and yell Fuck you so loudly he’d cover up his ears.
Her mother, because she needed to work, was not able to escape “Miss” Blaze, and called her that, always, even if there were no house guests or other young white people who’d come to call.
“No,” she would say to Blaze who asked her to call her what she’d always called her, “your daddy says you’re a young woman, and young women are called ‘Miss.’ ” It was a wedge between them. Deliberate and effective.
Was that it? Was that the source of the rage? Not what was attempted against Little Sister, which her mother helped her to escape by not permitting her to return to Blaze’s house, but what was forced on her mother, who could not escape? Little Sister had lived out her childhood at a time and in a place that permitted her to see both a remnant of slavery and a possibility of freedom. But the possibility of liberation was the gift she was unable to give her mother, just as the remnant of slavery, “Miss” Blaze, was the burden her mother refused to pass on to her.
Little Sister was unaware that her thoughts were causing her to glower. Or that she was staring at the surface of the lake as if a monster lurked just beneath. But she heard chuckling, and noticed Big Sister was looking at her.
“Stop frowning, you’ll get wrinkles,” she said. She sat on a blanket she’d brought from the backseat of the car, and sat oiling herself in the warmth of the afternoon sun.
“Changes, changes,” said Little Sister, smiling briefly. “Does anything ever turn out the way you expect it to?”
“I don’t think so,” said Big Sister. “I never even thought it would be warm enough today to swim.”
Little Sister nodded, and returned to her thoughts.
She thought about how hard it was to read the stories she sometimes received at the women’s magazine where she worked because in them white women were talking about their closeness to the black women who had nurtured them. Each time she read such a story, she encountered her rage afresh. Embittered by the possibility, the probability, that their black servants had nurtured, had loved them, as one particularly sincere writer wrote, “unconditionally.” It was a love compelled by forced circumstances and forced familiarity—similar to the forced affection one felt for certain likable white characters on TV. There they were, every Saturday night: Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, the M*A*S*H contingent; and they were silly and witty and bright. And you cared about them because they were there, and you liked television, and they were the best white folks to watch in a predominantly white medium.
Perhaps she was enraged because she had hoped love between maid and miss was impossible. That was obviously what every little girl whose mother was a maid hoped. For how could you compete with the little girl who had everything, could buy everything, including your mother? And had been buying your mother for centuries.
You could hate your mother for loving someone for whom she had to work. Perhaps. But how could you, since she worked for your benefit, because of you? The pain was because you felt she loved against her will. Because “If you can’t be with the one you love,” as the song went, “love the one you’re with.”
Now she felt the source of the tension she experienced, working at the modestly integrated, white women’s magazine. She could not complain about the behavior of the women toward her. They went out of their way, for the most part, to welcome her, to support her, to assure her they recognized her value not only to them, but to the world. And yet, each time she walked into the office she had to seclude herself for several minutes in order to get hold of her breathing. And she was there by choice. But not totally.
The black woman who cleaned the office at night was there, like her mother, because she, doubtless, had children and herself to feed. She knew that that woman too had difficulty breathing, as surely as her own mother must have had. Or maybe not. Because cleaning an empty office was just a job. Working with the white women every day was somehow more, because you were drawn into relationship with them, and sometimes you genuinely cared. So perha
ps the question was: Is not affection or love something pitiful, and degraded, when it is compelled by circumstances beyond your control? And when to choose not to love, or to feel affection, represents a greater danger to the soul than one’s simple inability to do so?
She watched Big Sister floating on her back in the water, the oil she had slathered on earlier making a greasy circle around her. She thought of her lover, of their trips into the country. The way they would pick an especially hot day to go exploring the countryside in, and then swim in every lake, in every park, they came to. How they would lie on the grass, smoking grass. How she liked to sing with him. How he sang. And yet, no matter how happy they were, there was his wife, and the child, and Little Sister’s obligatory worrying about them all. She was beginning to wonder how anyone ever had the strength to have affairs.