The Long Journey Home (6 page)

Then there was my great-uncle Gerard Christopher, a retired Baptist preacher who, when visiting from a nearby town, would stand and pray in our church for an unbearably long time. His tall, imposing frame towered over the Sunday-morning congregation, while church members shuffled in the pews and fanned themselves with paper fans with pictures of Jesus on one side and advertisements for the funeral homes on the other. Mother’s family was conventional and respected, a solid part of the system. They clearly belonged. The Richters were a puzzle, but I was far more interested in them.

The Richter who captured my imagination most was my great-grandfather, who immigrated to this country from Germany. I remember a few family stories about him: that in his old age, after his
first wife died, he married a woman who’d advertised in a newspaper for a husband, and that one of his wives made soap by boiling rats. I don’t know how many wives he had. I do know that he fought in the Mexican-American War, participating in the bloody conquest of Veracruz in 1847; and that he served in the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Along with the question of whether or not he was a Jew, there was one other story that gave him a prominent place in the whole of my life. It was a short human-interest story from a Baltimore newspaper, brittle and yellowed with age. I found the newspaper in the bottom drawer of Mother’s mahogany secretary that stood by the front door in the living room. The article told the story of how my great-grandfather had missed his ship to America because his baggage had failed to arrive at the dock on time. The ship,
Johannes
, left without him. It and its three hundred or more passengers were never heard of again. He then booked passage on the
Copernicus
and landed safely in Baltimore after a stormy crossing of fifty-one days. Three hundred people or more had drowned in a stormy sea, while my great-grandfather had lived to fulfill his dreams in America. I read and reread the story, trying each time to take in the truth of it: I owed my very existence to the late arrival of my great-grandfather’s luggage.

It seemed to me that whole generations of human beings must be alive because of some seemingly insignificant event or circumstance. Nothing, however small, could ever be dismissed as trivial. I thought of the many people who would not have lived had my great-grandfather drowned. I imagined the many other people who would have never felt the effects of his presence on this earth, or my presence, and that of my children. The connections seemed endless.

But was my great-grandfather a Jew? Over the years I’ve found nothing to prove it. But after all the years of focusing on my heritage, a part of me will forever be a Jew, imagined, real, or borrowed.

I slept through everything.

I woke to find Daddy sitting on the edge of my bed, dressed in a dark suit and tie. His hands were clasped between his knees, and his head was bowed. His eyes were red and swollen, and as he began to talk, tears streamed down his face.

Uncle Frank was dead.

A fire had started in his basement and climbed the stairs to the kitchen, just like the stampeding horses he’d always threatened would climb the stairs and trample me to death if I stopped rubbing his bald head.
The horses got Uncle Frank instead of me
, I thought, then tried to take back the thought that came with its flood of guilt. Hadn’t he invited me to spend that very night at his house? Hadn’t I told him no? Now I was alive while Uncle Frank was dead.

The night of the fire Aunt Mary had gone to Albany to pick up a new suit for him. She’d backed her Buick out of their driveway and headed north while the furnace rumbled and the flames even then were getting ready to break free, those thunderous horses, their wide nostrils snorting fire and smoke, hooves blazing.

I was dimly aware of people talking in the living room, wandering up and down the hall, all with hushed voices. It was as if the house had become a library or a church.

“That Frank’s dead is no excuse to not eat a good breakfast,” Mother announced as she set a plate of bacon and eggs and grits in front of Daddy at the breakfast table.

Mother’s command to Daddy jerked me out of my struggle with guilt to focus my attention on him. I could hardly bear what I saw. All of the light had drained from his eyes. Without a word, he picked up his fork and began to eat one mouthful after another, slowly chewing each bite, his movements mechanical, like those of a child with his spirit broken to silent obedience. Looking at him, I knew
with painful certainty that much of Daddy had died along with Uncle Frank.

Daddy would no longer take Uncle Frank to the special hospital where he went when his drinking got especially bad. He would no longer go and bring him home after he had—as Daddy called it—“dried out.” Uncle Frank had been outgoing, boisterous, and profane. Daddy was hesitant, timid, and private. Both men drove a hard bargain in business. Each clung to the other as if an invisible cord joined them from one incomplete heart to the other. Now Daddy was left with half his life source gone. Though it took twenty-two years for him to follow his brother to the grave, those years were lived with chronic depression, the onset and progression of both diabetes and heart disease, the downfall of a once prosperous business, loss of confidence, loss of self. “Only a shell of a man,” he would mutter. “I’m only a shell of a man.”

He slumped in the wingback chair in the living room, fists crammed hard against his eyes.

“Pull yourself together, Wyman,” Mother said to him. “Here come the Maxwells.”

Aunt Bama went to open the door. More people crowded into the house, but no one with whom I felt comfortable. I wandered among them feeling lost and alone. Daddy didn’t get up to greet anyone but sat silently. Aunt Bama pulled a chair over next to him, while he stared at the flowers in the rug.

A young black man named Sam Butler was killed in the fire along with Uncle Frank. Sam had worked for Daddy and Uncle Frank for as long as I could remember. The firemen found him lying dead at Uncle Frank’s bedroom door, garden hose clutched in his hand. The water was still running.

Sam’s mother was an old woman who still worked sometimes for Aunt Mary, and babysat for Bubba, Mercer, and me on those rare occasions when Mother and Daddy went out alone to the picture show. We called her Aunt Rossey, as we’d been taught to do. She had
gnarled fingers; her hands were often twisted around the worn stick with which she stirred white people’s laundry over the cauldron in her dirt yard, scraps of wood and coal burning under her large black wash pot. Her small, unpainted shack was perched on stacks of brick at its four corners. Her walls were papered with pages of old magazines discarded by her white employers, and calendars advertising the black funeral home, with a different picture of the fair-skinned, blue-eyed Jesus for each month of the year.

Aunt Rossey lived in the black neighborhood behind the houses of white people on North Broad Street. The black people’s shanties were separated from the white people’s houses by a narrow dirt alley and a tall fence, concealed on the white people’s side by a wall of thick bamboo that was home to starlings and rattlesnakes.

Sam had died a hero, leaving Aunt Rossey alone to bring in the wood and coal for the fireplace in winter, with nobody to sit at the kitchen table with her, eating turnip greens, black-eyed peas, ham hocks, and corn bread dunked in buttermilk. Sam had died and Uncle Frank had died, but our two families were separated in their grieving by segregation that even then stood thick as the fence and bamboo wall that divided the two neighborhoods. I wondered if Sam would want any white angels to bring him up to heaven. Maybe he would have wanted only black angels. In my imagination I saw a group of black angels making a bed for Sam with intertwined hands and arms. I saw Sam’s head resting on an angel’s chest, his big bare feet dangling, drifting through the clouds.

Uncle Frank and Aunt Mary’s house was so badly damaged from the fire that his body had to lie in the house of his older son, Ashton, for the calling hours. The open coffin stood against the blank north wall of the living room, wreaths and crosses of funeral flowers on wire frames at its head and foot. The room was dimly lit and simply furnished. It had none of the affluence of Uncle Frank’s living room, with its baby grand piano, plush carpeting, heavy, floor-length drapes, and art deco lamps and end tables. I’d spent many agonized times in Uncle Frank’s living room standing in the middle of the carpet
while he commanded me to turn around and around so some relative or other could see how much I’d grown since their last visit. “Look at her!” he’d boom. “Just look at her!”

But Uncle Frank was dead.

His daughter Roberta came up from Florida for the funeral. She was wearing a slim black dress and spike-heeled black shoes. When she walked through the door her presence filled the room. The crowd shifted as she made her way to the open casket. Leaning over her father’s corpse, her long hair falling around her face, she carefully drew the stem of a red rosebud through the buttonhole in his coat lapel. Then—with a piercing howl of grief—she threw herself over Uncle Frank’s body and sobbed into his new blue serge suit.

I will never forget the first time I walked up the walkway to the barn-red house on South Hansell Street in Thomasville, Georgia, to see Gem Vaughn Forbes. Peyton had taken art lessons with her when he was a young boy. Now I was hoping that I, too, would become her student. My mother drove me to the nearby town and parked in front of the house while I walked up the front steps, rang the doorbell, and stood, waiting. I was ten years old, a serious child who wanted more than anything to become an artist.

A face appeared beyond the glass pane of the door. Then the door itself opened and a tall woman with white hair looked down at me. Her posture was upright, regal, her voice formal, restrained. “Yes?”

She waited.

“I’m here about painting lessons,” I said.

“Then you want to talk with Mrs. Forbes. I’m Mrs. Clemons. Go around the side of the house by the porch and through the garden. You’ll find Mrs. Forbes in the barn.”

I thanked her and walked around the house. I walked through the
garden, toward the barn, from which the sound of hammer on nail came ringing and ringing.

The barn door stood open.

“Mrs. Forbes?” I asked, looking at the old woman bent over a small bench. Mrs. Forbes looked up, a hammer in her hand, and smiled.

“My name is Margaret Richter,” I said. “I’m here about taking painting lessons from you.”

She laid the hammer on the ground beside the bench and walked to where I stood in the splash of sun that spilled through the trees. Like Mrs. Clemons, Mrs. Forbes had white hair. But where Mrs. Clemons was tall, Mrs. Forbes wasn’t much taller than a large child. Smiling as she walked toward me, she was all effervescence and light. Her blue eyes were bright and welcoming. “I’m delighted to meet you. I was just repairing a bench. Come with me to the house.”

Together we walked through the garden. A fat robin pecked in the coarse grass; a mockingbird called from an ancient oak. “I call my garden Merrie Garden,” she said, the grass bouncing back after each brisk step she took. The name sounded like that of a storybook garden filled with elves and fairies. No one I’d ever known before would have given a garden such a name.

We climbed the steps to the porch. Wisteria vines twisted themselves around the columns supporting the porch roof. Among the light-filled leaves and heavy masses of lavender blossoms, bees droned and buzzed. “This is a wonderful place to live,” she said with a tone of such deep satisfaction that she could have been the prime creator looking around at her creation and pronouncing it good.

Mrs. Forbes twisted the knob of one of the French doors. “Come in,” she instructed, opening the door and standing beside it until I entered the room. Then she closed the door and followed me in. Early-afternoon light flooded the room.

She gestured toward a daybed in one corner. It was covered with a brown throw. Pillows of many different fabrics and colors were piled haphazardly along its back. I walked across the worn Oriental rug
and sat down. The bed was so deep that my back didn’t reach the pillows at all. I squirmed awkwardly. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said, sitting in the straight chair at a small desk. “Pile the pillows behind you.”

I did. Then I looked around the room. It was very long and narrow. The window at the far end faced Paradise Park. In front of the window stood a formal sofa in a faded rose color, and a table and lamp. In the corner beside the sofa stood an old upright piano. In front of the sofa, the carpet had been worn thin. A pathway separated the formal sofa and the piano from the more casual and larger portion of the room where several chairs, the daybed, and a desk clustered together. The window at that end of the room opened to Merrie Gardens. It was at a small desk beside this window that Mrs. Forbes sat, facing me.

While Mother waited in the car, Mrs. Forbes and I made arrangements for me to begin art lessons the following Saturday afternoon. I was impressed that her walls were hung with real paintings and not reproductions, like the branch of magnolia on brush-textured cardboard that hung in our living room. I was especially enchanted with a figurine on Mrs. Forbes’s mantelpiece. It was a hand-painted china cart with blossoms on it in soft, warm colors pulled by a little boy with curly blond hair and pink cheeks, his head turned toward me and thrown back in a gesture of gentle and joyful abandon.