Southern German
That’s the best thing my daddy ever told me. And he only said it once. He spit the words from his mouth like a death row inmate giving his final two cents on life and retribution.
My daddy made history.
With Daddy gone, Mama’s life went from bad to worse. The bill collectors kept calling. Sometimes they came by, riding in shiny white or blue Cadillacs. They pulled into the yard and honked for someone to come out of the house while Mabel and Clyde, the best deer hounds in all of North Carolina, chewed at their tires and jumped up on the hoods of their cars, barking and growling and scratching paint.
“Those dogs of yours are gonna wind up killing somebody,” the bill collector said from inside his car.
“They might,” I said.
“Is your mother at home, boy?”
“Nope, but we can take whatever messages you want to leave.” I sat on the bottom step of our old, gray porch as Clyde and Mabel did laps around the bill collector’s Caddy.
“Well, when she comes in, tell her that the bank needs her to call them. She needs to make some arrangements for payment on the money she owes. And I’ve got some papers here that I have to give her.”
“Yes, sir.” I said. “Just bring ‘em over to me.”
The bill collector, in his blue suit and blue Cadillac, looked out his window at Clyde, standing next to the driver’s door with the hairs on his back sticking up like pine needles.
“Now c’mon here, boy. Your mother needs these papers. How about you come over here and get ‘em.”
I gave him a smile and let loose a quick, sharp whistle that sent Mabel flying onto the hood of his car and Clyde chewing at the tires again.
“Damned mongrel,” the man said, looking at me and then looking at Clyde and Mabel. I wasn’t sure exactly who he meant was the mongrel.
The bill collector tossed his crisp, white papers out the window and threw his Cadillac into reverse. All the way out the driveway, Mabel stayed on his hood, clawing at the windshield and biting the wipers. She only came off when he got on the road and kicked into drive. Then she and Clyde chased that blue Caddy down the dirt road for a half a mile until him and his bank were nothing but a dusty summer memory.
It was hard for Mama, even before Daddy charged at that eighteen-wheeler. It was hard because, living in the south, in a place called Arcadia, rich and poor didn’t mix. Neither did black and white. Mama and Daddy mixed everything. He was a tall, broad shouldered black man with short, kinky hair and thick calluses on his hands from plowing fields and digging ditches. Mama was short, blue-eyed. Long blond hair. Small, thin hands that started out smooth and supple, but reddened and firmed when she married my daddy.
Far enough down the line, she was descended from Germans, my Mama. Damned Nazis, of all people. Closer to home, she had been a Weis before she married my daddy. Being a Weis meant she grew up eating off of silver and sleeping on silk. Her family was famous horse breeders. The kinds of horses that win the Derby and are worth more than most men’s lives. It was something to be a Weis. It made you a part of something big. Part of a dynasty. Mama used to be that, until she married Daddy, a nickel and penny farmer. Down the line, descended from slaves. Closer to home, he was a Brown. No more.
But Mama said that when her and daddy met, he was an honest man with a simple kind of charm. The kind of charm that stares up at the stars on crisp winter nights and asks what life is like on other planets. The kind of charm that doesn’t understand why Ahab didn’t just get himself a rifle and shoot that damned whale right between the eyes. Or at least carry a good knife on his hip so that he could cut himself out of Moby’s belly.
Mama said it was the charm that nobody else had. The charm that made life fresh. “Uncomplicated,” she said.
On the other hand, Daddy said that Mama was “genuine.” To him, the word meant that she could be trusted. It meant that she wasn’t trying to take his money or his manhood. It meant that she had given up something to be with him, and in return he owed her a debt.
“Your mama could have done a lot better than marrying a field hand like me,” he told me. “She coulda went to college and got herself a smart man with certificates and titles and fancy clothes. A man with money in his hands instead of blisters and dirt. She coulda married a white man and not had her family turn their back on her the way they did. But still, she picked me over them.” Sitting in the woods, with dense pines trees around us and a December breeze cutting through us, waiting for a deer to walk in front of our rifles, my daddy told me that.
In the distance, I could hear Clyde and Mabel howling in the wind. Hot on the heels of a buck or a doe. Baying and screaming. Running it straight towards our rifles like a freight train towards a hot bolt of lightning.
A few days earlier, Daddy had lost his job at the paper mill. A job that he had worked for twenty-two years. A job that replaced him with a computer and decided not to give him a pension or a handshake as they kicked his ass out the door. They just told him, “You’re job’s been phased out, Lynn Boy. We’re sorry.” They didn’t bother using his last name. Even as they escorted him out through the front gate and told him he could never come back, they wouldn’t call him Mr. Brown. Just Lynn Boy.
“Crops didn’t do too well this year,” Daddy said, chambering a round in his rifle as the sound of Clyde and Mabel grew closer. “But that’s nothing you don’t already know, Abriel. Things are fixin’ to get tight around here. Your Uncle Al said he might have some work for me at his garage. Won’t pay nearly as much as the mill did, but maybe it’ll keep us fed for awhile.”
“Yes, sir.” I said, wanting to say more but not having the words.
I was never sure what to say when my daddy talked to me that way, like an equal. I was eleven, an eleven-year old boy. Not his equal. He should have been telling me not to worry. He should have been saying that everything was going to work out. He should have lied to me so that I could sleep at night. But that would be complicated, and complicated wasn’t my daddy.
“Get educated, Abriel. Get some papers in your hand so you can get yourself a job using your head. Listen to your mama, she’ll tell you how to do it. She shoulda went to college, but it didn’t work out like that. So that means you’re the one. Means it’s up to you to take care of her when…if anything happens to me. Power of God, son, that’s what you are. Power of God.”
The story goes that I was born during one of the worst hurricanes to ever hit Bladen County. It was mid-July and the county had been in a drought for nearly three months. Nothing was growing in the fields. The cows and pigs were dying of disease by the dozens. People were calling it the end days. But there I was inside my mama, “kicking and scratching and clawing to get out,” she said.
Then, in the last days of the month, a black hurricane came in and ripped trees up by the roots. They called it a black hurricane because the clouds and rain were so thick they blotted out the sun like a midnight canvas. Folks called the reverend and asked to be blessed until the phone lines went dead. Then they curled up in storage rooms and bedrooms and had their own prayer sessions. Praying for death to pass them over as God gave the world a good beating.
All the water that had been missing from Bladen County for three months came down in the space of three hours. Somewhere around forty-five people died from flash floods and collapsed houses, caved-in roofs. Falling pine trees. Flying cedars. Grandma Ivory said it was a “Sinner’s Cleansin’.”
In the middle of it, in the worst part, when the wind was ripping the roof off of Grandma Ivory’s house and somewhere not far away Old Man Washington was having his heart attack and drifting off to the angels, there I was rolling out from between Mama’s legs. A child of twenty years of trying. A child with three stillborn brothers ahead of me.
It was a hard birth. As soon as I was born Mama knew that she’d never be able to try and have any more children. I was the last prayer against the wind.
Grandma Ivory said that for a long time I wasn’t moving and wasn’t breathing. I was just lying there in a pool of Mama’s blood. Everyone figured me dead, and they figured that Mama wasn’t far behind. Blood loss and grief, they kill fast and hard. Like an eighteen-wheeler.
In the middle of that hurricane, nobody knew what to do with me. The roof was gone off and the sky was pouring buckets and there I was, hot, still and lifeless. There was Mama, bleeding and crying for herself and her dead son. And there was Daddy, at the mill. Working. Sweating. Not knowing.
Uncomplicated.
Grandpa Cyrus, in his rain soaked blue jeans and red flannel shirt, took me from Grandma Ivory. He spit a fat wad of tobacco juice on my forehead and on my belly. He smeared it in between my legs. Then he spit that thick, black juice in between Mama’s legs. “Workin’ roots,” the old folks called that kind of stuff. Country magic.
As soon as he did it, the rain stopped. Just like that. The clouds parted and sunlight broke through in long, glittering shafts. I started yelling and screaming like a bear cub with a fresh set of lungs.
Grandpa Cyrus named me, Gabriel. Power of God. The only one.
With Daddy dead and buried, Mama and me both got jobs working for Uncle Al at his garage. Mama was his receptionist and go-pher. I rotated tires and did oil changes and started learning the ins and outs of engine work. Whenever I had a break, Mama made it a point to see that I had something to read. I carried oil-stained copies of The Odyssey and Leaves of Grass in the back pockets of my greasy, blue coveralls.
Uncle Al was a gambling man. Cars were his favorite, but when it wasn’t car races it was poker. When it wasn’t poker it was horseshoes. Two bucks a point. When his arm got tired of horseshoes he went back to racing cars. All the while money went in and out of his hands like a church collection plate.
His garage business was the best in the county. He made enough money through that little concrete building to be a rich man, if it wasn’t for the gambling. As it stood, he held a decent living and gained salvation points with the reverend by being so kind to his blond-haired sister-in-law and his mulatto nephew.
That was one of the nicer names people called me. Mulatto. I was also Mongrel. Half-breed. Gray Babe. Zebra Baby. People didn’t like my light skin or my hazel eyes. They didn’t like the fact that half of me was pure, white-as-snow German. They did love my hair though. It was smoother than anyone of my cousins and my aunts loved to let me know, “You’ve got such good hair, baby,” they said. My cousins, cedar brown and kinky-haired, called me, “Crackerhead.”
One summer, all of my aunts got together and decided that it would be nice to see their mulatto nephew grow his good, half-German hair out, long and straight. They told me to make sure not to cut it. Then they convinced Mama that it was something good for me. Something that all black folk needed to do at some point and, since half-white means all black, I needed to do it. Mama knew better, she knew, from my daddy, how black people could be about skin color and hair texture. She knew about the self-loathing and prejudice that could come from such simple things. But she made me stop cutting my hair nonetheless. “Maybe it is something that you need to do,” she said, as my hair got longer and Mama Ivory taught her how to cornrow and braid it.
As my hair grew, so did mine and Mama’s popularity. My aunts invited us over for Sunday dinners and let us ride with them in their long, heavy Ford Thunderbird on weekend trips into town.
“Don’t you ever cut that hair, baby,” they told me. “It’s so pretty and straight. Don’t you never go cutting it.”
At family gatherings, my aunts put my hair and me on display like a racehorse. “Isn’t it pretty,” they said, meaning either me or my hair. They’d hook their fingers into one of the front belt loops on my discount blue jeans and drag me from stranger to stranger. “This is Lynn Boy’s son,” they said, “Ain’t his hair the prettiest you’ve ever seen?”
People would look at me and pat my head. Feel my hair. Then they would smirk, knowing full well where my hair had come from. Which side of the racial divide I’d gotten it. “It’s pretty,” they’d say, speaking to my aunts.
On display, I met a gray-haired great grandfather named, Papa. He was almost as light-skinned as I was, with small, pursed lips like Mama’s. Hazel eyes like mine. He was kept in a wheel chair in a back room. Like a dirty secret. He could only smile and nod and occasionally ask where he was.
I met Great Aunt Inez. Grandma Ivory’s slightly younger sister. She had smooth, red skin and long, inky, straight black hair. Indian hair. A lot like Grandma Ivory’s but twice as thick and flowing.
“This is Lynn Boy’s son,” Aunt Elizabeth said, twirling her finger in the air as a signal for me to turn around and show myself off. “Ain’t he got the prettiest hair?” she said.
“What’s your name, child?” Great Aunt Inez asked, running her long, sienna fingers through my hair as gently as tulips stems through the wind. Caressing my scalp so gently that I felt her fingers reach down into my soul.
“Gabriel,” I said, closing my eyes. Drifting in the comfort of her fingers.
“You really are pretty,” she said. “Don’t let nobody tell you different.” In her voice, slow and deep, like a gospel song in the distance, I could tell that she had been where I was. She had been, and maybe still was, the freak show.
All the while, at family gatherings, Mama was alone. She stood out like a ghost in two a.m. moonlight. I could always see her from a distance. Her flour-white skin and long, blond hair. Her short, thin frame. Soft blue eyes and small, flat lips. Always pulled back into tight, empty smiles.
No matter how much she tried, Mama didn’t fit in with my daddy’s family. No matter who her husband had been or who her son was, she was still an alabaster statue in a garden of mahogany. Silent. Hard. Singular. Even a mongrel like me got more affection from my daddy’s family than Mama.
I got by on my daddy’s name. I got by on his nose and his lips that were stuck to my face. At least I was half accepted. But Mama, she was simply all the way white. Most of my daddy’s family treated her like a misplaced tourist. They constantly asked if she was okay and what time she’d be heading home. They made small talk about the weather.
A few of them outright hated Mama. They hated her blue eyes and blond hair. They hated the German blood that showed through the red veins in her slender, pale hands. It was that blood and those hands, those deep, winter-blue eyes and that long, straight hair that she supposedly used to seduce my daddy. She didn’t belong, and Daddy’s family reminded her of that.
They reminded her by constantly asking if the stewed chicken and rice or collards were too spicy for her. Or if she needed to go in out of the sun. That was their favorite one to ask, as if she were a flower ready to wilt. “Tender-skinned,” people said when they thought she couldn’t hear. “Delicate,” they said when she could hear. “Cracker,” they said when Mama wasn’t there.
The only exceptions were Grandma Ivory and Grandpa Cyrus. Grandma Ivory was a quarter Indian and Grandpa Cyrus was a quarter white, though none of the family would admit it. Grandma Ivory and Grandpa Cyrus treated my mama decently. They treated her like family.
One summer, Grandma Ivory and Mama knitted a quilt together. Mama Ivory was always making quilts and blankets. Thick, intricate creations with hand stitched pink roses always sewn into the top right-hand corner. Being in her early eighties, it was getting harder and harder on her arthritis. The roses hurt her hand to make them. They made her joints swell and throb. They forced her into quiet moments of suppressed agony.
That summer, to help ease Mama Ivory’s hands, Mama and me went over each evening after working at Uncle Al’s garage. I would sit out on the concrete front porch with Grandpa Cyrus, sucking on slivers of the fresh cut sugar cane that he grew in his garden. He and I talked about the weather and the crops. We argued over whether a Blue Tick or a Walker made a better hunting dog. He puffed from his pipe and sipped his strawberry stumphole. Moonshine, some people call it.
Those nights, I could hear Mama and Grandma Ivory inside the house, talking. Laughing. It was the light laughter of an uncomplicated moment. The kind of laugh Mama had had when my daddy was alive. The kind of laugh I could only occasionally manage to draw from her. It never lasted long, but it shined and sparkled in the moment that it was there. Like an ice cube on a rusty, hot tin roof.
Those nights, with Mama on the couch beside Grandma Ivory and me on the front porch with Grandpa Cyrus, we both had family. I had a father and she had a mother. We were happy and the nights were too short.
“A man that can’t support his family ain’t no man,” my daddy told me, drunk on whiskey, clenching and releasing the steering wheel beneath his palms. “I been a man since I was sixteen, Abriel. I been on my own, paying my way. Did ten years in the army. Supported you and your Mama ever since I had to. I been a man.”
I sat in the dark of the summer night, beside my father in his blue Ford pickup. The dashboard smelling of wood chips and the seat smelling of motor oil. Twenty-two years at the paper mill had sewn the scent of oak and pine into the dashboard like the pink roses on Grandma Ivory’s quilts, sharp and light. Almost gentle.
The two months of working for Uncle Al, hiding from bill collectors and borrowing money, had worked the smell of motor oil and antifreeze into the seats of Daddy’s truck. It was an acidic smell that burned your nostrils and made your eyes water. It made you self-conscious. You got out of Daddy’s truck checking the seat of your pants for stains.
“What’s a man got when he ain’t a man no more, boy? Huh?” he pleaded, half sobbing, leaning onto the steering wheel and hiding his face. “What’s a man got?”
I wanted to tell my daddy that he had me. I wanted to tell him that he had a son, that he had a wife. I wanted to tell him that he was still a man, but the words weren’t there. I could see them in my head. I proofread the sentences that I should have said. I revised the paragraphs that should have been rolling from my mouth like a white mountain of water busting through a dam. But I didn’t say anything, I just took the keys from the ignition so that he couldn’t leave the driveway and slam into any trees or ditches. Like Mama told me to.
My daddy and I sat there quiet as church mice for a half an hour. The space between us hollow, empty, and impassible. I didn’t know how to help my daddy anymore than a private knows how to console his general after the last great battle’s been lost.
“I’ll make it right,” my daddy said, breaking the silence with an abrupt air of decisiveness. He turned towards me. The moonlight came through the windshield of the truck and half of his face fell into shadow while the other half was as sharp and defined as a lightning bolt in a black sky. Behind the hard brown of his eyes, I saw something flickering there. Something like a fire. Something hot and consuming. Hungry and decided. “When all else fails,” he said, leaning in closer towards me so that I could see my own face reflected in the hot light of his eyes, “when everything is gone to hell and you know, you really know, that there’s nothing at all that you can do about it…make history!”
The next day, my daddy met that eighteen-wheeler.
* * *
Weeping and moaning, trembling and wailing, my white mama cried a river of tears for her dead black husband. She and I sat on the front pew of the church with the smell of roses and lilacs heavy on our shoulders. Seeping into our hearts like the stink of death.
They gave my daddy a casket, but honestly, that eighteen-wheeler stretched him out far enough to bury him in a shoebox. But in Arcadia, a funeral ain’t about the dead. It’s about throwing out enough money to show the living that you loved someone. The life insurance that my daddy had paid enough to cover the cost of his oak casket and most of the other arrangements.
Insurance companies don’t pay out for suicides, but nobody believed my daddy really charged at that truck. They said it was a just a horrible accident and that the truck driver was delirious when he said what my daddy did.
They didn’t know any better.
Thick waves of moaning rippled through the church as person after person walked up to my daddy’s closed casket and said their last goodbyes to his eight-by-ten photograph. A picture of him sitting on our old, gray front porch in his blue coveralls and straw hat. The sun on his face and dirt on his hands. His dark skin soaking up the world like a black hole.
People passed by my Mama and me and dropped off, “I’m sorrys,” like care packages. Then they went to the end of the pew where my aunts were screaming and moaning. They kissed my aunts lightly on the forehead and prayed for them. My mama only had me to hold her hand.
Sitting in that church, with my dead daddy and heartbroken mama, I wanted to make history. I wanted to be the first mulatto to change the world when everything in his life had gone to hell. I wanted to take my daddy’s advice.
If anyone could do it, I could.
The half-bred Southern German with the straight, beautiful hair that all of his aunts love.
Gabriel. Power of God. That’s what I am.
I became my daddy. I put myself in front of that eighteen-wheeler and called it a son of a bitch while the driver honked his horn and dared to think that I would move.
Ha. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that I’m here to change the world. He doesn’t know that I’ll rip that truck of his in half and shit down his throat for ever thinking that I can’t. He doesn’t know. The world doesn’t know. But in this moment, I’ll make history. I’ll change the world, and then, I’ll be able to support my mama and bring back my daddy. I’ll be a man.
At that funeral, I understood Lynn Boy Brown. My daddy.
For a while, I looked for eighteen-wheelers with nerve enough to think that they could kill me like they did my daddy. I looked for log trucks and dump trucks loaded down with sixty tons of steel that I could drop my shoulder against and split in two. Right there on the interstate. But somewhere, there was always a short, blue-eyed, blond-haired, German descended woman with no family. A woman that should have went to college and should have lived a life of silver spoons and million-dollar racehorses. A woman that had nothing left in this world but the memory of an uncomplicated, dead husband and a mulatto son with the power of God.
She kept me away from the interstate and eighteen-wheelers.
Appears in “Portals”
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