The Song and the Silence Read online

  When the two of them appeared at the bottom of the stairs, Amy’s face was red from laughing, but my mother’s was stern. She turned to Amy, and in a voice of manufactured sadness, told her that it was time for her to leave. Amy looked from my mother and up to me, her eyes full of confusion. She didn’t say anything. Maybe she was sensing it, too. After a moment, Amy put her head down and left.

  As soon as the front door closed behind her, my mother called me downstairs. I followed her into the recreation room, where she told me to pull my pants down. When they’d reached my knees she started whipping me with my father’s brown leather belt. It was long and its edges were covered in a thin, metallic material that was supposed to look like gold.

  “You wanna be a stripper, huh?” she screamed.

  “No, Mommy!” I cried.

  Most of my spankings occurred against a wall so I couldn’t get away, but this time I was in the middle of the room, trying to stay upright even though my pants were below my knees and a world of fury was raining down on my small frame. I was afraid if I fell from the force of her strikes, she’d get even angrier. I stumbled forward but never fell down.

  Afterward, the days grew warmer, but I had to wear pants to hide the red, tender welts that crisscrossed the backs of my legs. My mom and I never talked about why I’d received my spanking. I never found out exactly what Amy said to her or what was at the heart of my transgression. Did my mom believe that I really wanted to grow up to be a stripper? Was there something truly wicked about pretending to be one? Or did she think I’d invented a new game in which I would actually begin stripping for all the kids on the street?

  Not knowing why I was in trouble was normal. I was rarely able to pinpoint the true offense that warranted the spankings I received. The striptease beating was a bad one, but it wasn’t the worst. There were other times when my dad was wearing his belt, so she used hangers, shoes, or telephone cords—anything, really. When she spanked me, I sometimes got the impression that I was incidental. She could’ve been hitting anything because she was raging not against me but against life itself.

  But there was so much more to her.

  Almost daily, my mother would succumb to an undercurrent of tenderness, a sort of forced vulnerability. In those moments, her mind would go someplace else while her body was right next to me. She’d be lacing my shoes or cleaning out my ears, when the core of her, the stuff that made her truly alive, would just vanish. As I got older, I grew better at predicting when it was about to happen because I could see it on her face. Deep lines would pop up on her forehead and her lips would begin to move as if she was silently working out a complex equation, or negotiating a deal to gather up the pieces of herself, the ones left scattered across the Delta.

  A Yellow Gal

  “You ain’t no niggra, you’s a yellow gal,” Rosie heard Old Man Jones say again and again. In Mississippi in the early 1900s, most Blacks ranged from a light caramel to a brown so dark it resembled charcoal, but not Rosie. On a quick glance, she appeared to be neither White nor Black, as though her shade were dreamed up on an imaginary color spectrum. What was obvious about the girl who would become Booker’s mother was her beauty. She was so beautiful that it was almost unsettling. Rosie looked as though she belonged to a different time and certainly a different place.

  But how she spent her days—what she ate, where she slept, who she played with—and the yellow-brown skin that held the memory of all those beatings, were undeniable proof that Rosie Turner was indeed Black.

  Rosie was born in 1913 to a family of sharecroppers on a plantation in Lula, Mississippi, a small town nestled deep in the fields of the Delta. Numerous families worked those fields, most of their houses located at the end of a long road bordered by pecan trees. But the White plantation owner, who everyone referred to as Old Man Jones, forbade the collection of the tasty nut. The pecans fell to the ground where they lay rotting and overlooked by sharecropper children whose bellies were never quite full enough.

  Like the other families, Rosie’s lived beyond the pecan trees in a shotgun house. The name “shotgun” was derived from the structure’s simple design. The houses were built without hallways, with one room leading directly into another, and so on. In theory, if a person stood at the front door and fired a shotgun into one of these houses while all the interiors doors were open, the pellets would move straight through each room and out the back door without touching a single thing.

  Rosie’s shotgun house, which was really just a worn-out shack, was about twelve feet wide, made of bleached wood, and had one room, a dirt floor, and a tin roof. It didn’t have electricity, so meals, as well as heat, came from a potbellied stove in the middle of the room. The shack also lacked indoor plumbing, so an outhouse sat several yards away from it. When night came and the light had surrendered itself to darkness, Rosie and her brothers and sisters were too afraid of the dark to make the trek from the shack to the outhouse, so a bucket for bodily waste stood in the corner.

  The shack they lived in rested on pillars, leaving a space beneath it big enough for the children to play when they weren’t working. And there were plenty of them to play. Rosie’s mother gave birth twenty-two times. Only eleven of those babies lived to see adulthood, so before even reaching her teens, Rosie had experienced the stifling odor and wrenching ceremony of death over and over again.

  Maybe she was too young to process so much pain. Maybe her youthful mind wasn’t sophisticated enough to grasp the layered complexities of loss. Either way, when Rosie was still just a girl, one of her younger sisters lay in bed for weeks marching toward death, quickened by a combination of measles and pneumonia. When she finally slipped away, the only thing that came to Rosie, all she managed to say to her mother, was, “Now who’s gonna help me with these dishes?”

  But Rosie wasn’t heartless. In her world, death was a traveling cousin stopping by whenever he saw fit. The only gift he bore was a reminder that the future was guaranteed to no one. Amid all of those uncertain tomorrows, Rosie did make one promise to herself about her own future. Come what may, she was determined not to end up like the other Black girls living on the plantation, many of whom—whether by choice or not—slept with the White men who worked among them.

  Rosie kept herself busy by picking cotton, even though she hated the fields. Cotton picking was difficult, hard on the body, and because of the often sweltering heat, it was exhausting. All of this, though, Rosie could tolerate, because, in many respects, she was a strong and fearless girl. If she saw a snake, she had the bravery to kill it, to stomp it dead. There was something besides snakes, though, living in the fields, something that caused Rosie to panic and lose control.

  Whenever she encountered a worm, moving slowly along a cotton bush, Rosie would snap. Consumed with fear and unable to control herself, she would cry out, stop her work, and run away. Luck was rarely on her side, because many times when she fled from a worm, the plantation manager just happened to be watching and wasted no time in executing her punishment—a whipping.

  Old Man Jones was the one who rescued her. He began calling Rosie from the fields to help him with his favorite pastime, training racehorses. He took her under his wing and worked closely with her. It turned out she was a natural. Rosie came alive when she was with the horses. Old Man Jones even gave her one of his daughter’s old riding suits—a true treat for a sharecropper’s kid. Finally, life on the Jones Plantation was more than just bearable, it was wonderful. For a season, it appeared that Rosie’s life had turned a corner.

  Then, the season was over.

  Years later, Rosie would be fairly tight-lipped about why she left the Jones Plantation. All she’d say was that someone tried to have sex with her and so she fled because she refused to be “a piece of meat.”

  The year Rosie left, whether or not she was on her own or what she did for money are details lost to time. Her story picks up again in 1926, the same year that unseasonably heavy rains began to fall from the sky. While the Mississippi
River was steadily rising, growing thick with sludge and portent, Rosie Turner was living in the small town of Grenada, about 80 miles south of the Jones Plantation, and preparing to give birth to a little boy named Mack. Later, everyone would call him Booker. When her son was born, Rosie was thirteen years old.

  Part Two

  Family

  How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?

  John Steinbeck

  The Grapes of Wrath

  Black Is Beautiful

  “You’re a nigger because you come from Nigeria.”

  When I heard those words, I was standing next to a wall-size map of Africa that my third grade teacher had instructed our class to observe. That particular observation was made by a brown-haired boy with a bowl-shaped haircut who was staring at me quizzically, as though he’d just ripped the wings from a fly and wanted to watch it squirm.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re a nigger because you come from Nigeria,” he said, a crooked smile fighting with his lips.

  I looked down at the cracking skin that poked through the straps in my sandals and waited. After a few moments, I took a chance—hoping that maybe he’d moved on to observe something else—and I lifted my eyes up to him. He was still staring at me. They were all staring at me with their creamy white faces. I quickly looked away again and ran my fingers down the length of my chestnut arms. I didn’t know what a nigger was, but I suspected it had something to do with the color of my skin.

  In those days, Black women with glowing skin, wide hips, tight waists, plump breasts, and eyes swimming with desire looked boldly out at me from billboards and the back covers of my mother’s Black magazines—a modern day version of the sirens from Greek mythology. The phrase “Black Is Beautiful”—the only lyric in their siren song—was usually stamped in bold letters next to them. I was eight years old and I was just beginning to realize that the phrase “Black Is Beautiful” was a calculated campaign to reshape how the world saw people who looked like me.

  At the time, I had fat, unruly pigtails, brown lips, ashy skin, a wide flat nose, and legs covered with curly brown-black hair, and I was desperate to believe I could be made beautiful by the force of good advertising. The sirens told me to simply embrace my blackness, as if my own love of self would solve everything. But their message didn’t stand a chance.

  In the sweet afternoon hours between getting home from school and sitting down for dinner, my sister and I made up a game. We fastened long skirts around our heads to cover our real hair, and then we turned our heads really fast so that our pretend hair flew from left to right. We clumsily walked around in my mom’s high-heeled shoes, strutting back and forth with our heads held high and our chests sticking out.

  We pretended to drink martinis while we sat around and talked about playing golf at the country club, sending our kids to boarding school, and falling in love with men named “Spencer” or “Chuck.” Like Mary Tyler Moore, we had jobs in the city; we rode horses like the women on Dallas, and we said “kiss my grits” to each other like Flo from Alice. We didn’t care if the people we pretended to be were rich or poor, as long as they were White.

  When the game was over and I’d pulled my fake hair off, I slowly returned to reality. Not only was I Black in what seemed to be an all-White world, I was ugly and Black.

  From where I stood, White people had a thousand paths spread out for them, while my dreams were held captive beneath a dark, thin layer of skin. Being White meant having a story, or at least the hope of one. In books, on television, and in music they were falling in love, getting rich, traveling to foreign lands and finding themselves. They had so many stories, while Blacks only had one.

  “A woman was sexually assaulted while she was alone in her home last night.” “The bank on Tierrasanta Boulevard was robbed.” “A car was stolen.” “The sky is falling.” It didn’t matter. “We have a description of the suspect. He is Black and about who cares how tall and who cares what he weighs. Here is a sketch.” A man’s face, with extra shading to represent Black skin, would come up on the screen. With a wide, firm jaw and clenched teeth, he’d stare back at me, unafraid—eyes void of humanity.

  The only other place I ever saw eyes like that were in the heads of evil villains in comic books. Those eyes seemed absent to me, as if they belonged to people whose souls had been chased away, leaving behind only red-hot hate. Then the sketch was gone and the ivory-colored newscaster was moving on to another White story.

  I lived with my parents, my sister, and my little brother in a big house on a long, curvy road in an upper-middle class community. My neighborhood, which was full of canyons and green rolling hills, was also home to a senator, a television news anchor, advertising executives, and the like. During the thirteen years I lived in that neighborhood, I’d often meet people who would tell me, with a spark of excitement, that another Black family was living close by. I never bumped into them. In time, I figured the rumor about a Black family living in our neighborhood was probably just a rumor about us. I think they were trying to make me feel as though I wasn’t all that different, but I was. The difference wasn’t only about the color of my skin, either. Somehow traces of my family’s Southern heritage fell off my family like a trail of dust.

  Even though we never discussed where these traditions came from, whenever the kids in my house got really sick my mom would smear a towel with a sticky mixture of olive oil and Vicks VapoRub, heat it in the oven to an ungodly temperature, and place it on our chests. When my sister’s tonsils bothered her, my mother “mopped” them with iodine.

  She also made dishes that none of my classmates had ever heard of, like collard greens for dinner and warm grits. One day, I got into a conversation with some kids in my neighborhood about what we’d eaten for breakfast that morning. None of them had ever heard of grits before, but one of them had at least seen them. He explained to everyone that grits were like mashed potatoes for Black people.

  With eating something like mashed potatoes for breakfast, greens for dinner, calling a sink a “face bowl,” and straw-like hair that couldn’t be washed more than once a week, I was an anomaly to the kids in my community, as they were to me—with their roast beef sandwiches, petite butts, love of volleyball, skin that changed color in the sun (and then peeled off!), Vans, and station wagons with wood paneling. And that hair. It was as soft as feathers and always seemed to fall right into place like magic petals floating from the sky, coming together to make a perfect rose every time. Their hair was nothing like the coarse locks that stood up—like licks of fire moving in all directions—from the top of my head.

  There was a girl in my class who reminded me of the Doublemint twins because her hair was the color of honey, touched with varying shades of brown and blonde. It was the kind of color grown women spent hundreds of dollars to achieve. Hers was long, past her bottom, and it cascaded behind her when she moved. She’d twist it in her hands, wrap it around her arms, or spin, spin, spin, making her long tendrils fly like the thin legs of a thousand showgirls. I coveted that hair.

  It was one day after school when it happened. Almost all the kids were gone from the vast playground that was used by both lower and upper elementary grades. Somehow, we were talking—me, the girl with the magic hair, and one of her friends. I smiled at whatever she was saying and almost immediately I started to daydream about the future of lifelong friendship that lay before us. I saw us riding bikes, going to dances, and sharing clothes. She would share more than clothes with me, though—she would share her story, one of the dream-fulfilling life paths that lay before her. Her beauty would rub off on me and in her friendship I would find meaning and escape.

  Just as the clouds were moving across the sky, I heard something strange in her voice. It took a moment for me to wrap my mind around it, the thing she’d left dangling between us, hanging in midair. But there it was—a punch line. The girl with the magic hair had pulled me into conversation to mock me.


  A bright burst of sunshine blinded me like a flashlight in the eyes. I tried to look at her but I could only see parts—freckles carefully placed on the tip of her nose, an eternally rosy cheek, and a smile on her pink lips from which escaped a taunting giggle. In slow motion, I saw her turn to her friend, who was also laughing at me. I lowered my eyes and noticed they were both standing with their hands on their hips, waiting for me to respond.

  A jealousy aneurysm must have exploded deep in my brain. That’s the only possible reason I can come up with for why what happened next happened at all. What I know for sure is that it seemed right, like the natural order of things, for me to raise a hand, grab that lovely hair, twist it so that my grip would not be compromised, and pull the beautiful girl to the ground. With another large chunk of her silky soft hair in the other hand, I started to walk backward, dragging her across the playground while her friend took off running. The girl with the magic hair was kicking her tan legs, screaming desperately, and frantically batting at my hands with hers, but her hair was so long that I was able to pull her while staying over a foot away. She couldn’t reach me.

  I knew eventually this would end, my backward walk of redemption, but while it lasted I felt as though I was lifting the heavy weight of my lot in life, of all my girlhood grievances, and tossing them aside. I was judge and jury and I was making things fair in my world. For a moment, I wasn’t invisible, because I mattered to this White girl. I mattered to her a lot.

  I must have dragged the girl with the magic hair for a long time, because when the clouds once again hid the sun, we were on the other side of the playground. Her screams had turned into breathless sobs and her kicks had slowed, reminding me of what happened to people in movies when they were being choked and the fight was sliding out of them.