She had read of the Parks incident, but with little interest at first. That came little by little. It was hard to say exactly when or how her imagination had been caught and fired by that at first almost soundless racequake which had begun to shake the south.
A year or so later a young man she was dating more or less regularly began taking her down to the Village, where some of the young （and mostly white） folk-singers who performed there had added some new and startling songs to their repertoire—suddenly, in addition to all those old wheezes about how John Henry had taken his hammer and outraced the new steam-hammer （killing himself in the process, lawd, lawd） and how Bar’bry Allen had cruelly rejected her lovesick young suitor （and ended up dying of shame, lawd, lawd）， there were songs about how it felt to be down and out and ignored in the city, how it felt to be turned away from a job you could do because your skin was the wrong color, how it felt to be taken into a jail cell and whipped by Mr. Charlie because your skin was dark and you had dared, lawd, lawd, to sit in the white folks’ section of the lunch-counter at an F. W. Woolworth’s in Montgomery, Alabama.
Absurdly or not, it was only then that she had become curious about her own parents, and their parents, and their parents before them. She would never read Roots—she was in another world and time long before that book was written, perhaps even thought of, by Alex Haley, but it was at this absurdly late time in her life when it first dawned upon her that not so many generations back her progenitors had been taken in chains by white men. Surely the fact had occurred to her before, but only as a piece of information with no real temperature gradient, like an equation, never as something which bore intimately upon her own life.
Odetta totted up what she knew, and was appalled by the smallness of the sum. She knew her mother had been born in Odetta, Arkansas, the town for which she （the only child） had been named. She knew her father had been a small-town dentist who had invented and patented a capping process which had lain dormant and unremarked for ten years and which had then, suddenly, made him a moderately wealthy man. She knew that he had developed a number of other dental processes during the ten years before and the four years after the influx of wealth, most of them either orthodontic or cosmetic in nature, and that, shortly after moving to New York with his wife and daughter （who had been born four years after the original patent had been secured）， he had founded a company called Holmes Dental Industries, which was now to teeth what Squibb was to antibiotics.
But when she asked him what life had been like during all the years between—the years when she hadn’t been there, and the years when she had, her father wouldn’t tell her. He would say all sorts of things, but he wouldn’t tell her anything. He closed that part of himself off to her. Once her ma, Alice—he called her ma or sometimes Allie if he’d had a few or was feeling good—said, “Tell her about the time those men shot at you when you drove the Ford through the covered bridge, Dan,” and he gave Odetta’s ma such a gray and forbidding look that her ma, always something of a sparrow, had shrunk back in her seat and said no more.
Odetta had tried her mother once or twice alone after that night, but to no avail. If she had tried before, she might have gotten something, but because he wouldn’t speak, she wouldn’t speak either—and to him, she realized, the past—those relatives, those red dirt roads, those stores, those dirt floor cabins with glassless windows ungraced by a single simple curtsey of a curtain, those incidents of hurt and harassment, those neighbor children who went dressed in smocks which had begun life as flour sacks—all of that was for him buried away like dead teeth beneath perfect blinding white caps. He would not speak, perhaps could not, had perhaps willingly afflicted himself with a selective amnesia; the capped teeth was their life in the Greymarl Apartments on Central Park South. All else was hidden beneath that impervious outer cover. His past was so well-protected that there had been no gap to slide through, no way past that perfect capped barrier and into the throat of revelation.
Detta knew things, but Detta didn’t know Odetta and Odetta didn’t know Detta, and so the teeth lay as smooth and closed as a redan gate there, also.
She had some of her mother’s shyness in her as well as her father’s unblinking （if unspoken） toughness, and the only time she had dared pursue him further on the subject, to suggest that what he was denying her was a deserved trust fund never promised and apparently never to mature, had been one night in his library. He had shaken his Wall Street Journal carefully, closed it, folded it, and laid it aside on the deal table beside the standing lamp. He had removed his rimless steel spectacles and had laid them on top of the paper. Then he had looked at her, a thin black man, thin almost to the point of emaciation, tightly kinked gray hair now drawing rapidly away from the deepening hollows of his temples where tender clocksprings of veins pulsed steadily, and he had said only, I don’t talk about that part of my life, Odetta, or think about it. It would be pointless. The world has moved on since then.