“Yes, I do.”
“Mrs. Driskell, in what year were you born?”
“Oh, I ain’t your granny no more?”
I laughed. So much for my acting in my official capacity as an historian. “You’ll always be my granny!”
“I’m just teasing you, baby! Now, what you ask me again?”
“In what year were you born?”
“All right. Me and Huck was born on December third, nineteen and twenty. I done lived on this farm since that day. Never have lived no place else. Huck ain’t never been no place at all. He don’t like to leave home, but I done been to Atlanta, Milledgeville, and Macon.”
“Huck would be Henry John Collins Jr. Is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s my brother’s name. We’se twins.”
“And who are your parents?
“My daddy was named Henry John Collins Sr. My mama was named Pearl Thomasina Freeman. You want me to keep going back?”
“Yes, ma’am, if you would.”
“My mama’s mama was named Maybelline Victorina Freeman. They called her Lil’ May. And my granddaddy was Thomas John Pinchard Sr. They called him Big Thom. He was a white man. He was fat, too. That’s what they say. Grandma’s mama was named Sheba Freeman. We ain’t never know the name of Lil’ May’s daddy. He run off before somebody could make him do right. Sheba’s mama was named Eliza Two Freeman. We called her Meema. Her husband was named Red. That was Sheba’s daddy. They ain’t have no more kids. Red used to live on the Benjamin Plantation. The Benjamins was Jewish folks. But then, after Red took up with Eliza, he moved to Wood Place. He used to be Red Benjamin, but he changed his name to Freeman, too. Red and Eliza, they was married official by a preacher after the war, but they had done took up before then. I do know that. But he died when he was young. Lockjaw. And Meema, she ain’t never marry again. She didn’t take up with no more mens, neither. Maybe it was ’cause of them scars on her face. She had these marks, real deep. Like that.” Miss Rose ran her index finger over one cheek and then the other. “She was old when I was born, but she would have been a right pretty lady. Them marks kinda messed with her looks, though. You want to know about Grandma Maybelline’s brothers and sisters and all that?”
“That’s fine for now, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Driskell. We’ll probably come back to that at another time, though.”
“All that’s in Mama’s Bible, if you want to see it.”
“Dear Pearl kept a Bible?” I felt a rumble in my flesh: I’d found more documentation. “I mean, Mrs. Pearl Collins kept a Bible?”
“Shole did. She had me write down the names that she could remember, before she died.”
“Oh, excellent! Can I see that later?”
“You shole can, baby.”
“Now, can you tell me your earliest memory of your time on Wood Place?”
“All right, let me see,” she said. “When I was ’bout five years old, I ate too many peaches at preserve time and I got the worst ache in my stomach. Then my bowels got so loose, but my mama say, she ain’t feel sorry for me. She say, it was my own fault ’cause she had done told me to stop eating them peaches, but when her back was turned, there I go. But Meema, she give me something, some kind of tea, and that stopped me going to the outhouse. When Meema died, she was past ninety, and she knowed all kind of things. Like that time you got stung by that wasp in the church outhouse, and I chewed up that tobacco and put it on there and it drawed out the pain. You remember that, baby?”
“Yes, ma’am, I certainly do remember. It was an efficacious treatment.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means it worked!”
“I know that’s right! Meema taught me ’bout that tobacco.”
“How did she learn those things?”
“She say it was her own grandma. She was a Indian woman.”
“Really? Do you know the name of Meema’s grandmother?”
“They called her Aggie, and sometimes, Mama Gee. Ain’t nobody know what her husband’s name was, though. But they say the grandma had long hair, near-abouts to her knees.”
Though I hadn’t eaten anything that day—I’d been waiting until after this interview was over—my stomach lurched. Sweat broke out on my forehead.
“What’s wrong, baby?” Miss Rose asked. “You want a drink of water?”
“Um . . . no. I’m all right. You were saying that Aggie had hair to her knees?”