“Real, real long. And she frown all the time. Don’t never crack a smile. You sure you okay?”
“Um . . . no . . . I’m good . . . um . . .”
Miss Rose waved at a fruit fly. Asked me, did I mind going inside and getting a church fan out of the china cabinet? There was a whole stack of them. I clicked off the recording, grateful for a break. In the front room, I leaned against the china cabinet, breathed through my mouth. In my head, I heard Lydia’s laughter. A familiar voice from my dreams joined her laughter, and I reached for a chair. I called through the screen door, give me another second. I was still looking for the fans.
When I returned, I turned the recorder back on, asking her, did she remember anything else from her childhood?
“Lots of things,” Miss Rose said. “I remember a white man done came up here one day. He had some kind of contraption in the back of his car, say he want to sit it on the porch and let folks sing in it. My daddy knew them songs they used to sing in the fields and even before that. Oh, that man had a voice! Just like your uncle Huck. Meema, she ain’t want Daddy to sing, but he say the man seemed all right as far as white people go. He sure was polite, I know that. When he tried to get Meema to sing, she say to that white man, say, ‘I don’t serve the Devil no more. I used to chop down that cotton in my time, yes, sir, but I don’t chop nothing for the Devil, even if he do be a white man. Jesus and the Devil, they coming up the same road, just different sides. I guess they meet up at the crossing. I know that’s blaspheme, but it’s the truth. I knows it, ’cause I done seen it in a dream.’ Everybody on that porch except that white man knew Meema ain’t never chopped no cotton a day in her life, but nobody was gone contradict.”
“How old were you then, Mrs. Driskell?”
“Me and Huck, we must have been about thirteen, and my baby sister, Annie Mae, she was little. About six or seven. She was Mama’s surprise baby. Mama had lost some babies, and Uncle Tommy had took her to the doctor in town, and the doctor say, my mama couldn’t have no more kids, but then here Annie Mae came. That was a long time after I ate all them peaches, but I still wouldn’t eat them. I wouldn’t eat peaches for years after that, until one time, Sister Johnson brought the best peach cobbler to church for fourth Sunday. I don’t know what-all she put in that cobbler, but, child, I smelled it and just like that, peaches didn’t make me sick no more. I wished my mama had asked Sister Johnson for that recipe, because I have tried and tried to make that cobbler, but I can’t never get it right.”
“So, the man came with his contraption that day . . .”
“Oh! I’m sorry, baby! Yes, the white man, he done came up to the house with his contraption, and when he said he’d heard tell Meema remembered things before Emancipation, I ain’t even know what he was talking about.”
“He knew she had been enslaved?”
“That’s what he meant. But at the time, I was thinking, what that white man mean by Emancipation? Grown folks used to talk about slavery and freedom, but they ain’t never use that word. He asked Meema what her last name was back in that time, and I could see she didn’t want to say, but Negroes back then, we was afraid of the government. And this was a white man from the government. Uncle Tommy was alive back then, but still.”
“This would be Thomas Pinchard Jr?”
“That was his government name. He was Mama’s brother, but his daddy was related to Meema in some other kind of way, too. We was all related in betwixt and between. Kinda nasty if you ask me, but folks did that kind of thing back then, messing ’round with they cousins.
“And didn’t nobody want to talk about how white men loved to chase them some Negro ladies. In this town, you can’t go back but so far without finding out colored folks and white people is kin, but Uncle Tommy, he was good white folks. Not like the rest. He loved us, used to visit us on Sunday until the day he died. He give us what you call protection, but even Uncle Tommy couldn’t beat the government. I could see that Meema was scared of that white man with the contraption, and she didn’t scare easy. She told him what her name used to be, before she changed it. When I was a little girl, she was Eliza Two Freeman. All the folks on Wood Place besides us called her Miss Liza. But she was born Eliza Two Pinchard. The white man, he wrote that down and ask her some more questions. He want Meema to go back as far as she could remember.”
I got a jolt of excitement again: it sounded like the white man had been part of the WPA project, recording the lives of formerly enslaved folks. If so, there would be a written narrative of Meema’s recollections—and if I was really lucky maybe even the voice recordings the interviewer had made. But I still wanted to hear what Miss Rose had to say.