“What else did she remember?”
“Like what-all the slaves ate back then. Collards and turnip greens. Sweet potatoes. Pecans when they fell from the tree. Peanuts. Meema called them goobers, but same thing. Blackberries. Streak-o-lean and pig’s feet. Stuff like that. Same food I eat that your mama be fussing at me about. I don’t know what she saying, talking ’bout, don’t eat no pork. What kind of colored folks don’t eat no pork? That’s just foolish talk.”
“So, the white man and Meema talked . . .”
“They shole did. She wasn’t giving him no big piece of information, not at first, but that white man’s pen was moving across that paper like lightning, putting down things. He wrote down what-all her master planted: cotton in the big fields, a big vegetable garden for the big house, and that big peach orchard. That orchard burned down same time as the big house burned down. What’s there now is what the fire ain’t eat. You think that’s a lot of peach trees now, but that orchard was big.”
“Is that what the man asked Meema? About the fire?”
“No, that fire was after that white man. And that won’t the first fire, neither. It was a bunch of them. Looked like somebody always was setting fires on Wood Place, but Meema wouldn’t have told that man, no way. Not unless he asked her direct. She and that white man, they talked awhile about what work she had did in slavery time. She never would tell him she worked up there in the big house. I don’t know why. She told him how the cotton harvest went. What work the women did. What work the men did. He asked her about her family. She stayed quiet a long time. Then she said they was all dead. Her granny, her sister, her mama, her daddy. He tried to get her to tell him more about her family, but she wouldn’t. Every time he would try to get to her talk about them, she’d raise her hand. He left, but that night, she wouldn’t eat supper. She died ’bout a year after that.”
“Did Meema ever talk about slavery to you, Mrs. Driskell?”
“She never did. But my mama, she knowed some things. It took a long time for me to find out. I was a grown lady when I found out. I thought it would make me feel better, to know, but that ain’t happen. Mama told me Meema ain’t want to talk about none of that to nobody. It cut her heart to bleeding even thinking about it, but Meema had told the white man the truth. Her daddy had ran off. Her mama lost her mind and died. Her grandma died. Her sister died. Meema and her was twins, like me and Huck. She used to get up in the middle of the night, screaming, ‘Rabbit, Rabbit!’
“That’s what Meema’s sister was named. I don’t know why somebody want to name her that, but they did. Meema be looking straight ahead, singing and crying. Used to be singing in words didn’t nobody understand.”
She sighed, moving the church fan. I waited for her to speak again.
“Them was hard times, baby. You understand me? Real hard times. White peoples, they was mean to coloreds. Y’all young folks don’t know how mean they was. Ain’t nobody gone kill a colored man for looking at a white woman now, but they would do them kind of things back then. They was killing colored men like it was Judgment Day. Hadn’t been for Uncle Tommy, I don’t know how hard it would have been for my family. My mama was a good-looking woman. Ain’t no telling what some white man would have did to her if it hadn’t been for Uncle Tommy. Ain’t no telling what would have happened to my daddy trying to protect her. Uncle Tommy kept us safe. He was a good Christian. He was, but I ain’t want to always be standing in no white man’s shade. And all this time, I been asking myself, why couldn’t them crackers just leave us colored folks alone? Let me tell you something. That white man with his contraption, he killed Meema. That’s what he did, bringing all that up. He broke her heart. I loved Meema. She used to give me candy. Used to save it in her bureau drawer just for me. She was a good woman.”
She took off her glasses. Covered her face. There was another long silence.
“I wish that white man never had came up here that day! I wish to God he never had!”
Her voice had lifted to an anguished shriek. I told her I hadn’t meant to make her sad, but she didn’t reply. The tape recorder kept rolling for the next fifteen minutes, as we didn’t speak. Then my granny told me she was tired. She couldn’t talk about this no more. She was gone lay down.
I stood first, holding out my hands. As she took them, I thanked her for her time.
“You welcome, baby. I’ll see you on Sunday, at church.”