Since her arrival, Beauty had seen Lady a few times. She appeared as a white girl, but one day, Beauty had seen the girl with her father, Micco. Instantly, Beauty had recognized this man as a mulatto, for his features were a combination like her own. When she imparted this information to Pop George, however, he put a finger to his lips.
“Don’t be saying nothing like that again, chile, ’less you want to feel the whip.”
And Beauty felt her skin chew over with anger that Lady, a girl who appeared no older than fifteen—a girl with Negro blood—was allowed to live as a white woman. That Lady lived free and high above others and lived in a house with a wood floor, instead of dirt. That here this girl was called Lady, while Beauty had been given a new label, “Ahgayuh,” which wasn’t even Creek!
In time, Beauty’s new name was shortened to “Aggie,” and she decided that she would answer to this, to keep pure the name her parents had given her. For she had been made by two people who had loved each other, and each night under the tattered quilt that she had been given she would take out her memories and wrap herself tightly in them. She was owned, but her memories were not.
III
Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots; then again came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet we did not nod, nor weary of the scene; for this is historic ground.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Black Belt,” The Souls of Black Folk
Deep Country
When I was little, I had expectations of the seasons. Summer was for joy: the ride with my mother and sisters down the interstate to Chicasetta and seeing the Peach Butt in Gaffney, South Carolina. The tall structure that was supposed to look like a piece of ripe fruit but instead looked like somebody’s ass. Picking weeds with my granny, my sisters, and sometimes Aunt Pauline, and sitting on the porch after supper. Running through the peach, pecan, cedar, pine, and oak trees. Nothing barred my way, within reason. So long as I was with one of my sisters or, if alone, within earshot of my mother’s voice, I went wherever I wanted. I was free.
Autumn, winter, and spring contained my trials. There was contentment during the week at home with my sisters and parents. But on the weekends there were the hours spent at the house of my father’s parents. Those terrible Saturday intervals when Miss Delores took her half day and Nana went shopping. When those women abandoned me to the baths that Gandee would draw for us. When he threatened me that, if I ever told anyone about what he did to me, he would kill everyone I loved. I believed him, so I kept his secrets.
I had trusted the adults around me: my parents, the elders down in Chicasetta, Nana, even Gandee. Because I was a child, I’d believed what they told me, no matter how kind or cruelly they behaved. I lived surrounded by a fence made up of trust, one I’d assumed couldn’t be knocked down. But the day I heard Lydia yelling in my grandmother’s foyer, I walked up to that fence. The barest of touches and it fell so easily. This was the barrier separating my childhood from some other place. I wasn’t yet an adult, but my childhood was gone forever.
Before I’d heard my sister’s revelations, it hadn’t occurred to me that Nana might have left me on purpose all those Saturdays up until the year I was seven and Gandee died. I wasn’t sure that Nana had known what he was doing to me, but then, I wasn’t sure she hadn’t. And when I considered Nana’s behavior over the years—her casual rudeness toward my mother, her inability to consider anyone’s feelings but her own—I couldn’t come up with enough evidence to defend her.
I didn’t confront Nana, though, because there was something that I needed from her. That June, I didn’t want to be in Chicasetta by myself, thinking about my sisters. Lydia had disappeared. In a way, so had Coco, who’d phoned me to say a vacation wasn’t possible for her. She had graduated from Yale, and her medical school classes at Harvard University had started that summer. She had too much work to do. In Chicasetta, there would be no place I could go without thinking of the two of them. So I had a new plan: I was headed to Martha’s Vineyard, where I would stay with Nana. Up on the Vineyard, I could come and go as I pleased. And I could see Chris because his parents had a cottage on the Vineyard, too. Nana didn’t know that, of course, and neither did my mother. Only Lydia had known.
When I told Nana my summer plans had changed, she told me she’d be so happy to have me spend the summer with her. She took my hand and squeezed it, and I waited before I slipped away. Even her touch made me sick to my stomach. I could only play my game so much. But though I knew I was letting Lydia down, I kept on visiting Nana every weekend to get what I needed. I never mentioned the things that my sister had shouted that day.