The printed directions aren’t much help since not all the roads are well marked. I’m stuck on what seems to be a narrow dead end, hemmed in on all sides by dense brush and knee-high red-ant hills. In my mind’s eye, I see galloping horses and white robes, fiery crosses. I don’t want to be out here after sundown, that’s for sure.
Creeping along slowly, I search for the house, set back from the narrow road. When I finally see it, it feels like an accident, or like it decided to find me.
There are a few cars scattered randomly across the wide patchwork of weeds, dirt, and gravel that make up what can only loosely be called a yard. Uncle Rod’s giant RV towers over all of them. It’s bigger than the house.
I take in the modest brick ranch my great-grandfather Dash allegedly built with his own bare hands, which may explain why it leans slightly to one side. It’s amazing to me that Gigi held on to this land for so long even though she never came back here except for Aunt Mabel’s funeral. She used to rent it out to hunters during deer season and use the small income it generated as her “fun money,” mostly paying the cable bill and buying scratchers. I guess she was also socking it away in that Hefty bag. The place has been empty for a few years though. It’s four tiny rooms and one bath on a couple acres of land, but it was all hers, and Gigi was proud to have it. She said owning a piece of land made you someone, or at least it made you feel like you were someone. And no one could take it away from you… until they could. I have to shake the thought of my parents losing their house. One heartbreak is enough for now.
The railing shakes as I climb the uneven concrete stairs of the porch to the front door. It’s propped open and everyone has gathered in the living room.
I haven’t seen my uncle Rod since I was a kid. He and Momma have been estranged ever since they had a falling-out after Grandpa Leroy’s funeral over something no one ever talks about. When he steps up to hug me, the smell of his pipe sends me hurtling right back to the second grade. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen smoke an honest-to-God pipe, like a Black Sherlock Holmes.
I give quick hugs to Aunt Rose and two of my cousins, twin girls in their early twenties who are essentially strangers to me and who immediately return to looking at their phones.
Shaun thrusts a glass of wine into my hand. “Here, saved this for you. That’s the last of it, and we can’t get more because of the dumbass blue laws down here. So better drink up.”
The wine tastes like vinegar. That doesn’t stop me from taking three fast sips.
“Where’s Mom and Dad?”
“Dad went ahead to the cemetery to make sure everything’s straight. The limos will be here to drive us over in twenty.” Shaun looks me up and down. “Um, so you better start getting ready? Those sweats aren’t going to cut it. You can guess where Mom is.” He nods to the kitchen.
“Cleaning?” I already know the answer. Momma’s cleaning habits are legendary. Growing up, Shaun and I had a weekend chore list a mile long. In my eighteen years living beneath her roof, the woman never went to bed with a dirty dish in the sink, and now I can’t either. I tried once. I left an ice cream bowl because I’m a grown-ass woman who can leave a dirty bowl in the sink. The freedom! But I was so agitated an hour later, I got up and washed it at one in the morning.
I was eight when Momma first explained to me that white people often think Black people are dirty. I remember it vividly because it was the night of my very first sleepover （aside from those with Jen, who practically lived with us by that point）—Abigail from ballet was coming over. I had one of those intense little-girl crushes on her, with her long auburn pigtails and her dance bag with her name splashed across it in sparkly cursive crystals. To prepare, Momma and I spent the entire day cleaning. She was on her hands and knees, furiously attacking the linoleum under the kitchen cabinets, when she offered up that explanation. This didn’t make one bit of sense to me, since our house always smelled like ammonia and lemon. I’d learned to vacuum before I could even really walk on my own. Not too long afterward, I was allowed to sleep over at Jen’s house for the first and only time. I thought of what Momma had said as I took in the ring of grime around the tub, the crumbs trapped in the couch cushions.
“Germs are good for you,” Lou said when she caught my jaw just about hanging on the floor. “Look at Jenny. Girl’s never sick.”
When it was time to take a bath, I couldn’t find a washcloth. I asked Jen for one, and she told me they didn’t use them. Momma had always made it clear that a washcloth was essential to keeping your private parts “spick-and-span.”
It all left me confused as to who was clean and who was dirty and how these things were determined.
Here’s Momma now in her best black dress, a tattered apron tied around her waist, her head stuck deep in a cabinet, furiously scrubbing.
“Ma?”
When she emerges from the far reaches of the cabinet, one of the curlers in her hair gets caught on the door. “Baby girl!” She drops the wet sponge and takes me up in a hug. “I didn’t know you were here!”
“I just got here. Sorry I’m late.”
“Oh, baby, you’re right on time. Right on time. Here, hand me that roll of paper towels.” She picks up the sponge without missing a beat, and for the first time I think about my mother’s obsessive cleaning like my running, a way for her to feel a measure of control, or at least the alluring illusion of it.
“How are you, Momma?” I haven’t seen her cry yet either.
“Oh, you know, I’m fine. I’m fine. I just want to get this nasty kitchen cleaned out. We may try to finally sell this place. Your father went ahead to the cemetery. I wanted him to buy some flowers. Heaven knows where he’s going to get flowers around here, but he’ll figure it out. That man is resourceful if nothing else.”
“Okay, well, do you need help with anything?”
“No, no, you go get ready.” Momma waves me away with a wet paper towel.
I leave her to her scrubbing and slip into the same black dress I wore for Justin’s funeral. I’ve worn too many sad black dresses lately. I put on the pearls last, fastening the delicate strand around my neck, turning and turning it until the center pearl, the one that is slightly bigger than the others, sits exactly where it should, right above the hollow in my collarbone. I’m ready, and yet not ready at all.
In the back of a boxy Cadillac coupe from the seventies, thighs sticking to the cracked leather seat, my fingers return to the pearls. I stop when Momma looks at me, worried she’ll scold me for fidgeting.
“They look nice on you,” she says, and goes back to looking out the window, twisting her own wedding ring around her bony finger. If we had that type of relationship, I would reach for her hand now.
Finally, after snaking through a string of rural roads, we pull up to a small field. Crooked wrought iron gates frame a small sign announcing the “colored” cemetery, dating back to the 1800s. Daddy is standing in the middle of the clearing beside a minister from the local church. We don’t know him personally. His people are from Perote for generations back, and they knew Gigi and her parents. My dad and the minister are backlit by the setting sun, standing tall, proud, and solemn with clasped hands. It reminds me of a Gordon Parks photograph. I want to run to Daddy like I did when I was a little girl, have him lift me into the air and spin me around. This was before cleaning thousands of toilets left him stooped with permanent back pain. Instead, he receives me with a tight hug.