Joan Steinau Lester

TWO EXCERPTS from BLACK, WHITE, OTHER: In Search of Nina Armstrong

FIRST EXCERPT, opening of Chapter 3:
When Dad and Jimi stride through the front door I see they have a new way of walking together, swaggering in rhythm. Jimi’s growing his hair out too, so he’s even closer to the spitting image of Dad. They’re like Dad and Little Dad. Jimi always did take after him—those full lips and jet-black hair,—while I favored Mom’s redheaded family. We used to joke about it and it never seemed like a big deal before, when we were all mixed up: two kids, two parents, jumbled any which way. Dad would roll outside and we’d toss a ball against the back of the house, or he’d play a computer game with Jimi while Mom unraveled a badminton net with me. But now Jimi and Dad have this circle surrounding them. I can see it in the air, as if somebody took a brown crayon and drew a line around the two of them.
With Mom and me, it’s complicated. Even though our friends say we’re “light version, dark version,” lots of people can’t even figure out we’re related. Once I heard Mom tell her mom, Granny Leigh, “On the ferry to Angel Island, a woman came right up and asked if they were adopted.” Mom’s face flushed and I could tell how angry she was. I thought it was strange that she was so mad, since the woman said how cute we were too, “like sweet little caramel candies.” Instinctively, I walk over and put my arms around Mom from the back. She squeezes me. “Help with dinner?”
“Okay.” I stare down at my arm next to her hands. Darker. How could that boy with Lavonn imagine I was white? I don’t look like anybody in this family.
“Just give me a minute,” Mom says. While I’m waiting, I sprawl in the living room chair with its stuffed arms facing the bay, watching the lights below sparkle like bright confetti. Jimi jumps onto one arm, squirming and leaning into me. I’m glad he’s here for dinner; still, out of habit, I push him off and slap his hand when it touches me. Dad wasn’t supposed to stay, just drop Jimi off, but since he’s hanging around in the living room I tell him, “Dad, at school—”
“Nina, I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. Later, okay?”
So I head into the kitchen where I pour water into a pot for spaghetti. The kitchen’s so small that Mom and I bump into each other. We start butting our behinds on purpose and all of a sudden we’re giggling. When Dad comes in sniffing around the food, as if he’d like some too, Mom hands him a glass of red wine. But she doesn’t say anything. They stand there drinking; neither one says a word. They’re not even looking at each other. “You won’t believe what Jessica said—” I start.
“Look, Maggie, I’m sorry,” Dad interrupts and kind of pitches forward.
“This new girl, Claudette—” I try again.
But Dad ignores me. “Here’s to a good future, Maggie,” he says and raises his glass.
I give up, jiggle the frying pan, and add a few leaves of oregano from the farmers’ market.
“For all of us,” he says.
Mom doesn’t answer. Instead she lifts the pot of boiling spaghetti with two hands and pours it into a sieve I hold over the sink while the steam rises over my face. Then she slams the empty pot back onto the stove. Loud. And she starts to curse.
Dad leans against the wall of the kitchen, pours himself another full glass, but a few seconds later he bangs his glass on the counter so hard half his wine sloshes out, staining the counter red. “It isn’t only me.”
Mom makes a lot more noise with cabinet doors. “Not now!” she says, real sharp, and my insides clench tight as a rock. “Later.” She nods her head in my direction.
“Look, I’ve had it with that martyr look.” He tips up his glass. “The white woman special,” he mutters.
“I said, not now!” Mom turns her back. But I hear her muttering curses and I see her shoulders shake while she stirs the spaghetti with a big wooden spoon. It looks like she’s going to whip it into mashed noodles, she’s beating it so hard.
I don’t know what to do so I ask Dad for the last, tiny sip, and after he hands over the wine it warms my throat and opens my chest. I shake Parmesan cheese from its round green container. I keep shaking and shaking until it’s all gone, and before we’re ready to eat, Dad leaves. I never do tell them what Claudette and Jessica said at school.

A SECOND EXCERPT FROM LATER IN CHAPTER 3, after the story-within-a-story begins, with Nina's great-great-grandmother as the protagonist Sarah:

Every step took her farther from the Armstrong plantation. Yet while her feet moved north, her mind was split, chopped open like a melon cut in two by her father’s axe. On one side, every bit of her brain told her Go, run, legs, run for your life. But the other side of her mind held one silent howl of NO. When Sarah let herself touch that scream, she wanted to turn, sprint, and fling herself onto familiar earth. Everyone she’d ever cared about in her entire fifteen years had been on that plantation. But now, it was hard to believe, all were sold and scattered.
The soles of her feet had touched every inch of dirt around the cabins; she knew the soil when it was dusty and dry, and when it turned to mud that squished between her toes like cool corn mush or sucked her ankles up to her calves. She knew where to find fat earthworms at daylight, wiggling after she tugged them from the ground. Every spring she waited for the red-tipped shoots that sprouted; later, when evenings grew hot, she knew to expect the sounds of crickets chirping in the night, lulling her to sleep.
A light drizzle started up as the past filled her head, both sides united now in grief. The memories rubbed sore spots in her heart, but still she sucked on them the way she’d savored hard, buttery twists of candy at Christmas, caressing them with her tongue, wishing they could last.
Awoooo! Her scalp quivered and the hair on her head stood on end. Yet her feet kept moving. She told herself that if she could get up to that giant mossy pine ahead, she’d rest there—shutting out the night’s screeches and howls—and give herself in to remembering.
There. Just a few more steps.
“Coo, coo, coo,” little Esther had called, chasing a squawking chicken through the yard. Sarah remembered laughing when she watched her sister clap her hands and run. Her brother Albert toddled along behind, weaving a silly line. Wherever Esther was, Albert, with his mischievous eyes and round cheeks, was never far behind.
Sarah thought of days she and Esther had observed baby starlings. The beaks looked half as big as the bodies they could see over the rim of the nest. “Cheep, cheep!” the babies never stopped shrieking, except when their mouths were full. She and Esther watched until the day the tiny birds fluttered off, one by one, on their first wobbly flights from home. The Sunday after that, the nest was bare.
She’d had a lump in her throat that day. Four babies, two parents. The hurt felt like the one she had now, waking from a half-sleep tucked into the crook of a branch low on the mossy pine, its needles prickling her. Only this lump was worse. It felt like a big cornmeal dumpling that wouldn’t go up or down.
She lifted her head to make herself pay attention to the sounds of the night. Could that be a distant baying of dogs? Stop thinking about the past! she scolded, pulling a biscuit out of her pocket for one nibble. But with the familiar taste her heavy heart flew open, and a flood of memory washed in.
Little Albert could mimic the chattering of jays so well he’d fool them into thinking he was part of the conversation. Then she’d scamper up a tree and bring him down a warm bird’s egg. Remembering her brother, heat swelled Sarah’s throat and chest, and for a minute she couldn’t breathe. She thought of how Albert used to climb into her lap and tangle his hands in her long hair, pulling and teasing. Then she and Esther would tickle him until he begged them to stop.
She forced herself to stand up and start moving again. The half-moon was high in the sky. She had only a few more hours until morning, when she should arrive near a road and need to hide. She wondered if the bounty hunters were after her yet. If so, she couldn’t turn back; they might kill her if they captured her. Or make her wish they had.
Now that she was walking, the best memory of all flooded in, the one that made her eyes swim with tears until she couldn’t see the tiny arrow on the compass at all. The memory was about Sundays. Magic Sundays. For a sweet hour, until the moon dipped low on the horizon and the sky showed the first faint signs of pink, Sarah let herself sink into Sundays. Remembering was like being wrapped in a cozy quilt and rocked by Mama. On Sundays, she and her friend Ruth ran to a deep spot in the creek where they splashed and washed. Later they fished with a long strip of green wood, cut from just under the bark of a willow tree. They tied that strip, twisted like twine, to an old bent nail. Sarah forgot how sore her legs were now, after almost a full night of walking, when she remembered her excitement at the tug on the line—“Look, Ruth!” she’d scream—and how it felt in her hands, with the fish jerking one way and her pulling another. The spray was so vivid that for a moment she felt herself flipping up the line, and raised her hand against the water splashing over her head, until, shocked not to feel the drops, she dropped her hand. But she let herself breathe deeply, smelling the fish Mama cooked up on those Sunday evenings, all dipped in cornmeal, and she heard the sizzle in the pan.
When Sarah thought of Mama she thought of Papa standing next to her, giving thanks for their Sunday meal and another day together, and she missed them both so much her chest stung. Then, in the way that pain zigzags through a person like a magnet, one terrible thought triggered another, and she recalled the day that caused the first big crack in her world.
She’d been only six. Turkey buzzards circled high above, and she watched them, wondering. Ol’ Master Armstrong used to tell her that buzzards gave birth to slave babies. “You’re hatched from a buzzard egg,” he’d say with a laugh, his great belly shaking while he swatted at flies. “The stork brings the white babies.”
That day, like every other, Mama was out in the fields while Sarah chipped ice in the icehouse. She had to concentrate, not lose any of the precious, cold chips. Her bare toes dug into the dusty earth while her feet, long for a six year old, twitched. The air was always chilly with fear. Even on hot days, a sheer, invisible shadow made goose bumps on her arms. She could almost see it, like frozen screams.
At midday break she squatted, eating from the lunch trough Aunt Sally put out, sucking her fingers, savoring the flavors, tasting crumbled bread mixed with bits of cabbage, collards, and turnip greens, all made juicy with the pot lickker[AQ11] poured over it.
Focused on licking her fingers, Sarah hadn’t seen ol’ miss until she was on them, flicking her cat-o’-nine-tails at the children. When they fled, scattering, ol’ miss chuckled quietly, “The more they scamper, the more they grow for market.”
Sarah ran as fast as she could to escape the snaky lash that whipped through the air behind her, arching her back away from the stroke. She stumbled and bit her lip, hard. When she put her hand on her mouth to wipe the warm stickiness off, she saw the dark red blood. Ever since, her stomach had tightened when she caught sight of blood.
That night she waited outside until Mama stumbled home by the light of the stars and moon. “What did ol’ miss mean, ‘They grow for market’?” she asked. It sounded scary, the way ol’ miss said the words.
Sarah saw her mother flinch. “Don’t mean nothing, child. Hush.” Her weary mother comforted her later, stroking her head while they lay together on Sarah’s pallet. “Hmmm …” her mother began as she hummed the familiar chant, “It’s all right.” Even then, Sarah remembered, she had a terrible feeling that in spite of Mama’s words, everything was not all right. But she’d forced herself to burrow deeper into her mother, who hummed and rubbed her head until Sarah fell asleep.
Now, nine years later, her worst fears fulfilled, she was running for life. When Sarah saw the sky lighten, she knew she had to find another hiding place, a spot to sleep until night gave her cover to walk again. Creeping under a thicket of tangled brush, she unwrapped her provisions. Sarah longed to crawl toward a creek she heard rushing over rocks nearby, imagining how the cool water would soothe her bruised feet. But she couldn’t risk leaving shelter, even in early dawn. While mosquitoes buzzed and bit, Sarah forced herself to stay put, nibbling a corner of her biscuit.
Suddenly she heard a rustling nearby, the crunch of leaves. Her heart pounded. It came closer. She tried to flatten herself into the undergrowth, pressing into the ground. Twigs snapped. Something large was rapidly approaching. Closer, quicker, until two rabbits darted down the path, chased by a fox. After her heart quieted Sarah closed her eyes, praying no trader would find her while she slept.
Lying in the wet thicket, where she thrashed in spite of her determination to lie still, Sarah’s dreams grew more vivid. The sun rode high in the sky while she slept and dreamt. Her past came swirling at her in dust clouds that covered her until she couldn’t see anything else. In her dreams it was one continuous Sunday, a glorious day with no sound of the whip and a chance to play, or think. Everyone was in her vision: Mama, Papa, Esther, and Albert, just before—
But even in dreams she wouldn’t let her mind go to that terrible day. Instead, she stuck to other memories, the happy ones, all jumbled up into one delicious stew of Sundays.


EXCERPT from FIRE IN MY SOUL: ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Theodore Parker, 1810-1860, Unitarian minister and abolitionist orator


Excerpt from CHAPTER 1: THE ANCESTORS

The city into which Richard Holmes [Norton's great-grandfather] stepped was a city of contradictions. In the heart of world democracy, human slavery was legal. The recently passed Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had ensured his vulnerability to recapture, for crossing a state line was no longer sure protection: those who captured fugitives would be rewarded and harboring refugees was a crime. If found, Richard Holmes could legally be whipped, resold or even executed.
“Nor do I exaggerate how I understand my great-grandfather came here,” his great-granddaughter Eleanor Holmes Norton says a hundred and fifty years later, shaking her head in her plush Congressional office. “Walked off a plantation in Virginia, walked across the bridge. My grandfather told me this story, told it with enormous pride, and passed that pride on to us.
“Richard walked across the District line, because there you could get work, and the white man couldn’t get you unless he could find you. They were building Washington and hired people off the streets every day. My grandfather says that, moreover, under the law, you could come here and get your slave and take him back. The city was swarming with all kinds of blacks: you couldn't tell one from another because Washington had a large number of free blacks. And white people would come from all over looking for their slave.”

In the bustling Washington of the 1850s, Richard Holmes, like thousands of fugitives before him, made his way in a shadow economy. Southwest Washington was home to large numbers of fugitives; twenty-seven neighborhood churches provided relief, and the area housed many stops on the underground railroad. Escaped slaves were welcomed in this part of town. Probably living in a one-room shanty with a dozen others, he soon found work, according to Eleanor, on a construction gang.
“Remember, he came to a city where the Capitol itself,” she roars, “was built in part with slave labor, and blacks free and slave were used throughout the city to build the official buildings and develop the historic streets. Tough as it was, it beat working for nothing as a slave in Virginia.” Foremen on construction sites, needing ready and cheap workers during a building boom, often didn’t ask questions--especially when they could pay a fraction of what they’d pay their white workers or even their slave labor, hired from local owners.
Depending on the kindness of others and his own well-honed wits, crafted for survival, Richard made his way in the city. After only a few weeks, another day came for which he had rigorously prepared. According to family history, handed down generation by generation, while Richard shoveled mud on the side of a road, a white man stalked up and shouted, “Richard!”
Richard didn’t flinch, didn’t so much as move a muscle; he simply kept shoveling. His former owner accosted the foreman,
“That’s my nigger! I’d recognize that nigger anywhere!”
“Looks to me like he ain’t your Richard,” the foreman replied. “He didn’t answer to you. I saw him. He didn’t pay you no mind.”
Rebuffed by the insistence of the foreman, the white man finally gave up. With no way to prove his ownership of this particular disinterested black man, he wandered away. Perhaps he had made a mistake.
So Richard Holmes was, by his own hand, a free man.
“It’s enough to inspire anybody,” she says. “My great-grandfather clearly had been waiting for that day. Yes, he had disciplined himself to know that the day could come and he told himself, ‘Wait for that day. And when that day comes, make sure that you do not know who that man is. He must have practiced the inner discipline not to instinctively respond, even to what every human being responds to: his name! Here’s a man who thought ahead.”