Skin

Patricia Foster

A dark night, a clean clear night when I stand in the brightly lit room and examine my whiteness: my face is as pale as the moon, my eyebrows a wisp of smoke, my lips barely touched with pink.  Freckles speckle my nose, my cheeks, and with one finger I trace the veins along my forehead, thin tracks of soft, faded blue.  Sometimes I think I can lie on my bed and disappear, a ghost-self of near invisible hue.  “You’re just so. . . so white!” people yell at me on the beach, laughing at my absence of a tan.  At such times, I blush, embarrassed, turning quickly away, but tonight my whiteness tells a different story.  It shoves something old and forbidden down my throat

I'm staying in Tuskegee, Alabama, a small historic town in the Black Belt of Alabama, a town whose population is 99% black, a town I never visited during the eighteen years I lived in Alabama.  No white person I know went there either, as if Tuskegee were another country, a foreign land, a discarded place that existed on the far side of the moon.  But now, at age forty-six,  I’ve interrupted something in myself, walked over the border and put down my suitcases, shaken the dust off my shoes.  I’ve come here intentionally, done all the things that intentional travelers do: checked air fares and schedules, made arrangements for a place to stay, rented a car (my getaway), bought a new shower cap and extra toothpaste, and worried about what I’m trying to find.  It’s not that coming here is so radical -- this visit to an all-black town.  No, what astonishes me is that it’s so deliberate, so purposeful, so fraught with foolish expectations and hungry dreams.  Like all travelers, I’ve come here to translate myself, to become someone different, someone new as if the journey itself is an act of transformation.   And yet I’m frightened.  I don’t know how to act, how to treat black people as friends, as equals, as part of the casual conversation going on inside my head.  In my mind, their history keeps them separate, distinct, like guarded souls sealed up in a story I have no right to, a story of public pain and hidden pleasure while my story stems from hidden pain and public pleasure, the fate of a white middle class girl.

But those first days in Tuskegee, I don’t see any of this.  It will take me a long time to understand that what frightens me has lived all along inside me: the terrible fear of being unmasked, vulnerable and disappointing, a girl with too little to hold.  Awareness shimmers only in the distance like heat lightning flickering on the horizon, the air too close to my skin.  Instead, I stare at my whiteness in the mirror and wonder, What can I possibly hope to rectify?

“We’ve got to rectify what we’ve done to the colored folks,” my great uncle used to say as he drove me through the narrow streets of our small Alabama town, staring out the window at the black men who sat together on the courthouse square, exchanging gossip, dipping snuff, watching the white folks go about their daily business.  They looked older than Moses, their skin the color of ash, the whites of their eyes as milky as an oyster.  My great uncle’s skin was the color of Vic’s Vapor Rub, brown-spotted, wrinkled, mottled chicken flesh loose at his elbows and knees.  “Yes sir, got to rectify,” he nodded, earnest, sincere, though I could tell he hadn’t a clue what rectification might include beyond the Civil Rights Movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Though I nodded in agreement, I had a lot of other things on my mind, things like love and happiness and a particular man named Thad.  Oh, I applauded all the right causes --integration, civil rights, affirmative action-- but I had no intention of changing my life for them.  Ideas were ideas.  They lived in the cool isolation of your head.

Though I saw little of my great uncle after the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, I remembered how vigilantly he stared at the TV when Dr. King was on, turning up the volume and pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his long nose so he could see “that black man tell ’um how it is.” I was older by then and saw this great uncle only occasionally, too busy with my own life to attend to his, as little by little--like a turtle--I pulled my head out into the air.  I sniffed the winds, took stock of the direction of other people’s thoughts.  I married Thad and worked for the Department of Public Welfare in a small Tennessee town, spending a good bit of my day going on home visits, trying to ignore the chickens that pecked around my feet in the scratchy dirt yards and the hound dogs that rubbed their mangy backsides against my bare legs. There were as many poor whites as poor blacks in the county where I lived: sharecroppers and scrap haulers, maids and cotton pickers, trappers and junk dealers.  “Can’t you help get me no job, Miss Pat?” a woman would sometimes ask, looking appealingly at me with dark, anxious eyes, a child clinging to her arms, but I was too busy with paperwork and time sheets to do more than issue food stamps and send women to the Health Department for pregnancy tests and birth control pills.  “Sorry, Ailene, you have to go down to Mrs. Turkle for that.”

What shook me up instead was that my own life fell apart.  Divorce.  Breakdown.  Unemployment.  I had something to rectify then.  It wasn’t just an idea.  No sir, it was like re-directing the flow of a mighty river swept into some wild, serpentine path.  The water chilled and terrified me, sweeping me along in its mad, unruly flow.  Rectifying, I realized, was a heap of trouble all its own. 

---

“Yes, ma’m” the maid says with bland politeness when I ask for extra towels.

“I don’t know why I use so many,” I continue as if I need to explain myself. I’m still in my old blue bathrobe with the frayed collar and want to say something nice to this neatly dressed black woman in the gray uniform, something more personal about why I’m here at the Conference Center in Tuskegee, Alabama, about the writing class I’m teaching at the library, but what is there to say?  When the maid leaves, I sit down on the bed and sigh.  I’ve been here two days and everyone is so polite, so formal it’s like a stone wall of resistance, everybody nodding and smiling, their smiles frozen, predictable, like the smiles of clerks in K-Mart-- have a niceday!   I worry a loose thread on my robe as I finger the extra towels.   I had expected it to be so different, to find myself immersed in the soft chatter of talk as if talk had a size and shape big enough to roll around in, to get lost in.  Talk is what I came South for, believing it would be an opening, a wedge, a movement in the brain like the hiss of  rippled silk.  When I sped down the interstate on Wednesday, high on purple wild flowers and air thick as gauze, I thought of this as my big adventure, a kind of prodigal return.  “Carrying on,” I imagined my great uncle saying, nodding his earnest approval.  “Yes sir, rectifying.”  But now I’m cautious, self-conscious, like a person on display.  I’ve never been so aware of my whiteness before, my blonde hair knotted in tight curls, red lipstick accentuating the paleness of my skin.  Maybe it’s the wrong color.  I get up to wipe away a blur at the corner of my mouth.

Stop worrying, I tell myself.  Quit this fretting.  “You’re just getting your feet wet,” I say to my image in the mirror.  And it’s true.  I’ve come down here to teach a two-day summer writing class to men and women at the public library.  It’s an idea I dreamed up myself, a belief that writing will bring people closer to themselves, closer to each other as if writing is the great liberator, the freedom bus, the healing tonic close at hand.  To calm myself I sit on the bed practicing relaxation exercises, filling my mind with gentle black faces beaming their good will,  their pens poised above sheets of clean white paper.

 

The class meets in a small storefront library, one shabby room with a life-size poster of Zora Neale Hurston and fewer books than my own library at home.   Twenty people sit crowded around three tables staring at me as if I just dropped in from Mars.  I’m surprised to see two white people, a white woman and an elderly white man who sits erect and separate, tufts of cottony hair sprouting from his ears. 

As soon as I’m settled in an empty chair, the librarian, Mrs. Louisa Dawes--a pretty caramel-colored women dressed in bright pink--raps on the table to quiet everyone.  “Ya’ll, listen now while I introduce Miss Foster who’s come down here from Iowa with a P. H. .D.”   She says each letter as if it’s separate and important, and immediately I think I should be smarter, wiser, more poised than I can rightfully be.  And yet the class looks unmoved by the announcement as if Ph.D.’s are as common as dirt, no more bother than a dog’s breath, a flea bite, a spider’s web, and I tell myself to settle down, get with the program.  As I move to the head of the table I see the assignment I asked Mrs. Dawes to distribute last week sitting undisturbed, on top of the stack, and I have a small but cataclysmic panic attack.  What am I doing here?  Who are these people?

I look over at Zora and I swear she winks.  Com’on, girl.  Get a little action going.  And I move quickly to the “getting to know you” phase of the class.

 “My name is Carter Johnston,” the first man announces, rubbing his hands together as if he’s about to throw lucky dice, “but everybody calls me C. J. so you can too.”  I nod hello and we go around the room: Miss Carlene, Miss Xaviera, Paul Z, Mrs. Roberta, Mrs. Bessie, Miss Cicely, Miss Lasanya, Miss Corinne, Miss .. . .   Men and women anywhere from thirty to seventy years old, three girls no more than sixteen.  Despite my desire to pay attention, I’m distracted by a piece of paper fluttering near the air-conditioner vent.  It sounds like the buzz of a small helicopter, like a mind splitting apart.  I notice a fly zigzagging around the group, circling and circling as if it’s gone mad.

“I’m excited that so many of you have come to the library to write about your lives,” I say, though my voice sounds pinched, self-conscious, and quickly I move to a fifteen minute pep-talk on concrete detail and specificity—“Now when you talk about a hat, you’ve got to tell us whether it’s a blue ball cap turned backwards on your head or a wide-brimmed sun hat with pink ribbons unraveling in the breeze.”   I plow through the field of my knowledge, spouting familiar ideas that grow like alfalfa in my head: character, dialogue, point of view, dramatic situation, diction, exposition, interior voice.  I’m off and running, feeling suddenly exuberant, purposeful, words slipping easily off my tongue as I talk about the way a writer slows the narrative down to show a particular moment, an action, an event, a thick slice of life.  The moment of horror when you watch your dog run out in front of a car.  The moment you see your sister dive off the pier into the swampy creek.  The moment you wake up frightened from a bad dream.  As I settle into my spiel, I greedily collect the heat of their attention like a single focused gaze-- they like me! -- a loosening among us, and I’m relieved that I’m able to ad lib, to settle back down to earth.  I’m in the middle of a sentence when a white hand shoots straight up like a spear in the air.

“Yes sir?”  I’m pleased by a first question.

The white man leans intimately towards me, brow wrinkled, lips pursed.  He swallows loudly as if there’s phlegm in the back of his throat, then says hoarsely, “Now listen here, you’re doing all the talking.  I don’t like that.  What makes you think you have so much to say?”

Too astonished to reply, I only nod at him while something old swells in the back of my throat.  I am nothing, no one.  I look beyond him into what seem like black expressionless faces: one woman is quite beautiful, her tight gray curls sculpting a small, regal head; another woman looks tired and bored, sucking on her bottom lip.  One girl pulls at her eyebrows.  Another twirls her dangling earring.  An older woman picks lint off her t-shirt that says in bold letters ADVANTAGED.  There’s an awkward pause and I realize I’ve misinterpreted their interest.  They were merely being polite.

“Well, she’s the teacher,” Miss Carlene, a large black woman, speaks up.  “She’s supposed to talk.”  Miss Carlene smiles benevolently at me and with that heat, blood flows back into my veins.  I give Miss Carlene a private room and extra bath towels in heaven.

“That’s right,” I say as if this is news to me.  “I’m supposed to talk. . . but I’m only introducing the subject and I want to hear from all of you, so let’s get down to the business of writing.  Let’s write for fifteen minutes about a moment in childhood that still has heat, a particular event that’s filled with emotion, then we can all talk about what we’ve written.”

Though they begin promptly, heads bent, pencils moving, all but three women stop writing after five minutes and stare blankly at the dust floating in the air.  “I don’t much like writing,” Miss Cicely whispers when I ask her what’s wrong.  “It don’t come out like it’s supposed to.”

“I can’t think of nothing to say,” one of the teenagers says and begins erasing

“I’d rather read stuff in a book,” C.J. agrees, looking expectantly at me. 

But of course, I’ve planned nothing of the sort, have stayed up late thinking only of writing assignments until they’ve multiplied inside my head. I frown at the clock.  Two more hours to fill.

“Well, I don’t know about the rest of ya’ll, but I want to read my stuff,” Miss Carlene says proudly, then stands and reads a story about being invisible, unseen, sitting out on her front porch under God’s blue heaven and vanishing like milkweed in the air.

“That’s wonderful,” I say, grateful for this woman’s lush, honest voice.

“But she ain’t white,” C. J says.  “Milkweed is white.”

“I don’t think it has to be literal,” I say, smiling.  “It can be representative, symbolic, something blowing away, vanishing, you know.”

“I don’t think it works,”  C.J. persists, looking archly at me.

“You don’t know anything,” Miss Carlene says.  “Listen to the teacher.”

“I went to college longer than you did,” C. J. says.  “And I know it don’t matter if it’s concrete if it’s wrong.”

Somehow we manage to get through the next two hours, the air conditioner blasting us with frosty air, the men and women bickering with each other, some not bothering to write at all, but chatting with each other while I talk. At the end of the class people say their goodbyes, telling each other about the Saturday market on the square, about the revival going on down near Notasulga every night. “You oughta come,” Mrs. Dawes tells me, “and see what t’s like.”  There’s the scraping of chairs, the sudden wash of heat when the front door’s opened wide.  I see the old white man look insistently at me, demanding my attention, and for a moment I think he’ll apologize as he sidles up close and leans near.  “I hope you learned something today,” he says scornfully in his loud old man’s voice.

Alone in my room, I marvel at what I’ve learned: First, this is no adventure, no blessed return. Second, nobody likes me.  I can feel it in their eyes.  I’m just a drive-by visitor dumped in their laps.  And writing?  How could I possibly have thought writing made anything clearer?  Writing is just plain hard.  It stirs up the water, makes things murky, cloudy, unsettled, all those ideas jiggling fast against each other, shaking loose fuzziness instead of focus.  I’m so upset with myself, I get in my rental car and drive to the next town, a white town, where I can sit in a restaurant and look bluntly at white people, not caring a hoot what they think.  I listen to the chatter of other customers, hear the waitress joke with two old men in the next booth.  “Oh, I’m hanging in there like loose teeth,” she laughs as she refills their water glasses and asks about their golf game.  Then she sees me and smiles sunnily.   “Now what you want, sweetie?”

What I want is to understand why I’m here, to believe it’s not all vanity, indulgence, some old karma working its way through my mind.

Slowly, I eat my hamburger, then drive back along the winding roads, past the old Victorian mansion with intricate fretwork, a small windowed turret, and a spacious porch that wraps around the west end of the house.  Once it must have been beautiful; now sun-bleached weeds grow wild near the entrance and peeling paint and busted screens suggest desertion.  A dead raccoon lies stiff as a stuffed toy in the middle of the road.  Kudzu drapes over trees and ditches and when I roll down my window, the air feels like Jello.  I swear it hasn’t moved all day.  Even the trees look wilted into place.  I drive past the boarded up windows and faded Dr. Pepper signs in the town and when I go through the lobby of the conference center, I stare straight ahead.

 

The next day only six faces greet me around the table.  Six black faces.  The white people have fled.   Good riddance, I think.  Maybe it’s the whittling down of the class that makes the difference but today I’m more pulled together, not so anxious or afraid.  “Let’s talk about race,” I say, looking at those six curious faces, “about the fact of it, about the stories we tell ourselves about it, about the silence behind it.”

Miss Carlene vigorously nods her head.  “I can’t stand it when somebody says they don’t see color.  Everybody sees color.  It’s the first thing you notice.”

“Absolutely,” I agree.  How smart I’ve become in twenty-four hours!  Only yesterday did I realize how white I was.  “But good white people don’t want to admit it.  It makes us nervous,  makes us think we’re racists and we don’t want to be racists anymore.  We think we’re liberated, been given our exit papers.”

Miss Carlene smiles.  “You know when we left here yesterday I asked these girls if they had a moment of forgetting that you were a white girl. . . just a moment.”  She pauses.  “And you know, everybody shook their head.  You are just . . . white!” she laughs.  The girls start to giggle and then everyone joins in.  As we laugh, the tension eases out of the room as if it’s a bad smell that’s been hanging around us for days.  My shoulders loosen.  My mind clears. Everything seems ready now, poised for my assignment, the one I’ve been waiting to give.  “Everybody can write about our difference,” I begin, “the distance between the races, but I want you to write about a moment of intimacy, of emotional closeness you’ve had with a person of another race.”

Xaviera’s mouth falls open.

“Nah!”  Roberta scoffs.

“I can’t,” Cicely whispers, pushing her chair back, frowning.

“No, I mean it,” I say.  “A ‘moment’ of intimacy-- not a lifetime.  I just want everybody to think of one time when you’ve felt something about somebody of another race.  Maybe you admired something, felt sympathetic towards somebody because they were sick or in trouble, or maybe you’ve helped someone or they’ve helped you.”

Six black faces look at me in dismay.  “Maybe you don’t know the person well, but you’ve noticed something about them.  You know, you see a woman who=s having a hard time carrying her child or a man pushing his Down’s Syndrome kid in a swing.”   I’m back-peddling now because there’s so much resistance.  “You see someone in a wreck, a little kid who’s fallen off his bicycle, an old man in the Emergency Room.”  Truth be told, I’m also having a hard time thinking of examples; what comes to mind isn’t intimacy with a person of another race, but the feeling of intimacy I had for my great uncle when he made his pronouncements advocating change. 

“I used to think I was better than black people,” he told me one Sunday when I brought him some crowder peas my mother had put up in the spring.  “Thought it meant something when a black person stepped off the sidewalk when I walked by.  Stepped right off into the dirt, they did because they had to.  I used to think that was the way it should be.  But that was only an immature ego, something that made me feel better, kicked me up a notch.  It was the way I was brought up, thinking color not character made the man.  Character. . . now there’s something to think about.  Then one summer I worked with a black man up at the University.  I was shelving books and he was emptying the trash, but he’d read more than I had, and when I had to open up the Special Collections Room for him so he could get the garbage there, he asked me if I’d read Faulkner and Tolstoy. Said they’d make me think about things.” 

I can see my great uncle buttoning up his old cardigan sweater and picking up a watering can, going out to the garden, talking to himself about Sutpen in Absalom!  Absalom!—“Jesus, all that naked fighting in the barn and that business with Clytie”-- or about the worms on his tomato plants.  I thought when he talked he said important things, things my family never talked about as if certain silences were the natural order of the universe.  In silence, there was protection and safety where no mistakes could be made, no danger spread.  Silence meant there was no arguing, no indecision, no bad thoughts leaping from your mouth.  But silence also meant there was no unburdening, no sense of relief that the worst part of you was pushed out into the air.

As I look at the class, I realize I’ve seldom said what I think about race because I don’t know what I think except that black people make me feel anxious and awkward, as self-conscious as a mole startled by sunlight.  Even as I sit here I remember the evenings my mother and I drove through Aronville, the black section of my hometown with its shanties and wide ditches, its septic tanks and dead snakes lying like discarded belts in the road; I’d shrink at first from looking at the houses, the people, the dirt yards as if an aesthetic barrier protected me from this community.  Though the sun still shone like a faded orange bloom in the sky, everything here looked gray, dirty, sunken in, the porches warped, rickety, sometimes an entire house leaning at an odd angle, the cracks in the doors and windows covered with cardboard, nothing but wooden stilts between the house and the ground.  It was obvious even to a child that any critter could work its way into the foundation, and I knew that rats and snakes would most likely be first.  If it was summer and we were taking Ora home there would be the smell of collards and pomade and something sickly sweet mixed with the smell of dirt and goldenrod and honeysuckle.  In winter, the smell of wood smoke, pine needles, and burning leaves dusted the air.  As we drove by, skinny-legged black children stopped in their games and stared at us as if suspended in a vision, sticks and balls clutched tightly in their hands.  Simultaneously, I’d stare back at them, trying to assimilate this world into my picture of American small-town privilege with its black maids and yard men, its trips to the ocean, the swimming pool and shopping malls of Mobile.  I knew I should smile at these kids, but I was simply curious, wanting them to show their distress while  they merely stared back at me as if I were an anomaly too. 

For a moment, I sit quiet, listening to the air conditioner start its wintry blasts, thinking how we’ve all just claimed the racism in ourselves.

“Listen,” Roberta is the first to break the silence, “black people can like you, but you can only get in so far,” she says, holding her hand about two feet from her chest.

The others nod.

“But that means you can never really let a white person be your friend,” I say, withholding the word ‘me.’

“That’s right,” Roberta says.  “That may sound bad, but it’s true.  What happens over a lifetime of bad things happening is you don=t allow yourself to trust.  You get mean and small.  There are decent people on both sides, but when you’ve been through as many battles as I have, you’ve been worn down.”

“That’s it,”  Nancy chimes in.  “And there are days I take offense at what a white person says just because I’m in a mood.”  She looks sad, dispirited, not happy with this truth.  “But you know what would kill me?  If my son married a white girl.  That would be a betrayal.”

At first, I stiffen as if rebuked, but then I think of how often I’ve heard the same sentiment from the other side.  Nothing terrifies many white people like the threat of intermarriage.  It brings up the possibility of black babies and kinky hair, of a solid line dividing the family into two tribes.   And yet as the talk continues, it surprises me to discover that most of these women have a white person in their families, somebody ‘married in’, somebody from up north, somebody crashing the party.  For awhile I remain quiet, but then I say, “You know, if I’m honest,  I’ve never had a moment of intimacy except with the black maids who used to work at our house.  That was all I had.”

They nod at me as if now I’ve entered their world.  The world of color.  The world of buttressed lives and blunt talk, the world of stalled separation, of stark memories.  “That’s the only good connection my auntie had,” Xaviere says.  “She was a maid to these white children and she was always talking about them.  Once she came home and told us about fixing them blueberry cobbler and how good it was, how everybody put whipped cream on top and the little boy ate three helpings.  She was so proud of her cooking.  But I hated that little boy because I didn’t get no cobbler.  But I don’t want to write about that.” 

Just a moment, I think, and realize how presumptuous I’ve been.  Instead we continue writing about our childhoods, Carlene argues with her nappy hair, Xaviera with her chubby eight year-old self, Louisa mourning the loss of the country, the real country with polecats and wild dogs and moonshine hidden in the woods.  Roberta surprises us all by writing about a can of syrupy peaches she longed to eat.  And there was only one left, sunk deep in the bowl, buried by an ocean of syrup.  I reached in to pull it out.  So sweet.  So good.   When the two hours are over, we don=t stop, but keep going until Carlene throws down her pen.  “Okay, that’s enough.  I’ve got to have me some carbohydrates.”

Someone goes across the street to Syder’s Grocery and we push back our chairs, waiting, then heaping vanilla ice cream and strawberries in plastic bowls, cramming our faces, laughing and talking while the ice cream melts in a puddle of sugary cream.

That afternoon I drive away from Tuskegee, looking at the white sheets blowing in the wind beside a house trailer with a TV dish larger than the car.  There are tarpaper shacks falling in on themselves, vines climbing smartly up the telephone wires.  Black children run around the yard, yelling, playing some game.  As I drive further into the boonies, I think about the story my great uncle told me about a visit from the Ku Klux Klan.  It happened in a small town in the mountains, a poor part of the state where he first started as a doctor.  The men, mainly sharecroppers and small businessmen, waited with everyone else in the waiting room, staring at the picture of a doctor standing next to a little girl with polio.  In the picture, the doctor and the little girl are both smiling, the little girl with leg braces and a snaggle-toothed grin, the doctor modestly proud.  The men remained until the last patient had been treated and left, then stood up as a group and said their piece.  “We ain’t sick,” they said.  “We’re just here to talk.  Business.”  And they made their offer while sweat leaked down their backs and their necks strained with expectation.  The doctor would be a catch.  An important member.  But no, he shook his head.  “Got lots of sick people in the county,” he said.  “That’s enough to keep me busy.”  No anger.  No Get Out of My Office.  No threat to stop this foolishness. The great uncle just picked up his black bag and walked out to his car.

“Got to rectify what we’ve done,” he kept saying to me. “Got to act.” And I’d imagined white people going into Tuskegee like an army of Peace Corp volunteers, nurses and teachers and plumbers, taking with them everything they’d learned.  But so much of what we’ve learned is  the bare fact of color, the blunt paternalism of power.             

---

    In the dusky light of early evening, I’m sitting in a dark parlor, looking at the ravaged body of my great uncle.  He’s lost in old age and illness, moaning occasionally, then coming back to himself.  I listen to the rhythm of the white housekeeper chopping onions, preparing dinner.  Behind her the sky is slate blue, the cicadas just starting their nightly drone.  I begin telling my great uncle about the trip from Iowa to Tuskegee, about the students in my class, how we’ve talked about the nuances of race.  I hide everything that’s been difficult, uncertain.  I don’t tell about my own nervousness, the way anger and tension rises in me like a tide. I don’t tell him about my uncertainty, my confusion over what it means to be a good person, a good white person.  The old man listens for awhile, then waves his hands in great agitation.  “I can’t hear about that.  There’s no more time,” he says, his voice so quavery, I go quiet and still.  “I gotta talk to Jesus.”  And he closes his eyes.  “I love you, Jesus,” he whispers in his faint, quivery voice, and when he opens his eyes, tears bud on the lids.  For the first time I notice his skin is sallow and dry, the color of old sandpaper, the veins faded and prominent, big bruised spots flowering like tiny eggplants across his hands.  The cicadas buzz louder, shriller than a chorus.  He coughs and spits, then he points a finger at me.  “Who are you?  You the teacher?” he asks suddenly as if he doesn’t recognize who I am.  “You the one with big ideas?”

I nod.

“Carrying on,” he says with a hint of a smile.  “That’s the thing to do.”  But so much talk seems to tire him and without another word he closes his eyes, settles suddenly into sleep.

As I drive back to Tuskegee, I think that I no longer know what it means to carry on.  I’ve come down here naive and ill-informed, believing I could survive on good intentions.  But good intentions never anchored anyone, never won any wars or established a beachhead.  Good intentions, I understand, are among the passive virtues, safe conduct only in the landscape of dreams.  Instead, relationships are built on mutual needs, often singly, one by one by one. 

I try not to think about my great uncle as I sit with Louisa Dawes in the African-Methodist-Episcopal Church in Tuskegee the next Monday night.  I have missed the revival week of New Testament celebration, but I’m here for a baptism, in this fine red brick church of over 100 pews.  Louisa invited me the last day of class and I surprised myself by saying yes, though it meant a quick turnaround trip to Tuskegee.  So here we sit side by side in the middle of the church, surrounded by hymnals and programs and the nods of prominent members who sing with the spirit.  The baptismal party crowd together at the very front of the church, everyone dressed in white, the women in white robes and hats that look like old-fashioned pillbox hats, the daughter young and soft in white silk, her hair pulled back into two smooth plaits braided with white ribbons.  The minister talks in a voice of pure honey about losing oneself in life, about loss and resilience, about the very difficult matter of faith.  I listen as he tells the story of losing his son to leukemia, about the real fact of grief and its anguish. I listen as he tells about a morning of demonic agony when he couldn’t quit the sorrow, couldn’t bless the life, then months later another morning of cool breezes and the smell of honeysuckle in the air, the chirping of birds, the first hint of relief.  I watch as the little girl mounts the stairs to the baptismal, her legs like thin brown stalks.  The girl vanishes from sight as she winds her way up the hidden stairs.  Then she reappears with the minister in the balcony of the church, a place lighted with soft lights as if it’s the very top of heaven.  It’s here that the baptism will take place.  It’s here that the minister holds the girl in his arms, asks her about her belief, asks her to choose Jesus, then lowers her whole body into the pool of blue water.  “Take us to Jeeee-sus,” the choir sings soft and swaying as if singing is their life. “Give us to Jeeee-sus.”  And there is something in that pure sound, that lowering of a girlish body in a pool of cool water that opens me.  I feel a sudden spill of tears and for once I don’t try to tidy my emotions, but let them leak across my face.  I know that I am right in the middle of a difficult matter of faith. I don’t know what I believe, what I want to believe, what I believe I can want.  My great uncle is dying and with him many of my naive notions of change.  I don’t know what will replace them, how I’ll break this new silence.  I’m caught in the middle of this when Louisa’s hand moves over to gather up my own.   It’s such a simple gesture, I don’t think as our fingers intertwine. 

As I’m driving away from Tuskegee, I imagine a distant time in the future when my great nieces will tell this story, repeating bits and pieces of what I’ve told their mother.  They’ll huddle together as little girls do up in the attic or the basement of one of their houses and talk about the old aunt, wrinkled and weird, the one who can’t shut up about her stupid life.

 “She’s crazy,” one of them will say.  “She can hardly remember anything ‘cept her silly stories and that old place, Tuskegee.  You’d think it was interesting.”

  “Oh, forget about her, let’s do something fun,” the first one says, eyeing the trunk full of dress-up clothes.

But the third little girl sits apart, rapt and surprised at the turn of her thoughts.  She peeks at her skin: how white it is!  It looks like a sheet has fallen over her, clamped tight to her thighs.  She wonders if it’s important, if anybody notices.  She wonders if you can go through life forgetting that it’s there.  That skin.  White skin.

 

Reprinted from Just Beneath My Skin: Autobiography and Self-Discovery by Patricia Foster, by permission of the University of Georgia Press.