Laney

I’M FINE ENOUGH till I’m breathing in the stench of sea air and the grumble of bay water I see now I never have quite washed away. Ad undas. “To the waves,” literally, but what it really means is “to hell.”

I stand on the bird-dropping-splattered pier, trying to attend to what Ginger is saying about her mama’s peacock book. This is hard for her, too. But I can’t find my way beyond the smells and the looming red of the lighthouse, the birds squawking and trilling and something that sounds like a cross between laughter and barking. The joy of them seems worse than anything nasty could be, laughter at the edge of a newly dug grave. Although this particular grave isn’t new. This grave is peeking out from under decades of weedy underbrush.

It’s only three days, and Betts needs me. Surely I can tolerate three sunny autumn days with my dearest friends.

I try to focus on how much I did love this place those first days: the white houses at the public end of the island perched like lilies on a soft summer pond; the boats arriving with their catch, all the men here crabbers; the children luring baitfish into mason jars with bits of bread and lines of string. I recall one mama crying out, “Run nor’east, honey!” to a girl with a kite who changed direction as if she were a compass. I almost wish Willie J and Manny and Gem and Joey were still little like that, still needing me to help them decide which way to run to catch the wind.

As the splattered purple-red berries on the path smush into the thin soles of my pumps, I try to find comfort in thoughts of my life now: William and the children and our home in Decatur, the many friends pitching in to help with my campaign. My own mama deserves the credit for my running for political office, or perhaps the word is blame, and Faith, too, played a role. But I’d be nowhere at all without friends. Even my first job in government came through a friend of Daddy’s from his Morehouse College days: Maynard Jackson, who was by then the first black mayor of Atlanta. After I’d graduated from Wellesley, not long after my parents moved to Atlanta, I found myself interviewing to work for a spell on Maynard’s reelection campaign.

I hadn’t been working but about a week when someone collected me to take me to Maynard’s office, and before I knew it I was following him to speeches and press conferences, in charge of his outreach to young voters. He took me under his wing the way a man does when he’s known your daddy since the two of them were eighteen. He urged me to apply to law school, and took me back into his fold three years later, when I just couldn’t go back to Tyler & McCoy.

Maynard was the one who talked William and me into buying the house in Decatur, and after we’d already made an offer on a place in Fulton County, too. “Any black is going to have a tough time getting elected in Fulton County unless the white folks in north Fulton manage to secede and re-form Milton County, in which case what’s left of Fulton is going to be poor as the red Georgia clay,” he advised me over fried chicken at Paschal’s, his favorite place for soul food. “A black gal—even one as pretty as you, Laney—she won’t stand a chance. You and William just go on now and have a look at this little house.”

He wiped his hands on a paper napkin, then handed me a note card with an address, a house that was close enough to Agnes Scott College, where William teaches, for him to walk. Maynard had this all thought out.

“Mrs. Davidson doesn’t think she’s quite ready to sell yet,” he said, setting at the chicken again. “But you and William give her a fair price and the only one to suffer will be the real estate agents.” And when I insisted I would never run for office, he replied, “You just go on and make a deal with Mrs. Davidson. Your time will be coming, whether you want it to or not.”

That was the way Maynard did things. He wasn’t a gradualist; he believed the time for change was now. If he offended a few folks or even a lot of folks on his way to getting black Atlanta a fair shake, well, then he offended some folks. That was how he got to be the first nonwhite mayor of a major Southern city, and Maynard was a big believer in dancing with the girl you brought to the party, except maybe when the girl was Bunnie, his first wife.

I ought to have run for office back then if only to give Maynard the pleasure of seeing me run, but it wasn’t until I saw Faith at his funeral that I gave it a sturdy thought. June 28 of 2003, a Friday, with Coretta Scott King and John Lewis there, and President Clinton remembering Maynard’s “gift of gab that could talk an owl out of a tree.”

“Maynard believed politics should be practical, not radical,” President Clinton said that day, and I had to stop to think whether that was true or not. “That we should all strive to be righteous, not self-righteous … and that it was wrong to claim to have the truth and then use it like a stick to beat other people with.”

Half of Atlanta was at that funeral, and Faith must have been eighty by then, but she plowed through the crowd to find me. She pulled out the same key Ginger is jiggling in the lock now and pressed it into my hand at Maynard’s graveside, when she urged me to run for office, when she said she and Maynard had talked about it, that she’d promised Maynard she would see me along. I remember the buttery feel of the silver keychain engraved with the Oxford University seal, from the year Faith studied there. I remember reading the inscription, Dominus illuminatio mea, “The Lord is my light,” and wondering at the irony of that, and then at the irony of her very name, since Faith never did believe in God.

“Come visit me,” she said. “Come next week.” And I promised her I would. I didn’t take the key, though, I said she needed it and she would be there to answer the door. The truth, though, is that even as we stood watching friends scoop earth over Maynard’s coffin, I’d thought I never would return to Chawterley. I never meant to come back.

It took me another seven years to work up my nerve to run for office. Seven years of visiting the simple stone marker on Maynard’s grave as if he might advise me from the other side. Seven years of Faith’s introductions to people at the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Women’s Campaign Forum and Emily’s List, her constantly evolving advice about what office, exactly, I should run for. At Maynard’s funeral, it was the Georgia state congress, but she upped the ante to the U.S. House of Representatives when Denise Majette tossed aside her representation of the Georgia fourth to run for Zell Miller’s Senate seat.

Seven years of Faith’s advice and my excuses: I was better behind the scenes; I’d never be able to raise the money for a campaign; the children were too young to have their lives disrupted; William didn’t have the stomach for being a candidate’s spouse. And underlying the excuses this worry: that questions would be raised about Cook Island, about things I’d not told even William. I’d always meant to, but then as time passed the telling became complicated by the years of things left unsaid.

I told you so, Maynard, I’m thinking as I stand on the berry-splattered steps at Chawterley. But I didn’t, actually. I never did tell Maynard the truth about why I didn’t want to run.

The fact is I felt the guilt of sitting out all the hard stuff my whole life while most folks like me weren’t left with that option. I may as well be white for all the suffering I haven’t been put through. When the civil rights demonstrations tore apart Birmingham, we picked up and moved a thousand miles west, to Denver, to a university where Daddy was welcomed as an important young professor, the heir to the head of his department. I grew up in a world that was all safe neighborhoods and tidy lawns, and if anyone didn’t like me because of my skin color they knew better than to say so because my daddy was an important man. My parents moved back to the South, to Atlanta, only long after the violence had ebbed, when I was safely off at Wellesley anyway.

The only moment that doesn’t fit in my whole happy almost-white childhood was one memory from just before we left Birmingham. I was in the first grade, but I hadn’t been allowed to go out for days, not even to school, like I was sick except I wasn’t, I was baking things with Mama, I was reading books Daddy brought home. He and Mama were always talking, always shushing me and sending me away. And then I was helping Mama pack things in boxes for moving to a new house where I could have my room whatever color I wanted. I wanted purple.

That particular day, the boxing-up day, Mama told me to put on my best dress, we were going out but I mustn’t tell Daddy. This would be our secret and it would be fun to have a secret and Daddy wouldn’t mind if he didn’t know. Mama looked pretty in her church dress, with her hat and gloves, too, and when I asked where we were going, she said we were going to church.

“To church?” I asked. “Will I have to go to Sunday school? I don’t want to go to Sunday school, I want to stay with you and Daddy in the big church.”

Mama stooped down and looked at me, then hugged me and told me Daddy wouldn’t be there. “Remember, we’re not telling Daddy; this is our secret,” she said. And she promised I could stay in the big church with her.

When we got to the church, though, it wasn’t our regular church, and it was already full, with a big crowd of folks outside, too. I couldn’t see anything, so Mama lifted me up and put me on her shoulders. There wasn’t much to see from up there either, though, just the tops of a lot of heads and everyone shushing to hear the preacher.

“You pay attention now, Laney,” Mama said. “You won’t much understand, but you pay attention. You try to remember.” And she patted my leg.

I think Mama was already crying when she said that. She didn’t want me to see she was crying but there were so many people crying that I only could wonder why she wanted to take me to someplace so sad. I thought it was going to be a fun time, a secret.

And then the preacher was talking about some little girls like they were heroes. He was saying, “They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution.” And I couldn’t tell from the way Mama just kept crying, the tears on her cheeks and her shoulders shaking, what she wanted me to think. Did she mean for me to be like the girls Dr. King was talking about, or not like them? My daddy must have wanted me to be not like them, I decided. That that was why I was meant to keep secret that we were there.

Do we want our children to be heroes, or to be safe? As a mother now, I see Mama’s answer would have been “Both A and B above” if that answer had been available. But I don’t expect it ever is.

Even after Mama had her stroke, when she looked up at me from that hospital bed and wept like she had at that funeral for those little girls who died in the church bombing, I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me. It wasn’t until she died the next night, until I was on the telephone telling Ginger she was gone, that I heard what Mama had been trying to tell me my whole long life, what Maynard had been trying to tell me and Faith still was. It’s a different thing, though, when your own mama is trying to do the talking with a final breath she doesn’t have.

So what am I doing now? I should be standing up and shouting out the truth, saying This is what I did and the consequence belongs to me or to folks long dead or perhaps to us all, to every one of us except Betts. But I’m standing idle, saying nothing. Even in my campaign, I’ve been clinging to caution. I’m running for office, but I’m running a safe race. I take pains to offend no one. I’m as white as a black woman can be.

AT THE CHAWTERLEY door, Ginger rattles the key in the knob furiously, but still the thing won’t open. “Shit shit shit,” she says.

“Let me,” Max insists. Let me do this for you, this one small thing.

Ginger surprises me by stepping aside to allow Max her place at the door. He works the lock without any fuss at all, and opens the door just a crack before handing Ginger back the key.

The door creaks wide at Ginger’s touch: to the dim interior, to a back foyer wider than William’s and my bedroom in Decatur, with twin staircases rising high to the second floor. What strikes me first is the musty, slightly moldy odor of an old house closed against the damp for months but unable to keep it out. I taste it deep in my throat, and I turn back to the bay as if it’s one more glance at the view I’m after, and not the pier and the boat and the possibility of escape. This is the best alternative we have, I understand that, I do. And I suppose Ginger never did say the lighthouse was gone, she only said a new lighthouse had been built closer to town and that if we didn’t get here before sunset the approach to the house would be awfully dark. I’ve only imagined that they tore the lighthouse down, that no one could ever again turn off the lantern and lean out over that rail.

White sheets cover the upholstered chairs in the back foyer, the rattan furniture in the Sun Room to the left, the grand piano in the Music Room to the right. The thin white fabric floats above the floors like ghosts moving in, taking over, claiming this as their home.

Ginger is trying to look sturdy, but she’s more spooked by the ghostly furniture than I am. Poor Ginge. She’s forever bluffing without so much as a pair of twos in her hand. We need Betts to say something to make us laugh, but she just stares into the Music Room as if the ghost of Mrs. Z is settled in the chair by the fireplace, her zhaleika to her lips.

It’s colder in the house than outside: cold stretch of marble floor, cold expanse of high white ceiling, cold empty stone hearths in every room.

Max settles our bags and places a gentle hand on the small of Ginger’s back. “Wish I’d known you were coming,” he says. “I could at least have uncovered the sofas.”

Betts thunks down her swanky little black leather briefcase like she might mean to crack right through the cold marble, which maybe she doesn’t intend to do or maybe she does. A disturbance is just what we do need, though. When we all startle at the noise, she makes a face that is Betts at her silliest, and everyone smiles.

“Well, I’ll leave you to yourselves then,” Max says. “I’m just down the road if you need anything.” He gives Ginger a friendly peck on the cheek and then, on a second thought, wraps his arms around her and holds her for a long moment. She closes her eyes, her lashes moist, unblinking.

“Neighbor,” he says, the single word loaded heavy with fondness, with the kind of love that comes with being friends as children and ever since. “Really, if you need anything at all.” It might be his attention lingers on Mia just before he closes the door quietly, or it might be it doesn’t. It might be I just want to think it does.

Ginger gathers up what she hopes looks like courage. I half expect her to say something like “The thing I hate most is waking up next to a fella whose name I don’t know.” Except that here her bluff would be something more like “The thing I hate most is returning to the home of a dead mama I understood so very well.” My face flushes with the guilty memory of Faith’s gravelly rough voice over the telephone, conversations Faith would have liked to have with Ginger rather than with Betts or Mia or me, but Ginger and Faith never could talk. Which was true of Mama and me, too, I suppose. It’s the weight of the dreams, the feeling you’re meant to do what your mama and daddy couldn’t do, that the path you choose will complete their lives, or not.