Read Online Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) by Tracy K. Smith - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Tracy K. Smith
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like me.
I stayed indoors most days, sitting on the floor or reading in one of the chairs by the record player. I imagined my cousins playing in the woods on their visits to this place, but the woods were yet another unknown for me, so dark and alive. I worried that a wolf or a bear would find me there and carry me away. Even when Mom and Mother went out visiting or shopping, I stayed inside with Mama Lela, not bothering to decipher too much of what she said. I was afraid. Not for me but for my mom out there on thosecountry roads. I can see very clearly now what my fear was built of, but I couldn’t have put it into words easily then. Partly, I was afraid of the kinds of dangers I sensed must be lurking out there. The wolves and the bears that lived in my mind’s woods, yes, but what I really feared were the dangers that had to do with people. I was afraid of having my mom pulled out of the car by an old country sheriff, the kind I’d seen in movies, who would call her gal instead of ma’am , and who’d tell her to git along , warning her not to go looking for trouble. The kinds of human harm that sat just outside of the frame of those stories of the long-ago days down south, just beyond the edges of Daddy Herbert’s woods, just around the wrong bend. The terrible threats to people like us, threats of violence and scorn. Things people did to people they didn’t view as people. Murders. Lynchings. Even just a few words spat out with the right kind of force. It’s what the history I already knew had convinced me that our chapter of the past was built on, and what I tried to keep separate, for my own protection, from my view of my parents as children of the South, what I made an effort to avoid all reminder of, even if it forced me to steer clear of whole regions of the past for fear of catching a passing glimpse. Was all of that gone, along with the smokehouses and the acres of cotton, or had I just been lucky enough this trip to avoid it?
I was afraid of something else, too. Mother was sixty, and she still worked a little, cleaning for a family I surmised must have been white. The kids, one of them was named Butch, called her by her first name (or a version of it: Ma-gree , probably from Marguerite, which wasn’t exactly her name but was close enough, he and his parents must have reckoned). She cleaned for them and looked after the kids, which I figured made her their servant. If Mother were to visit them and bring my mother along with her, I was afraid it would make my mother into a servant, too, in their eyes.I didn’t want that, didn’t want anyone to think they could send her chasing after their children or tidying up their mess. I was scared, whenever she left, of this threat and the other, and in the long, still afternoons while she was out (afternoons that were dark, because the curtains were always drawn just as the day was getting hottest), I sat trying to play patiently beside Mama Lela, who rocked in her chair beside me, laughing and spitting into her Folger’s can and talking to someone who may or may not have been me.
Because I never asked, I did not know if my mom knew how to steer completely clear of those kinds of dangers, if there was a woman inside the woman I knew who spoke the language of racial deference, or if she was, instead, fearless of standing her ground and staring down her opponent. I didn’t even know if the word opponent set up the right way of thinking about it; was the South really, after all, just a simple matter of wrong versus right? I did know that my mom knew how to speak with the elderly black men and women who came out onto their porches to greet us or who asked us in for glasses of water or iced tea. She called them sir and ma’am , and she offered to attend to them, even in their own homes, fetching them pillows for their backs or stools for their feet. Being beside her when she was like that, I could make out a version of her young self, but I also saw how that respect
I stayed indoors most days, sitting on the floor or reading in one of the chairs by the record player. I imagined my cousins playing in the woods on their visits to this place, but the woods were yet another unknown for me, so dark and alive. I worried that a wolf or a bear would find me there and carry me away. Even when Mom and Mother went out visiting or shopping, I stayed inside with Mama Lela, not bothering to decipher too much of what she said. I was afraid. Not for me but for my mom out there on thosecountry roads. I can see very clearly now what my fear was built of, but I couldn’t have put it into words easily then. Partly, I was afraid of the kinds of dangers I sensed must be lurking out there. The wolves and the bears that lived in my mind’s woods, yes, but what I really feared were the dangers that had to do with people. I was afraid of having my mom pulled out of the car by an old country sheriff, the kind I’d seen in movies, who would call her gal instead of ma’am , and who’d tell her to git along , warning her not to go looking for trouble. The kinds of human harm that sat just outside of the frame of those stories of the long-ago days down south, just beyond the edges of Daddy Herbert’s woods, just around the wrong bend. The terrible threats to people like us, threats of violence and scorn. Things people did to people they didn’t view as people. Murders. Lynchings. Even just a few words spat out with the right kind of force. It’s what the history I already knew had convinced me that our chapter of the past was built on, and what I tried to keep separate, for my own protection, from my view of my parents as children of the South, what I made an effort to avoid all reminder of, even if it forced me to steer clear of whole regions of the past for fear of catching a passing glimpse. Was all of that gone, along with the smokehouses and the acres of cotton, or had I just been lucky enough this trip to avoid it?
I was afraid of something else, too. Mother was sixty, and she still worked a little, cleaning for a family I surmised must have been white. The kids, one of them was named Butch, called her by her first name (or a version of it: Ma-gree , probably from Marguerite, which wasn’t exactly her name but was close enough, he and his parents must have reckoned). She cleaned for them and looked after the kids, which I figured made her their servant. If Mother were to visit them and bring my mother along with her, I was afraid it would make my mother into a servant, too, in their eyes.I didn’t want that, didn’t want anyone to think they could send her chasing after their children or tidying up their mess. I was scared, whenever she left, of this threat and the other, and in the long, still afternoons while she was out (afternoons that were dark, because the curtains were always drawn just as the day was getting hottest), I sat trying to play patiently beside Mama Lela, who rocked in her chair beside me, laughing and spitting into her Folger’s can and talking to someone who may or may not have been me.
Because I never asked, I did not know if my mom knew how to steer completely clear of those kinds of dangers, if there was a woman inside the woman I knew who spoke the language of racial deference, or if she was, instead, fearless of standing her ground and staring down her opponent. I didn’t even know if the word opponent set up the right way of thinking about it; was the South really, after all, just a simple matter of wrong versus right? I did know that my mom knew how to speak with the elderly black men and women who came out onto their porches to greet us or who asked us in for glasses of water or iced tea. She called them sir and ma’am , and she offered to attend to them, even in their own homes, fetching them pillows for their backs or stools for their feet. Being beside her when she was like that, I could make out a version of her young self, but I also saw how that respect
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