The House You Pass on the Way (2 page)

Her father had married a white woman. That’s how Sweet Gum people talked about it, talked about her mother. Not to their faces, but it got back to them. The whole family did well at hiding the sting of townspeople’s words. It was not
what
they whispered that stung. But how they whispered. Yes, Mama was white and that made all of them—Charlie Horse and Dotti and Battle, Hope and Staggerlee—part white. The only mixed-race family in Sweet Gum, maybe in all of Calmuth County. No, it wasn’t
what
people said, for that part was true. But Mama was more than “white.” She was Mama, quiet and easygoing. She kept to herself. When she smiled, her whole face brightened, and tiny dimples showed at the edge of her lips. Why was
white
the word that hung on people’s lips? At school, when the kids talked about her mama, they whispered the word or said, “Your mama’s
white
!” and it sounded loud and ugly, like something was wrong with Mama. And if something was wrong with Mama, then that meant that something was wrong with all of them.

Some evenings they would sit out on the porch laughing and carrying on and her father would say, “Staggerlee, why don’t you play us a little song?” Those nights, Staggerlee took her harmonica out of her pocket, ran her tongue over her lips, and started playing. If Dotti was home and in a decent mood, she’d sing. She had a pretty voice. Those evenings, they were not black or white or interracial. They were just a family on a porch, laughing and making music. Those nights, Staggerlee wished they could always be that.

And when people asked her what it felt like to be both black and white, she didn’t have an answer for them. Most times, she just shrugged and looked away or kicked her hiking boot against the ground and mumbled something like “fine.” Her family had never talked about it, the way they hadn’t talked about a lot of things.

Lately, she’d been thinking about God, watching old film footage of her grandparents, listening to the hymns they used to sing. They had been in show business, her father’s parents. Grandma could sing a blue streak, and her grandfather was right beside her, dancing, his candy-striped cane flying, tap shoes moving so fast they blurred. Some nights, sitting in the dark, watching old film clips of them performing on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, she would imagine them alive, about to finish up a show and come home.

And last Sunday morning, for the first time in her life, Staggerlee rose at dawn, put on a gray-and-blue dress, pulled the thick blue sweater Mama had knitted over her head, and walked the six miles to Sweet Gum Baptist Church. Some people smiled when they saw her, trying to hide their surprise. A few old women came up to her, asking if she was Elijah Canan’s girl. Staggerlee nodded, waved hellos, and took a seat close to the door. She was looking for God, not townspeople. Looking for answers, not questions.

Sweet Gum Baptist is a beautiful church—white walls and high, polished oak pews. On the stage, behind the preacher, there is a stained-glass window. And from the stained glass, a brown-gold Jesus looks out at the congregation. Staggerlee stared up at the glass without blinking.
He looks like me
, she caught herself thinking.
Not black, not white, but both and all of it.
She stared at him so long the colors in the glass blurred—the yellow gold of his robe melted up into the brown disappointment in his eyes. From what seemed like a faraway place, Staggerlee could hear the chorus singing “Precious Lord.” Softly. Sweetly.

She could hear the preacher climb the pulpit and clear his throat. But she could not pull her eyes from Jesus. And the words from the preacher’s mouth blended into the stained glass, poured from the clear glass tears in Jesus’ eyes and slowly made their way to Staggerlee.

“Truly I say to you . . . one of you will betray me.”

Staggerlee blinked. The church felt small and hot suddenly. She could feel Trout pressed into her, shoulder to shoulder, her voice whispery and warm.
Feels like everyone in my life has betrayed me, Staggerlee.

The organ struck a chord; then the choir started humming. The preacher’s voice grew loud, more desperate, but Staggerlee didn’t hear the words anymore. Couldn’t. The church was closing in around her. She felt herself standing and squeezing past people. Then she was outside, taking in huge gulps of ice-cold air. But Trout was still at her shoulder, her voice still hard against Staggerlee’s ear.
Feels like everyone in my life has betrayed me. I guess I’m kind of scared you will too.

Now Staggerlee shivered, remembering that Sunday. That was before the letter. When months and months had passed with no word from Trout. No, she hadn’t betrayed Trout. Now she knew that. She had the letter in her pocket to prove it. And she would read it. Again and again. But first she had to go back to the beginning of all this—had to remember the before time. And maybe if she started from that before place, she’d understand this all.

The sun moved slowly over the water. She hugged herself harder. Her hair blew wild and the wind slapped against her face. Like somebody’s cold, cold hand.

TROUT H AD COME TO SWEET GUM THE FIRST TIME by letter, a letter from Ida Mae addressed to Elijah Canan—Staggerlee’s father. It arrived on a rainy Saturday in April, and while her mother read it, Staggerlee stared out at the rain. She had never met Ida Mae—only knew of her from the stories her father told. Her mother read softly, her eyebrows lifted in surprise. It had been twenty years since anyone had heard anything from Daddy’s sisters.

When her mother got to the part about Hallique passing, Daddy started crying softly, one hand pressed over his eyes. Staggerlee watched him. It was not the first time she had seen her father cry, but the first time she had seen him cry so openly, sitting at the table with all of them around him. Some nights, when they watched old film clips of his parents performing, his eyes would fill up and in the darkness of the TV screen light, he looked thinner and sad-faced.

Dotti got up from the table and put her arms around his shoulders. She whispered something. Staggerlee stared at them, wondering when Dotti had become grown-up enough to do something like that. She wondered what her sister had whispered, why it had made Daddy nod and pat her hand.

There were photo albums and frames filled with pictures of Hallique, but the pictures were old, from years and years ago. In them, Hallique was a teenager, tall and thin like Daddy, with dark suspicious eyes. Staggerlee stared out at the rain slamming against the window and imagined it was the spirit of Hallique trying to get inside. Trying to get a good look at them all once, just once, before moving on to the next place.

“Was she good, Daddy?” Staggerlee asked softly.

All spring she had been thinking about good and bad. She didn’t understand it—what made a person good, what made a person bad. She didn’t know what
she
was. At school, kids said she was stuck-up, thought she was better than other people. Maybe she was stuck-up. Maybe she did think she was better. She didn’t know. So she remained quiet, watched people without joining in. Did that make her bad? Seemed all the girls at school knew who they were somehow. The way they dressed. The way they moved in clusters—laughing and holding their books tight to them. The way they sloe-eyed the boys. She knew she didn’t want this—to be a hanger-on, a follower, a part of somebody else’s pack. But then what was left? Where did she fit in? All her life she’d been thinking it was the mixed blood—the black and the white of her leaving her somewhere in the middle of things. But that wasn’t it. Charlie Horse and Dotti moved so freely in the world, and they had the same blood running through their veins. No. It was something deeper—something lonely inside of her. Something quiet.

And the night before—what about that? The night before Ida Mae’s letter came, something had happened to Staggerlee. Something hushed and solemn her mother said happened to all girls. And after they had spoken, Mama brought Dotti in to join them and they drank wine from a small crystal glass. A celebration, Mama whispered. But maybe it was bad, this thing that had suddenly changed her from a girl to a woman. Because she couldn’t tell the men about it, not her father, not Charlie Horse, who she had told everything to always. Why did she have to start having secrets from him? What was so bad about it?

“Was she good, Daddy?” Staggerlee asked again, pressing her hand against her stomach. All morning long, dull pains had been shooting through it. “Hallique. Was she a good person?”

Her father frowned.

Hallique and Ida Mae had stopped speaking to him when he married Mama. They said they didn’t have anything against white people, they just didn’t want them in the family. That was twenty years ago. Staggerlee looked down at her arm while she waited for him to answer. Her arm was pale now. By the end of summer, it would be amber.

“Yes,” her father said finally. “Underneath all the things Hallique did and said, she was good.”

“But she hated us,” Dotti said.

Mama shook her head. “She didn’t know you. It was the idea of us she disapproved of.”

“The
idea
of us.” Dotti rolled her eyes. “Well, I can’t grieve the
idea
of her passing.”

“I would’ve liked to have known her,” Staggerlee said. “Even for just a minute. I would have liked to look in her eyes, her true live eyes, just once before she died. I would have said, ‘Hallique, look at me. I’m your niece. Your blood kin.’”

The family sitting around her was the only family she knew. No aunts or uncles or grandparents. No cousins or nephews. Just what was in this kitchen and the baby her mother was four months pregnant with. Staggerlee looked around at everybody. Suddenly they seemed small, like a tiny raggedy army trying to hold on.

Charlie Horse was sitting away from them on a stool at the counter. He sniffed, and Staggerlee wondered if he was trying not to cry. She wanted to hug him the way Dotti was hugging Daddy. A year ago she would have. Even a week ago. But now she felt strange, distant—different from him. When she was young, they would spend hours sitting out by the river. Charlie had played piano since he was two. He would sit by the river with his hands out in front of him as if they were resting on the black and white keys of his piano. And he’d talk about the songs he was going to write one day while his fingers danced excitedly—like they could hardly wait.

“Hallique was the one who sang,” Charlie Horse said now, looking down at his fingers. Maybe he was thinking of the music he and Hallique could have made together. “She cut a couple of records, didn’t she?”

“Two,” Daddy said. “Cut two records back in sixty-eight. But when she and Ida Mae were so mean about your mama, I threw those records out.” His eyes filled up again. When they were young, Daddy had told them once, Hallique would dress him up in her frilly blouses and push him around in a stroller with her baby dolls. He said he loved the way she took such time with him, unlike Ida Mae, who was older.

“Somebody should have been strong enough to say something,” Charlie Horse said softly. “Twenty years is a long time to go without speaking.”

Staggerlee nodded. No one talked about the twenty years of not speaking. It was an unwritten rule.

Battle started whining to get down from the high chair. Staggerlee reached over and pulled him out and watched him take off for a stack of toys in the corner of the kitchen. She excused herself to go to the bathroom.

In the bathroom, she stared into the mirror. She had grown taller over the winter, and her hair had gone from dark to reddish brown. She pulled a lock of it down over her eye and watched it spring back. Her lips were full across her face like Daddy’s. What had Hallique known about them? That they were mixed-race, black and white joined together—what their grandparents had fought for and what had killed them.

Staggerlee took a step back from the mirror and pressed her hand against her chest. Her breasts were sore. Her mother had said this would pass. How long? What had it been like for Dotti the first time? And Mama? She hadn’t said much to her and Dotti last night. Mama was quiet that way. “I’m used to working things out on my own,” she had said once. “In my own mind.”

“Ida Mae and Hallique were already living in Maryland when your grandparents died,” her father was saying when Staggerlee came back to the kitchen. “I was up in New York. We all came back here for the funeral. Must’ve been a thousand-something people paying their respects.” He sniffed. “I brought your mama. . . . We’d been dating a couple of months by then.”

“They know the story, Elijah,” Mama said. Daddy ignored her. Mama was wrong. They knew bits and pieces of a hundred stories. But not one whole one.

Mama pulled her needles and yarn from a bag beside her chair and started knitting. The yarn was a soft blue that made Staggerlee think of cornflowers. Once when Staggerlee had asked her mother about learning to knit, her mother had said, “My mother taught me.” Something in her mother’s voice let Staggerlee know that that was all she was going to say about it. Mama’s parents had disappeared a long time ago—they hadn’t approved of the marriage either. Some days, Staggerlee felt surrounded by disappeared people, old photographs and bits of stories of people who had long ago left the picture.