Silva’s home sat at the end of a dead-end street, a small neighborhood of clustered shacks longer than they were wide, all lined up beside each other like battered soldiers in formation, where at the end was a black-owned grocery whose exterior showed the charred edges from previous fires.
“That white paint turn gray long time ago,” Floyd said as we arrived. “Never stood a chance wit’ what they did to it. Mostly the smoke got to it, but had no life after all them times. Why folk won’t let that place stand, I don’t know.”
Floyd fussed until Silva met me at the door, her hair worn down in observance of her day off, her face the loveliest I’d seen it as, outside of that home, she could now smile and show glimpses into her true character. She took hold of my arm and guided me inside the house, waving a pleasant goodbye to Floyd, who mumbled something under his breath as he drove away. Inside the living room sat Jesse with a bowl of knickknacks, his eyes about the size of half-dollars when I entered.
“Miss Bernie!” he said in shock, immediately dropping the bowl to the ground, which saw those items fall in every imaginable direction.
“It’s good to see you too, Jesse,” I replied.
He sank in his chair, a weight upon him like that of bricks stacked upon his shoulders. He appeared sickly as he showed a look of desperation, panic, and surrender all in one turn of his upper lip.
“It’s good to see you too, Miss,” he finally said, standing from his seat to welcome me properly and indeed clean up that mess. “Mama didn’t tell me you were coming.”
“Last-minute plans often work that way,” I said, finding a seat near him on the sofa where I rested my legs from that cramped ride. “I’m sure there’s lots she doesn’t tell you. Kids nowadays wanna know everything.”
Silva laughed as she returned from the kitchen with a plate of sweet rolls before dinner.
“They think they grown,” Silva said. “Especially the little one.”
It was at that moment that a voice called out from behind me, low and refined, saying my name with an ease that rolled from the tongue as if the person somehow knew me and was accustomed to using that shortened name I went by. I turned and standing there some eight inches taller was Fletcher, smartly dressed and looking just as handsome as he did when he was a boy. It was amazing how fast children could grow, as if they were just waiting for our heads to turn that they might shoot up some ten feet taller and lose their childish ways. His voice was deeper too, his hands a tool for work now as he reached out to me.
“Fletcher!” I exclaimed.
“Miss Bernie!” he called out with the same excitement in his voice, his words a low bellow that never quite emerged until that last syllable when they finally sounded louder than any other words in the room.
His embrace was kind and his linger a side effect only of those stifled memories that could come crashing down at any moment, and indeed all at once, from the mere sight of a familiar face and the thoughts of where one saw it last. For I’m sure at that moment Fletcher recalled that large plantation out amongst the rye grass and wild iris of Leflore County, that smell from their bitter shucks that stung his nose on cool mornings when they’d arrive for work in the fields, the whites of those cotton bolls still fat in his hands as he filled his sacks with the soft buds out there amongst the endless powder. And no matter how he felt about it now, that place and its memories and that negro calling were still a part of him, those scars just as deep today as they were only a year ago. For, truly, no one grows out of it, not the pain of childhood or that lesson into who we are—not the fear it deals or that constant curse of waiting to get out, attempting to progress toward some semblance of your true purpose, regardless of that heaviness right there in the pit of your heart, a bottomless torture that repeats for an eternity as that mere act alone causes us to push and pull and never truly free ourselves of that previous person, place, or thing that has brought us harm.
We each sat around the living room with our rolls and tea, Fletcher settling into stories of his summer in Jackson and the people he’d met. According to Silva, he was worse than “this one over here,” she said, pointing to Jesse who hid his face behind his hands and, in silence, bade me not to speak.
It wasn’t until we’d each had our fill of stories and laughter that Silva led us to the kitchen table, showing the way through a home that, although overflowing with affection, still sat as a sparse collection of rusted items not numerous enough to give that home sufficient warmth or character. Their poverty was evident, the emptiness beginning in the living room where only one sofa and chair dressed the room. A coffee table sat in the middle and a cabinet in the corner, a wooden cupboard simple in design and construction adorned the hallway, with family photos displayed on top, and the kitchen sat as an open space with merely a table and chair—the other chairs being carried from the outside by the boys who wiped them clean before sitting on them.
Dinner was no surprise, given Silva’s usual meals at the Kern house, and it was just as good. Jesse sat quietly while Fletcher, although grown-up in appearance, rattled on as a child would, leading Silva to end those discussions each time he went on too long. He was still just as innocent, glimpses of that young boy recognizable in his large eyes and feral smile, his gaze staying on anyone who would give him praise. Yet when he spoke, his tone was not that of a child, that tenor sounding as if he merely mimed some adult nearby. He was no longer the young boy in the stables. He was a man now, with a voice that didn’t belong to the boy at all; it belonged to Mr. Kern.
“They gave me my own room down there, too,” Fletcher continued as we ate.
“He ain’t been there since he was little,” Silva interceded. “Ain’t seen his cousins since he was like four or five.”
“Everyone kept calling me ‘light-skinned brotha,’ ” he said proudly. “Marshmallow, too.”
“He think he handsome now,” Silva joked, winking at the boy who smiled back. “I told him he goin’ ta get darker; just look at his ears. They were the first thing to turn when he was little.”
“It ain’t happened yet,” Fletcher said, clearly still waiting for it to occur.
Who knows how many people in her family knew her secret, but one thing for certain was that her boys did not, the little one even now still uncertain as to why he looked so different than everyone around him, even willing to give up that perceived beauty that came with lighter skin just so he’d look the same.
“I joined the rally down there, too,” Fletcher said.
“That’s the first thing he says to me when he come home,” Silva spat, her words a condemnation. “All this time, and he still don’t know how to talk.”
It was in her eyes, that fear and fire, that anguish that only a mother knows from the emptiness of her womb and now her arms. Lord knows I had placed these thoughts far from my mind, that hearing them made it even more difficult to bear.