1943
There I was, sitting in a bright blue Ford De Luxe sedan—a car with three windows on each side, rounded fenders, and a funny, snubbed trunk—flying along Highway 11, the wind blowing the tail of the blue and green chiffon scarf wrapped around my hair like a kite. Joe had borrowed the car from his tailgunner’s father. “You’ve been flyin’ my son two miles up in the air over enemy territory,” Joe said the middle-aged man had told him. “Reckon I can trust you to drive my Ford to Mississippi and back.”
It was a beautiful April day, clear and bright and unseasonably warm, and I felt like springtime personified—young, alive, full of rising sap. We joked and laughed and sang out-of-tune accompaniments to the radio, our spirits in perfect harmony. I felt like Katharine Hepburn—free and daring and larger than life, too wild to be confined by anything as stuffy as convention.
My next clear memory is of pulling into the parking lot of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Coldwater, Mississippi. We were late—the parking lot was full, and everyone was already inside—but Joe took my hand and led me into the squat cinderblock building all the same.
One thing the obituary hadn’t mentioned was that “Uncle Leo” was black. We walked through the door and stood out like two flour-covered thumbs—so out of place that the soloist, a large woman wearing a wide veiled hat decorated with black cloth roses, stopped in mid-lyric.
It was odd enough for white folks to attend a Negro’s funeral back then, but it was even more unusual for a young white couple from out of state to attend the funeral of an elderly Negro man—aman who’d lived in this town of less than five hundred souls all his life and, as we later learned, never ventured further than two counties over.
The room rustled as the entire congregation turned and stared. Joe smiled, nodded, and lifted his palm in a little wave, as if it were perfectly normal for everything to grind to a halt just because he’d entered a room. The soloist nodded and smiled back, then resumed singing with renewed vigor. The mourners took a little longer to finish staring at us, but they turned back around in time to dutifully sing, “Ain’t that grand!” to the call-and-response line of a hymn about laying down swords and shields.
One song followed another for a good half hour. The music was alternately heartbreaking and rollicking, accompanied by an out-of-tune piano. The mourners swayed in time to the beat, occasionally breaking into riffs and adding extra “Amens” to the endings.
At last we were allowed to sit. I could see a plain pine box at the front of the church, with a single wreath of carnations atop it.
A minister in a sharply tailored black suit took the pulpit behind the coffin and pointedly welcomed us, then launched into a hellfire and brimstone sermon without a single word about the deceased. “Uh-huh,” “Praise God,” “You tell ’em, Brother” and other bursts of encouragement from the congregation punctuated his relentlessly fiery diatribe.
After the service—which went on for two full hours, and included a mandatory “viewing” of the gray-looking, emaciated old man in the coffin—a middle-aged woman dressed head to toe in black made a beeline toward us. “Thank y’all for coming.” She clasped both my hands, then Joe’s. “How’d y’all know Daddy?”
“We, uh, didn’t.” Joe squeezed her hands. “But your father helped my granddaddy out of some kind of scrape when he was young. Never would give us the details, but he said your father was a hero. He saw the obituary in the paper, and he insisted we come and pay our respects.”
“Oh my.” The woman released her grip on Joe to clasp herhands to her chest. “You don’ say. Ain’ that won’erful! Why didn’ he come hisself?”
“He couldn’t.”
“Whyever not?”
Joe looked her straight in the eye, his expression somber. “He’s in an iron lung.”
I nearly laughed out loud. Joe stepped on my toes as a warning.
“Oh mercy! So sorry to hear that.”
“It’s okay. He’s over a hundred years old and he’s ready to meet his maker.”
“Well, it’s so nice he sent y’all to pay his respects.” She turned to a large woman beside her, similarly clad for mourning, and grinned like a kid who’d just gotten a new bicycle for Christmas. “Roberta, these here people say Daddy done somethin’ good!”
As it turned out, apparently Uncle Leo had been a meanspirited old goat and his family had been concerned about his afterlife destination. They were thrilled to learn he’d had a generous moment, no matter how long ago or vague, and they insisted we join them for lunch at the home of one of his daughters. They fed us pulled pork, black-eyed peas, smothered greens, and cream pies until I thought the buttons on my dress would pop.
“We did those folks a world of good,” Joe said after we’d finally taken our leave.
“We lied to them.”
“We made them feel better about Leo.” He headed back onto the highway.
“It was still a lie.”
“The world isn’t like your newspaper photos, Addie girl. Not everything is black and white.”
“Black-and-white photos happen to have lots of shades of gray,” I pointed out, meaning that gray things were made up of black and white, negating his argument.
“Exactly,” Joe said, as if I’d just agreed with him.
The conversation drifted to lighter topics, but I filed his remarksin the back of my mind to discuss later. We talked about family—I learned his father had left his mother shortly after he was born, that his mother had died when he was fourteen, and that he and his older sister had been raised by an aunt in California. He deflected most of my questions by asking about me. I chattered away like a magpie. I told him my father was a parish judge, and my brother, Andy, worked as an analyst for the War Department in Washington, D.C., and he was more like a distant uncle than a brother because he was so much older and I hardly ever saw him. I told him about the rest of my family and Wedding Tree and even Charlie.
We drove all afternoon, stopped around dusk at a diner for sandwiches, then drove another hour before turning off the highway onto a dirt road. It was black as pitch, and the tree frogs sang a loud, nighttime chorus. The road grew narrower and narrower, the tree branches scraping the sides of the car. I thought for sure we were lost, when the headlights finally lit up a little cabin. It was unpainted clapboard, and it had a ramshackle, untended look to it.
