We Love You, Charlie Freeman: A Novel Read online

  I smelled their death and then I read the letter. There was no more money. That was the long and short of it, though it took Mumma ten pages to say so. They were on the verge of bankruptcy. They’d been skimming from their own till for years, and when that no longer was enough, they’d begun to take from the Stars’ and Saturnites’ treasuries. The money had all been for me. For my good dresses and elocution lessons and the Negro teachers’ college out of state, all to make me a presentable bride for a man who never came. And then they feared they had taken too much and they would be discovered. It was money that made them lose their faith. They said in the note that all of this was for my own good. They didn’t want to burden me with their disgrace. They told me to tell everyone they’d suffered strokes, simultaneously, and died together in each other’s arms. They thought this was a chance for me to make a fresh start. They still thought maybe their investment had not been in vain, that maybe I could be married—this is how I knew their grief had made them delusional.

  I put down the note and I looked at them again, my father curled in on himself like a baby, my mother wide open to God. Without thinking, I took an oil lantern from the mantel and I went to the back of the pharmacy, to Pop’s office, and I smashed that lantern down, as hard as I could, into the green leather ledgers Pop used for accounts. I smashed and smashed until the books went up in flames and I stood and watched until my eyes watered and I gagged on the smoke and then I fled. I ran into the street and raised the alarm and people came with buckets but it was too late. I stood in the street and all the other Stars, the very ones my mother couldn’t face, came and stood around me. They rubbed at the soot on my cuffs and collar, they rubbed the soot on my face, and they shook their heads and said what Stars always say when one of us dies: “A good light gone.”

  I watched the house burn and felt the Stars’ hands rub my back and pat my arms and all I could think of was the math. My parents poured two cups of poison, not three. They left me behind.

  Have you ever heard of colored people killing themselves? And over money, too. As if a colored person has never been broke before. We do not commit suicide. That kind of nonsense is for white people. We endure. We are the masters of endurance. We get stronger and stronger until we shine like Stars. But Mumma and Pop ultimately did not believe this. And when I found out that they didn’t believe, that the tenets of the Stars were hollow words to them, I turned cold and raging inside. I turned mean.

  The other Stars watched me closely after my parents died. They were waiting for me to crack, but I never did. They watched as I went to the school every day and then returned to the room I let from a retired Star named Sermon on the Mount. They knew there was something wrong, but I would not break for them.

  Still, the loneliness began growing inside me, until it was a large gaping maw that, I swear, pulsed in my chest right before bed, in the morning, and in the cold, as regular as any wound. I missed my one true friend, my mother. She and I were close in a way I don’t think many other mothers and daughters were. I slept beside her every night of my childhood: so near to her back, I could probably sketch the constellation of moles and freckles on her skin there. When I was a very little girl, every morning I would wake before her and arrange myself so that when she woke, we were eye-to-eye.

  I miss her, with a never-ending ache that I did not think was possible, that crowds out any other feeling and certainly all my reason, and any good sense.

  DR. GARDNER BEGAN coming to Spring City at the beginning of April. He just started showing up in the evenings. At first, he didn’t come near us. He hung around the shops on the border, where Spring City meets Courtland County. The whites in Courtland County consider Spring City their Negro Quarter, but on the border are the in-between places that all of us have to use: the rail depot with the dusty cafe; the cobbler and the notary; the general store.

  Everyone in Spring City knew who Dr. Gardner was because there’d been rumors about him all through town for at least a year. We knew he worked up in the monkey house. He came to Courtland County the year before, when little Julia Toneybee-Leroy, the neighborhood heiress to a rubber fortune, returned from her Congolese safari with a dead monkey and ten more live ones on the way.

  Very soon, Julia Toneybee-Leroy let it be known that she wanted to convert her mother’s estate into some kind of all ape zoo, with Dr. Gardner as the head. The place used to be a music conservatory, the best to be found between Boston and New York, everyone said. The first summer after my parents killed themselves, I went there for an outdoor concert, stood on the section of lawn reserved for colored patrons of the arts, and heard a Bach concerto so sweet and sad it drew the ache of my parents’ demise from my chest and forced me to weep in public. I didn’t even cry at their funeral. I had felt all the eyes of the Stars on me, eager to see my grief. To cry in front of them would have been unbearable, an admission of defeat, a humiliation, so I bit the inside of my cheeks to keep my eyes dry. I was my mother’s daughter to the very end, till the moment they put her in her grave. But the music of that conservatory broke me down to tears and I didn’t care who saw it.

  When Julia Toneybee-Leroy fired all the music teachers and sent home the students, she installed the animals in their place. We never did see the monkeys move in: just heard the ten of them making a racket in the specially equipped freight car she had run up the tracks and past Spring City on the way to the newly named Toneybee Institute for Great Ape Research. Last fall, she brought in Dr. Gardner.

  Julia Toneybee-Leroy said it was all for magnificent revelations in science, shortly forthcoming, but everyone in white Courtland County and black Spring City alike thought she was just using the monkeys as a cover to have an affair with Dr. Gardner. He was supposed to be an evolutionary genius and the next Charles Darwin, if some were to be believed.

  After a few weeks of lurking around Spring City’s border, Dr. Gardner got bolder and crossed over. He walked up and down our streets leisurely, waving every so often at the people he passed. He did this despite the children who would stop stock still when he saluted them, and just stare, despite the strained smiles of the women and the reluctant hellos of the men. He made a supreme effort to disregard the very obvious fact that we did not want him here. He walked around and surveyed the houses for a few days more, and then he started bringing his sketch pad. I caught him once or twice, standing near the wooden fence around my schoolyard, leaning his pad against a post and watching intently as the boys and girls cried “Red Rover.”

  When Dr. Gardner slouched around our streets he made everyone in town uncomfortable, the women most of all. They asked Mr. Dawes, the undertaker, to talk to him about it. To see what was what. But Mr. Dawes said he didn’t want to get caught up in it. He said he had too much to do to worry about a skinny white man drawing cartoons and we should all have too much to do, too.

  So the Stars of the Morning of Spring City got together and asked me to address Dr. Gardner. They asked me because with Mumma and Pop dead, I am alone. I don’t have any kin, not even a mangy husband or brother to protest, to say, “Why are you picking on Nymphadora?” They took advantage of the fact that I am a thirty-six-year-old orphan.

  One Tuesday night after a Star meeting, Nadine Morton took me aside. We were folding up tablecloths and as we held an expanse of white lace between us, as we brought the corners together to make them kiss, she said, “Just find out what he wants. And once he tells you, suggest that perhaps he can find it elsewhere.”

  Nadine really was the one who should have approached him. She and I both knew that. She was hired up at the Toneybee Institute shortly after Julia Toneybee returned, though nobody knew what exactly Nadine did up there. She claimed she was not allowed to say. Nadine had trained as a nurse with the Red Cross in the Great War, she’d worked with an all-colored battalion, but when she came back home to Spring City she’d had to take in washing because the only hospital around was twenty miles away and didn’t hire colored nurses. Up at the Toneybee, with her mysterio
us duties, Nadine presumably worked with Dr. Gardner, or saw him more often than I ever would. But it gave her a special kind of satisfaction for her to order me to do it. She was showing her power, now that Mumma was dead and she was the biggest Star of the Morning in Spring City.

  I took a moment before I answered, let Nadine squirm. “All right, Sister Saul,” I said. Saul was Nadine’s Star name and she hated it. This is why I did not rise to the same position as my mother. I am too ornery. I have no social graces.

  After that, the next time I saw Dr. Gardner walk past my school room, I went to the door and I called after him, “Hello, hello, hello,” to get his attention. Maybe the three hellos were too much.

  He turned, very surprised. “Hello?” he called back, just like that, a question. And then he raised his hat to me. When he spoke, I heard his accent. I already knew, from town gossip, that he was English, but his accent was still a surprise. Still, the way he stared at all of us, the way he gazed at our faces before sketching us down, I thought he couldn’t have seen many colored people wherever he came from.

  I invited him into the schoolroom and offered him a seat at one of the pupil’s little desks and I sat down at another. He was so tiny, so unassuming, and then again, he was not American and so probably unfamiliar with how to correct the Negro impertinence of giving him the seat of a child.

  Looking at him, at his bony knees pressed up against the underside of the wood desk, at his oversized hands with the nails bit down to the faintly bloody bed, he didn’t seem like anyone’s secret lover. That rumor about him and Julia Toneybee-Leroy had to be wrong. How could an heiress fall in love with this wisp, with his thinning hair and dirty shirt collar. Did we honestly believe she would import a population of apes as a noisy cover to allow her to conjugate with Dr. Gardner in peace? Dr. Gardner could never inspire something that florid. I could not imagine him conjugating. He was younger than me, I thought. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. He looked even more virginal than I did.

  But when he sat down, I sniffed the chimps on him, first thing. It was the most distinguishable thing about him. Here was this flute of a man in a jacket too big for him, with damp cuffs, wandering around, smelling of something so powerful it could not possibly have come from inside him. It had to be a borrowed scent.

  As a Star of the Morning, I have been trained in the art of polite conversation, but I’d pretty much given that up. So I did not bother to coyly draw Dr. Gardner out. I wasn’t afraid of him, either. I said sweetly, “Dr. Gardner, you are annoying my students.”

  “Oh. I didn’t mean to.” He drummed his fingers across the desktop and then glanced at me shrewdly. “How, exactly, am I doing that?”

  “You follow them through the streets and hang around the school yard, taking their likenesses without their permission.”

  He blushed. “They’re just sketches. For my own education.”

  “It makes them uneasy.”

  “I don’t want to do that.” He slumped in his chair like a scolded child. This was not what I expected, and made me, for just a minute, want to lord it over him. So I pressed. I said again, my voice sweet, “You make the girls self-conscious and you make the boys feel funny.”

  “That is not my intention. Please, tell them to pretend I’m not here.”

  “But it’s very obvious when you are here, Dr. Gardner.”

  “Oh.” He began to nervously peel the skin on his left thumb as if it were an onion.

  “Well.” He peeled some more, and the flesh reddened. “Well, what if I ask them to pose for me instead? If it makes them that uncomfortable. What if I arranged a formal drawing session, with your help?”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  Dr. Gardner stopped peeling at his thumb. “I am an anthropologist.” He smiled widely. “That means I study people.”

  “I know what it means.” I tried very hard to keep my voice light, but I was not successful because he blushed again.

  “I’m sorry to presume that you didn’t.”

  I sat back a little, surprised that a white person would understand my tone, surprised they would feel it enough to want to apologize. “Well, go on.”

  “I am an anthropologist and I enjoy studying all people. The people of Spring City are excellent specimens.”

  I kept my face blank.

  “By ‘specimens,’ ” Dr. Gardner continued, “I mean they are good examples—”

  “I know what ‘specimen’ means as well,” I said, a little darkly.

  “If you are familiar with the science of anthropology, you can see why I would want to draw your students.”

  “Yes. And I can see why I shouldn’t allow it. I don’t want them ending up somewhere in some study, examples of Negro buffoonery, like you scientists like to do. I won’t have them studied, if that’s what you want to call it.”

  As I spoke, I flushed hot at the frankness of my words, but then, I told myself, it wouldn’t matter. I expected Dr. Gardner to pretend not to know what I meant. I assumed he would do was what most white people would do in his position: save themselves the embarrassment and plead ignorance, force me to articulate. But instead, Dr. Gardner shook his head, almost impatiently.

  “No. Not like that. Nothing like that at all. I understand your suspicion, but let me make it clear. I don’t have any prejudice toward the Negro people. In fact,”—here his voice rose, nasal and shockingly high, to near breaking—“I love the Negro people. I love them so much that I’ve devoted myself to making a study of them. Of you. Of your life and ways.”

  I sat back in my narrow little chair. “You are aware that’s already been done?”

  “Yes, by many very stupid men.” He got me to laugh at this, so he pressed on. “They don’t have the appreciation and respect that I do. They study you with some sort of secret agenda, with malice.”

  “You’ve never heard of Dr. Du Bois? He studies us with something other than malice. You’ve never seen his work for the Paris Exhibition?”

  “Of course, of course. I’m a great admirer. I haven’t seen the Paris studies, though. I’ve only read about them.”

  “You should see them.” And then I did something I had not done in a long time, not since my parents died. I voluntarily told someone something about myself. I said, “I was in his original prints.”

  Dr. Gardner was very excited by this. “You were?”

  “Yes. When I was a girl.”

  “Dr. Du Bois took your picture?” And he was so interested, so guileless in that moment, I nodded, very shyly and I told him about how all of Paris saw my picture as an Infant Star, although I didn’t know it then.

  Just after our Initiation, a man with a camera, one of those great black boxes, billowing with heavy dark curtains, that’s how long ago it was, he came to Spring City. The man was the exact same color as the weak tea my mother served him in our parlor. He even sounded like a teapot when he spoke: the air whistled in between his front teeth on every third or fourth word. This was in 1898, when I was five. We knew that he was from the Berkshires, too; that he’d grown up just a few towns away. He told us it was his mission to take photographs of all distinguished Negro people across America—the first true record of our race in the brand new century to come. With Mumma’s permission, he had all the little Stars line up in our white dresses and he took our photograph in the field beside the church. And then he picked the three brightest Stars for a “study”—that’s what he called it.

  “You should learn to use that word,” I told Dr. Gardner. “It makes everything sound official.”

  He laughed at that and said he might.

  The weak-tea-colored man sat each one of us Infant Stars in a velvet chair and he took a close portrait, a three-quarter length, and then a full. And then he packed up his camera and was gone, off to the rest of the world.

  The pictures returned to us three years later, in a red leather album. The front said in gold letters THE PARIS EXHIBITION, 1900. There were pictures from Georgia, fr
om North Carolina, from all over the South. From Chicago and the Plains: all the notable Negroes of America, divided up and cataloged by region. We were in the Northern section. All of us Stars, and me myself, haloed in my solo portrait, we were all there as a grand representation of the glory and the flower of the Negro race. I wasn’t named, but underneath my image Dr. Du Bois had placed the label “A stellar example of Northern Negro Lineage.”

  “I was a beautiful girl,” I told Dr. Gardner, unembarrassed, and he had the good manners to not look shocked. When I was an Infant Star, there was no comparison. I really was beautiful enough to be included on a list of Negro Greats. It hasn’t carried over into adulthood. My full cheeks have grown heavy and my eyes that were large and inviting as a girl now are just goggled and popped, their whites all bleary and yellow. My young skin was shiny and smooth but as soon as I entered adolescence it began to spot, and when my parents died, all the light went out of it completely. Now I’ve got a conspicuously dying front tooth, a distinct shade of gray, impossible to hide. I am not beautiful and I am sarcastic and I believe I am better than most in this town and that is why I am a thirty-six-year-old orphan with no husband and why no man in Spring City has ever even held my hand. The fact that my star name is Nymphadora has become a kind of perverse joke. The other women say it now with a lilt that betrays their amusement and it pricks my skin every time they do.

  Of course, Mumma was very proud of my inclusion in Dr. Du Bois’s work, but Pop was horrified. He never liked to brag. He was just as powerful in the Saturnites as Mumma was in the Stars. The Saturnites are the Stars’ brother organization. But you would never know how powerful Pop was to talk to him, and he only wielded his influence occasionally. When he saw the album page, at my image printed all alone and burnished with drawn-on curlicues he said, “Nothing good can come of this.”