We Love You, Charlie Freeman: A Novel Read online

  And he was right. All the other Stars, and even a few Saturnites, were furious and accused Mumma of favoritism, of telling Dr. Du Bois to give me a special place. But Mumma said the Stars were just jealous, that Dr. Du Bois recognized good breeding when he saw it. I guess you could say that picture was the start of my parents’ downfall. Mumma, poor Mumma, was convinced I would grow into an even greater beauty and in anticipation of my imminent flowering, she began to buy me finer clothes and nicer hats and even a piano. And the waste of this is even more shocking because the girl in that photograph no longer exists. I am not a beauty anymore and certainly not a testament to the Negro race.

  But as a child, I was just excited that a bunch of Parisians had seen my photograph. We were reading A Tale of Two Cities in school, and so I imagined some descendant of the unfortunate Dauphin, some secret French prince, seeing my photograph in the Paris Exhibition and falling in love with me and searching throughout Massachusetts for me and finding me and marrying me and making me a Northern Negro princess.

  “It was the greatest regret of my childhood that that didn’t happen,” I said.

  And for a third time, Dr. Gardner surprised me. He genuinely laughed, not in disbelief like most white people would, but in appreciation of the joke.

  Since my parents killed themselves, I don’t count myself astonished by many things or many people. Dr. Gardner was my first surprise in a long time, and because of that, I felt a flash of affection for him.

  Dr. Gardner sensed it and seized on it, pressed me further. “Let me sketch the children. Shouldn’t they have a dream like that? My drawings won’t end up in front of any Parisians, but they will make your students feel, for a moment, wholly unique and special and looked at.”

  And he really did read me well because those were the exact words that would get me to say yes. I told him he could do it if he would agree to stop lurking around with his notebook, and he pretended to be offended by this, but he smiled, too, showed me the little gray pebbles of his teeth and I decided he was relatively harmless.

  He sketched my students first in a group and then as they played, and really, they weren’t as uneasy as I’d pretended they were. And I told Nadine Morton to humor him, and he would leave after that, so she persuaded the other Stars to let their children participate.

  But the problem was that he kept coming back. Dr. Gardner was never satisfied with one sketch. He returned week after week, interrupting my class and, worst of all, recess. That was my one free hour of the day, when I took an old Police Gazette to the back of the classroom and read stories of murder in peace while discreetly sipping sherry out of a porcelain teacup.

  It was odd. After my parents killed themselves, I developed a passion for crime stories, the bloodier the better. Pop used to keep a copy of the Police Gazette curled and hidden behind the till in our general store. Mumma hated it, called it vulgar, but it was the forbidden talisman of my childhood, glimpsed only occasionally, before it was snatched from my hands. Now that they were dead, I realized there was no one to stop me from reading the Police Gazette if I so chose.

  If I am being honest, I like the girls in the Police Gazette the best. Murder is interesting, but I save my copies so that I can study the girls again and again. The ones with the curls piled on their heads and the fat thighs crossed or tossed across the backs of divans. The ones with the cinched-in waists. The cover girls I like the best, not the girls on the inside pages. I like the way they hold their arms curved over their heads, and their backs arch. It makes their large bosoms rise up, this is certain, but I like it, too, because they are so vulnerable, so open. The very beating hearts of themselves are wide open to the world if the world would have them, if the world would only be clever enough to sift below the heavy, fleshy white rolls of décolletages.

  Sometimes, if I’ve drunk too much sherry, if the day outside is cold and gray, I set down my teacup and fold up the paper and throw my own arms back like that, dangle them over the back of my little wooden school desk chair and toss my feet up on the scarred desktop, cross my own scant thighs. As I totter on my narrow seat and try to keep my balance, I know I am not nearly so reckless, so open, so brave as those women in the Police Gazette. I reckon I resemble more a hoary, staid starfish, showing my prickled and shellacked underside to the world, waiting to be poked so that I can curl all my arms back in defense and hide my tender underside again. I chalk it up to another luxury only white women have: to be that open and vulnerable to the world. If Mumma could see me, she’d slap me hot and fast for ever comparing myself, my good and beautiful and dutiful and clean Negro self, to white flesh. And she would be right and she would be wrong. Because I do not wish my own skin was white. What I envy is not their skin but their insouciance. I envy the freedom to sin with only a little bit of consequence, to commit one selfish act and not have it mean the downfall of my entire people. Where indecency and mischief do not mean annihilation. I envy that their capacity for love is already assumed, not set aside or presumed missing, like it is for us Negro women. That’s what I wish that I had from those pictures.

  My one small personal pleasure, though, my contemplation of the beautiful and courageous hussies of the Police Gazette, was ruined once Dr. Gardner showed up because the children were always coming in to complain, when they should be outside, hallooing and leaving me in peace. And the other Stars, of course, were furious with me and implied that I had misled them, because the drawings hadn’t stopped and their children were annoyed.

  Fed up, I went outside myself one afternoon and found Dr. Gardner again, crouched close to a game of jacks with that obnoxious sketch pad. I explained to him that I thought we had an agreement and he would leave after his pictures were done.

  “But I can’t,” he bleated. “I haven’t sketched nearly enough.” He didn’t bother to stand up or stop watching the game as we talked. He squatted in the dirt, his eyes intent on the dull flash of gunmetal in the dust.

  I stood over him. “Sketch what you can today and then I am going to have to ask you to leave.”

  Of course, he did not have to do what I told him. He was a white man in the black part of town. The law was on his side and he could return as often as he liked. But that wouldn’t have suited him. He wanted to be liked, you see. That was his weakness. He wanted us, all of us Negroes, to like and maybe even to love him. It’s why the children grew uneasy around him. Dr. Gardner was too eager, too solicitous. When they barged into my quiet school room to complain, each and every one of them, “Miss Ellen, why can’t that crazy white man just yell at us or leave us alone?”

  “Please, Miss Jericho.” Dr. Gardner was still in the dirt at my feet. “Please. Just let me draw the children a few more times.”

  “I can’t allow it.”

  And here he turned cunning. Because he really did make a study of people, and I think, from our first conversation, he knew my weakness. “I’ll leave if you let me draw you instead,” he said.

  Nobody ever thinks a plain old woman can be vain, but I agonize over my appearance. I spend hours in the mirror before class, my pin safely hidden away, attending to the wisps of hair that still stand up in graying licks, despite the hot comb. I wash and cream my face three times a day. I do this despite the fact my skin’s been dull for years. Whatever extra money I have after paying my boardinghouse fee and paying the barbershop for its old Police Gazettes, I spend on very small bottles of sharp scent which I have the courage to wear no place, except on the occasion of going to bed early on a Friday evening.

  So when Dr. Gardner said, “Let me draw you instead,” I am ashamed to say I only slightly hesitated.

  “I suppose I’ll do it,” I said. “If you really agree to leave my pupils alone.”

  “I swear I will.” He stood up now, dusted his knees. “Come to my rooms tomorrow afternoon.” When I hesitated he shook his head slightly. “The landlady will let you in.”

  “Then I definitely can’t come. She’ll spread it around the whole town and I’
ll lose my position.”

  “Then come when she’s not at home, through the back way. By the road closest to the woods. We’ll make sure no one sees you, I promise.”

  A Star shines because of self-denial. I thought of those women in the Police Gazette. I thought of my seven-year-old self, flower of the Northern Negro Race. I thought of the sweet surrender of knowingly making a mistake, and knowing, hoping, things would be fine despite it all. No Negro I’d ever heard of or met had ever done that. I thought of those cinched waists on newsprint, tossed into the fire when I was through with them, twisting up into annihilation.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Laurel

  Laurel told her daughters that they were special. This was why the Toneybee Institute wanted them. “You know how many families applied to do this?” she said in the months leading up to the move. “So many. But ours was the only one with kids who already knew how to sign. I was the only one with girls that smart.”

  They knew how to sign because Laurel was special, too. She had grown up as the only black girl in the state of Maine. Or, if not technically the only one, then at least the only one in a one-hundred-mile radius. She always said it that way, too, a “one-hundred-mile radius,” so that Callie and Charlotte imagined a large bull’s-eye, its red rings hovering over the state’s borderlines. The small dark circle at the rings’ center was Laurel.

  Laurel’s father, Theodore Quincy, was a former serviceman. Her mother Nancy was a seamstress. Together they bought a Christmas tree farm in Farragut, Maine, because they liked its solitude.

  They never explained to Laurel what awful noises of the world had driven them to choose the muteness of assimilation. Each morning, Nancy Quincy stood at her stove and stirred a pan of oatmeal. Theodore Quincy sat behind her at the kitchen table staring out through the window, cutting down every tree he saw with his eyes.

  Theodore and Nancy had not counted on it being so hard, so very, very hard, to be the only black family in a one-hundred-mile radius. But it was too late to give up, once the place was bought and Laurel was born. To admit defeat would have broken what little heart they had left. Nancy and Theodore willed themselves to believe that this life was best for Laurel. At least she wasn’t a hooligan. At least she wasn’t running the streets of Boston. She had air and trees and an overpowering sky tamping down to meet her. That had to count for something.

  “None of the white people ever said anything outright mean to us,” Laurel lied to her daughters. By which she meant that she allowed herself to remember only once or twice when someone called her “nigger.” She would never say that word out loud to her girls. “It wasn’t like that,” she explained. “It was just the opposite. They were always so polite. They were so polite it nearly killed me.”

  For Laurel, growing up in Farragut felt like the whole world was holding its breath around her. As she moved from her home to the road leading to school and back again, she entered a kind of airless delirium. Her favorite sound in the world was that of the soles of her own penny loafers scuffing on gravel as she walked to school. It was realer than the scrape of her mother’s tin spoon in the pan of oatmeal at the stove or the click in the back of her father’s throat as he lit imaginary fires behind his eyes and dreamed of burning pines. Whenever Laurel shuffled her loafers over the gravel, she shut her eyes and opened her mouth, tried to swallow that noise and keep it safe in the well of her neck. When the indifference of town overwhelmed her, she’d hum and hum until she brought back up the sound of her own shoes on gravel.

  Once she reached town, the atmosphere was even tighter, like a lung suspended in motion. At school, the teachers spoke in loud, bright voices to try to draw her out but never named the thing that made her different.

  On the playground, children screeched and ran and skipped, and Laurel sat beneath a pine tree and watched them. She rubbed a patch of sap between her fingers, and every time the stickiness pulled at the skin there, she closed her eyes in gratitude for the pain. Each stinging smack told her brain and her skin and her blood, “I am here, I exist, I am here.”

  It was in this climate of reticence—never being asked more than what was polite, never being spoken to first in public, always being courteously omitted, the eschewal of ever naming things outright—that Laurel grew to hate the failures of the spoken word.

  By the time she was ten years old, she had had enough. She stopped speaking. She still talked at home, but out in the streets of Farragut, she wrote everything down on a notepad with a golf pencil she nicked from the bank. She wrote notes to the grocer; to her teachers; to the few classmates who directed conversation her way. She wrote notes to the wind and the trees and the stars—her companions—and she tore up the paper as soon as she was finished writing and dropped fistfuls of it around the farm, to ensure their delivery.

  For a half year, she was solved. Her teachers gladly accepted her notes, relieved to have a bona fide reason to ignore her. They palmed the sheets of paper and trained their eyes to forget her for the rest of the day. Laurel moved silently through the school’s hallways and the stream of calls and shouts and giggles ebbed and flowed around her. She felt proud, contained within herself, a smooth, perfect rock at the bottom of a river. Not a part of the current, it was sure, but not because she wasn’t good enough to be counted as water but because she was made up of a different element entirely—she was silent and strong and adamantine stone. When she was mute, Laurel was finally happy. She’d bucked the spoken word.

  It was Nancy who ruined it for her, who found a semester’s worth of discarded notes in the bottom of a battered schoolbag, who marched Laurel to class and said to the teacher, her voice shaking to stay calm, “Why didn’t you ask her to speak?” and the teacher, perplexed, “Because we thought this was better,” and Nancy again, her voice nearly hoarse with the effort to stay cordial, to not show her anger, “Please treat her like everyone else. Teach her like everyone else. She needs to speak like everybody else. Please ask her to speak.”

  Nancy hustled Laurel out of the classroom and into the cab of their pickup truck. Before she even put the key in the ignition, Nancy reached for Laurel’s golf pencil and silently, efficiently, broke it down into splinters. She gathered all the pieces in her fist, rolled down her window and tossed them on to the curb.

  “We’ve got enough problems out here,” she told Laurel as she brushed the lead dust off her palms. “You don’t want to make being peculiar one of them.”

  Being the only black family for a one-hundred-mile radius had one benefit. Laurel and her parents were famous. For nearly a decade running, the Quincys’ tree farm was the only entry for the entire state of Maine in The Colored Motorist’s Guide to America. They were, officially, the northernmost Negroes in the United States. Day-trippers from Boston, defiant honeymooners, bored servicemen on leave from the Navy Yard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—they all came to the Quincy tree farm to gawk and take pictures. The Colored Motorist’s Guide told them where they could and could not sleep, in what towns the citizens would shoot them if they stayed there after dark, and here, in a book that listed what was possible and what was not, was the impossible printed plain on a page: Negroes in Maine.

  The summer Laurel was eleven, the Hallelujah School for the Colored Deaf found the tree farm. They came at the end of the season, in a white rusting school bus, with their name printed on the side in bright blue paint. The bus pulled up alongside the farmhouse’s front gate and idled as about a dozen boys and girls pressed their faces to the windows and stared at Laurel where she played. She ignored them.

  She was bored of tourists. They were black, but they spoke to her parents with a condescension Laurel felt in her bones, though she didn’t have a word for it yet. “It’s a living, I guess,” they said, while drinking her parents’ lemonade. And the kids who came with them, who hung over the sides of doors chewing gum and staring at the jagged ends of Laurel’s hot-comb pressed hair, spoke too quickly, in a high pitch and with a force Laurel found bewild
ering. It was giddiness that made them talk like that, something Laurel had never heard before and so could not understand. Here was an even harder truth to live with: she couldn’t trust any words, even when the people speaking them looked like her.

  So Laurel pretended not to hear the bus’s engine.

  The bus door folded open and a woman came down the stairs. She took the liberty of opening the Quincys’ front gate herself, and she walked up to where Laurel sat in the grass drawing in her notebook. She was probably only about nineteen or twenty, but she seemed like an adult to Laurel. The woman wore a flowered skirt pressed into sharp pleats, but when she held out her hand Laurel could see faint stains on the armpits of her blouse.

  The woman said: “You’re the Quincys? You live here?”

  Nancy came from the house and into the yard and shook the woman’s hand. The woman said that her name was Mary Ann Grannum and she was a teacher at a colored school for the deaf in South Carolina. They paid for their classes by touring the country every summer in an acting troupe. Nancy asked, “How do the students give their lines?” and Mary Ann smiled. “We’re special.”

  They came from a place that had been forgotten by time, a school founded to teach signing to the colored deaf, started right after the Civil War by well-meaning Yankees and quickly taken over by the colored citizens themselves. Over the years, when other deaf schools banished sign language, declared it backward and a threat to the wholesome spoken word, subscribed to the theory that sign language would encourage the deaf to marry only each other and create a perpetuating race of non-hearers, and swaddled the hands of their most defiant students in thick cotton mittens, the students at the Hallelujah School paid no heed to any of that and kept signing. They became a rarity: black children who could speak with their hands.