We were presumed insane. Mother took the diagnosis well. She moved our things out of storage into a plywood cabin on the piney outskirts of town, which she rented on the strength of a tiny legacy from Grandfather Wharton. She did not hook up the telephone. She took up a hoe instead, and began to put every square inch of her sandy two-acre rented lot under cultivation: peanuts, sweet potatoes, and four dozen kinds of flowers. She seemed determined to grow tragedy out of herself like a bad haircut. A neighbor down the road had a mean goose and hogs, whose manure Mother toted home daily like a good African in two balanced bushel pails. It would not have surprised me to see her put a third bucket on her head. By midsummer we could not see out the windows for the foxglove and the bachelor’s buttons. Mother said she aimed to set up a plank shack by the road and sell bouquets for three-fifty apiece. I wondered what Bethlehem would say about that. The minister’s wife gone barefoot to roadside commerce.
As earnestly as Mother had taken up seed catalogs, I took up the catalog of Emory University and studied my possibilities. Then I rode the Greyhound to Atlanta and limped into the admissions office. I was allowed to have an interview with a gentleman named Dr. Holden Remile, whose job I think was to discourage people such as myself from asking for interviews with people such as himself. His desk was immense.
I opened my mouth and waited for the sentence I hoped would arrive. “I need to go to your college here, sir. And when I am done with it, I will need to go to your medical school.”
Dr. Remile was quite shocked, whether by my deformity or my audacity I can’t say, but probably less shocked than I was by the sound of my own voice. He asked whether I had funds, whether I had high school transcripts, whether I had at least taken high school chemistry or advanced algebra. The only answer I had was “No, sir.” But I did mention I had read quite a few books.
“Do you know what calculus is, young lady?” he asked, in the manner of a person who is hiding something frightening in one of his hands. Having grown up around the hands of Reverend Price, I am fairly immune to such fright.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “It is the mathematics of change.”
His telephone rang. While I waited for him to have his conversation, I worked out in my head both the sum and the product of the numbers on the large numbered set of files on his bookshelf, which were all out of order, and made up an equation for righting them, which I wrote down for him on paper. I had to use algebra, though, not calculus. I also observed that his name, backward, was the French verb for wearing one’s clothes threadbare, so I told him that as well, with no offense intended as his clothes were fine.
Dr. Remile suddenly ascertained that I was due some government benefits, being the child of a veteran. He set me up for taking the entrance examinations, for which I returned to Atlanta one month later. I didn’t miss any of the questions in mathematics. On the verbal portion I missed four questions, all having to do with choosing a word in a series that doesn’t belong. I have always had trouble with that line of questioning. Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.
I had told the truth: I needed to go to his college. I needed to get out of Bethlehem, out of my skin, my skull, and the ghost of my family. It is not because I was ashamed of Mother-how could I, the village idiot, be ashamed of her? I somewhat enjoyed the company of her madness, and certainly I understood it. But Mother wanted to consume me like food. I needed my own room. I needed books, and for the first time in my life I needed schoolmasters who would tell me each day what to think about.
In organic chemistry, invertebrate zoology, and the inspired symmetry of Mendelian genetics, I have found a religion that serves. I recite the Periodic Table of Elements like a prayer; I take my examinations as Holy Communion, and the pass of the first semester was a sacrament. My mind is crowded with a forest of facts. Between the trees lie wide-open plains of despair. I skirt around them. I stick to the woods.
Since I can’t call her, I take the bus back on weekends. We drink tea and she shows me her flowers. The odd thing is when Father was around she never gardened at all. That was his domain, and he directed us all in the planting of useful foods, all to the Glory of God and so forth. We never had one flower in our yard the whole of my childhood. Not so much as a dandelion. Now Mother’s shack is the mere peak of a roof surrounded by a blaze of pinks, blues, oranges. You have to bend under a wild arch of cosmos when you come up the walk, and use your whole right arm to push the hollyhocks aside to get in the front door. It turns out Mother has an extraordinary talent for flowers. She was an entire botanical garden waiting to happen.
When I visit her we never talk much, and are both relieved by the silence, I think. There are only the two of us now, and I owe her my very life. She owes me nothing at all.Yet I have left her, and now she is sad. I’m not used to this. I have always been the one who sacrificed life and limb and half a brain to save the other half. My habit is to drag myself imperiously through a world that owes me unpayable debts. I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom.
Now I owe a debt I cannot repay. She took hold of me with a fierce grip and pulled me through. Mother was going to drag me out of Africa if it was her last living act, and it very nearly was. This is how it happened: the commerfant whose truck showed up like a rusted-out angel in Bulungu promised us a ride to Leopoldville with his bananas, but he soon changed his mind and dumped us for more bananas. After a conference with some soldiers along the road, he became convinced that fruit was now bringing a higher price than white women in the city. So out we went.
We walked for two days without food. At night we crouched at the edge of the woods and covered ourselves with palm leaves so the soldiers wouldn’t spot us. Late on the second evening an army truck pulled up beside us, and a man threw us suddenly into the back, where we landed across laps helmets rifles. No doubt the soldiers planned to do us harm; I was numb with that expectation. But Mother’s milk-glass eyes frightened them. Plainly she was possessed of some fierce evil that would enter these men if they touched her, or me. Especially me. So they kept their distance from both of us. We bumped along silently in the back of the truck, passing through dozens of military roadblocks, and were turned over to the BelgianEmbassy, which took us in until someone could sort out what ought to be done with us.We spent nineteen days in the infirmary, swallowing a variety of specialized poisons, since we had intestinal parasites, fungus growing on our feet and forearms, and more than the usual degree of malaria.
Then, on a hospital plane full of UN workers and sick white people, we were transported through a long thrumming darkness, in which we slept the sleep of the dead. When the droning stopped we all sat up and blinked like disturbed corpses. There was light at the round windows. The belly of the plane groaned open and we were delivered abruptly into the benign spring air of Fort Benning, Georgia.
It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. Yellow yellow line line. I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had gone into that one curb. For what? I could not quite think of the answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must be divided into places with and places without them? Was it always so, or did they multiply vastly, along with telephones and new shoes and transistor radios and cellophane-wrapped tomatoes, in our absence?