The Other Madisons Page 8

  At some stops, the porter hopped off the train to buy food for passengers from women holding covered baskets. Mary and I and our mothers ate roast beef or turkey sandwiches in our cabins. Meals in the dining car were “outrageously expensive,” my mother told me. More outrageous, she said, was that when the train reached the South, colored diners would have to sit behind a curtain. I thought that eating behind a curtain sounded like fun. At home, my friends and I dragged toy furniture behind the drapes and played teatime with our dolls.

  One evening, Mom surprised me with a treat. She had ordered fried chicken from the dining car and invited my new friend and her mother to join us in our compartment. A waiter came, balancing an enormous tray on one shoulder. Beside the sparkling glasses, shiny silver domes covering the plates reflected his smile and stretched it wide. When he lifted the domes, the paper ruffles on the drumsticks flabbergasted Mary, but my mother had already told me about decked-out chicken legs.

  The next afternoon, as I was about to go meet my playmate, Harold appeared at our door. He looked over my head at my mother, a frown wrinkling his forehead. Worry flashed across Mom’s face. Something had happened. The train was at a station that looked like all the others, but when the outside door opened, a blast of hot, humid air filled the car. We were in Texas.

  I stepped forward to find Mary, but Mom called me back. “Why?” I whined and protested for a moment, but from the look on her face I knew I should not press her further. Harold glanced at me, then started down the passageway toward Mary’s car. Mom closed the door to our compartment, and I played alone with my doll, pouting.

  At the next stop, I went to the window to see who would get on. My mother was close behind me. I pressed my forehead against the glass, and what I saw bewildered me: Mary stood on the platform between her mother and a pile of straw suitcases. They had reached their destination, I realized. Holding her pink plastic doll case and her white sweater, Mary searched the train windows. She found me, and we began to wave a tearful goodbye, the steel and glass separating us. As my mother wept for me, Harold stepped through the open cabin door, knelt down, and held me gently. In the years to come, I would grow to see that this childhood moment was my introduction to Ol’ Jim himself. I lived in California; I didn’t know there were places where friendships between black children and white children were forbidden. In 1990, when it came my time to be the family griotte, I would add this childhood memory to the stories to be told to future generations of Madisons. But on the railroad in 1948, the two mothers, in unrehearsed unison, lowered our waving arms. Then the train, slowly at first, carried me deeper into Texas.

  7

  The Dentist

  Among Gramps’s many contributions to our griot tradition was his pragmatic philosophy. Mom told me that when she and her brothers asked why there was a colored car and why it was the dirtiest car on the train, he answered with just one word: “Racism.”

  He told his children that experiencing racism was as much a part of them as their name. Mom remembered her surprise when he said, “I’m glad we colored people have to fight it.” Gramps explained that he believed racism made the black community more cohesive and helped its people see what everyone deserved and should work toward. “And,” he told the children, “when we stick to it, we get it. Maybe it’s hard to believe sometimes, but we have the upper hand in the fight. Racists are scared, and racism is just another challenge, and challenges make us strong.” He ended with this reminder: “White folks may not like it, but here we are, and here we’ll be. They don’t know it, but we know we are not victims. Racism is a feeble leftover of slavery.”

  Gramps was born free, but his father, Mack, had been born a slave. In his lifetime, Mack had been threatened, humiliated, and sold, but he believed in himself, Mom told me. After emancipation, he worked as a sharecropper until he had enough money to buy land. For the first time in his life, he owned something. Mom remembered Gramps’s words: “You children have never been slaves; neither have I. We own plenty of things, so surely we can put up with separate toilets and drinking fountains. We can’t touch produce when we buy food. We can’t try on clothes before we purchase them. We have to lower our eyes when a white person looks us in the face. And, if we’re lucky, we sit at the back of the bus. So what? Those foolish things don’t stop us from being who we are: Madisons. Americans.”

  No one believed in the family saying more than Gramps. No one was prouder of his ancestors, black and white. He was as proud that Mandy had survived the Middle Passage as he was that President Madison had helped found our nation. Without Mandy, we would not have our strength. Without Madison, he said, we would not have our name.

  Time and again, Gramps told his children that America, conceived by Madison and the other Founding Fathers, would never have become what it is without the millions of slaves like Mandy who worked its soil. He taught my mother and her brothers to recite these words: “Our white ancestors laid the foundations for this country, but our dark-skinned ancestors built it. They worked the fields, nursed babies, preached sermons, and fought in wars. They played music, owned businesses, cured sickness, and worked on railroads. They taught their children everything important about life in this world. They taught their children about God.”

  Since my first train ride, I’d had many lessons on dealing with racism, yet I was surprised every time I traveled to the South and saw Ol’ Jim shamelessly display himself in the WHITES ONLY or COLORED signs over water fountains and restroom doors. During and after the civil rights movement of the 1960s, those signs came down, slowly, but the hatred and resentment that had hung them there linger.

  One day in Boston, shortly before I traveled to Virginia to research my family’s history, I pulled out of the parking lot of the hospital where I had worked for nine years and my BMW’s blinkers malfunctioned. So I used hand signals. Another car pulled up close, and the driver shouted, “Get your fucking black hand back in your fucking car!” Then he sped off. The coward was gone before I could see his face. I feared worse in the South and, later, saw the behavior of the rude librarian as a warning, but after that, I allowed the exciting discoveries and the welcoming people to dim my vigilance.

  On the last day of my trip, looking forward to winding down as I enjoyed a homemade breakfast, I found a seat in the cozy dining room of the B and B. Pat stopped by to say goodbye and thank me for staying with them.

  “Lots of cream and sugar, I remember,” Bobby, the host, chef, and waiter of the B and B, said with a grin as he poured coffee into my mug. “Don’t want it to taste too much like coffee!” he teased.

  I leaned back and gazed through the window at the dense grove beyond the well-kept lawn. I thought about Mandy losing her way of life, Coreen losing her child, and Jim losing his home and family just a few miles away. But their survival assured me they must have found a way to believe in themselves, to identify a purpose for their lives. They wanted to leave a legacy and teach values through stories to be passed on to future generations, I decided. For family.

  “May we join you?” a man asked.

  I looked up. A white couple, probably in their late thirties, stood over me. The man, blue-eyed and blond, was well over six feet tall and wore starched and pressed khaki slacks and a light blue jersey. The woman, a tall, big-boned brunette, also wore casual but crisp clothing.

  Though there were empty tables nearby, and I preferred to relax and reflect in solitude, I knew the basis for the B-and-B code of behavior: Every guest is a member of the household.

  “Certainly,” I replied.

  “We’re from Baltimore,” the man said, pulling out a chair and sitting down. The woman waited several moments, looking at him, then took a seat. I wondered whether she had been waiting for him to stand up and pull out a chair for her or whether she had hoped he would move to another table. I couldn’t read her smile.

  “I’m from Boston,” I responded to the man’s statement.

  “Really? I grew up in Braintree,” he said, opening hi
s napkin and arranging his fork and knife.

  “That’s just a few exits down the interstate from where I work.”

  “Been up and down that so-called expressway a thousand times. Had enough. Braintree is an okay town, but it’s just a place on the way to somewhere else. I prefer Baltimore. More action, like the Hub, but more real. So what do you do there?” he asked. The woman smiled at him as if she thought his calling Boston by its nickname “the Hub” was clever.

  “I’m a pediatrician.”

  “Is that so? Good for you. I’m a dentist.” He patted the woman’s knee. “This gal here is retired. She used to be my hygienist; now she’s my wife.” He guffawed. His wife smiled again. This time I could see she was embarrassed.

  Between bites of thick-sliced bacon and sips of fresh-squeezed orange juice, we chatted about what to do and see in the area. I recommended Montpelier but did not mention the purpose of my visit.

  During a lull in the small talk, I reached for the pitcher to pour warm maple syrup on my apple waffle. As a stream of clear, brown liquid began to flow toward my plate, the dentist cleared his throat.

  “I have to change the subject to something sticky,” he said, his face solemn.

  The syrup?

  His wife looked puzzled.

  “Black people and white people can’t seem to get along,” he said, scanning my face.

  “Really?” I braced myself. His wife concentrated on the pats of butter melting on her waffle.

  “In Baltimore, a large part of the inner city is black. The mayor is a black man.” The dentist smiled, leaning back. “He’s liked and respected, so why doesn’t he just tell everyone they should put racism behind them and work together?”

  “Yes,” his wife said, glancing up from her waffle. Her vacant smile penetrated my skin like millions of tiny needles.

  “It’s complicated,” I found myself saying. “Racially based attitudes and behaviors can be subtle and difficult to recognize.” I knew I sounded professorial, but I continued, “Racism is systemic—this country wouldn’t look the same without it.”

  “Oh, come on,” the dentist said, scooting his chair closer. “Blacks have it made. Kurt Schmoke graduated from Harvard Law School. Now he’s mayor of Baltimore. It’s a southern town, you know. I voted for him.” He grinned. “And look at you. You’re a doctor.”

  I put down my fork.

  “Blacks can do anything and be anything they want,” he said. “Discrimination is a thing of the past.” He tapped the tabletop. “When something doesn’t go their way, blacks blame race.”

  My jaw clenched and began to ache.

  “Take the incident with those black Secret Service men in that Denny’s Restaurant in DC,” he continued. The smell of syrup on his breath made my stomach churn. “They claimed they weren’t being served because they were black. I’ve eaten in Denny’s myself; the service is bad. That’s all.”

  “Other customers who came in after them were served first,” I said.

  “You’re wrong. A group of white Secret Service men came in about the same time and happened to be served before the black guys.”

  “That’s not what the newspapers reported. And Denny’s ended up losing a class-action suit. The courts fined the company and required it to give sensitivity training to every employee.”

  The dentist shook his head. “See, this is the problem. This is what I’m saying.”

  It was my turn to scoot closer. “Regardless of what did or did not happen at Denny’s, discrimination is not a thing of the past,” I said. “In that same city, the capital, no less, and in many others, black professional men and women wearing business suits and carrying briefcases complain that taxis will pass them by to pick up white passengers a few yards up the street.” I could not stop. “Blacks throughout the country experience this kind of treatment every day in restaurants, shops, hotels, at work, on the street, everywhere.”

  “Calm down. No need to overreact,” the dentist said.

  His wife looked up from her clean-as-a-whistle plate and dabbed her mouth with a corner of a napkin, trying not to smear what was left of her red lipstick. She smiled, and I thought I saw sympathy in her face. Did she feel bad for me because of her husband’s behavior or because of my blackness?

  I glared at them. “A few years ago, I was at a medical conference, and a white colleague asked me how it felt to be black. I told him, ‘Great. No one should miss it.’” The couple appeared so confused I knew I should feel sorry for them, but my voice rose. “Why would he ask that, and what made him think I could speak for every black person?”

  After a brief silence, I continued, my voice unsteady with anger. “This is a bed-and-breakfast. I paid my money, and I’m a guest here, like you. I am not going to be the sounding board on which you can try out your ignorant, arrogant ideas about race relations, and I am certainly not going to validate your notion that racism is only in my head.”

  Heart racing, temples throbbing, I pushed my chair away from the table, stood up, and headed toward the door. Floor and ceiling pressed toward each other, and rage obscured my vision. The room, the B and B, and all of Virginia had gone silent. As I kept walking, I felt a pair of well-matched, all-American fools staring at my back.

  Just outside the dining room, I stopped. I realized that Mandy, Coreen, and Jim—no matter how much self-worth they had or how solid their commitment to family—could not have walked away as I just did—at least, not without consequences. This confrontation with racism would have its emotional costs for me, but I would not be beaten or sold.

  I returned to Boston, determined to put the B-and-B incident behind me, but I kept fuming at the dentist’s brazen arrogance and the hygienist’s smiling complicity. I could not figure out why I let them send me into a tailspin. They were afraid of me and knew they could change neither my history nor my future. The upper hand was mine. In fact, the dentist had offered me the power to wipe away his prejudices, and all I had to do was pat him on the back for voting for a black man.

  But well before then, racism had become the flash point in my life, a gnawing entanglement of anger, pain, frustration, and sense of futility that rarely failed to set me off. I had spent decades trying to avoid, confront, resolve, understand, circumscribe, ignore, minimize, and deny the impact of racism on my life, though if any black child could have been protected from racism in America, it would have been someone like me. Like Mary Stone, the squeaky-clean, middle-class teenage daughter in the 1960s TV series The Donna Reed Show, I was popular at school and earned good grades. Mary’s dad had a successful white-collar job; her mom was a homemaker. My dad was a second-generation physician; my mom was a second-generation teacher as well as a homemaker. But Mary Stone was white. She could believe racism did not exist. I could not. In my well-regarded, racially diverse elementary school in liberal Northern California, white classmates called me “Brownie” or “Fuzzy,” and by the time I entered junior high, I knew bigotry would limit my future unless my academic performance was much better than theirs.

  The racial prejudice I lived with extended well beyond the classroom. A few months before I began my senior year of high school, I saw an ad in a local newspaper. A drugstore needed a clerk that summer. I called and scheduled an interview with the owner, Gil. The night before my appointment, I ironed my skirt and blouse, washed my shoelaces, and powdered and buffed my white-suede saddle oxfords, the shoe of choice among teenage girls who wanted to be hip.

  When I entered his office, the heavy-jowled man looked me up and down, sprawled out in the chair behind his massive desk, and picked up a lit cigar. After taking a few puffs, he said, “I’m not about to have no colored gal working in my store.”

  I felt flushed and caught my breath, but then, remembering Gramps saying, “Racism is just another challenge, and challenges make us strong,” I looked Gil in the eye and said in a level voice, “Your loss.” I turned my back on that man and walked out the door.

  Over the years, I learned that slav
ery and racism had left an indelible imprint, a birthmark, on America. The driver, the dentist and his wife, the drugstore owner, and my white schoolmates decades earlier reminded me that no matter what kind of car I drove, how many academic degrees I earned, how spotless and hip my shoes were, or how multiracial my classroom was, there would always be people in this country who thought I was lesser.

  Mandy

  The boat stopped. It swayed and groaned, more quiet now. Overhead, the trapdoor opened, grinding, creaking, falling back loud and hard, casting a square of light down on us in the dark. Black outlines of men rushed through the light, down a ladder, shouting. Rods. Thuds. Whips. Whirls. Screams. A racket of chains. Children crying. Commotion all around. A whip cut my back, then my shoulders. Someone shoved me to the ladder. Chain on my arm yanked me up, chain on my leg yanked me down, a girl’s arm caught in it. I dragged her up. Had to.

  Outside, above the black hole, chaos. Black men. Black women. Little black boys and girls, some smaller than me. The bright daylight made me squeeze my eyes shut. Legs so weak, I crawled. My knees scraped raw on the splintery wood; they burned in vomit. My hands slipped in blood. Wiped them on my thighs. Thick and sticky. I forced my eyes open, and despair poured into my heart. The ocean lay still and gray and ugly. Not dancing, blue, and beautiful. Not mine. Not mighty.

  I stumbled down a wood plank, almost fell into the dying ocean. I dropped down beside it and pulled my fingers through my hair. Only one of my pretty red beads was there.

  Everything—the sounds, the smells, the sights, the people—was different. White men prodded, beat, whipped us away from the shore, crowded us into pens. Dumped buckets of water on us. Water poured over my head, into my nose, my mouth. I gasped for air, squatted down in our filth. They threw food at us. I cupped my hands, shoved it into my mouth. I gagged.