An American Story Read Online Free

holdings, spied my great-great-aunt’s lush garden, kicked open their door, and demanded half: “What grows on my land belongs to me!” He made clear his intention to claim half in perpetuity, so they plowed the garden under that night. And then there were all the times the overlord sent for his vassals to perform some menial labor in his baronial mansion, like furniture-moving or trash-hauling. They made a habit of showing up drunk, so that custom withered away as heirloom china shattered on the polished oak floors of de Big House.
    Degradation was a daily occurrence for them, yet I have to comb through my memory for stories like that. I don’t believe I could come up with many more. Except, of course, for the worst one, the one I’ll never forgive that Southern system of apartheid for.
    Though for years my mother moved me to tears with the sad story of her mother’s childbed death, I was nearly grown before she added the details many others would have put first. A white doctor had managed to stabilize my grandmother, though her condition remained grave. He left firm instructions that she was to be left alone, that only he would attend her. White interns, eager to practice their newfound surgical arts, operated on her for practice anyway. Drastically weakened, infected from the botched job, and afraid of what else they might do to her, my grandmother hid the pills they gave her in the masses of her curly black hair and died. It’s not clear that the pills would have saved her, or even exactly what they were for, but none of the family ever doubted the wisdom of her refusing further treatment. Having heard about the forced surgery, the Gooches were coming to take her home to safety. But they were too late.
    To my mother, that story is only about inevitability and loss. It’s about hearing those tiny little pills click-clack against the floor tiles when they came to claim the body, watching them skitter heedlessly, impotently buffeted by forces so much stronger than they. This was not—as it was for me, when I tried to radicalize her later—a story about white perfidy and the valuelessness of black existence. To accept that version, she would have had to have been a different person, a person who could hate.
    She rarely told a story the point of which was anything other than simple entertainment. She kept up with the yearly (pre-VCR) showings of
Cinderella, The Wizard of Oz,
and
Peter Pan;
she clapped as hard as we did to keep Tinkerbell alive. She made the simplest tasks and events seem fabulous, which is not to suggest that she wasn’t a stern taskmaster; no drill sergeant set higher standards than did she. For her, there were only two ways to do anything: “my way and the wrong way.” The wrong way got you whipped, so we stepped lively. Take hanging out the wash.
    After manhandling it through our wringer washer (a big improvement over the scrub board and big iron tub that used to turn Mama’s knuckles to sausage, but still hard work), our job had just begun. It had to be hung in a particular order (men’s shirts, men’s pants, all underwear—in their proper, gendered order—obscured in the middle for decency’s sake); in a particular manner (right side out, right side up, front facing the house if out back, the basement stairs if inside); and with a specified number of pins (five per sheet, two per shirt unless it’s a baby’s, in which case . . . ); pinned in a prescribed fashion (shirts: one at each shoulder . . . ). An overuse of clothespins was wasteful, an underuse was trifling, slovenly. Any deviation was “jes doin things any ol’ kinda way.”
    Worse than her whippings was her wit. If I daydreamed while a pot of water hissed and bubbled unnoticed, Mama would quip, “What you want that pot to do ’sides boil?” If some lazybones replaced an empty box in the pantry, she’d ask innocently, “When you