Catfish Read online

  “I can see why. She’s so beautiful and smart and, no offense Toot, but you’d never know she was colored unless someone said so. Do you fuss at her and punish her because she can’t make friends?”

  Tootsie didn’t answer. “Help-code,” The subject dropped, I was left to ponder.

  I think I made the decision to become a writer after Catfish told me the second story in a long list of ‘yarns’ he’d spin for me over the coming years. As usual, Catfish was on his back porch, sleeping in his rocker when I climbed the steps and sat in the other chair. It was much too hot to sleep inside the little cabin, I expected.

  It was a perfect day, sunny with a breeze, budding azaleas and dogwoods brought smells of summer and I had skipped down South Jefferson with a spring in my step. After a few minutes sitting, watching the corn grow, as Catfish would say, I tapped him on the shoulder. He woke with a start and looked at me. I laughed at his surprised expression. After a long pause, he began to laugh, too. We both felt more at ease now that nothing had happened during all the months I’d been visiting.

  “Hi, Missy,” he said. I wondered if he knew my real name. I liked his pet name for me but I wondered. Then I remembered our first meeting when I was seven, “Is Susie short for Susanna? ... then you have a nickname.” I laughed under my breath.

  “What you been doing?” I asked him.

  “Oh, Missy. I been watching the grass grow.” I laughed and looked at his profile set against the backdrop of pecan trees and tall live oaks with branches that curved up, then down and reached almost to the ground. It was as if the Quarters was hidden in a forest. You couldn’t see it from South Jefferson Extension and, if you didn’t know where to find the one-lane dirt drive hidden in the trees, you’d never get there. I would creep into the little clearing where the cabins were, by following a foot trail Tootsie told me about that had its entrance on Gravier Road. Once I took three steps onto the trail it curved sharply and I could no longer see the road or any signs of life other than the footpath that weaved through the trees and bushes. I wondered how the Klan knew how to find the Quarters.

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Fit as a fiddle,” he said. We both laughed.

  “Look,” he said. He motioned to his right. “Here come Marianne.” I waved at my best friend. She smiled broadly and waved back.

  “What you doing here?” Marianne asked. She climbed the steps and sat next to Catfish’s chair, facing me.

  “Do I need a reason to visit my favorite old man and best girlfriend?” Catfish chuckled, and we giggled. “I was hoping Catfish would tell us the rest of that story about when his granddaddy was taken from his mother”

  “Will you, Granddaddy?”

  “Let’s see, girls. If I remember correctly, the last time I tole you about when my granddaddy got sold and came to Shadowland, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” He looked off into space. I followed his eyes and thought they watched a Robin flit from one pecan tree branch to another. He was lost in thought and I didn’t interrupt. Finally he began the story.

  *

  Mama

  1878

  ‘It was a normal day in 1878,’ my granddaddy would say. ‘Almost twenty years after I came here to Shadowland.’

  A horse pulling a flat board buggy trotted up the long, tree-lined drive you could hardly see from the main road, hidden by a grove of oak and pecan trees that shadowed the entry to Mr. Gordon Van’s plantation house.

  “That’s why they called in Shadowland, you know,” Catfish commented. “The house and all the fields was hidden in the shadows. You had to know it was here. Anyways ...

  A young light skinned man sat on the elevated bench with the reins in his hands as the horse trotted up the long, circular drive. He stopped the horse in front of the steps that led to the wide, wrap-around porch. Columns the size of oak trunks braced the roof, two stories high. Everything was painted white except the black shutters and the black front door.

  The man, dressed in baggy, once-white pants and a thin, loose fitting cotton shirt, sat on the wagon bench and didn’t move. His hair was lighter than most of his kind and not bristly like mine. His eyes was bluish-green. He had a long, thin nose, not wide and flat like most us coloreds on Mr. Van’s plantation.

  The man didn’t climb down from the wagon, didn’t call out, didn’t make no noise, he just sat on the wagon bench, looked straight ahead, and held the reins patiently.

  Before long, Mr. Van’s house girl, Lizzie, opened the front door and axed what he needed.

  ‘I need to see your boy named, Samuel Massey,’ he told her.

  ‘I’ll go see can Mr. Van come talk to you,’ Lizzie said and disappeared through the tall, black double doors with long windows on either side.

  The man in the wagon tried to peer through the glass, but couldn’t see nothing. Soon, the girl returned with Mr. Van behind her. He was a tall, white man with thick, dark hair that had shocks of grey at the temples and above his ears. He wore a white suit, white shirt and a skinny black necktie with a silver clasp. He held a black felt derby hat in one hand and a pair of black gloves in the other. He slapped the hat with the gloves as he stood on the edge of the porch and glared at the man in the wagon.

  ‘What you want, boy?’ Mr. Van axed.

  ‘Sir, I gots a sick woman in the back of this wagon needs to see your boy, Samuel. I been told he stay here.’

  ‘Samuel, yes, yes; Samuel works for me,’ Mr. Van said. ‘You’ll find him in the Quarters, or he might be in the fields nearby. You passed it on your way here. Go back down the drive and turn right. The next turn into my property will take you to him.’

  ‘Much obliged, Sir,’ the young man said, and he led the horses around the circular drive and off the plantation grounds. The horse-drawn wagon pulled into the property by the cabins.

  “That was right here,” Catfish said. “Right in front of this porch where we sitting, and Granddaddy was in the field planting corn. Granny, her name was Anna Lee, saw it first, coming towards the Quarters.”

  Dust rose under the horses’ hooves and stirred up under the wagon wheels. Granddaddy didn’t see the wagon but he knew something was coming up to the Quarters, because he smelt the dust in the air.

  ‘Samuel,’ Annie hollered. ‘Get over here.’ Annie grabbed Sammy,

  “That was my daddy,” Catfish explained. “Sammy was his name. He was about three-years-old at the time”

  Little Sammy stood on the back stoop and waited, wide-eyed and afraid. This was a stranger and they didn’t have strangers come to our place unless it was trouble.

  “Granddaddy looked up and watched the wagon appear out of the cloud of dust as the powdery ashes settled,” Catfish said. “Then he walked slowly towards the horse and never took his eye off the younger man on the wagon seat. He took his time so he could size him up and Granny was yelling at him to hurry. She was scared.”

  The driver looked to be about ten or twelve years younger than me, and he had lighter skin. In fact, you couldn’t tell was he a white man or colored. He had long legs and didn’t wear no hat to cover his light brown head and straight hair, cut short, above his ears.

  “As Granddaddy got close to him he noticed the man’s eyes.

  They was big as moon pies and a shade I’d never seen on a colored man, but, somehow, I knew he was colored, cause he seemed familiar, almost like I’d known that young man from somewhere.

  Granddaddy would later say he knew that man wasn’t here to cause trouble, he could tell from the man’s face. It was kind-looking and sad. He’s the one looked scared. Granddaddy would say.

  ‘What can I do for you,’ Granddaddy axed him when he got up even with the wagon.

  ‘I got someone want to see you,’ the man said and he cocked his chin towards the bed of the wagon.

  He spoke so low Granddaddy could hardly hear him. The young man just stared straight ahead and when he popped his chin to the side and sa
id, ‘In the back.’

  Granddaddy walked around to the back of the wagon and Granny met him there with my daddy in tow.

  Little Sammy didn’t want his mama to hold him so she let him down and he followed behind her, close. They all three looked in the back of the wagon over the sides that rose about a foot or so from the floor bed.

  Lying on burlap sacks, under a thin gray blanket was a frail, grey-haired woman with her head resting on a bedroll. She must have known Granddaddy and them was there because she opened her clouded eyes and looked at him and Granny standing there and little Sammy crawling up the back of the wagon.

  Then, the old woman started to cry. Right away Granddaddy said he knew who it was. He climbed in the back of the wagon and picked her up like a baby and laid her across his lap. She weighed so little she felt like a pillow.

  ‘Mama,’ Granddaddy cried, and tears rolled down his face and the dirt and dust made ridges, like tiny streams that cut through a muddy field, and they almost ran together and collected under his chin until his entire face was wet and made the mud stick in the crease of his neck, but he didn’t pay it no mind. Tiny dollops of muck fell on the blanket.

  ‘Oh, Mama,’ he said.

  He just held her and she let him cradle her as she nestled into his arms that he tightened around her as tight as he could without hurting her, and he rocked her like a baby. He stroked her thin, graying hair and kept saying,

  ‘Mama. Mama. It’s really you.’

  ‘I don’t know how long we stayed out there, in the back of that wagon,’ Granddaddy would say. Even Granny couldn’t tell you. Granddaddy’d look over at Granny and she’d have tears and she’d just nod. Finally, Granddaddy carried his Mama into the cabin and laid her in the bed. Once she was resting peacefully, he and Granny, Sammy on her lap, sat down at the kitchen table with the young man, who said his name was, Thomas.

  The aroma of freshly brewed coffee mixed with the muddy taste in his mouth as they sat there, quiet-like, and tried to figure out how to talk it out. Turned out that Thomas was Granddaddy’s half-brother. He didn’t know who was his daddy, but he was told it was a white man that worked at the Kent House.

  Thomas said his Mama’d been sick for the past few months and she’d been crying at night to see Granddaddy.

  ‘I knew if she kept up that crying she would die,’ Thomas said. ‘So I finally made a deal with The Man and brought her here to Jean Ville. She said she always knew where you was, because she made some kind of deal with one of the men who brought you here.’

  ‘She never stopped yearning for you,’ Thomas said. ‘She missed you every day.’

  Granddaddy tole Thomas that he missed her, too, every day and every night. He tole his half-brother he never stopped believing he would see her again.

  Granddaddy was much obliged to Thomas for bringing his Mama to see him. She died a few days later, but he got to spend time with her and introduce her to Annie and his boy Sammy, her only grand chile.

  Thomas took Mama back to Alexandria to bury her on the Kent Plantation because he had that deal with The Man. Granddaddy didn’t try to stop him. He didn’t want to make no trouble for Thomas.

  “You know, if my granddaddy had stayed at Kent House in Alexandria, I guess I wouldn’t be here, or Tootsie, or Marianne or none of us,” Catfish said. He stared at the cornfields beyond the pecan groove. He looked reminiscent.

  “Wow, Catfish, that’s quite a story,” I said, and meant it. I started to think about his stories, how these incredible pieces of history would die off with him if someone didn’t write them down. I thought how important it was that they be told.

  I knew I had to become a writer. I would record his stories and let the world know what white men did to other human beings. I would make readers think about how it would feel if those same things happened to them, because of the color of their skin.

  “You bet it’s a interesting story. Just when I think we coloreds have it bad now, I remember some of the stories about my granddaddy and my daddy and I think I have no room to complain.”

  You do have room to complain, I thought. Things are not much better now. White men still think they can put black men down in order to make themselves feel like men, when, all along, it’s the Negro, strong and resilient, who is the strong one. The joke’s on Whitey, I thought. Then I remembered that I was white. Who was I to tell the story of slavery and the injustice done to colored folks? That was my dilemma—a white girl telling the story of Negroes—pretty unreliable. I’d have to work through that, as I’ve spent years trying to do.

  “Now you girls run along. You done wore me out, again!”

  We hugged his neck and kissed him on the cheek. Then we skipped down the steps in the direction of the barn.

  Catfish watched us. I could always feel it, how he looked from one of us to the other as if trying to figure something out.

  *

  I knew how much Tootsie loved me, I never questioned that, but now that I knew Marianne and realized how much Tootsie loved her own daughter, I wondered whether it made Toot love me less. She told me later that when she got to the Quarters from our house early one Wednesday and saw me climb the steps onto Catfish’s porch she felt afraid for me.

  Tootsie knew that if Mama found out I was in the Quarters, there’d be hell to pay. Tootsie wanted to protect me, to send me home, to tell me to never come back. On the other hand, she knew I made Marianne happy. And Marianne was lonely and she needed me, almost as much as I needed her.

  Marianne told me that her cousin, Rodney, visited on occasion, and Marianne liked him. She said they were related twice. Rodney’s uncle, Bo Thibaut, was married to Marianne’s Aunt Jesse, Tootsie’s sister. Bo was Marianne’s uncle by marriage, and Rodney’s uncle because Bo was Ray Thibault’s younger brother. Rodney was a couple years older than Marianne, and Tootsie began to worry about what the boy might teach her little girl. They’d go out to the barn to talk and Tootsie was glad Marianne had someone to be with, but as a mother, she was concerned.

  In Tootsie’s eyes, I was a much better friend for Marianne. I was immature and innocent, and Tootsie secretly hoped some of my naiveté would rub off on Marianne, who seemed to grow up way too fast after the KKK incident. But it usually worked the other way around—the older girl would teach the younger one, and Tootsie knew I was more than likely to lose my innocence than I was to give some of it to Marianne.

  Tootsie told me she watched me with Catfish, the way he smiled when I was around and the way Marianne seemed to come to life when she was with me. Tootsie wondered why I didn’t make the white girls at my school smile. Tootsie knew that some of my teachers sent notes home about me and that the nuns never liked me and finally found a reason to expel me, even though I was stupid enough to keep being nice to them.

  Tootsie said she heard Mama tell her Bridge ladies all the trouble she was having with me. One of the ladies, Miss Bertha, took issue with Mama. She said Mama shouldn’t talk that way about her own daughter. Tootsie liked Miss Bertha, she said what she thought.

  “Anne, you should be ashamed of yourself talking about your little girl that way,” Miss Bertha said. “You know those girls at the public school are jealous of her. They feel threatened. She needs a friend and she’ll find one where you don’t want her to if you keep pushing her away.”

  “Yeah, Anne,” Miss Judith said. She was Miss Bertha’s sister-in-law. They were close. “You need to be Susie’s friend and stop criticizing her. Let her confide in you. You’re just pushing her away. Before you know it she will have an older boyfriend, get pregnant and bring shame on you and Bob.”

  “Oh, she won’t do anything like that,” Tootsie overheard Mama say. “She’s such a Goodie-Goodie that she’d never betray us or do anything to hurt Bob’s political future.”

  “A girl her age gets lonely enough, you don’t know what she’ll do,” Miss Bertha said.

  “Yeah, Anne. It would be easier for you to be her friend s
o she has someone to talk to, rather than to risk her going elsewhere.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I’ll think about it.”

  The next day, when I got home from school, Mama sat down with me in the kitchen. She was nice to me and let me tell her about how the girls treated me at school. She pulled it out of me. She didn’t fuss or criticize, she just listened and held my hand. Tootsie said she knew it was a trick, that Mama was just pretending she cared about me. Of course, I didn’t know that, I was so glad to have Mama’s attention.

  When Daddy got home Mama took him in the bedroom and Tootsie could hear them talking about me. She said she couldn’t hear everything, but she knew Mama told him what I said. Tootsie wanted to warn me, but she knew her place. Help-code. She felt stuck. She had to watch what happened and couldn’t do anything about it.

  “That poor girl, she don’t have no one,” she said she thought. “She trapped. Don’t none of the white girls like her and she’s ain’t allowed to have a boyfriend, a colored friend, a grown friend. When she try to turn to her Mama or Daddy, she get it worse.”

  Tootsie knew something I didn’t know—until much later—that Mama was jealous of me, her own daughter, and did everything she could to turn Daddy against me. That was why Tootsie stayed with us all those years. She said she felt I needed someone in my house who would love me and look out for me.

  I could tell that Tootsie liked Daddy—and he was nice to her, which made Mama mad. Tootsie tried to explain to me, much later, that Daddy was caught between his beloved daughter and his demanding wife. Tootsie knew something I couldn’t understand—that if Daddy didn’t do what Mama wanted, she won’t give him sex. That was something Tootsie understood. Of course I, on the other hand . . sex?

  Tootsie could tell that, lately, Mama worked harder to turn Daddy on me. Tootsie knew the breaking point was near. It was a story that repeated itself time and time, again. She couldn’t count the number of times she got to work and found me in my room with an injury or illness that no one tended to. It was her job, as the help, to put me back together, like Humpty Dumpty. She said she was always afraid that she would arrive at our house one morning and there wouldn’t be enough pieces left to make me whole again.