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Emily pulls her knees up to her chin and rubs her moccasins. Moth wing, she thinks. They feel like moth wing. These are day dreaming shoes worn in order to feel the earth. The next best thing to barefoot.
Her dress furls in the breeze and flutters its colors. Red, black, green, to honor Daddy Joe. A drop of Mother Africa for his memory. On these languid afternoons, she gives herself over to that memory, letting her body and her mind yield to the truth. She wants to remember the truth.
The sun glint on the water flutters her eyes, as she searches the bay for a sign. The man is not there. She sighs. So? she thinks. If you never see him again, so what? It's not like he's somebody. He's just a vapor, girl. Like someone in a remembered dream standing there on his boat looking at the shore. And here you think he's watching you and falling in love with you. Shake it off! Probably works for the construction company, just plain doing his job. You livin' in a dream world, Emily gal! She laughed at Daddy Joe's accent coming through her thoughts so clearly. Daddy Joe...always there in her head.
It is the mysteryof it that she loves. The searching, and when finding him, imagining him watching her, wanting her. The thought of their chance encounter. It makes her feel alive. She envisions lingering looks and slow smiles and feels the blood rush to her face...oh God! She takes a look at the bay once more. Just a glimpse, God, just one small glimpse, please.
She pushes the exotic comb deeper into the back of her head. Its feathers dangle, tickling her neck. Indian? African? She wonders. The comb matches her dress, it blends, that's why she stole it. To blend...that is all... Blend. Good word, she thinks feeling no guilt about stealing. The pricy boutiques never watch her. She doesn't look like a threat. Don't they know she needs to be watched? They've never been warned. She's never let on. No matter. Truth and honesty are not a part of her life.
J.L. laughs at her when she shows him the feather comb. He fingers the price tag.
"Fifteen dollars?"
"No...no...I didn't pay...that much..."
He shakes his head. "Indian feathers? Moccasins? What's next?" The colors mean nothing to him. He doesn't know about Daddy Joe. He picks up the skirt of the dress,
"See through?" He drops it like it's a rag on fire, as his mother's words haunt him. Words she had hoped would snag his mind like barbed wire and bring him back to his senses. "Geechie Girl!" his mother had screamed not realizing that her words would echo in his head for years.
He defended Emily because she was beautiful and because he wanted her. Dear God, how he wanted her! "She is not a Geechie Mama, she's from South Carolina, but she is not a half-breed...Nig..." He couldn't say the word. His mother was egging him on, but he just couldn't say it.
He looks at Emily's olive skin, her black eyes and sees how lovingly she caresses this rag of a dress. Beth and Andy are playing with the feather comb. They begin to crawl toward him as he opens the refrigerator. They favor Emily's side...that's for sure. Maybe Mama was right. Most likely there's Geechie blood there.
"Gotta drive all night Em. Load's gotta be there at daybreak." He brushes her cheek with a kiss and it feels to her as if he has tasted something bitter on her skin. He picks up his keys and lets the door slam on his family's soulful eyes.
She watches the bay now and touches the soft feathers. Grey dangling ones and downy pale blues. Daddy Joe would approve. Moccasins, feathers, colors! She had been what he called his "Pretty little yalla gal," and she knows he would smile if he could see her looking like this.
She got the courage to dress this way, to acknowledge the gift, the night she had gone in the bedroom to comfort Andy. He had awakened from a dream and it was the sight of her hand in the moonlight that shocked her. The iridescent light robbed her skin of its color. It drained the very life right out, and she knew how wrong she had been to deny her heritage. She sat there on Andy's bed and opened her hands as if holding a gift, and watched the moonlight wash over her arms. Daddy Joe's voice came back to her then and she raised her hands to cup the moon. "A gift for you Sugar, a gift for my pretty little yalla gal."
The sadness almost choked her as she thought of what she had denied her children because she had been able to pass...and of what she had been denying herself. She pulled the quilt over Andy's legs and touched his Daddy Joe hair. She sobbed for all she had lost, and for her shallowness. Beth, with the same hair, the same skin was snoring soundly. Emily smiled and began to hum a tune she had almost forgotten, and in so doing began to cup her hands once more as if gathering in all of the old moon dreams. As she hummed she gathered her memories back into her heart. She had made up her mind. These memories would be shared with her children.
She shoos away the gulls that are beginning to swoop around her now and decides to walk down the beach to the construction site. She takes another look at the bay hoping to see him watching her through his binoculars. Still there is no sign. Fool, she thinks, daydreamer, and scuffs her feet along the sand.
Fitzwater's crew is busy today. Bringing buildings in from all over, like busy ants constructing a village. It would be good if you could build your own world, she thinks. Bring in people too, all kinds, "of ever descripture," as Daddy Joe would say. Bring 'em from Africa, Asia, and Timbuktu! Bring in the dark red blood, the brown and black skin, the white and yellow and blue bloods too! Let 'em all live together. All colors on one green palette, a sort of jewel encrusted home... Everyone blended like the threads of a tapestry woven while the faint of heart sleeps and a mysterious someone stands at the midnight window cupping his hands, holding up the moon as a gift for them... lighting their way.
If she were Fitzwater, she would bring Daddy Joe's trailer too. Then Beth and Andy could walk out back to the woodshed and find him whittling. She fights back tears and the old, old anger she can feel building again like shale, upon her heart.
The injustice she felt when her father had taken Daddy Joe's carved horse from her hand and thrown it into the fireplace was still with her. She didn't know what she had said that angered him so. Her mother told her later that she should always refer to the man who lived in the trailer as Mister Joe. "Daddy Joe just sounds too personal for your father to hear."
Daddy Joe whittled another horse for her, and he sang as he whittled using ancient words and secret tunes. She kept these things at Daddy Joe's place. She kept all of the secrets of who she really was buried at Daddy Joe's place. She kept the songs as if they were precious stones to be gathered when needed and shared only with other kindred spirits. Mammy Pearl was just such a spirit.
She was heavy set and as brown as chocolate and always smelled of cinnamon. She called her son by his full name, Joseph Bell Allen, and told anyone who would listen what fine stock he had come from. "His daddy was Joseph Allen the third!" she exclaimed proudly. "The Allens from Brewster and Concord." She carried her pride like a banner. "He comes from good stock! From my people he gets his African aristocracy!"
She was indeed a descendant of the royal Bell family of Duala, Cameroon, in West Africa. Her carriage spoke of nobility, but her jovial manner gave witness to years of servitude. She had learned at her mother's knee how to lower her eyes respectfully when speaking with the other race, and how to keep her voice humble. "Never offend them."
She raised her son to be proud of his African blood, but each glance in the mirror reminded him of his whiteness. He was most unhappy during his teen years when he cried alone at night feeling diffused and weak. He wanted to feel whole. To be fully black. He was called high yalla by the envious blacks, and Nigra by the white community. He knew he didn't really belong anywhere.
One drop, he told Emily. That's all it takes for you to be called Nigra. One drop...and your dream has done been dreamt. Emily felt his sadness that day as she stood before him wanting to make his hurt go away. She held his face in her hands, as he had held the moon for her, "A gift, Daddy Joe..." she said. It was the first time she had called him daddy. "...a gift for you." Then she began to hum one of the ancient tunes he had taught her.
He hugged her to him, "My little yalla gal," he said through tears, then he laughed that resonant laugh she would remember forever. The sweetness of that laugh stayed in her memory and she listened to it over and over, like a mellow drum beat that wouldn't stop.
Emily had asked her mother why her father had gotten so mad at her for saying Daddy Joe's name. Her mother sighed as she took Emily on her lap and began to tell the story of how she and her father had been promised to each other and how their two families had seen to it that they were properly wed, but how at the same time something special had happened and how none of them knew, not even Daddy Joe and Emily's mother, that a baby was already growing inside her and getting ready to be born.
Emily pulled her legs up to her chest and tried to make herself into that tiny baby again. She listened to the beating of her mother's heart and felt the rocking chair begin to move. "But why does that make father get so mad at me?"
The creak of the rocker hung there holding the silence, poised and waiting. "Because he knows he is not your real father and he wishes he could be." Emily waited for her mother's next words. The words she knew in her heart, but had never heard said out loud. She waited as quietly as she could, wanting to keep the stillness suspended like the creak in the rocking chair.
Her mother's voice was soft. "Daddy Joe said you were the greatest gift in the world, darling." Emily looked up and saw tears streaming down her mother's face. She waited. "I'll never forget how he held you on the night you were born. He took his sweet little baby girl in both of his hands and raised her gently up...as if trying to touch the moon."
Emily nodded. "A gift." she said.
"We let Daddy Joe name you that night." Emily smiled. Her insides felt like Christmas morning.
"He said you should be called Emily Bell Johnson. Johnson because that's the man who would raise you, and Bell in honor of his mother's ancestry, and Emily in honor of a lady who was mulatto, with skin like yours.
Emily looked at her hands, then up at her mother to see if she had stopped crying.
"Emily Morgan was the original yellow rose of Texas."
"Yalla," Emily corrected. Her mother laughed. "Yes, "yalla" like Daddy Joe says it."
Her mother's feet began to brush on the carpet as the chair rocked back and forth.
Emily snuggled her legs tightly into herself, trying to be small again, feeling the warmth, listening to the creaking.
"Do you love Daddy Joe too?" she asked. The truth was there, almost palpable. Her mother kept her head down for a long time. Emily waited, watching her face.
"Yes, I love him, honey. I love him very much."
"Didn't you want to marry up with him?"
"I did," her mother's voice was a whisper.
"Then why didn't you?"
"I guess the time just wasn't right, sweetheart. People...wouldn't...understand."
"People?"
"You're too young to understand right now yourself, but you see, because Daddy Joe is black and I am white...and we...just..."
"Daddy Joe's not black, he's Nigra."
"Yes...did he tell you that?"
"Mmmmmmm....he tol' me how it only takes one drop for you to be Nigra, but why can't you marry up with somebody you love no matter if they be Nigra or White or whatever? Love is love, right?"
Her mother began to laugh. "Right," she said, "Right you are, little girl!"
The wind caught the feathers and blew them across her face as she scanned the construction site. Hey you...who's your supervisor? Does he have a sailboat? She laughed out loud at herself. What a sight she must be, squinting here in the sunshine in her Indian garb and billowing dress. Should get on home and tend to Andy and Beth. Take off the old colors, the war paint. Scrub out the sink like a normal person. Forget the past and make a home for J.L. Forget that there ever was a Daddy Joe and the gift. With everyone gone, what did it matter anyway? Did any of it matter anymore?
She should at least tell J.L. that his mother had been right. Emily Bell Johnson, his pretty olive skinned wife, the soon to be mother of his children, was indeed Geechie. Geechie blood ran through her veins just as surely as it ran through Daddy Joe and Mammy Pearl. They belonged on the sea islands, speaking the Gullah language. They knew the Gullah songs. They were all Geechie, but they were not a disgrace. She would tell him that. She was not a disgrace. She was a proud aristocratic high yalla gal!
Tears fall on her cheeks and she uses the hem of her dress to dry them. She knows she will never be able to take that kind of pride in her heritage. Too much has been denied for too long. She begins to pray. She prays for a sign from somewhere. "Oh Daddy Joe, what would you have me do? Mother? Please...Mammy Pearl? I can't forget everything and let Beth and Andy grow up not knowing. I can't let the gift be lost to them forever. Daddy Joe....you would tell, wouldn't you? You would stand proud, and hold both of those little ones up high and tell them to reach for the moon, I know you would.
She walks the path back down the beach and when she reaches the bay she has made up her mind for sure. The gift is too precious to be lost. The heritage is always there reverberating, humming. She will claim it! She will rejoice in it. She will teach her children how to bring it forth through the old songs and stories. She will teach them the joy of Daddy Joe!
First the colors, she thinks. I will teach them the colors. Red for the blood. Black for the skin and green for Mother Africa. She lifts her skirt and twirls, dancing in her moccasins. The long grey feather is flying around and around. She collapses on the grass dizzy and giddy. She tries to focus once more on the bay. A faint outline is there. His boat! Dear God, his boat is here!
Her heart is pounding, ears throbbing. She stares at the boat, but sees no one. Quick footsteps behind her. Prickly skin on her arms, her back. She turns. His binoculars are swinging from side to side across his chest. His skin is glistening such a dark black it is almost purple.
Don't even think it fool, she says under her breath. You've got a husband, children. A life that is real. This man who looks so good to you is a dream. Just a dream.
She can feel the closeness of his body and turns to face him. His eyes hold her's like magnets. He has a slow smile and the most perfect teeth she has ever seen. He reaches for her hand and she feels electricity move through her arm. He drops a coin in her open palm.
"Penny for your thoughts," he says and his voice reverberates against her throat as if it is her own. She wants to kiss his mouth and bury her face in his chest. She touches the penny and then the binoculars, questioning him with her eyes.
He laughs. "I've been watching you..."
She keeps her face straight, but inside she feels like Christmas morning.
"I've been watching you struggle with a problem for weeks now...found the answer yet?"
She looks away and asks of Daddy Joe, "Did you send him?" The wind billows her skirt and the feather catches in her hair. She hears the familiar, soft laugh.
"A gift...little gal...a gift for you."
Emily smiles at the handsome stranger and thinks of J.L. and of how she should say something polite and go on home to her family. She knows also that miracles happen everyday, and that most of them are lost because we are too blind to see them, or hear them, or touch them. Her skirt is furled by the breeze and falls softly. The red and black and green...
"I like your dress," he says. "Penny for your thoughts?"
He touches her hand once more.
The moment is poised and waiting, like the creak in her mother's rocking chair. She hears a voice, "A gift...a gift...little gal."
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