Chapter 8

It turned out that Mama hadn't planned on fried potatoes, but they'd go perfectly well with the barbecue sandwiches she'd made. Daddy had barbecued a whole mess of pork the week before, and warmed up and slathered with more sauce, on thick slabs of homemade bread, the sandwiches were delicious – though you don't eat such food without making a mess of yourself. And the potatoes were good. There's one thing I can do in the kitchen besides wash dishes, and that's fry potatoes.

That evening, after we'd eaten and had the customary reading from the Bible – Darlia had picked the entire 21^st chapter of Revelation – Cecelia and I helped with the dishes, while Daddy walked out in the field and looked at his tomatoes and onions and whatnot. It's a field, all right, but he runs it like a truck garden, growing vegetables which he sells to the store in town, and some to roadside vendors. Some he saves back for Mama to use in the kitchen, and some he just gives away.

When the dishes were drying beside the sink, Mama shooed us out of the kitchen. Darlia went out to the barn, where she'd read or work on the paper she had to write, or do some homework, before she went to bed. And Cecelia and I went out on the front porch. I sat down in the swing, and she sat down in my lap, turning so that her left side was leaning against my chest. She snuggled up against me, seeming to become just a tiny thing though she's nearly as tall as I am.

"I'm glad we came," she said in the dusk.

"Me too, but then I've never come here that I regretted it."

"Did you not regret it the first time, when Daddy and Mama were still suspicious of you?"

"No – I regretted the suspicion, but the fact is they had cause. Here I'd married you without so much as sayin' boo to 'em, an' then I showed up on their doorstep an' I was white. It would've been surprising if they hadn't been suspicious. An' what I regretted was givin' 'em cause."

"I gave them just as much case, beloved, if not more. I didn't let them know either, nor did I invite them to come to our wedding, nor did I bring you here to meet them. I had failed in my obligations as a daughter – for reasons which we've discussed, of course, but which don't negate my failure."

I shrugged. "Ain't no point in rehashin' that now. That's 15 years gone – 16 years gone, now. I hope you ain't forgot today's our anniversary."

"Isn't it the stereotype that the husband always forgets?" I knew from her voice that she was smiling, though I couldn't see her face. "I have not forgotten, though this sudden trip has prevented me from taking tangible steps to show my remembrance. I do, however, remember that today marks 16 years that we have been married – and I do remember that I love you fiercely, and eternally, and immutably."

"An' I love you likewise. I can't be as flowery as you can without sounding silly. You've got a gift for saying sentimental things without gettin' sappy, an' I don't. But I'd sooner cut off my own head than leave you, or have you leave me. I could as easy live without my heart as live without you. An' if to make you happy meant that I had to leave or let you leave, I'd willingly go through that agony for you."

"In your own rough way, Darvin, you are capable of expressing emotional reality. I know exactly what you're speaking of; I feel it myself, for you; what you have said, I could equally say, merely reversing the pronouns."

I put my boot up on the tin that protected the porch railing and began gently pushing us back and forth. "Did I have it to do over again, the only thing I'd change would be that I'd go ahead and propose to you, instead o' makin' you propose to me. I'd get off my butt faster."

"Yet I treasure the moment I proposed to you, Darvin. It is not every woman who can offer that to the man she wishes to make her husband; I had that opportunity, and it was glorious."

"An' I didn't mind it at all. It's kind of neat, I think, that you proposed to me. It ain't traditional, but then we've come a long way since women were the property of their fathers and then of their husbands."

"There's a word which no one should ever use of another human being."

"Yeah. An' you know it if anyone does."

"My great-grandfather was a slave," she said, and I felt her nodding against my chest. "I never knew him, and Daddy was still young when he died, but Daddy has told me what his father saw – the marks of a whip on my great-grandfather's back. All this talk of 'slave blood, ' as though one is a better person, or at least a better black person, if his ancestors endured slavery, is so much rot – but knowing that my great-grandfather, a man whom my own father personally knew, had been property, and received a worse whipping than his master would ever have given to a recalcitrant horse or mule, has made me adamantine on the point. To own another human being may be legal in certain times or certain places, but it is the most immoral thing any person can do or any society can countenance."

"It may be legal, but it ain't right, no sir," I said, and the line that I'd heard on a TV show suddenly ceased to be part of a sitcom, and was a fundamental moral principle.

Cecelia was quiet for a moment. "The suffering of my ancestors is rather far," she finally said, "from our marriage. And yet it is not entirely irrelevant; you did marry into a family with slaves in its history."