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“Yes, sir, Daddy, I sure will,” Jack and Jeff Lee had each dutifully said back, but now also starkly aware of differences between Blacks and whites, and rich and poor.
Miss Jessup would wear her maid’s uniform, starched and crisp, on even the hottest summer days. Her wide feet were squeezed into uncomfortable black lace-ups. Her hips were broad and grew wider still over the years. He could remember going over to play with the youngest Ashby boy, and some other children from the neighborhood, and having Miss Jessup bring out glasses of lemonade with little chips of ice. She would also have some cookies and paper napkins with designs on them. This was how Jack knew the Ashbys were rich. They had napkins and lemonade and cookies on a platter in the afternoon, and a colored maid to carry it all right to them.
He would watch as Miss Jessup trudged back inside, her hand slipping to the cookies left on the platter and several of them would disappear into her apron pocket. He never begrudged the woman any of that. They weren’t his cookies after all and the Ashbys had plenty more. The rich always had plenty more.
He hadn’t really thought of the woman that much since he’d become an adult. That is until he had seen her about three months ago when he’d come to his parents’ house early one morning to pick up some papers he needed for court and had mistakenly left there the previous night. She was just getting off the bus, her hair still wavy and abundant but also all gray now. The driver had closed the door so fast it clipped her in the rear end. And he sped off with such velocity that she got a lungful of exhaust fumes to start her workday.
Jack could imagine the driver thinking what a good deed he had done putting a Black woman in her place. Although ever since Rosa Parks and others had come along, Miss Jessup could ride anywhere on the bus she wanted. Yet Jack knew legal rulings were one thing, making folks live in accordance with them was quite another.
This made him remember something. When he was a little boy he had once heard Miss Jessup talking to Ashby’s wife. There seemed to have been a disagreement between the two women, for Mrs. Ashby looked upset and Miss Jessup was saying, “I got me my place and you got you your place and they’s oil and they’s water and they just don’t mix. Fo’ sho’ they do not mix, ma’am.”
A flustered and teary-eyed Mrs. Ashby had quickly gone on her way, while Miss Jessup had just stood there, hands on hips, shaking her head and looking—at least to Jack—like she’d just finished dressing down a youngster for doing something foolish.
“Hello, son,” said a familiar voice.
CHAPTER 5
JACK TURNED TO SEE HIS father wiping his hands off on a work rag. His daddy was a union mechanic at Old Dixie Transport. As a young boy Jack had little reason to dwell on what his father did for a living until an accident involving one of the company’s trucks. A semi hauling Hostess products had overturned on a rain-slickened road. His father had gone out at near midnight to remedy the problem. In return he had been given first dibs on the ruined cargo. The Lees had, for years afterward, been knee-deep in cupcakes and Twinkies off that one doomed shipment. And during each of those years Jack had desperately wanted to grow up to be a union mechanic.
“Hey, Daddy,” said Jack.
Francis Lee was known to everyone as Frank, except his wife, who thought the name too juvenile. She always called him Francis. He was an inch short of his oldest son’s height, but he was more heavily built in the shoulders, arms, and chest. Pulling wrenches for a living had made his forearms as broad as the widest part of his Remington twelve-gauge’s wooden stock. He still had on his work uniform: light blue long-sleeved shirt with a white T-shirt underneath, and dark blue pants. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut as close to his scalp as a soldier’s, which he had once been, performing his patriotic duty in World War II, much of it in the Pacific Theater.
Frank Lee never talked about the war, but sometimes Jack had caught him sitting in the TV den, a beer in hand, just staring off, his unblinking gaze dead on the far wall. Maybe seeing through the cheap wood veneers directly back to Guadalcanal, Luzon, or the Battle of Okinawa, where the Americans suffered fifty thousand casualties in less than three months.
Jack had only learned about some of his father’s military career when he’d discovered a cigar box in the back of a closet that contained medals and ribbons, photos, commendation letters, and official discharge papers. That was when he’d read the names of these Japanese outposts that American soldiers had had to take one by one with appalling losses at each island stop. He’d later been told by his mother that after a particularly vicious battle on Iwo Jima his father had been the only survivor of his rifle squad.
He’d heard his father screaming at night a few months after coming home. That was when his two Smith & Wesson revolvers and the Remington over-under shotgun had disappeared from his parents’ bedroom.
“Happy birthday,” Frank Lee said after crushing his boy’s hand in his, and flicking his brown-eyed gaze over his son. “You’re way older’n I was when we had you. Now you just go ahead and think about that.” His father added a hard slap on the shoulder to the bruising handshake.
Preambles over, they sat down to their meal after saying grace, which was given by Lucy, who stumbled over some of the words but otherwise did fine. She slipped in an ad hoc prayer for her youngest brother and hoped he was okay, wherever he was, while her mother and father gazed stoically at their food. A half an hour later, the cake and coffee consumed, Jack looked at his father.
“Momma said Miss Jessup came by looking troubled.”
His mother said sharply, “And I told her she never should have stepped foot in this house. I was very clear on that point with her.”
“Nobody talkin’ to you, Hilly, would ever come away not knowin’ where they stood,” observed her husband.
“Being wishy-washy never leads to a positive end, Francis.”
“Miss Jessup’s a good woman.”
“She could be the queen of England and it’d be the same principle.”
“Uh-huh,” said her husband. “Only maybe the queen of England wouldn’t want you to step foot in her house.”
“Well, I can see this will get us nowhere fast,” retorted Hilly.
It was a line she was using with increasing frequency, Jack had noted, especially with his father.
She started clearing the dishes. The Lees did not do presents anymore for celebrations like this. Money was tight and the meal was deemed sufficient.
His father put down his cup, pried at something between his teeth with his axle-greased fingernail, and then rubbed the freed bit of fried chicken skin onto the perimeter of his plate. A hunched Lucy rose and stood in front of the GE window air conditioner twirling her hair and letting the cool air waft over her.
Frank eyed her and said, “Let’s head on out to the garage, son. Lucy, girl, you keep the air conditioner and your momma company, honey.”
They walked out to the garage, where Jack leaned against a workbench he and his brother had built for their father nearly twenty years ago. Half the driven nails were bent, and where board met board the edges were so badly mitered they appeared not to even be joined together. It was so unlevel that if you put a marble on the workbench’s top it would roll right off. But their daddy had thanked them for the honest, heartfelt effort, and he had begun virtually every task undertaken in his garage right there.
