Swan, p.1
Swan, page 1
Swan
Africa Fine
Genesis Press, Inc.
Indigo Love Spectrum
An imprint of Genesis Press, Inc.
Publishing Company
Genesis Press, Inc.
P.O. Box 101
Columbus, MS 39703
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, not known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission of the publisher, Genesis Press, Inc. For information write Genesis Press, Inc., P.O. Box 101, Columbus, MS 39703.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author and all incidents are pure invention.
Copyright© 2010 Africa Fine
ISBN-13: 978-1-58571-616-6
ISBN-10: 1-58571-616-2
Manufactured in the United States of America.
First Edition.
Visit us at www.genesis-press.com or call at 1-888-Indigo-1-4-0.
Dedication
“We are each other’s magnitude and bond.”
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000)
Acknowledgements
Although Swan is a work of fiction, I made an effort to place my fictional characters in settings that were faithful to places and times. Several books and authors were particularly helpful, including:
Haskins, James. Black Music in America: A History Through Its People. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1987.
Huey, Brenda. The Blackest Land, The Whitest People: Greenville Texas. Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2006.
Spinney, Robert G. City of Big Shoulders: A History of Chicago. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000.
Ward, Geoffrey C. and Ken Burns. Jazz: A History of America’s Music. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Dukes Family Tree
Chapter 1
“Blues in the Night”
Duck
Greenville, 1942
I spent my childhood in Hunt County, Texas, in a town called Greenville. It was a place that had two sides, the side that it showed to the world, and the side it tried to hide. If you stood on Lee Street facing east, you would see the Greenville Hotel and Crawford’s Grocery and Market on the north side of the street. Above all the other signs, you would see a large black banner hanging over the street. “GREENVILLE,” it proclaimed in white block lettering. Underneath in smaller letters was the word “Welcome.” That is how the people who ran Greenville saw themselves and the town: a place that welcomed visitors and natives to our downtown. We were Southerners, proud Texans who loved our home.
On either side of the words “GREENVILLE” and “Welcome” were two parts of a single phrase. “The Blackest Land” appeared on the left side of the sign. On the right side was the phrase “The Whitest People.” Our soil was black and fertile, the best kind of dirt for growing and prospering in an agricultural community. And our people, well, they saw themselves as clean and honest. White. This was what the people in charge meant to say, but the truth was that this was wishful thinking. I always believed that the white people wished Greenville was a white town, both in morality and population. And maybe if they put up a sign that said so, Negroes would take the hint and move on out. Or maybe visitors would take the sign to mean that while black people might live in Greenville, they weren’t the kind that would make waves, complain, demand political power or the right to eat in the same establishments frequented by upstanding, moral white folks. The people who mattered were white. The people who didn’t were black.
When I was twelve years old, I didn’t know the word irony. But I knew that by letting that sign hang on Lee Street for more than forty years, whites in Greenville intended to show their good side; but without meaning to, they showed what was wrong with the town.
Greenville was a town so small that everyone, whites and blacks, was related somehow to everyone else. That did not mean that there was any mixing of the races, at least not in the daytime.
We were sixty miles outside Dallas, which isn’t that far, but living in Greenville was like living in another world. While people in the big cities were worried about the Germans, jazz music and the “Negro problem,” life in Greenville was the same as always. The town was divided by railroad tracks that hadn’t been used in years. The wealthiest people had many acres of land and two- or three-story homes that were called estates. Poor whites lived on one side in houses that looked like ours except they all had tiny patches of grass that served as yards. We lived on the other side of the tracks. No one thought to cross over.
We had separate grammar schools, each of which went up to the eighth grade. There were two high schools, one for coloreds and one for whites, but not many black kids graduated. Most had to drop out to work.
Since there weren’t many businesses in Greenville, whites and blacks had to share some things. But the white town council divided the hours for all merchants into hours for whites and hours for blacks. That way, the good upstanding citizens of Greenville didn’t have to come into contact with us Negroes any more than was necessary. They said it was for our benefit, too, although no one ever explained how or why.
We worked for the whites, of course, doing jobs they didn’t want to do, like cleaning and lifting, and working the more dangerous machines in the cotton mill. There was no social contact. We spoke only when spoken to, and there was no room for friendship between blacks and whites.
Greenville was a town full of secrets big and small. Some secrets were truly that, and some were secrets in name only, since everyone knew about them but no one ever talked about them.
I have always known secrets. I knew that Mother loved my sister Merline more than she loved me. I knew that Mother had never loved my father, and I knew that my father and Merline’s were not the same man. I knew that although Greenville was segregated in the daytime, there was at least one place on the Negro side of town where rich white women came to drink whiskey and flirt with black men while their husbands were away on business trips. I knew that I could sing better than anyone in the church choir, but I was too shy to let anyone hear me.
During the summer of 1942, when I was twelve and Merline was seventeen, my sister was keeping the biggest secret of all. She didn’t tell me, of course. I just knew by the way she acted that something was different. I made it my business to find out.
* * *
My name is Delia, but everyone called me Duck. When I was six years old, the teacher in our four-room school read a story from a book. It had a hard green cover and the pages were creased and some of the pages were torn. I already knew how to read, which set me apart from the other students in class. The story was called The Ugly Duckling, and it was about a little duck who looked different from the others, but who turned into a beautiful swan at the end. Or something like that.
Maybe my mother meant well when she called me Duck, thinking that my ugliness was temporary, that I would someday be the swan in the family. Then again, there already was a swan in the Dukes clan: Merline. Ours was a house of women, no fathers or brothers, and I used to hope that calling me Duck was their way of making me feel better about being the ugly sister.
The day the teacher read the story, I asked Merline about it.
“People said you had the biggest nose they’d ever seen on a newborn. They called it a duck’s bill. And for the ugly part, well, look in the mirror.” Merline walked away, laughing.
Merline was mean. Not just to me—Merline was mean to everyone as far as I could tell. But she was also breathtakingly lovely. By the time she was eleven years old, men regularly stopped to watch her walk by. She grew her hair long and straightened it, using hot irons to curl it into whatever styles were depicted in the movie magazines she stole from Woolworth’s. She wore skirts that showed off her calves, and when she got a little older, she wore high heels she bought with money she begged off Mother. She made everyone outside the house call her Merl because she thought it sounded more sophisticated. At fifteen, she started wearing red lipstick despite Mother’s disapproving claim that only whores wore red. When I learned the word irony, I realized that my sister was a perfect example: ripe on the outside, rotten on the inside.
“Go away, Duck,” Mother said when I asked her what a whore was. “You need to be cleaning those dishes instead of asking me foolish questions.”
Merline offered her own graphic explanation later, which I did not believe. The things she told me were sick, and I may have been just a kid, but I knew no one would do the things my sister described. Even then, I didn’t trust Merline.
Mother put her in charge of my care, like a lieutenant reporting to my mother, the captain. Mother worked long hours at two jobs, cleaning houses on the white side of town, so my sister and I were left alone after school. When I complained that Merline was bossy and unfair, I had two choices: obey my older sister or suffer a beating with a belt, an extension cord or the flat of Mother’s hand, depending on her mood.
My mother wasn’t the nurturing parent I read about in books. She didn’t bake cookies, she didn’t let us snuggle up to her on the sofa, and she didn’t compliment us. If she was pleased with Merline’s looks, she might say, “Girl, that long hair and those eyelashes are going to get you in trouble if you aren’t careful.”
Or, if Merline m
I can’t remember ever doing anything Mother thought worthy of praise, backhanded or otherwise. She only said I reminded her of my father, a man whose name I never knew.
“That man was evil,” she used to say. “God blessed me the day he disappeared.”
It was a small kindness that she didn’t add that leaving me behind was a curse.
Merline’s father was different. He was the love of my mother’s life, and he had died when Merline was just a baby. I always imagined this was what turned Mother hard, what robbed her of the ability to enjoy even the smallest pleasures. All she would ever say was that she’d loved him, and white people had killed him.
More than the pain, the anger was what made Mother’s beatings so hard to take. Still, I was certain that I’d rather take a beating than have my sister order me around, but I knew that if I chose the punishment, Mother would just beat me and Merline would still be in charge.
Usually, my sister ruled me like a drill sergeant under the threat that if I didn’t obey, she would tell Mother. During the summers, I had very specific duties that needed to be carried out at various times during the day. These tasks were all my sister’s chores in addition to mine. Mother didn’t care, as long as everything got done and our house looked like “we’d been brought up right.” I hated summers, because I was forced to spend entire days being ordered around like a servant. At least during the school year, I got a break until three in the afternoon.
But that summer of 1942 was different. Merline disappeared for hours at a time every afternoon, leaving me free to do anything I wanted. She never told me she was leaving. I would notice an unusual break in between orders, and I would escape to our room to hide and read once I realized she wasn’t there.
I loved reading. I remember the first time I read a book from front to back. It was a Nancy Drew mystery. The existence of that other world amazed me. Nancy Drew wasn’t like the white people in Greenville. She didn’t use the word nigger every other sentence. She drove a convertible and had friends, Beth and George, and even a boyfriend named Ned. She was smart and solved mysteries like no one else could. Her hair was titian blonde, and even though I didn’t know what that meant, I knew it was good. I wanted to be Nancy Drew. I didn’t think of it as wanting to be white, or not wanting to be black. I just wanted what Nancy had. Freedom. Happiness. Hope.
I was a skinny, dark-skinned black girl called Duck. I didn’t know anyone who had gone to college except the teachers at my school. I’d never seen a Negro in a convertible. No one commented on the beauty of my nappy hair, and it certainly wasn’t titian blonde. I didn’t have any friends; at school, the girls made fun of me when I raised my hand to give the answers and the boys ignored me.
I knew I couldn’t be Nancy Drew, so the next best thing was reading about her. Greenville had a tiny library and the white woman who worked behind the desk was nice to me, meaning she didn’t call me nigger and didn’t laugh when I told her I wanted to borrow books. She kept me stocked with Nancy Drew books as they came out, and I devoured every one of them as if it were my last meal. At first, I didn’t care why Merline disappeared those afternoons. I looked at it as a gift from God. More time for me and Nancy.
Under normal circumstances, Merline liked to be the center of attention. She would have hated to think that she was gone and no one even noticed. But that summer was different. Merline had a secret. It wasn’t until she started sneaking out at night that I got interested in what she was doing.
It was a mystery that I decided to solve, just as Nancy Drew would have.
For several days, I did everything Merline told me to without any argument at all. And I watched her. She left the house around two o’clock every afternoon. From our bedroom window, I watched her look around before walking down the dirt road toward the railroad tracks. While I read about Nancy, I kept an eye on the clock and an ear out for Mother. Merline returned just before five o’clock, when it was time to start cooking dinner, or more precisely, time to order me to start dinner. Mother never got home before nine o’clock from work, so she didn’t have the time to keep tabs on my sister. But I did.
At night, Merline’s pattern changed. She waited to leave until my breathing became regular and she thought I was asleep. I learned to keep still, my eyes slits as I watched her put on her best dress, dab perfume on her throat and, carrying her heels in her hand, climb out of our window. I didn’t want her to see me in the moonlight, so I stood to the side of the window and peeked out to see her hurrying down the dirt road in the same direction she’d taken in the afternoon.
The mystery had three parts: Who was she going to see, where was she going, and why was that place in the opposite direction from where everyone we knew lived? Our house, a narrow structure called a shotgun, was separated from most others. We were close to the edge of the Negro neighborhoods, not far from the tracks. But there was nowhere to go once you reached the tracks. On the other side were the white people. No black person would cross those tracks.
At least, not in the daytime.
But what about at night? The one Negro bar in Greenville, the Top Hat, held dances that Mother had forbidden Merline to attend. At first, I thought she was sneaking out to meet one of the boys who drank there while listening to the jazz music that I loved and Mother said was sinful. Once I had seen her go in the opposite direction three nights in a row, I knew Merline wasn’t going to the Top Hat.
Once I was sure of Merline’s patterns, which never changed over a week, I thought about my next move. What would Nancy do? What Nancy would do, I decided, was follow Merline. It wouldn’t work in the afternoon, when the sun provided too much light for stealth. But at night, she was so involved in reaching her secret destination that she might not catch me following. Because footsteps on the dirt road sounded like rasping breaths, I knew I would have to stay far enough back so that my own footsteps would get lost in the sound of Merline’s. I would need to wear something dark and hug the trees that lined either side of the road. I would need to catch just a glimpse of my sister’s destination, and then head back home so I would be sleeping by the time she returned. Most of all, she could never know I had done this. I knew she would never tell Mother. That would mean revealing her own secret as well, and it was clear that she didn’t want anyone—especially Mother—to know. But Merline had ways of getting revenge. I did not want to experience the full brunt of her rage.
I decided to follow her on a Friday night. I figured this was the best chance of catching something interesting going on. Mother always said that the worst sinning happened on Saturday nights, and that was why the Second Baptist Church on our side of town (the whites claimed First Baptist as their own) was full every Sunday morning. Not that my mother had firsthand knowledge of this. She wouldn’t set foot in a church, claiming that it was full of hypocrites, and, if there was a God, he would be aghast at what people did in his name.
But Merline stayed in on Saturday nights. Either she wasn’t sinning, or Mother was wrong.
It was a still July night during one of the hottest summers anyone could remember. The temperature passed 100 degrees during the afternoons, and the nights cooled to the upper eighties. After those hot days, the nights, as still and dry as they were, felt like a cool breeze.
The room I shared with Merline was the hottest in the house because it was the smallest, and, somehow, no breeze ever passed through the window even when left wide open. Our house was long and narrow, the kind of wooden structure that people used to say you could shoot from the front door and have the buckshot end up in the backyard. It was built of sturdy wooden planks that had been painted white when the house was new. All the rooms were small and connected to the next. The front door opened into a tiny living room. Next was the kitchen, then the room I shared with Merline. A bathroom separated our room from Mother’s, which had a door going to the tiny patch of dirt out back. It might have had a certain charm when it was new, but it had not been renovated since it was built to house workers at nearby ranches and estates in the 1800s. The walls needed painting inside and out, the rooms were cramped instead of cozy, and the hardwood floors were scratched and worn throughout the house.
