Those we thought we knew, p.9
Those We Thought We Knew, page 9
“But how do you know that’s how they meant it?”
“Because it wasn’t one time. Wasn’t even a couple times. It was every day. You experience it long enough and it don’t take a scarecrow’s brains to figure out what somebody’s saying, whether they put words to it or not. Don’t even really matter how they meant it. Probably didn’t think about it. Probably wasn’t even intentional, because that’s how it is. It’s the same thing as when y’all would come to our church, it was always, ‘Y’all sure do cook good,’ ‘Y’all sure can sing,’ and I know there wasn’t a one of you meant anything bad by that. I know that, John. But you can’t hear how those words sound in my ears. It’s the subtle things. Just lights up real low and dim to where if you ain’t watching, you can’t see it.”
Coggins didn’t know what to say, and for a long time the two of them just sat there quiet on the porch while the night bugs filled the woods with sound.
“Niggerskull Road,” Vess said all of a sudden, and hearing that word from her mouth struck him like a clap of thunder. “All our lives that’s what that road was named.”
Coggins knew the place and he knew the story. The way the old-timers explained it, two escaped slaves had run north out of South Carolina and somehow fought their way through briar fields and laurel hells out of the flatland and into the mountains. A winter storm blew in, night fell, and as temperatures bottomed, they climbed inside the cavern of a hollowed-out tree and clutched tight to one another for every speck of heat their bodies could kindle. They froze just the same, so that months or years down the road all that was found was two skeletons braided together like vine.
That was the official name of the state road until the early nineties. Once upon a time there had even been a Niggerskull 4-H club. A professor at the university petitioned the change so that the road was eventually renamed Cedar Valley, but of course that didn’t stop local folks from calling the place what they’d always called it. Sometimes he’d still catch that name come across the scanner as older volunteer firemen spouted off directions to a wreck or fire in the area, but hearing her say it right then caught him sideways.
“When they went to changing the name of that road I was standing at the farm supply getting a sack of scratch for the chickens, and this woman I’ve known all my life tells me she don’t know why in the world they needed to change that name, that there wasn’t nothing racist about it, that that was just what they found up there. That’s what she told me. And let me tell you right now, it took every ounce of faith in my heart not to snatch that woman up by her hair and drag her ass all over that store.
“Even after, wasn’t twenty years ago the state went to changing the name of that whole cove, Niggerskull Mountain, Niggerskull Creek. They were changing those names all over the state, and you know what our congressman said—a state congressman, now, born and raised right there in Sylva—you know what he told the paper? Said he hadn’t heard anybody was offended by it, that it was just what it’d always been. Now, he might have talked to some folks and they may very well have told him that, but do you think he ever come asked me? That’s a man stood in our sanctuary when he needed a vote, but you think he come and ask us whether or not that word meant anything?”
“I don’t know what to say,” Coggins said, and that was the truth. He’d come with empty hands and now they were full, and he didn’t know what to do with what he was holding. What she’d handed him was heavy and he had no place to sit it down.
Vess pushed up in the chair and stood. “There’s things like that word and things go unsaid and a whole lot of things fall between. That’s all I’m saying, John.” Her bare feet slid along the porch planks and she stopped with her hand on the screen door. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “Got something I’ve been meaning to give you.”
Coggins sat out there in the dark with the night sounds around him and chewed his toothpick. There were a whole lot of things rolling about his mind right then and he couldn’t pin a one of them down. He didn’t know how to feel anymore.
The porch light flicked on and he squinted until his eyes had time to adjust. When she came back onto the porch the moths were already batting around the light, and she closed the screen fast to keep from letting them inside.
“Tell me who these young men are,” Vess said as she walked over. She had a photograph held out in her hand, and as Coggins took it from her she snickered.
Lonnie Jones had driven a brown Chevy LUV pickup, and him and Coggins were sitting on the tailgate together with a deer stretched between them. “They Lord almighty.”
He remembered that day in detail. It was a big-bodied forked-horn Lonnie shot way off in a hole on the back side of Chink Knob. He’d called Coggins for help and it had taken them all day to drag it out. By the time they got the deer back to the truck they’d worn the hair off one side. In the photograph, Lonnie was holding up the buck’s head by its antlers, and the deer’s tongue hung from its mouth. Coggins had his eyes crossed and his tongue hanging out, and Lonnie was laughing with a great big smile Coggins could still hear echoing through the back of his mind.
“You ever seen that picture before?”
“I don’t think I have. Got a pile of pictures of us turkey hunting, but I don’t think I ever saw this one before.”
“Well, you keep that. I must’ve had doubles printed. Got another one just like it in the house.”
Coggins couldn’t turn away from the photograph. He missed Lonnie something fierce and he knew that was a feeling that must’ve eaten at Vess every minute of every day. There came a time when all the folks you knew and loved started passing away and it was almost a curse to survive them.
“Now, this here is what I wanted to give you.”
He looked up, and she was holding a small scratch box turkey caller Lonnie had made from a slab of rainbow poplar, a narrow piece of slate that had served as the striker rubber-banded to the top of the call. Coggins had never been able to run a scratch box, but there was no telling how many longbeards Lonnie’d struck or finished with it through the years. He placed the picture in his lap and took the call from her hands.
“Vess, I can’t take that.”
“Sure you can. What in the world I’m going to do with it? That call ain’t doing nothing but sitting in a box with a whole bunch of other things I don’t have any business keeping. You the only man I ever knew as eat up with them birds as Lonnie was. You take it. He’d want you to have it. Matter of fact, he’d want you to use it.”
“Yeah, so he could get a good laugh.”
“Maybe.” Vess smiled.
The two of them sat there together for a while longer swapping stories about the man they’d both loved, and as the minutes passed the weight slowly lifted, so that when it came time to leave Coggins no longer felt the way he had an hour before. Of course, nothing had really changed. His mind had simply found a new place to light. There was still the world coming down, and in the morning he would see its reckoning.
The shoebox was still on the counter. The snake was still curled inside.
18
There was no one in the building that night except her. Most of the time Brad stuck around and worked in his own studio while she was there, but he was busy with other things. He’d swung by earlier to unlock the doors and let her in, but after that Toya was alone. She didn’t mind. In fact, she preferred it, the silence and emptiness channeling her focus to a singular point.
It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy being around people. Sometimes she even relished the give-and-take idea flow between herself and other creatives. But when it came time to do the work, the presence of anyone else had always been a distraction. Her creativity necessitated that she remain completely inside herself, and that was part of what had made the work that summer so difficult. What she was doing required the help of others, and that was new country for her as an artist. Collaboration required trust, and it was hard to put that sort of faith in someone with a project this intimate and personal.
She’d come to the mountains to trace the roots of where and whom she’d come from. For months leading up, she’d purged her mind of any preconceptions, any biases she’d held, so that she could step into that space blindly and without hang-up. When she’d arrived from Atlanta she’d had no idea what the search might look like or where it would take her. All she’d really hoped was that whatever she discovered might serve as inspiration for art, for her thesis, that the journey itself might become an origin story.
The idea finally came one night while she was in the university library. She was digging through microfiche of old newspapers for anything at all about the church when she stumbled onto a black-and-white photograph of her great-grandmother. It wasn’t that she’d never seen the woman before. There were a dozen or more pictures scattered through family albums. But this particular photograph was different. It was as if she were looking into still water and seeing her own reflection.
The woman’s name was Tawni, though everyone had called her Bird. In the picture she stood by the river struggling to hold up a fish that ran the length of her leg. The fish was all light and shadow, deep grays and bright whites in heavy contrast, though enough detail remained to make out the armored scales down its sides. The caption read simply, “Bird Clawson catches first sturgeon ever recorded in Tuckaseigee.” The article explained how she’d caught the fish on a small piece of cut chub meant for redhorse. She was beaming in the photograph, a smile stretching wide across her dark face, her eyes squinted and lit, and it was that expression that had struck the girl.
The second she saw it she scrolled through photos on her phone looking for a selfie she’d taken that spring in Atlanta with one of her girlfriends after a Tobe Nwigwe show. Holding the two photos side by side, she was taken aback. The likeness was uncanny. Anyone who didn’t know better might have sworn it was the same person. In that moment she was taken aback by the power of blood. Everything she’d spent the summer searching for, the answers of where and whom she’d come from, was a living, breathing thing beating inside her chest.
The second that thought solidified, the concept of the work consumed her. She gathered all the photos she could find of Bird and studied the expressions on the woman’s face. The first molds she made herself while staring in a mirror with plastic wrap pulled over her braids and Vaseline on her skin to keep the plaster strips from sticking. It was hard enough to do the work alone, but holding the expression throughout that process proved impossible. After a handful of failed attempts, she knew she would have to ask for help.
Brad was a godsend. He immediately recognized what they could do to make it work. They made molds with alginate, the same material dentists used to make molds of teeth, and though it took some trial and error, they slowly dialed the process in. Toya would sit back in the chair while Brad worked the material onto her face. She imitated the expressions captured in the photographs and soon there were molds mimicking every picture. When she cast them in plaster and held them in her hands she began to see not only herself and Bird but the faces of her mother and grandmother, expressions that had traveled down through four generations of women.
Music played on a small Bluetooth speaker behind her. Dust coated her arms like chalk. She was busy smoothing out one of the plaster casts with a sanding pad. The album playing was one Brad had turned her on to, by a band from Asheville called the Honeycutters. All summer they’d swapped music, the conversation having grown out of a shared love of David Bowie and Sam Cooke, the Velvet Underground and Outkast. She gave him Add-2. He gave her the Chocolate Drops.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw her phone light up with a text message and knew without looking it was Brad. All night he’d been hounding her about the protest. Toya didn’t want to go but he’d been adamant that she be there. The screen went briefly dark, then lit up again. When she looked, there were thirteen text messages from him and she knew she could only put him off so long.
What she wished she could explain was that thin line between fearless and foolish, that tightrope she’d walked all summer. For her that line was as deep and dangerous as a canyon, but for Brad it didn’t even exist. There was no mistaking on which side her going to the protest would fall.
Toya looked around the room she’d used as a studio that summer. When she’d approached the art department about a space to work in, they’d brushed her off, and it was Brad who’d found her the space and set it all up. Though it wasn’t much bigger than a closet, it was all she’d needed.
The walls were covered with photographs of Bird, her grandmother, and her mother. There were other photographs of people and places she did not know but had discovered as she thumbed her way through the archives trying to gain an understanding of a community that was all but gone. Standing there, she was surrounded by history. She was surrounded by all the things that were buried somewhere inside her. What she was doing here had become something spiritual. She’d turned that room into a sanctuary.
Right then her eyes settled on the picture of Bird, that giant smile and that monstrous fish. She set the sanding pad onto the table and ran her hands across the cast of her face, the curves now smooth and soft as skin.
In the end, there was only the work, and that was what no one else seemed to understand. The work was the one thing, the only thing, she owed anyone.
19
Ernie’s house had belonged to his grandparents. It wasn’t much, just a two-bed, one-bath farmhouse with good bones on a block foundation. His punishment for breaking Nick Lovedahl’s nose was a two-week suspension without pay, which would’ve hurt a lot worse if the home weren’t paid for. As it stood, though, the time off was a blessing.
With the way work had been over the past few months, Ernie was burned out and needed a break. He was looking forward to catching up on chores, to napping, and to feeding the fish in the backyard stream. He was looking forward to hunting chanterelles, black trumpets, and boletes, to time in the woods scouting deer for fall. Lovedahl, on the other hand, had been fired as soon as the sheriff learned what he’d said, and how quickly Coggins had made that decision was one more reason Ernie respected the man he worked for.
The dishes in the sink had been soaking since supper and Ernie went into the kitchen to knock them out before the water got cold. When he was finished, he dried his hands and grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, then returned to the den to wait on the ten o’clock news. He was eager to see if they’d mention the protests. Rumors were stirring that people were coming from all over western North Carolina, and regardless of whether that was true, he was certain the whole thing would turn into a shit show.
A window across the den looked onto the front yard, where white oaks cut the moonlight and cast the house in shadow. The porch light wasn’t on, so the windowpane was dark aside from a dim reflection of the room where he sat in a worn-out recliner. Out past the white oaks, the driveway bordered a cattle pasture the neighbor’d left vacant all summer for hay. He was watching the television, but in his peripheral vision he saw a pair of headlights sweep into the field. When he looked, the lights flicked off.
There weren’t many places along this road to pull over and it was common for people to use his driveway to turn around. This vehicle, though, had appeared to park. Ernie crossed the room to peer out but it was too dark to see past the trees. He opened the door and stepped onto the porch. He was barefooted and the concrete slab was cold against his feet. He wore a tattered T-shirt and a pair of canvas carpenter’s pants, the bottom hems tucking under his heels as he made his way out to the trees.
A man named Knotty Luker owned the surrounding pasture, and Ernie’s first thought was that he’d probably come to take care of something late. Usually Knotty left his truck running and the headlights on so that he could see to work the lock loose from the gate. Typically, he could hear Knotty’s diesel chugging loudly from the house, but there was no sound right then aside from crickets and peepers.
From the oaks, he could make out the silhouette of a long sedan parked crossways at the end of the drive. The car was a few hundred yards out, and in such low light he could not discern anything more than its shape. The hood didn’t appear to be up and no one seemed to be milling around, but he figured it could be someone having car trouble.
To avoid the gravel, he slipped along the fence line through grass trimmed short to the ground, dew wetting the cuffs of his pants. As he got closer, he could make out the tops of someone’s shoulders and the outline of their head. They appeared to be peeping over the roof of the car, and for one brief moment it seemed like they might’ve had binoculars held up to their eyes. Slinking along that edge, he was certain they couldn’t spot him, so when the distance had been cut in half he walked in the open, for he did not wish to surprise them.
He yelled hello, and just as soon as that word echoed down the driveway the person came around the back of the car. It was still too dark to make out anything other than shadows but he watched as they climbed behind the wheel and the engine squealed to life. The headlights brushed through the hayfield and the tires spun briefly in the gravel and just like that, they were gone. Ernie stood puzzled, wondering if it had been someone looking at the house or if his eyes had deceived him.
All he’d really seen was an outline, and he couldn’t be certain whether they were facing his direction or looking away. It was probably just some drunk who’d stopped to take a leak, he told himself, and if not that, then something equally benign. Walking back to the house, he wrote the whole thing off.
20
By three a.m., Coggins knew there was no chance of rest. He’d gone to the couch around midnight to keep from waking his wife, and for the past three hours he’d been scrolling through Facebook on his cell phone, reading comments on news stories despite the fact that he knew better.
