Paper son, p.8
Paper Son, page 8
We strolled through the backyard toward the stream. “Thanks for indulging me,” I said to the men. “I think the Tams needed a moment alone.”
“I completely agree,” said Roberson, serious now. “Reynold was very upset when he heard what happened. It brought home to him how he’s never really known his Delta kin.”
The ground began to get soggy. We stopped and I said, “I know Reynold’s father never paid much attention to his relatives here, once he moved away. But Pete also implied you—Reynold’s staff, I mean, not just you—want to play down his Chinese side.”
After a moment, Roberson said, “That bothers you.”
“I’m sorry, but yes, it does. Especially since you’re married to his daughter.”
I expected a shrug and a This is Mississippi, but instead Roberson stuck his hands in his pockets and gazed out over the sluggish brown water. “I was a senior at Ole Miss when Reynold made his first run. I was fixing to go north when I graduated.” He nodded toward the river. “This is home. My people go back five generations here. But to get Mississippians to change—I swear, it’s like pushing a rope. Folks here take pride, sometimes, in their backwardness. I was impatient. I was pretty sure I knew what was possible in Mississippi and what wasn’t, the way you’re sure of things when you’re twenty. When this progressive, half-Chinese attorney announced for Congress, I laughed.”
“You didn’t like him?”
“The reverse. I didn’t know him, only what I read, but his positions seemed like they lined up with mine. That was enough to mean he’d probably lose, never mind about his race, except in Mississippi, you never do never mind about race. But I was in poli-sci, so I applied to do a practicum with his primary campaign. No way we were going to win, but I didn’t care. I just wanted a little experience in the field before I headed north.
“I should have thought it through, but I hadn’t. I was blindsided when my dad was furious. ‘You’re working for that Chinaman? What does a Chinaman know about what’s good for Mississippi?’”
“But Reynold was born in Jackson.”
Roberson gave a small laugh. “Yes, and my dad has nothing against Orientals. He’d tell you that, and that’s the word he’d use. He just thinks people should stick to their own. It should have occurred to me, how he’d react to me being on Reynold’s team.”
I didn’t know what to say. I looked at Bill.
“I was raised with people like that, too,” Bill said. “In Kentucky. I’m surprised Mr. Tam’s gotten as far as he has.”
“I was, too, believe me,” said Roberson. “We won the primary, and I continued through the general, and we won that, too. By then I’d graduated. Reynold asked me to stay on, offered me a staff job. I took it because I wanted to see how far we could go. If a man like Reynold Tam had a chance, I thought, maybe I wouldn’t have to leave Mississippi. Maybe I could stay where my family is, where my roots are. I was hoping my parents would be pleased. After all, I wasn’t going north.”
“They weren’t?”
“My mother, yes. She was willing to overlook my reasons as long as I stayed close to family. But Dad, he’d been counting on Reynold losing the general so I could put that foolishness behind me. When we won, he took it personally. Like I’d engineered it just to prove I was smarter than he was. Then I started dating Megan. You can imagine how that went over.” Roberson watched water drift between the reedy banks. “We have two little girls now. To look at, they’re as white as I am. But my dad’s a one-drop guy. My kids are Chinese, as far as he’s concerned. Mom comes up to Jackson to visit, on a Saturday or whatever. Takes the kids to the zoo. But we spend holidays with my in-laws. Reynold, Alicia, Megan’s brother, Donald—I count my blessings every day for the way they’ve welcomed me.”
“But really, your father? He doesn’t come see his own grandchildren, because they’re, what, one-eighth Chinese?”
“In Mississippi, during Jim Crow, you were white or you weren’t. That’s what ‘one drop’ meant. The law’s changed, but a lot of people haven’t. Dad’s not so unusual around here.”
I thought about my mother. Nothing—hell, high water, or the whole heavenly host—would keep her from my brothers’ children. Even, I was rock-solid sure, if their mothers hadn’t been Chinese.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I assumed that kind of thinking was a thing of the past.”
Frank Roberson, my cousin by marriage, smiled. “It is. And here in Mississippi, we love the past. We especially love the kind of past that never was. Reynold can do great things as governor of this state. But he’s got to get elected first.”
14
HB sent up a greeting yip when we came up to the kitchen door. When I entered the living room, Reynold stood. “Well. See any snakes or gators?”
“Not a reptile,” I replied.
We all sat. Pete offered more sweet tea and cookies, and Reynold turned to me. “Cousin Lydia, Pete and I have been reminiscing about Leland and our relations, but I have to apologize for my ignorance of family history. It must be worse than I thought, for me to have missed a branch of the family tree that produced such a fine sprig as yourself. Would you tell me about our shared kin?”
“I’d be happy to.” I skipped over the fact that our ignorance, until yesterday, had been mutual. “Your grandfather who came to Mississippi was my great-grandfather’s brother.” I gave him a moment to work that through. “My great-grandfather stayed in China, though. My branch of the family didn’t come over until my parents.”
“My grandfather,” said Reynold. “Hong-Bo Tam, the original H. Tam. I never knew him, unfortunately.”
“He’s the original H. Tam, but did you know he was a paper son? That you’re really Chins, not Tams?”
Reynold looked at Pete in surprise. “I surely didn’t,” he said. “Uncle Pete?”
“Well, of course. Really, Paul didn’t teach you anything?”
Frank Roberson looked from Reynold to me. “I’m sorry—what’s a paper son?”
So I told them about paper sons, and about Chin Song-Zhao and how he changed his name. At the end of my recital, the sweet tea was all gone, no thanks to me. Pete started to push himself up to go get more, but Bill volunteered. Apparently the fridge was to tea as the cabinets were to cookies.
“Well,” said Reynold. “Well. I’d heard about paper sons, but I had no idea I was descended from one.” He turned a concerned look on his son-in-law. “Frank, I almost hate to mention it, but you don’t think—?”
“Nope,” said Roberson. “I don’t.”
“But Frank, sounds like my granddaddy was an illegal alien,” Reynold persisted. “It’s the kind of thing’ll make Mallory’s mouth water.”
“Stirling Mallory appeals to the crowd that liked it better when everybody knew their place,” said Pete. “Do I have to translate that for you Yankees?”
“No, Pete,” I said, and Bill, coming in with a fresh sweating pitcher, shook his head.
Reynold sighed. “Now, Uncle Pete, lots of folks are hurting. They want answers, they need help. Stirling’s got a way of telling them he’s got those answers. I just happen to think he’s wrong.”
“Wrong? The boy’s a Neanderthal with a set of white sheets hanging in his hall closet.”
Roberson grinned. “I guess speaking your mind runs in the Tam family.”
Pete poured the tea, eyeing my still-full glass with suspicion. “Well, but look at the good Reynold’s done already. Repairing those small-town bridges, and that stopgap school bill—those were you, weren’t they? Oh, Reynold, don’t look so surprised. We maybe haven’t seen each other in a dog’s age, but I do live in this state.” Pete settled back in his chair.
“Delighted that you follow my career, Uncle Pete, and that you approve of my initiatives.” Reynold turned to Roberson. “So, we have nothing to worry about?”
“The paper son thing? I think we’ll be fine,” Roberson said. “For one thing, if you didn’t know it, how would Mallory find out?” He looked, eyebrows raised, at Pete, at me, at Bill.
“Well, I sure as hell won’t tell him,” Pete said.
“Family lore,” I said. “None of anyone’s business.”
“And me,” said Bill, “I just work here.”
“There you go, Reynold,” Roberson said. “Not a problem.”
“Unless it does come out.”
“And if it does, we’ll handle it. Would you please let me do the worrying?”
“Okay.”
“Thank you.”
They both smiled; it must’ve been a refrain between them.
Roberson turned to Pete. “But I won’t lie, this story makes me curious about these folks. Mr. Tam—”
“Pete.”
“Pete. Any chance you’d be willing to bring out the family photos?”
“Don’t have many. I travel light. Leland had most of the family records and such,” said Pete. “Kept it all neat, organized.” A cloud passed over his face; he must have been thinking about the current state of the store and house.
“You do have some, though?” Reynold asked. “I’d like to see them, too, if you don’t mind, Uncle Pete. I have just about nothing, myself.”
“Well, sure.” Pete reached into a drawer in the coffee table. He cleared a space and opened a thin scrapbook.
On the first page, a sepia studio portrait: three scrubbed Chinese boys in bow ties and short pants, between two solemn Chinese adults. The man, slick-haired and stocky, stood on the boys’ left; a permed woman in a straight skirt flanked them on the right. Pete pointed to the boys, largest to smallest. “Paul. Jonas. Me.” The boys were distinctive, each from the others. Paul, just coming into adolescence, tall and gangly, with a wave in his hair, had a hand on the shoulder of his rounder brother Jonas, as though to restrain him. Pete, maybe two years old when the photo was taken, stood facing the camera with his chest thrust out, already wearing the same wide grin he’d greeted us with this morning.
“And Ma and Ba,” Pete said. “Ba, that would be Hong-Bo,” he added, in case Reynold or Frank Roberson needed the reminder. “The original H. Tam.”
He turned the pages slowly. More shots of the kids, leaning on bikes or playing on dusty streets. Photos of them older, with school books, with baseball bats. The eldest, now a young man, tanned and smiling, leaning his bony elbow out of the window of a pudgy automobile. “Your daddy, Paul,” Pete told Reynold. “His first car. He was so proud. We all were, proud of him.” Pete laughed. “Me and Jonas, we practically swelled up with it, because after Paul got that car, it got to be his job to take us down to Cleveland, to school. We used to ride in Daddy’s old rattly truck. Then suddenly, there we were, sitting in the back seat like we had us a chauffeur. Paul thought it was funny, too.”
“You went to school down in Cleveland?” Reynold asked. “Not here?”
“Oh, sure. Those days, Chinese couldn’t go to the white schools. We were somewhere between black and white, you see. Now, anyone could see that the colored schools, they weren’t teaching those kids anything more than they needed to know to sign their names to a contract and total up how many bales of cotton they brought in. So Daddy and a bunch of the other shopkeepers, and the Baptist Church, they set up the Chinese school down in Cleveland. Chinese kids from all over the Delta went down there. Paul was one of the first students.”
Reynold Tam shook his head. “So much I don’t know.”
“Well,” Pete said, “never too late to learn.” He turned the scrapbook page and we all leaned over to look. The next photo was of H. Tam and Sons from across the street, paint sharp, no mesh on the windows, the other storefronts all occupied: a dress shop, a hardware store, a Laundromat, a café. After those, a few shots inside the shop, inside the house. On the last page, the adults, both graying, smiled from the dining room table I’d last seen covered with broken dishes in the back of Leland’s store.
As Pete closed the scrapbook, I was hit with a thought: All these people were my relatives. We had roots in the same muddy village in Guangdong, where my great-grandparents’ houses might still be standing, the ancestral tablets still in somebody’s home. I decided that one day, I was going to go see them.
“That’s it?” I said when Pete slid the scrapbook back in the drawer.
“Sorry, Cousin Lydia. Like I said, Leland had most everything. Whatever I find, I’ll let you know. Reynold, you don’t have any old photos, things like that?”
“I do have that one at the front there, Grandpa and Grandma Tam, my daddy, you and Uncle Jonas. Up on the mantelpiece. But that’s all.”
The talk then turned to Leland, his love of family and the sacrifices he made for it; to Pete’s life, growing up in the Delta with his brothers; and to Reynold’s own family: his father Paul, his mother Mary, his wife, children, grandchildren. He brought out from his wallet a crowded photo of a serenely smiling blond woman surrounded by curly-haired kids and their handsome parents, among them Frank Roberson. “My wife Alicia, Megan and Frank and their children, and our son Donald, his wife, and their three.”
We all admired them. Reynold’s mother had been white, his wife was white, and his children had married white spouses; in these littlest cousins, the Chineseness had been diluted to invisibility. Still, they were adorable, and they were my family.
Reynold tucked his wallet away. “Uncle Pete, I want to say again how sorry I am I never got to know my Delta kin better.”
“Hardly your fault,” said Pete generously. “Big brother Paul was never interested in us po’ folk down here. He didn’t raise you with family feeling, where were you supposed to get it from?”
“Kind of you. Still, I feel badly. Anything Jefferson needs for his defense, you let me know.”
Pete’s eyebrows knit. “You’re not worried he’s guilty?”
“No man’s guilty till it’s proved.”
“I’m thinking more how it’ll appear to your constituents.”
“It’ll appear that the congressman supports his family through thick and thin,” Roberson said. “Mississippians put stock in family. A man can’t disavow his kin. Voters will be proud.”
A good way to spin it, I thought, since you can’t hide it.
Reynold smiled, seeming satisfied that his son-in-law was satisfied. “We’d have come down yesterday,” he said to Pete, “but truthfully, I couldn’t get away. The obligations of public life.”
“You came yesterday, you’d have missed Cousin Lydia,” Pete pointed out. “And Bill. They just got here.”
“Well then”—Reynold smiled—“that worked out for the best. Cousin Lydia, Bill, what brings all y’all to the South?”
“Pete asked us to come see if we could be of any help to Jefferson,” I said. “I’m just sorry this is the first time I’ve ever been here.”
“If nothing else good comes out of this, I guess we can still say the Tams reconnected with each other and with our Northern kin.” Reynold smiled. “Do you think you can? Help the boy out, I mean.”
“I don’t know. Especially now.”
“Especially now? How do you mean?”
I looked at Pete, who said, “You gents don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?”
“Oh, Lord.” Pete sighed. “I’m sorry to say it, and I don’t know what it’s all about—hoping it’s not what it seems—but the bald fact is, the boy did a runner.”
“Did a— He escaped? From jail?”
“Yes he did.”
Reynold’s eyes widened, and Roberson frowned.
“I admit it doesn’t look good,” said Pete. “But personally, I’d like to withhold judgment until I have a chance to speak to him on the subject.”
Roberson slipped a cell phone from his jacket pocket and said, “Excuse me.” He went out on the front porch.
“I’m sorry,” said Reynold. “But it’s his job. I’m sure he’s doing damage control—” Outside, Roberson’s voice rose on the porch, then abruptly died down again. “Starting with reaming out our PR people for not being on top of this. Pete, when did it happen?”
“This morning, though those fools down to the sheriff’s office didn’t notice until a few hours later.” Pete painted for Reynold the picture of Jefferson’s escape as it had been given to us.
“That’s troublesome,” Reynold said, rubbing his forehead. “Him having help like that. Makes you wonder.”
“That it does,” Pete agreed, and none of us voiced what it was we were wondering.
The front door opened, and Roberson returned. “I’m sorry,” he said, phone still in hand. His smile had returned, though his eyes were troubled. I liked him for not trying to hide that. “Reynold, I think we’d best be heading back. You have that dinner with those Family First people tonight.”
“Right. Have to be on my best behavior. No, no, Frank, don’t get your shorts in a twist, you know I take their concerns seriously.” Roberson’s phone rang, interrupting his nascent protest. With a look at Reynold, he excused himself again and went back outside. Reynold grinned and shook his head. “My lucky day, when Frank signed onto my team. He’s the one with a genius for looking ahead. Me, I went into politics to help out. Kind of old-fashioned, I know, but the congressman before me, he wasn’t as straightforward in his dealings as he might have been.”
“That was Fitzhugh, wasn’t it?” Pete asked. To me and Bill, he said, “Boy was so crooked he could’ve hid behind a corkscrew.”
Reynold smiled. “I thought my neighbors deserved better. So I got elected and I was happy, until I started to wonder if there wasn’t more we could do for this state. Having Frank with me made all the difference. I had to give him my daughter, but it was worth it.” His smile expanded.
Through the door, we could hear Frank Roberson throwing metaphorical dishes against the wall.
“Running against Stirling Mallory, it’s a challenge, though,” Rey-nold went on. “That’s why we’re courting these Family First folks, groups you’d expect to come down on Mallory’s side of the seesaw.” Eyeing the door, Reynold said, “But Frank’s stock in trade is he knows everyone, knows everything about ’em. He’s a laid-back fellow, but you can maybe hear how you don’t want to cross him. This business about Jefferson escaping, it shouldn’t have had to be sprung on us like that. And Granddaddy being a paper son, Frank says it’s not a problem and maybe it’s not, but it’ll be eating him as much because he didn’t know it, as for what it is.”
