Love you,
Langston III
November 12, 1918
Darling Rose,
Get out my civilian clothes. The war, as you probably learned before me, is over. We are all desperate to come home. I am dying to hold you. But for now all I can do is touch this paper with the knowledge that it will soon pass into your lovely hands.
Your boy,
Langston
November 28, 1918
Rose,
It makes me sick to say this, but I just got word that we’re going to be sitting tight for a long time — possibly a month or two — before sailing home. You might as well prepare yourself NOT to see me at Christmas. The American soldiers over here are in a mile-long lineup to sail home, and guess which ones of us are at the back of the line.
Aching for you,
Langston
February 19, 1919
My girl,
I’m coming home, baby! Now you can get out my clothes! Haven’t heard from you in the longest time, but don’t bother writing now. We’re on our way! This is just a quick one — a mail orderly is picking up letters. I have to tend to my men now.
Hugs,
Langston III
P.S. The colored boys over here can’t wait to get home. They think everything will be different, now that they’ve fought for their country. I’m not so sure. The way I see it, white people in America haven’t seen — and won’t necessarily care to know — what we have gone through in the trenches. I’d like to see things change, but I’m not holding my breath. What do you think?
March 24, 1919
Dearest Rose,
I’m so blue I can barely write. I’m sick of the entire adventure. We’re still bogged down, waiting to sail home. I am okay, just depressed, and longing to be in your arms again. They promised me I’d be home by February, so I’m taking with a grain of salt the promise of another month — that I’ll be home by end of April.
Yours,
Langston III
I imagined my grandfather writing from the trenches, trying to keep his letters focused on love. I imagined his decision not to talk about the war itself, and I understood the request he made in one letter not to be told any bad news from back home.
Mill came into the guest room to say that I had spent enough time with those letters. What was I trying to do in there, anyway — memorize family history?
I asked if I could return and she said to come on back sometime. I said I’d better be on my way and she nodded. So I went. Millicent wasn’t one for shaking hands or kissing good-bye. But once I’d stepped off her front porch and was heading toward my car, she called out:
“Say hello to your dad for me.”
“I haven’t spoken to him, lately.”
“Tell him thank you for the cheques. I guess I should have thanked him myself.” “What cheques?”
“Your father sends me a hundred a month. Been sending me a hundred a month for fifteen years. Before that, it was fifty dollars. You didn’t know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“He doesn’t write. Never says nothing. No photo, no letter, not even a Christmas card. Mind you, I don’t write either. He doesn’t talk to me, and I don’t talk to him. But he sends me money, every month. Tell him I said thank you.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be talking to him soon.”
“Then call ‘im, you hear me? Git on the phone and call ‘im. I showed you round the church even though you’re nothing but a pagan buzzard —”
“Where’d you get that expression?”
“From my mother, bless her soul. I was saying, I showed you round the church, got you lunch, let you spy all over my family documents, now get your father on the phone and thank him for me.”
“All right, Mill, I’ll do that. I’ll call him from a pay phone tonight.”
“A pay phone? I don’t want you standing in the street announcing my family business!” I wondered, exactly, what she was doing standing at the door hollering at me on the street, but I didn’t pursue that argument. “Then get yourself back in here and call right now. What’s this nonsense, no phone? What you doing, living like a bohemian? What if someone takes sick? What if someone needs to reach you?”
I skipped back into Millicent Cane’s house. “You sit here and make that phone call,” she said. “I’ll see what there is in the fridge. You eat honey ham?”
I dialed my parents’ number. I wasn’t expecting an ecstatic reception, and I didn’t get one.
“Yeh-es.” That was my father. I’d been hoping he wouldn’t answer, or that he wouldn’t be in. He always sounded put-upon when he answered the phone.
“Dad. It’s Langston.”
“Son, where are you? Are you in trouble?”
“No. No trouble. I’m in Baltimore. I think you know that. But right now, I’m at Mill’s.”
I could imagine him sitting up in his chair. “Dorothy,” he hollered. “Get on the line, would you? Your first son, the one who has my name? He’s at Mill’s place. Son, I warned you not to bother her. She has nothing to give you. If you need anything, come get it from home.”
“I’m not asking for anything. We’re just — visiting.”
Millicent poked me in the back. “Thank him for the cheques, and get off the line. That’s a long-distance call you’re making.”
“Mill says thank you for the cheques.”
“That’s none of your business,” Dad said.
“I’m just passing on a message. She says —”
“Gimme that phone,” Mill said, grabbing it. She shooed me out of the chair so she could sit down. “Lang, how’s it going? Good? Well, I was just saying thanks for the cheques. You don’t have to keep sending them, you know. But I have been putting them to good use. Got my porch to fix next. I’m thinking of asking your son to help, since he’s sitting here eating me out of house and home. He any good with his hands? No? Well, I might ask him anyway. Nice talking to ya. Bye.”
Mill hung up the phone. I don’t believe she’d waited for my father to say good-bye. Or much of anything else.
“You like mustard?” she asked me. I hate the stuff, but I felt it politic to nod. “Good, because I put it on your sandwich. I didn’t put on any mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is a waste of money. And they say it’s bad for your heart. But I got Coke. You like Coke? Go get the platter from the kitchen and bring it in here.”
Two glasses of Coke — with ice — and two honey ham sandwiches sat waiting on the platter. I brought them into the living room. Mill told me to push the newspapers off the couch and to sit down and eat. She had a dining room table, but it was too covered in junk to sit at.
“I’m not a brainchild, like your father,” Mill said. She didn’t give me time to protest. “I like plain talk. I like words I understand. So tell me this. When you write up this family history, are you going to put me in it?”
“Yes.”
“You’d better get your facts right, then. I might be able to help you.”
I sat back in my chair, wondering how I could work with this woman.
“Be sure to get it right about Aberdeen Williams,” she said, out of the blue. “Crazy old bat thought he could marry a white woman in 1930! Humph. He learned his lesson good.”
“How do you know about that?” I asked. I, too, had heard stories about Aberdeen in Oakville.
“You seem to think that only men are in your family story. But I was there, too. I used to live in Oakville. Get that through your half-nappy head. I was there, I keep telling you, and I won’t be left out of this story. Aberdeen used to take care of me when I was a little girl. I intend to get on back up there and hug that man before we both kick off for good.”
“He spends a lot of time at my folks’ house, wandering around.”
“I was just three years old when I first met Aberdeen. He was a teenager. I used to think he was so old. And now I’m four times the age he was then. Why don’t you call him and tell him hello for me?”
I called directory assi
stance and got Aberdeen’s number. But nobody answered the phone. Mill seemed disappointed.
The next day, Mill asked me, “Why’re you so interested in your grandpappy, anyway?”
“He and Rose seemed to have an incredible relationship.”
“I don’t think she thought it was incredible. Him, neither.” “In what sense?”
“Get back in that room of mine and keep digging. I got me another box or two on them, diaries, letters, all sorts of junk. I was fixing to throw it all out soon. Takes up too much room.”
“Don’t throw it out. I might need that stuff.”
“If you’re going to write about them, you’d better put in the part about their long and rocky road.”
June 5, 1919. Second Lieutenant Langston Cane, honorably discharged from the 368th Light Infantry Division of the American Expeditionary Forces, bearer of a medal for bravery displayed in risking enemy fire to drag an injured comrade back to the trenches in the Vosges Mountains, sat at the dining table in his parents’ summer home near Frederick, Maryland. He was eating a piece of cherry pie. He felt numb. He had no desire to eat, but he ate anyway. His mother hovered around him. His sisters. In a rare display of affection, his father had shaken his hand three times. Rose, who sat across from him, should have thrown her arms around him and refused to let go. She should have sat in his lap at the table, gushing about her undying and absolute love for him. She should have thrown modesty to the winds and dragged him to a bed upstairs. But all she did was bite back her tears and force a smile.
Langston had waited a year for this day. A year, he’d been away. Fort Des Moines, Iowa. Camp Meade, Maryland. New York. On board the ship to England. To Brest. Dijon. La Metz. The Vosges Mountains. Paris. Nice. The Vosges Mountains again. Paris. Lyons. Normandy.
He had lived for her letters. My darling boy, she had written. Just imagine I’m giving you the kisses I’m sending you. My darling boy, my lover, my husband. All that, and more. And he had waited. Sometimes, he had waited a month for her letters. Once, in the trenches, he’d gone six weeks with no word. He’d spent a week in a makeshift hospital, a week on his back with dysentery, with more pounds lost than he cared to admit. It was hard to believe a body could give up that much fluid. No word from her all that time. Then, when her letters did get through, there was nothing she could possibly say that was sufficiently passionate or adequately distraught. Rose’s crisply penned references to family visits and meals eaten seemed to make light of his longing and his discomfort. In the final months of the war, Rose’s letters enraged him. He actually tore one of them up. He was dying of weariness of the whole thing, and felt suffocated by his hatred of the American war bureaucracy.
When they stationed him for weeks in Lyons, instead of sending him home after Armistice Day, he was so angry he wanted to shoot someone. He couldn’t believe the destruction he found there. Decay. Desperation. There were no French men. He saw women, and children, and old, old men. But no young men. Children ran up to him for money. So did women. A young war widow took him into her bed in Lyons. Langston went into shock when he left her. He was aghast at himself. Over and over, he muttered, “Look what this war has done to me. If only they had sent me right home.” Rose cascaded into his thoughts, and he drove her out. When he left the war widow, he put twenty dollars on her table. It wasn’t asked for, but it wasn’t refused. She asked him to come again. He never did. He checked himself for a month for symptoms. It was the only month in his entire year overseas that he had not wanted to return home. Never again, he told himself. Never again would he do that.
His letter writing dropped off. Finally, back to Paris. He was too dejected, too sick of being away, to enjoy the city. On to Brest. Then Dover. Sick for three days on the trip back across to New York. His trousers were falling down. With his knife point, he dug two extra notches in his belt. Rose had warned him in one of her last letters that she had put on fifteen pounds. He hadn’t told her of his wartime dysentery. The bit he’d put back on in Paris after leaving the trenches was lost again over the Atlantic. He weighed himself in the infirmary during his last day of the crossing. One hundred and twenty-five pounds — twenty-five less than what he had weighed a year earlier.
In New York, the discharge process. The war was over. The returning soldiers had been fêted, long ago. There were no crowds waving, no flags flying. He could have sent a telegram from New York, to tell them he was coming. But he didn’t. He resented her not being there in New York. She should have been waiting in the New York harbor, screaming, Langston! My darling! Look at you, my man! She should have known when he was coming. Made the necessary inquiries. In his final letter, from Brest, he had mentioned the name of the ship he’d be sailing on. But nobody was waiting for him in New York. And nobody was waiting for him in Baltimore. And he couldn’t get a cab home. Life hadn’t changed. America hadn’t changed. And Rose wasn’t there to greet him. Their house was empty. His key still fit the lock. Nice of them, not to change the lock. Empty house. He raged. He kicked his own bed, swept five glasses off a table. It was a Monday. The first Monday in May. They would be at the family home. Hill Crest. Just outside Frederick. It was two hours away, by a milk-run bus. Second Lieutenant Langston Cane sat in the back, brooding. Ready to shoot someone. In uniform still. Unwilling to take off that uniform until he had stood before his family. The family summer home was two miles from the bus stop in Frederick. Second Lieutenant Cane decided to hoof it. He was a tad feverish, his eyes so tired they burned.
Langston stood at the foot of the dirt driveway up to the summer home, kit bag by his feet. He stood, waiting for Rose to come get him. He heard a scream from the porch. His girl. His baby. His Rose would come running to him now, and hug him, hold him, take him, guide him, kiss him, lead him up to meet his parents. Wrong. It wasn’t her. It was his sister. His sister saw him first. Violet was the one screaming, not Rose. Violet ran down the road, grabbed him, hugged him, damn near knocked him over. Mother was behind her. Where was Rose? Where was Rose? Walking slowly down the driveway. Sniffling. Calling out his name, hesitantly, as if she didn’t recognize him. Langston? Langston? She walked more quickly toward him, but never ran. Tears. She took his hand. Pecked his cheek. One single and solitary peck on the cheek. Come on, Langston, she said, what are you standing there for? Let’s get some food in you. Come on in, Langston. He dropped her hand and walked up the drive. Rose walked beside him. She didn’t take his hand again. Violet carried his bag. Mother was screaming, now, to her husband in the backyard. Your son is home. Your boy is back.
Langston noticed the gleaming hardwood floor, saw his father coming, tall and dark and stately with his hand out. Langston felt it coming and could do nothing, absolutely nothing, about it. Dizzy, swirling, round and round, down. Out.
He woke up in bed. Nobody there. No Rose. Waited for her to come. Waited ten minutes. Finally got out of bed and stomped a bit. She arrived right away. He let her know that he didn’t care for her kind words, for her solicitations. They were too late. Where was she when he was in France? In New York? In Baltimore? Where was she when he was at the Frederick bus depot? Langston felt as dry as kindling inside. He saw Rose crying and didn’t care.
The next day, eating with the family, Langston mumbled something about feeling bone-tired. “But you never liked clichés, did you, Rose?”
Rose got up and came to stand behind his chair. “A returning soldier is allowed whatever cliché his heart desires,” she said.
Langston managed a smile. When he heard her sniffle, he offered his hand up over his shoulder, and she took it.
“You never told us you won a medal, son,” his father said.
Langston felt Rose’s breast against his neck.
“My boy,” she said. “My boy is home.”
He fell asleep before dinner, woke up before dark, slept another hour, awoke before midnight. Up and down through the night. Never more than two hours of sleep at a time. Rose never complained. She stayed by his side, in bed. After three
days, four days, a week, he finally started to sleep. Still, he hadn’t held her man to wife. For another six days, he went to bed after dinner. On the seventh day, he awakened at ten on a Saturday morning. Looked outside and saw Rose hanging clothes on the line. His parents and sisters were in Baltimore. Father would be preparing his sermon. Violet had a job nearby in Harpers Ferry. Rose was here alone. Langston knew that nobody was in the house. He climbed out of bed, tumescent, and bathed. Still tumescent. Wandered downstairs with a towel around his waist. Let the white cloth fall from his chocolate and — as Rose once observed — supremely edible behind, turned his wife around, took her mouth with his, and tried to get her down on the grass. She giggled, laughed, pushed free. No, sir. That’s out of the question. Get your behind up those stairs and I will follow you when I’m through hanging these clothes. Langston! Stop that this minute. Put that towel back on! What if somebody comes by? Go on, get upstairs. I’m coming, I’m coming, I’ve been waiting a year for you, my darling lieutenant, so don’t you worry. I’m coming.
Langston taught elementary school in Baltimore for a term, but that didn’t work out. He sold encyclopedias, but gave that up after two months. He put up with all manner of ridicule from the Bridges family. Loretta was enrolled in medical school. Rose was teaching elementary school, making better money than Langston. This couldn’t last. He applied to law school, and was accepted, but didn’t have enough savings to study full-time. His parents had no extra cash, and he refused to let Rose ask her parents for money for his education.
Rose hated Baltimore. She didn’t like Langston’s state of stagnation. And she certainly didn’t enjoy living with her in-laws, in their house, with the stampede of visitors and delegations and bishops and deacons from the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Rose was getting lured by her mother. Hazel Bridges offered to pay for Rose to study law or medicine if she left Langston.
Rose became pregnant. Langston spoke with his father one evening, continuing late into the night. His father made some inquiries. They conferred, again confidentially, late into the night. Rose suspected something was up. She was six months pregnant. Langston announced that he had decided to join the A.M.E. Church ministry. His father had found him a position in Independence, Missouri.