Red River
Andrew Tademy has blossomed as principal of Grant Parish Training School for Colored, expanding the elementary school Jackson Tademy started, while his older brother, Nathan-Green, barely scrapes by. Nathan-Green sometimes teaches the lower grades and sometimes farms in The Bottom. Andrew, stoked by his own inner fire and pushed by Gertrude, owns a house in Colfax and the land beneath it, while Nathan-Green lives on a piece of land given him by their father to work. An indifferent farmer, Ted’s father is capable enough, but without any deep passion. What he does best is create more children.
His mother, Lenora, soft of voice, is as different from her sister Gertrude as Nathan-Green is from Andrew, two physically unalike sisters married to two temperamentally unalike brothers. Gertrude continually remarks, reproachfully, on Lenora’s quiet demeanor and lack of ambition for her husband. Two Tademy brothers and two Smith sisters married, so dissimilar that had they not been surrounded by a town preoccupied with family lines and assumed connections, they would have done no more than tip their hats to each other if they met in the street.
“What’s wrong with Willie Dee Billes?” Ted finally asks. He feels a vague unease that he hasn’t rushed to his father’s defense first. But he doesn’t know how to respond to everything at once, and the web of relationships between his parents and their siblings is a larger, more long-standing, and more complicated quagmire that he isn’t eager to slog through.
“Just another high-yellow gal with her nose in the air. Stay away, you hear? That girl never give you the time of day anyhow.”
Gertrude has generated a list of people her family can associate with, and under what circumstances, and a far longer list of those they are warned to keep away from for one reason or another.
“She’s my friend,” says Ted.
“Not so long as you living under my roof, she isn’t,” replies Gertrude.
Gertrude puts her hands on her wide hips, glowering at Ted. This isn’t the first time they have come to an impasse. Ted feels a swirl of red begin to bubble deep within himself.
“Then I got to go,” he says before the red rage has time to release and carry him off to some unpredictable place. He turns his back to his aunt and quickly snatches up his nearest things, his cotton jacket, his other shirt, and a borrowed textbook. He moves fast before she can regain her wits and come after him with the strap.
Ted trudges toward home with his small bundle of belongings thrown together and tied up in his jacket, all the way from Colfax to The Bottom. With each step of the two-hour walk, he realizes what a mess he has made. Maybe in Colfax he is labeled a country boy and poor relation, but he has waited years for his turn to break free of the constrictive confines of The Bottom, to shed the ill-fitting farmer-in-training persona thrust upon him, to finally venture beyond the limiting drudgery and sameness that nibbles away at his core. And now, because of his temper, he walks back toward that life, no one to blame but himself.
When he comes to the half-dead oak tree split by lightning just beyond the Walden Bayou bridge, Ted turns right instead of left. Rather than go directly home to his father’s cabin, he makes his way to GrandJack’s two-story house at the edge of the bottomland.
GramAmy sits on the front porch, bowie knife in hand, cleaning the fish she caught that morning in the bayou, and GrandJack stoops over a row of sugar peas in the garden at the side of the house. They are old, his grandparents, both over seventy, but they have a gentle way with each other that gives Ted a feeling of stillness and peace, as if nothing bad can happen when they are around. Each visit starts with a treat from the back burner of GramAmy’s stove, maybe tea cakes and a strong cup of chicory coffee, or a long-simmered pork stew and sugar tea. They assign him chores whenever he comes by, water to tote, eggs to collect, vegetables to pick, or the cow to milk, and he is glad to help them out. After, he sits alongside GrandJack and listens to his advice. GrandJack always has advice.
“L’il Man,” his grandfather calls to him when he sees Ted tramp up the path toward their farmhouse. Jackson Tademy stops to lean on his pitchfork, his initial pleasure in seeing his grandson suddenly replaced by suspicion. He wears a wide straw hat as protection against the sun, and his fresh blue coveralls have smudges of mud from the garden. GramAmy keeps his grandfather in starched and ironed clothes, whether he goes out to work the field or into town for business. “Why you not in school?”
“The books they got not even good as yours, GrandJack,” Ted says. “And I won’t stay with Aunt Gertrude no more. She don’t think I’m good as them.”
“She doesn’t think, L’il Man.” His grandfather always corrects Ted’s speech, although Ted doesn’t quite understand how GrandJack can so consistently find the errors in his grammar but then turn around and make the same mistakes himself when he is doing the talking.
“Aunt Gertrude doesn’t think I’m good as them,” Ted repeats. “Uncle Andrew on my side, but I can’t do nothing right for her. Trying to tell me who I can see and not see, how to act.”
“L’il Man, don’t be disrespecting your elders to me or nobody else. And you going to stay in school. Too many paid too steep a price for you to turn up your nose at the opportunity.”
“School’s all right,” says Ted. “But I won’t stay with Aunt Gertrude.”
“Whoa, now. Draw back on the reins, telling me what you will and will not do,” Jackson says. The old man sheds his friendly expression. “You not too old to whup.”
“Yes, sir,” Ted says. He drops his jacket to the ground and takes the pitchfork from his grandfather’s hands, tilling the row where Jackson left off. The only sound between them is the strike of metal in dirt and the soft catch of the earth as he turns the soil. After a few minutes, Ted speaks up again. “I was hoping may be somebody know someplace else I could live for the school term.”
“Somebody? When you turn into such a brassy little man?”
The older his grandfather gets, and the more infirm he becomes, the looser he gets in bearing and banter with Ted, as if they are almost equals.
“Why you call me L’il Man, GrandJack?”
“That’s what you are, that’s what you always been. A little man. Go to the Bible. No boys and girls in there. God made us all in His image, men and women, splendid. You not a boy, you a man in training, close to coming to your own. Don’t never let another man calling you boy take you down to his level. That his ignorance, and you got to be wary around it, but his blindness don’t have nothing to do with who you are.”
Ted loves the sound of his grandfather’s explanation each time he hears it.
“Your aunt Gertrude got her ways,” Jackson says. “If staying with her the only means to keep you in school, that’s what you do. And no complaints. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Ted says, cowed.
“Hitch up the horse. We going into Colfax and straighten this out. No need bothering your mama and papa until we know which way this likely to fall.”
Now Ted is cautiously excited. “Yes, GrandJack.”
“Pay respects to your grandma first, and let’s get gone.”
“Yes, GrandJack.”
Dear Willie Dee,
Today in geography class, Professor Tademy told us about the world. He showed us a globe, a way to hold everything that is the earth in the roundness of your hands. I never heard of some of the places he talked about. Colfax is not all there is. Neither is Aloha or Alexandria or Montgomery, or even Louisiana.
There are things I think about, especially at night when the quiet gets strong. Solving a hard arithmetic problem. The smell of my GrandJack’s library on his farm in The Bottom. The last minutes of a fast basketball game when both sides match up the same. The way you smile and build up to a laugh, like rolling thunder but without the noise.
You remind me of one of the people in a book my GrandJack let me borrow from his library. They don’t have the book here at school. Her name was Eliza, and she had long hair too.
I moved out of my Aunt Gertrude’s house an
d live with a nice couple close to school. Nep and Annie Boyd like me in their house. They say I am young, and I do errands and fix things. Her cooking is good, especially the three-layer jelly cake.
I hope you and me can be friends.
Sincerely,
Nathan-Green (you can call me Ted) Tademy, Jr.
It is his sixth draft, and Ted knows if he doesn’t give Willie Dee the letter soon, his nerve will pass. His thoughts organize themselves better when he puts them down on paper first.
Ted folds this latest version and writes “Willie Dee Billes” in large script in his neatest penmanship on the outside.
At school the next day, he slips his first of many letters into the storage compartment of Willie Dee’s desk and hopes for the best.
Figure 27. Willie Dee Billes
Figure 28.
Willie Dee Billes’s
elementary school certificate, 1934
Figure 29. Gertrude Smith
Tademy, Andrew “Professor”
Tademy, and Mary Tademy
Chapter
35
1935
E arly in the spring of 1935, time finally catches Noby Smith, that old dodger of death’s heavy hand. On a breezy but bright Easter Sunday, they reserve the first four pews inside the poorly lit preaching room of Mount Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church for the kin of the man in the coffin, brought back across state lines into Louisiana in the rear boxcar of the Texas & Pacific.
The pecan trees haven’t quite yet come to bloom, the definitive signal that the last of the sudden morning freezes are behind them, but today’s crisp brightness and unfolding warmth are a welcome backdrop to the massive turnout for the funeral. At daybreak, for Easter sunrise service, Ted’s father played for a smaller congregation on the church’s wobbly black piano, his stubby fingers surprisingly fluid atop the yellowed, cracked keys, and once again he sits at the piano’s smooth bench for the afternoon memorial service. His music ushers in the latecomers.
Every available surface inside Mount Pilgrim Rest is crammed with arrangements of spring’s early-budding wildflowers. Indian paintbrushes compete with clusters of blue chicory, yellow daisies surround clumps of elegant daylilies at either side of the raised pulpit, and tangles of blue irises in large containers encircle the choir box.
Ted Tademy waits impatiently as more men, women, and children from The Bottom and Colfax, and what looks to be all of the colored Freemasons in Grant Parish, arrive, find seats, and settle in. This gathering is the largest collection of old people in one place at one time he has ever seen, as if every colored person over the age of sixty, regardless of infirmity, has come out to the church. They will follow the body to the colored cemetery in Bagdad for the next part of the service, and after, a smaller group of family and friends will meet at Grandma Emma’s house near Walden Bayou.
More than anything, Ted wanted to be sitting next to GrandJack to witness the final return of the grandfather he never had a chance to meet, but earlier, when he approached the front of the church, his mother, Lenora, cut her eyes to a pew two rows behind the honor seats held for the family elders. He obeyed, squeezing into a space farther back, between his brothers, but not before he heard Aunt Gertrude whisper to his mother loudly, “Uncle David better not show his face in here. Not here and not at the house, even to see Mama Lucy.”
Ted knows the story, as does everyone in The Bottom. How his great-grandmother Lucy refused to stay under one son’s roof after the other had to flee. How Emma returned from Oklahoma without Noby to care for his aging mother. How, regardless of David Smith’s success, his Freemason brothers no longer welcome him.
The new widow sits in the middle of the first long pew. Emma has pulled her white hair straight back from her high forehead and smoothed it down, but even though thinned by age, stray strands still flaunt their coarse wildness. Profound lines etch deep into the contours of her face. The long black shapeless dress she wears, the staple of every practical country woman, accentuates the undertones of yellow in her skin. Her upsloped, slanted eyes, shaped so like Ted’s mother’s, are dry.
Because Ted is restless, on the lookout, he may be the first to see the old man enter the back of the church. The man hesitates, but only for a moment. Although the dark three-piece suit he wears is newer than most of those to be found in the congregation, and his shoes are good-quality leather, barely scuffed, in other ways, time has not been kind to the man. His hands tremble, always in slight motion, and his pale gray eyes water without letup. He does not look well. He walks directly to the front of the church, to the first pew, but none there greet him warmly or make any effort to create a place for him. He says a few words to the widow, and Emma murmurs something back. Finally, Polly Tademy raises her hand and beckons, presses closer to Jackson, and makes room for the man on the end. By now all eyes in the church are trained on the front pew. David Smith is Noby’s brother, after all. By rights, he should be here.
A narrow shard of sunlight from the window accentuates the deep copper-brown tones of Jackson Tademy’s face, which will darken even more as summer catches hold. He carefully dabs at his eyes with a crisply ironed white handkerchief, stiff with starch. He says nothing to David.
At last the service begins. After several piano melodies, a strong voice solo by Aunt Gertrude, and endless remarks by the minister, there are a parade of testimonials for Noby Smith, Colfax’s first colored iceman. Like all funerals in The Bottom, this one goes on for a very long time. Old men and old women totter up to the front of the church with slow steps, or lean on the available arm of a church deacon. Lodge brothers pay tribute to Noby’s good works and industry, widows recall his kindnesses and sense of community. Still, regardless of how often the words good and proud and brave are repeated, Ted can’t grab hold, can’t decipher who his other grandfather really was beyond generalities.
Once everyone has had a chance for a say, the minister leads them in a final prayer, and the service concludes. Ted’s father plays one last tune on the piano, and the congregation files out, reassembling in the small vestibule of the church and flowing outside into the sudden chill of the afternoon. Attendees express their condolences to the immediate family, visit for a bit, and then some hurry off home to their waiting Easter dinners.
Ted lingers in order to offer his services to the family, but David has already taken Polly’s arm to escort her.
Again Polly motions to David, who leans in close, putting his ear almost to her mouth, but Ted is standing close enough to overhear. She whispers, “You paid your respects, but now you not welcome. We gonna carry him home from here.”
To David’s credit, he doesn’t falter or drop her arm, but slowly walks Polly to the waiting buggy outside. She is one hundred and one, and although she insisted on coming to the church and is still able to walk short distances on her own, she won’t accompany them to the graveside.
Once outside, Jackson places his old brown fedora on his head. The ancient hat has lost its original shape, caved in beyond repair near the back, where a blue-gray heron feather, hopelessly faded, is secured by a fraying band around the brim. The hat is so threadbare in one patch that Ted can see clear through the material to GrandJack’s scalp. The hat gives off a musty smell that follows in GrandJack’s wake. Ted’s GrandJack is a meticulous man, particular about his person and his clothes, but nonetheless, he wears the badly preserved brown fedora to every funeral he attends.
Jackson leans heavily on Ted. One group spilling out of the church sets off immediately for the cemetery, plodding down the wide dirt road at a slow stride. As the pallbearers load the casket into the waiting wagon, Ted helps GrandJack and GramAmy twist and squeeze into the cramped backseat of the lone automobile, a shiny black 1930 Chevrolet sedan that belongs to Ted’s brother-in-law. Emma is adamant in her refusal to ride in the devil machine; she is shepherded instead into a horse-drawn buggy and driven away. Ted walks behind with several others in the wake of dust kicked up by the vehicles. Once they arrive in the sec
tion known as Bagdad, everyone leaves the road and walks for the last quarter mile into the cemetery, an uneven patch of overgrown land encircled by a short rotting fence of pine pickets. Homemade grave markers populate the area, some stone, most wood. The pallbearers carry the casket onto the grounds next to a freshly dug hole, six feet deep and three feet wide, marking Noby Smith’s ultimate resting place.
“Noby Smith survived, unlike so many of our other men,” the minister says. He looks as if he will say more but instead takes out his handkerchief and wipes at his face. “Finally, he can rest in peace. At long last, Noby Smith has returned home. Amen.”
Ted’s last sobering image of his other grandfather is a crude wooden box lowered into the ground by four pallbearers, the snatches of legend as cold and flat as the man inside the crate.
About thirty of the mourners return from the cemetery on foot or in a convoy of buggies, buckboard wagons, and horseback to Grandma Emma’s farmhouse. Food has been spread out on tables inside, and more dishes arrive with each visitor—a three-layer coconut cake, crawfish casserole, butter beans in rice, still-warm candied yams.
Ted has lived with the specter of Grandma Emma’s absent husband for as long as he can remember, although Noby Smith has been decades gone from Louisiana. Over the years, Ted formed pictures of his other grandfather in his mind, speculating on whether Noby could be as smart or wise as GrandJack, whether the tales they told about him were exaggerated or true. Ted always thought he would one day get a chance to meet the misplaced man who continues to hold sway over the lives of the Tademys and Smiths both, as if his other grandfather just wandered down to the commissary for tobacco and would show up again, unannounced, when he tired of the conversation around the cracker barrel. But now Noby Smith is dead, and Ted will never know firsthand whether he favored his predecessor, in facial features or carriage, in speech or temperament. Whenever the flooding red rage descends on him, especially when Ted was younger and his tantrums had more power to sweep him away, his family has shaken their heads with regret. “He got Noby’s temper,” they say.