Дороти Эллисон - Bastard Out of Carolina

You got family you an’t ever gonna know is your own—al of you with that dark dark hair he had himself.” She grinned at me, reaching out to push my midnight-black hair back off my face.

“Oh, Bone!” she laughed. “Maybe you should plan on marrying yourself a blond just to be safe. Huh?”

Granny wouldn’t talk much about my real daddy except to curse his name, but she told me just about everything else. She would lean back in her chair and start reeling out story and memory, making no distinction between what she knew to be true and what she had only heard told. The tales she told me in her rough, drawling whisper were lilting songs, bal ads of family, love, and disappointment. Everything seemed to come back to grief and blood, and everybody seemed legendary. “My granddaddy, your great-great-granddaddy, he was a Cherokee, and he didn’t much like us, al his towheaded grandchildren. Some said he had another family down to Eustis anyway, a proper Indian wife who gave him black-haired babies with blue eyes. Ha! Blue eyes an’t that rare among the Cherokee around here. Me, I always thought it a shame we never turned up with them like his other babies. Of course, he was a black-eyed bastard himself, and maybe he never real y made those other babies like they say. What was certain was my grandma never stepped out on him. Woman was just obsessed with that man, obsessed to the point of madness. Used to cry like a dog in the night when he was gone. He didn’t stay round that much either, but every time he come home she’d make another baby, another red-blond child with muddy brown eyes that he’d treat like a puppydog or a kitten. Man never spanked a child in his life, never hit Grandma. You’d think he would have, he didn’t seem to care al that much. Quiet man, too. Wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t barely talk. Not a Boatwright, that’s for sure.

“But we loved him, you know, almost as much as Grandma. Would have kil ed to win his attention even one more minute than we got, and near died to be any way more like him, though we were as different from him as children can be. None of us quiet, al of us fighters. None of us got those blue eyes, and no one but you got that blue-black hair. Lord, you were a strange thing! You were like a fat red-faced dol with al that black black hair—a baby dol with a ful head of hair. Just as quiet and sweet-natured as he used to be. You didn’t even cry til you took croup at four months. I’ve always thought he’d have liked you, Granddaddy would. You even got a little of the shine of him. Those dark eyes and that hair when you was born, black as midnight. I was there to see.”

“Oh, hel ,” Earle laughed when I repeated some of Granny’s stories. “Every third family in Greenvil e County swears it’s part of Cherokee Nation.

Whether our great-granddaddy was or wasn’t, it don’t real y make a titty’s worth of difference. You’re a Boatwright, Bone, even if you are the strangest girlchild we got.”

I looked at him careful y, keeping my Cherokee eyes level and my face blank. I could not have said a word if Great-Great-Granddaddy had been standing there looking back at me with my own black eyes.

Mama wore her hair cut short, curled, and bleached. Every other month she and Aunt Alma would get together and do each other’s hair, rinsing Aunt Alma’s in beer or lemon juice to lighten it just a little, trimming Mama’s back and bleaching it that dark blond she liked. Then they’d set pin curls for each other, and while those dried they would coax Reese into sitting stil long enough that her baby-fine red locks could be tied up in rags. I would tear up the rags, rinse pins, strain the juice through a cloth happily enough, but I refused the perm Mama was always insisting she wanted to give me.

“Stinks and hurts,” I complained. “Do it to Reese.”

“Oh, Reese don’t need it. Look at this.” And Aunt Alma tugged a few of Reese’s springy long curls free from the rags. Like soft corkscrews, the curls bounced and swung as if they were magical. “This child has the best hair in the world, just like yours, Anney, when you were a baby. Yours had a little red to it too, seems to me.”

“No.” Mama shook her head while she pul ed more rags out of Reese’s curls. “You know my hair was just blond. You had the red touch, you and Ruth. Remember how you used to fight over whose was darker?”

“Oh, but you had the prettiest hair!” Aunt Alma turned to me. “Your mama had the prettiest hair you ever saw. Soft? Why, it would make Reese’s feel like steel wire. It was the softest hair in Greenvil e County, and gold as sunlight on sheets. It didn’t go dark til she had you girls, a little bit with you and al dark with Reese. Hair wil do that, you know, darken in pregnancy. An’t nothing that wil stop it once it starts.”

Mama laughed. “Remember when Carr first got pregnant and swore she’d shave her head if it looked like it was gonna go dark?”

Aunt Alma nodded, her dark brown pin curls bobbing. “Rinsed it in piss, she did, every Sunday evening, Tommy Lee’s baby piss that she begged off Ruth. Al ‘cause Granny swore baby-piss rinses would keep her blond.”

“Didn’t she stink?” I bit at the rubber tip of a hairpin, peeling the coating off the metal so I could taste the sweet iron tang underneath.

“Baby piss don’t stink,” Aunt Alma told me, “unless the baby’s sick, and Tommy Lee wasn’t never sick a day in his life. Carr didn’t smel no different than she ever did, but her hair went dark anyway. It’s the price of babies.”

“Oh, it an’t that.” Mama pul ed me up onto her lap and started the arduous process of brushing out my hair. “Al us Boatwrights go dark as we get older. It’s just the way it goes. Blond goes red or brown, and darker and darker. An’t none of us stays a blond once we’re grown.”

‘Cept you, honey,” Aunt Alma grinned.

“Yeah, but I got Clairol, don’t I?” Mama laughed and hugged me. “What you think, Alma? Should I cut this mop or not? She can’t keep it neat to save her life, hates me pul ing on it when I try to brush it out.”

“Hel yes, cut it. I’l get the bowl. We’l trim it right down to her neck.”

“Noooo!” I howled, and wrapped my hands around my head. “I want my hair. I want my hair.”

“But you won’t let us do nothing with it, honey.”

“No! No! No! It’s my hair and I want it. I want it long and tangled and just the way it is.”

Aunt Alma reached over and took the hairpin out of my mouth. “Lord, look at her,” she said. “Stubborn as the day is long.”

“Uh-huh.” Mama put both hands on my shoulders and squeezed. She didn’t sound angry. I raised my head to look at her. Her brown eyes were enormous close up, with little flecks of light in the pupils. I could almost see myself between the flashes of gold.

“Wel , what you expect, huh?”

I looked back at Aunt Alma. Her eyes were the same warm brown, deep and shining with the same gold lights, and I realized suddenly that she had the same cheekbones as Mama, the same mouth.

“She’s just like you.”

My mouth wasn’t like that, or my face either. Worse, my black eyes had no gold. I didn’t look like anybody at al .

“You, you mean,” said Mama.

She and Aunt Alma nodded together above me, grinning at each other in complete agreement. I loosened my hands from around my skul slowly, letting Mama start brushing out my hair. Reese put her pudgy little fingers in her mouth and stared at me solemnly. “B-Bone,” she stammered.

“Yes,” Aunt Alma agreed, hefting Reese up in her arms. “Our stubborn Bone is just like her mama, Reesecup. Just like her aunts, just like a Boatwright, and just like you.”

“But I don’t look like nobody,” I wailed.