A Place at the Table: A Novel Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Alice and James in North Carolina

  Wild Sow

  Part One

  Bobby in Georgia

  1. Royal Ambassador

  2. Gracious Servings

  3. The Firefly Jar

  4. I Never . . .

  Part Two

  Bobby in New York

  5. Letter Home

  6. Pounding the Pavement

  7. “Just Don’t Call It Elaine’s”

  8. Letter Home

  9. Like John the Baptist, Dripping with Honey

  10. Hostess Gift

  11. The Monster Under the Bed

  12. Communion

  Part Three

  Amelia in Connecticut

  13. Empty Nest

  14. Family Tradition

  15. A Question of Scruples

  16. Seed

  Part Four

  Bobby and Amelia in New York

  17. The Truth Never Hurt Anyone

  18. Homegrown

  19. The Fragments Left Over

  Acknowledgments

  Mittie Crumbie Wade’s Sour Cream Pound Cake

  A Soft Place to Land Excerpt

  Bound South Excerpt

  About Susan Rebecca White

  To Teagan and Olivia: you, you, you, you, you

  Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.

  John 6:12

  Prologue

  Alice and James

  in North Carolina

  WILD SOW

  (Emancipation Township, North Carolina, 1929)

  For Alice, looking at James was like looking back at herself, only a washed-out, lighter version, and with short wavy hair instead of plaits held in place with pieces of torn-up muslin. Alice had been looking at James all twelve years of her life, she who entered the world exactly fifteen months after her brother. From a young age they would have staring contests; first one to blink lost. They were constantly engaging in these battles of will, though Alice was always the loser. James could stare through the tears building up in his eyes, while Alice couldn’t bear the sting.

  Saturday nights, after supper, nighttime chores, and the weekly bath, the extended family would gather in Granddaddy and Granny’s house, where Alice and James also lived, their mother having moved them all there after their father died. They would read Bible verses, sing songs, recite poetry. Sometimes the elder adults told stories of slave days while the children sat at their feet, listening or playing with cornhusk dolls or the treasured set of marbles Granddaddy kept in a black velvet bag and stored on the top shelf of the pie safe. During one such time Alice and James retreated to the corner of the main room. They sat across from each other, knees bent, the flats of their feet touching, so they were connected. In their laps they each held a small chalkboard from school and a stub of chalk. They had an idea. They were going to transmit their thoughts to each other through the air.

  They were always saying the same thing, always laughing at each other’s private jokes, though no one else understood what was so funny. And so James thought they should test it, see if there really was something strange going on. He told Alice to think of an image—an ear of corn, a candle, a squirrel—and write the word for it on her chalkboard. Then James would concentrate real hard and draw whatever image he saw in his mind. Again and again he drew the right word, missing only occasionally.

  “Cat.”

  “Raccoon.”

  “Tomato.”

  “Pig.”

  “Flower.”

  “Mother.”

  They called their mother over to them, tried to show her the amazing thing they were doing, but as soon as she heard the word “magic” she told them to quit fooling with spirits and get back with everyone else before she whipped them for blasphemy. They obeyed but continued playing their mind-reading game anytime they could, lying to Mother about why they needed the chalkboards, pretending they were busy memorizing math equations for school.

  Mother often threatened to whip them, but she rarely did. For large crimes, she would hand them over to Granddaddy to discipline, and while he had never whipped Alice he had once whipped her brother, a beating so severe it had laid James up for days. But usually Granddaddy would come up with other punishments, punishments that involved extra chores or no dessert or even the silent treatment for a week, and not just from him but from everybody in the community of Emancipation Township. Granddaddy confessed that while he’d whip a child if he had to—and that one time there had been no choice but to beat James into submission—it turned his stomach to lash black skin. As a boy he had seen what had happened to the slave who had tried to run away from Hortican Stone’s farm. He had seen a back lashed to bone.

  • • •

  Alice and James were down by the creek, checking on one of their rabbit traps. James looked puzzled. The trap was missing its bait but contained no rabbit, and both he and Alice knew this should not happen, because he always placed the lettuce far enough back so that the door would bang closed before the rabbit even got a nibble. Even if some other animal had taken the food, it should be trapped inside the box for James to find and release. Often when this occurred the freed animal would try to follow James around afterward. There was just something about James that drew animals to him. The year their father died James turned one of their chickens into his pet. Or rather, the chick claimed James, following him everywhere. Pretty soon she was riding high on James’s shoulder anytime he wasn’t doing farmwork or playing stickball with the other boys.

  Suddenly there was a thunderous drumming and a surge of heat and the earthy smell of animal and swoosh! A wild pig almost nicked them in her passing, splashing their bare feet with cold creek water as she crossed to the other side, out of Emancipation Township and into the woods that separated their land from the town of Cutler, North Carolina, where they had to bow their heads and pretend not to be so free anytime they needed to do business at Sam Hicks’s General Store.

  For a moment Alice and James remained silent, in awe.

  “She got herself a litter,” James finally said. “See those tits?”

  Their granddaddy would scold James if he heard him talk this way. Crude and unsophisticated. True, Granddaddy himself stumbled over the written word and he sometimes slipped into country speech, but the children of his children were given opportunities he never had, including a schoolhouse run by a steady rotation of college graduates, lured to Emancipation to experience the pride that comes from working in a community owned and run by Negroes. Alice’s grandmother Rachel, Spelman degree in hand, had been the first of these young people to come. Other Spelman graduates followed, along with male teachers from Morehouse and Howard, where James was expected to go the following year when he turned fifteen, just as two of his uncles had gone before him, one now a doctor in Washington, D.C., the other back on the farm, raising his own family.

  Alice had not noticed the animal’s tits. She had been too mesmerized by how fast the sow ran. How ugly she was, with her thick coat of dirty, pointy hair, her elongated snout, her tiny black eyes. The sow was a beast, fierce and ferocious, while the pigs they raised on the farm were almost comic, oinking with excitement when Alice walked toward their pen carrying the slop bucket. And when their diet shifted from slop to acorns—finis
hing the pigs on acorns was the secret to the sweet succulence of the Stone family hams, which Sam Hicks sold fast as he could get them at the General Store—they became even more frenzied at feeding time, as Alice approached with buckets of acorns, taken from the supply she and James and the other cousins gathered every fall and kept stored in the barn. Mother said the pigs liked those acorns as much as Alice liked pecan pie.

  “We find her piglets, we eat high all winter,” said James.

  While Alice craved sweets, her brother loved meat. Chops and ribs and butt and bacon. Sausage sizzling in its own fat, the key ingredient in the white gravy Mother fixed, which she poured over biscuits, made tender and flaky by a lacing of lard through the flour. You would think that with the number of pigs their family slaughtered each fall James would have as much meat as he desired. But crop prices were down and the tax bill was high and last year they’d sold every pig they raised just to get through the winter. “Thank God Almighty for swine,” Granddaddy said.

  James and Alice stared into the distance, following the blurry path of the racing sow. They saw her go over a hill on the other side of the woods. She disappeared for a moment before reappearing on the top of another hill. And then they saw her turn and disappear again, this time for good. As if she vanished into the earth, though probably she had just entered a cove.

  “C’mon,” said James. “Let’s get her.”

  He was carrying a loaded rifle. He took it every time they went trapping, in case there was an injured animal in need of a mercy killing or they spotted a raccoon high up in the trees. But the sky was a pale lavender, soon to be swallowed by dark. They were expected home before this happened, home for a supper of fall vegetables and Mother’s good yeast bread, and maybe some meat—squirrel most likely. And for dessert they could eat as many crunchy apples, the first of the fall season, as they wanted.

  “We’re not gonna find that thing,” she said.

  “Granddaddy says wild pigs are the devil on crops. You know he’d want us to kill it.”

  Alice did not know this at all. She imagined their granddaddy would want them to come home, right away. But she also knew what James was thinking, that if he could bring home a slain pig and her piglets, his granddaddy couldn’t help but show pride in him. Alice knew he was imagining Granddaddy’s expression when he saw the kill. Imagining Granddaddy clapping him on the shoulder, calling him son. Like he did to the other boys who made Granddaddy proud.

  Granddaddy was proud of James, surely. Alice had seen Granddaddy cheer on the sidelines when James hit a home run during a stickball game. Alice had seen the glint in Granddaddy’s eyes when James brought back eight rabbits from the woods, all trapped during one day. But Granddaddy’s pride in his oldest grandson was never directly expressed. The old man was forever swallowing what gentle thing he might say to his headstrong boy.

  Mother claimed that James and her daddy were too much alike to get along well. She must have been talking about their temperaments, because appearance-wise, James was tall and thin while Granddaddy was short and stocky. And Granddaddy’s skin was the color of roasted coffee beans, while James’s always reminded Alice of peanut shells.

  • • •

  James knew the woods the way Alice knew Mother’s recipes. He was a quiet walker, each step deliberate. The children were barefoot, as they would be until the first frost. The ground was mostly soft beneath Alice’s feet, though occasionally she would step on something sharp and pointed and have to stop and dig the stickler out. Her feet were so callused she hardly even noticed the sting.

  About twenty minutes into the hunt, as they ventured deeper and deeper into the land outside Emancipation, James stopped short, motioning Alice to him. He pointed to a menacing contraption on the ground, a thick chain attached to a giant mouth with sharp rusty teeth, ready to spring should you step inside it. When she saw the jagged metal teeth, stained with dried blood, Alice yelped. James hushed her, saying it was only a bear trap, but that she should keep her eyes on the ground in case there were others.

  They walked on, their footfalls forming a rhythm as they padded along the ground, strewn with fallen leaves, many already turned the colors of autumn. Off in the distance Alice heard the distressed cries of an animal. The scant hairs on her arms popped up.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Alice yearned to be inside her granddaddy’s house, beside the fire, safe and warm.

  “Let’s go up here,” James said, turning left, making his way up an unmarked hill and through a growth of thin, young trees. The hillside was slippery with fallen leaves, and Alice had to grab onto the tree branches to support herself. But the one she grabbed snapped in two, and Alice, off balance, fell backward.

  “You okay?” James asked.

  Alice nodded. She was. She stood up, looking around for a moment while she got her bearings. She stared in the direction of an oak tree off to the side. She thought she saw an owl perched on one of its branches. She had heard the calls of a barred owl earlier that evening: woot, woot, woot, woo; woot, woot, woot, woooh!

  “Ready?” James asked. He was waiting for her on top of the little hill. He told her which trees to grab, and she followed his direction. When she was just below him he extended his arm and she grabbed onto it tightly. He helped her up, and they were safe and on another cleared trail, higher.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. It was darker now, and she was cold.

  “There’s a cove up here,” he said. “Maybe she’s nested in it.”

  “I thought they rooted in mud piles.”

  James turned and put his finger on his lips. “Shhhh.”

  “Why are you shushing me? They do.”

  James held his finger in front of his lips and glared at her.

  And then she heard it. A rustle. A low hum. More rustling, more crunching. Someone or something was making its way through these woods. She heard talking, but she could not yet make out what was being said. And then she saw them, down below, on the path they had walked on, three white men. Three guns by three sides, a lantern with a flickering flame lighting the way. One of the men had beautiful red hair, illuminated by the lantern’s glow, the hair the color of the skins of the apples she was supposed to have eaten for dessert that night. One man had something besides his rifle tucked beneath his arm, something round and coiled, which looked to Alice like a snake. Two bluetick hounds loped behind the men. Hunters, thought Alice. Looking for the sow, too.

  “The look on that boy’s face,” said one of the men, chuckling, shaking his head.

  They were closer now, in hearing range.

  “ ‘Please, suh, I didn’t take no chickens!’ ”

  “Lying nigger.”

  “He’s eatin chicken now, boys. He’s eatin chicken now.”

  An explosion of laughter.

  Alice did not fully understand what these men were talking about, but she knew she needed to change into something other than a girl. She needed to become one of the trees, to plant her feet into the ground, to be unmoved, even if someone walked right up to her and stared her in the face. Don’t blink. Granddaddy was always saying that the trees had borne witness to all of human misery. The trees were here when Jesus Christ walked the earth, when he was hung on a cross made from one of them.

  The men were directly below them now. When the sow had charged by at dusk, Alice had felt heat, smelled something feral and of the earth. There was a stench to these men, too, a musky mix of sweat and adrenaline. Alice closed her eyes. Relied on childhood logic: If I can’t see you, you can’t see me.

  Beside her James had turned not to tree but to stone. Like their namesake.

  The men kept walking. Eventually Alice lost sight of them, though she could still catch snippets of what they said. Something about coming back the next day to show him off to the other boys. Something about maybe they ought to tree a coon while they were out there, but nah, they’d already done that. Laughing again, low and
hollow.

  Alice smelled something new, a whiff of ammonia. She turned her head toward the smell and by the moon’s white glow saw a darkened line down James’s pants.

  • • •

  They saw the rope first, illuminated by the nearly full moon, hanging from the branch of a pecan tree a good fifty yards away. They made their way down the hill toward it, picking up speed as they went. They slowed when they saw the boy, the boy hanging from the rope. His head was tilted back, his chin pointed toward the sky, as if he were looking for God. His hands were bound behind him with more of the thick rope. His once white shirt hung around his waist, the empty arms dangling. There were diagonal stripes across his back, the skin around the lashes puffed, swollen. How skinny he was, skinny enough that Alice could see his ribs. He was as skinny as James. He was a boy like James, maybe even the same age. This could not have happened to a boy like James, a boy who also had long, delicate fingers.

  There was something white coming out of his mouth. Alice got closer, covering her face with her hand to block the terrible smell that was all around, a smell of shit and fear and mud and bile. Chicken feathers. They had stuffed chicken feathers into his mouth. There were so many feathers, some wet with vomit. They must have stuffed the feathers in his mouth before they hung him. They must have held him down. He must have been so scared. The feathers would have been dry and soft, but the quills would have poked him. They would have poked the back of his throat, making him choke. He would have been gasping to breathe, but he could not breathe because the feathers were in his mouth. He would have gagged, then vomited, and the force of the vomit would have sent some of the feathers out of his mouth and onto the ground below. The men would have laughed. And then stuffed more feathers back in.

  James put his gun down on the ground, hugged the trunk of the tree, and shimmied up it, swinging his body onto the branch the rope was tied to. James took his knife out of the back pocket of his overalls and started sawing away at the rope, sawing and sawing until finally it was down to its last threads. “Move,” he said to Alice before cutting the remaining tie. The body landed on the ground with a thump, still dead, as it had been the moment before, but no longer swinging, no longer on display for white men to gloat over.