Carol Black

13. The Free State of Lunenburg

My mother was from Virginia, so I learned at an early age how beauty was wed to evil. Every summer we would go to Grandma Janie’s house, deep in Lunenburg County (sometimes referred to as “The Free State of Lunenburg,” in honor of the Declarations of 1861, when, impatient to join the Confederacy, the county voted to secede from the Union on its own.) In the heart of Virginia’s Southside, the region is so economically depleted that the population hasn’t increased since the Great Depression. Red clay soil worn out from tobacco, railroad gone since the 1950’s, the only new place to work is a prison. 

And yet, to a child, it was beautiful. As we headed south, subdivisions and interstate gave way to sweet country roads and tobacco fields, and we entered a land of crisp white houses with deep porches that looked cool in the heavy heat, glowing green lawns and tall pecan trees that arched through the sky like gothic cathedrals, hydrangeas bountiful with heartbreaking blue. I rolled down the window of the Buick and breathed it in. Best of all, I loved the tiny houses with tiny front porches that sporadically dotted the roadsides. They were so cute, I thought. I wanted to live in one.

My mother would get that look on her face. That oh, child, there is a world of sorrow too vast to fit inside your tiny head look. Firmly she made it known to me that the tiny houses were old slaves’ quarters, now sharecroppers’ dwellings, and however we chose to describe them, we would not be using the word cute.

My mother was implacable. She had been baptized into the Vidalia Christian Church, a congregation itself so implacable that it refused to be denominated by anything more specific than the name of Christ Himself, and which practiced a faith so pure it held fast only to the two creeds of the original Disciples: the taking of Holy Communion, and Full-Immersion Baptism. Beyond that, the Church took a tolerant attitude toward individual interpretations of Scripture. The faithful were admonished to study the Bible and pray for guidance but not to insist on complete agreement on matters of doctrine; as the old Campbellite slogan went, “in essentials, Unity; in non-essentials, Liberty.”  

As it happened, these non-essentials included the Liberty to run around in pointy white hoods on Saturday nights burning crosses in the darkness, and when my mother, sometime during her early teens, got wind of this weekend avocation on the part of her fellow congregants, it was all over between her and Jesus. End of story. When I was growing up she always told me with fire in her eye that a woman should only ever allow herself to be hit by a man once. Apparently she held the Messiah to a similar standard. When Mom came of age she high-tailed it North, replaced the Christian Church with the League of Women Voters, and raised her children as heathens.

Born on New Year’s Day in 1930, just 62 days after people starting throwing themselves out of windows on Wall Street, my mother was not only poor but believed herself the source of all poverty, since according to her older sister everything had been so much better before she came along. At first they had an acre out at the edge of town where her mother kept a vegetable garden and a cow and some chickens, but since her father, who worked on and off on the railroad, liked to take his paychecks and spend them up at the Hot Springs doing God knows what, they lost that place. So that was the end of the old kind of poverty, the kind where you don’t have cash but you have green beans and collards and tomatoes and fresh milk and eggs and every once in a while fried chicken on Sundays, and the beginning of the new kind of poverty, the kind where you don’t have cash so you live on cornbread and get pellagra, the lethal vitamin deficiency disease that wiped out tens of thousands in the South during the Depression (ten Black people for every white one, and two women for every man.) Like other women, Grandma gave the best of what food they had to her husband and children, until she finally started showing the first three of the telltale “4 D’s” of pellagra (Dermatitis, Diarrhea, Dementia, and Death.) She was lucky to escape the fourth “D.”

In the only picture I ever saw of my mother’s father — I never think of him as my grandfather, because I never laid eyes on him even though he was alive until I was in my twenties –– he and my mother are standing behind a dusty Ford Model A with a shotgun and a string of dead crows. The crows were for dinner; people ate them during the Depression. (My mother used to sit at the edge of the woods for hours, hoping to see a squirrel, because you never saw a squirrel in those days since people ate them, too.) On the sporadic occasions when her father was at home, everyone had to be silent because he worked the night shift on the railroad and slept during the day. The three females lived in fear of his temper, which could turn ugly. One day my mother’s cat was making noise while he was trying to sleep so he got up out of bed and shot it. And then later, after she got another cat, he shot that one, too.  

She hated him. Implacably. 

Like most kids during the Depression, Mom always worked; when she was twelve, on the milk truck where it was her job to ride in the back with the glass bottles of milk and deliver them to the front stoops of the houses; later collecting scrap metal in an old wagon for the war effort, then behind the counter at the five and dime store. From a real estate standpoint, she was never well positioned to be an academic success; she was at best an average student, never one of the smart kids, or so she always told us. Her friend Mary Lee Rutherford, Dr. Rutherford’s daughter, in the big brick house with the wraparound porch on the corner of Elm and Lee, had been the valedictorian at Vidalia High School; Eleanor James, her college roommate from a well-to-do suburb of Richmond, had graduated summa cum laude. But Mom was lucky to go to college at all, and lucky to earn “B’s” and“C’s,” since she got up at four o’clock every morning to work a four hour shift in the college dining hall and then a second four-hour shift at dinner time. Grandma Janie took work as a home nurse for the elderly to help pay the tuition, changing bedpans and diapers and mashing food with a fork.   

Halfway through college Mom saw her father for the last time. After decades of profligacy, he had gotten religion, which, like everything else, he indulged in to excess. He sampled every church in town, deemed them all insufficiently righteous, then took what little money they had and began to build his own church. One day he bellowed at my mother to turn the radio off because the music was sinful, and Mom shouted back that if heaven was full of people like him she’d prefer go to Hell (possibly unaware that the first person known to have quipped something to this effect was Hatuey, leader of the Taino resistance to the Spanish conquest of Hispaniola in 1512, before being burned at the stake.) Then she walked out of the house and did not speak to him for the rest of his life. 

As far as Mom was concerned, her father and Jesus were in the same boat.

Godless heathens that we were, my brother and I loved the Vidalia Christian Church. Not that we ever went to a service, except on the one single day when Grandma Janie tried to force the issue by inviting the preacher to dinner. But the church, which stood directly across the street from our grandmother’s house, became the site of many and varied heathen games of tag, hide-and-seek, whiffle ball, and later on secret snuck cigarettes in the sunken stairwell that led to the basement Sunday school. My poor grandmother, convinced as she was that her own daughter’s offspring were bound for a fiery Hell, tried to surreptitiously slip us evangelical brochures when our mother was not looking. But we were too far gone to save.

Still, Grandma Janie was, to me, a magical miraculous woman, master of all the arts that fascinated me but never interested my mother. She made peach pies and fresh-baked biscuits and homemade pickles and damson preserves, she crocheted intricate white popcorn bedspreads and braided thick rugs out of scraps from men’s woolen suits and embroidered crisp white pillowcases with twisting vines and six-petaled daisies. Fashion started passing her by in the 1920’s; she never opted for the Jazz Age “bobbed” hair of other people’s grandmas, instead maintaining to her dying day a cascade of silver down to her waist which she wore knotted in a bun all day and brushed to silky smoothness each night. Her crepey skin was soft as silk, blue veins pulsing between the thin bones of her hands. I loved to watch the way her hands moved, quick, deft, sharp, decisive, snapping beans, darning socks, dismembering chickens, whipping egg whites into frothy peaks. People talk about how oppressed women were in those days, and God knows they were, but what is often forgotten is that they also had powers. They knew how to sustain life in sparse conditions, how to grow food, how to slaughter it, how to cook it, preserve it, how to make it last, how to make things, mend things, how to make do with nothing. They lived deep down inside themselves, in strong substantial bodies, never glancing over their shoulders to ask do I look fat in this? When I see some modern high-achieving career woman spinning like a top to hide her hollow core of shame, I sometimes think: my grandma could’ve kicked your ass, you weakling. Get it together.

Janie Linton Vaughan, born in 1899, is recorded in the 1900 census as “Jennie.” Her mother, who had come to Virginia from north Yorkshire when she was 11 years old, loved the name Jennie, and scoffed at her neighbors when they told her that it was a “colored” name and thus off the list of acceptable options. But Lunenburg won out in the end, and by the 1910 Federal Census, Grandma is recorded as “Janie.” 

The Vaughans went back in Virginia for a long time; the first Vaughan, a Welsh farmer’s son, came to Jamestown on the Bona Nova as an indentured servant in 1619, the same year the first African people were kidnapped and brought to the colony to be enslaved. I picture my progenitor, hairy, dirty, hungry, terrified, and armed, and shudder to think what violence was necessary to establish his DNA on this continent. He is said to have married a 16-year-old Patawomeck girl, from the nation the Potomac River is named for. “Grace,” they called her. Please do not picture a romantic tale here. My ninth great-grandmother, whatever her true name, and whatever the circumstances under which she was first impregnated by John Vaughan, bore four sons in rapid succession and died at the age of 22. Sixty years later the governor of Virginia ordered the complete extermination of her people. Only a small number survived.

But her four sons survived, and reproduced prolifically, if not prosperously. In 1870, 250 years after their arrival, and five years after the end of “The War of Northern Aggression,” (as my mother’s schoolteachers liked to call it) the Vaughans are dirt farmers and sharecroppers, scrabbling out a living in the hard red clay, listed on the census as “farm laborer” for the men, and “keeping house” for the women. Their great distinction is that they lack what every adult Black male citizen on the census has: beside the elegant, spidery hand of the census taker, a dark, thick, angry check mark in the box labeled “Whether deaf and dumb, blind, insane, or idiotic.” A designation that, of course, deprived its bearer of the right to vote.

As children we loved Lunenburg County. We loved that there was no municipal garbage collection, so we got to take the trash out back every day and burn it. We loved that there was a tire swing in the oak tree by the burning garbage, which we checked for black widow spiders and then swung in, veering and circling crazily while we waited for the acrid flames to die down. We loved that instead of a concrete curb and gutter by the road there was a grassy drainage ditch where water trickled and tiny green frogs hopped in the weeds. And we especially loved that just around the corner on Lee Avenue past the church was our great-uncle Everett’s gas station and grocery store, where we could spend our allowance on Nehi grape soda in scratched-up returnable bottles and hard bitter sticks of bubble gum with monster cartoon trading cards. We would dash over there the moment we arrived at Grandma’s house, handing over our sweaty quarters and nickels to old Uncle Everett behind the counter in his crisp white shirt and little round wire-rimmed glasses like Woodrow Wilson’s.

Sometimes Everett’s son, my mother’s cousin Billy Lee Vaughan, would be there instead, twirling a toothpick between his teeth like the creepy Southerner from a movie, his thinning black hair slicked back with Brylcreem, smiling the kind of oozy gap-toothed smile that seemed to slide onto his face from somewhere over in the neighborhood of his left ear. He would laugh his heh-y laugh as he glanced sideways at us and baited our mother with veiled bigoted remarks that slid uneasily over our heads. Only foggily were we aware that she was known in town as a turncoat, the girl who went Yankee, but we never quite understood what it was all about until the summer we arrived in Vidalia and our mother told us we were not to go to Uncle Everett’s store.  

We had already launched into full-whine protest when we noticed she had that look on her face. The bone structure of her jaw suddenly looked even more geometric than usual, her beautiful laughing mouth set in a hard line.   

Billy Lee has joined the Klan, she said. We will not patronize their business.

Then, of course, she had to explain to us what that meant.

That was the summer she took us to the other lake. Every summer we went for a picnic at Goodwin Lake in neighboring Prince Edward County (whose claim to fame was that it shuttered its entire public school system for five years rather than integrate it after Brown v. Board of Education.) Goodwin Lake was pretty close to our idea of heaven, with tall pine trees and picnic tables with fire pits, a sandy beach with a platform you could dive off and a swimming area demarcated by a candy-cane striped rope with red-and-white floaters. There were paddle boats you could rent and shady little coves where you could fish for lake perch and sunfish using Chee-tos and chunks of hot dog for bait. It never for one minute occurred to us to wonder why everybody there was white, so when Mom got that look on her face as we packed up the car at the end of the day and then drove around to the other lake, it was like suddenly entering a strange inverted world. There was another beach we had never known existed, with the same pine trees and picnic tables. The water was a little greener with algae and the beach a little less well maintained. But the families were the same, parents roasting hot dogs and children playing catch and teenagers showing off doing cannonballs into the water while portable radios blared from the tabletops.  

Except everybody was Black.

That summer, unbeknownst to us — it was not reported in the Vidalia Voice — Julius P. Everton, head of the local chapter of the NAACP, and a team of college student volunteers were going door to door on a voter registration drive. They had a hard job of it; as Everton later said, he would go to a sharecropper’s home to talk and see people running out the back to avoid him. They feared for their lives; they didn’t want trouble. The Klan had come up from North Carolina that summer, was holding rallies, enrolling new members. A burning cross was lit in a front yard. Shots were fired into the NAACP office on Main Street. Everton and his team protested to the Vidalia Chamber of Commerce, but nothing was done.

Years later I found the pictures: the silent procession of people on the road, walking. Dressed neatly in light flowered dresses or white shirts and slacks, a few carrying signs, almost two hundred people walking in that sweltering August heat from the Baptist church to the County courthouse, risking their lives to register to vote.

But we never heard a thing about it.

I never heard my grandmother say a single thing about race in my entire life. It was as though it didn't exist. Other than Billy Lee, I never heard any of my Virginia relatives, or their friends or neighbors, say anything about race either. What I heard was their silence. Their politeness. Their gentle voices and mild conversation over iced tea and peach pie on shady front porches. What I heard was the sound of whiteness, silent as falling snow. 

But that summer, when the Vidalia Chamber of Commerce met the burning cross with silence, every Black resident in that town boycotted every single white-owned business: quietly, silently, walking and riding bicycles and forming carpools to drive to other towns to shop. 

So it turns out my uncle Everett and Billy Lee lost more that summer than the price of our hard bitter gum.

When Mom was five years old Grandma Janie drove her to visit a friend, dropping her off at the end of the long dirt drive to the house. The day was cold; a bitter wind was blowing out of the northwest. A long line of trees fringed the road to the north, bent against the gale. Grandma told her that it would be okay for her to walk the quarter mile down the road to her friend’s house, because the trees would break the wind.

 My mother stared at her, perplexed. The trees waved their long arms wildly in the cold air.

But, my mother protested.

I thought the trees made the wind.