Sylvia’s new house (new though she’d lived there for over twenty-five years) was a small brick split-level (what a wonderful name for a house) with a carport on the side. Not a mansion by any stretch, but so perfect for Sylvia that she could not recall many details about the trailer to mind, a trick of memory she appreciated. Except for the occasional feel along the wall for a light switch, except for that nagging moment of muscle memory, that trailer in the woods where she and Don had lived had almost never existed.
The builder set the houses on half-acre lots on Development Drive, slung a handful of grass seed, spit with a go with God, and hoped that it would take root on the red clay hills. The seed promptly got carried by wind or washed down the sides of the yards into ditches. Grassy lawn or not both she and her husband, Don, had thought the place a miracle. Development Drive was a longish stretch of paved street with small houses owned by black families. This was once one of the nicer places for blacks to live in town. Somebody had thought ahead, thought big. A few black people would slowly move up in the world and would want homes without junk cars. A development for them would do the trick and keep them all on their own streets. The developers had not imagined a possible future with blacks and whites in the same neighborhoods. Enterprising builders created separate communities—no block busting necessary. But whatever was in the builder’s hearts, the new homes were remarkable steps up from ramshackle old clapboard houses, sagging porches, or old rusted trailers. Black people with a few dollars could get a half-acre plot with 1,000 square feet or in the deluxe model 1,250 feet, fridge, stove, ready to make your life in.
What dreams they all had of progress! Each year the house would get a little better, the white linoleum the thoughtless builders put in the kitchens and baths exchanged for hardwood floors and porcelain tile. In the coming years decks got added to the rear of the houses, small decks sure, but big enough for a grill and a four-top table. They moved from all the poorest crannies of the county where people sat on porches and fanned themselves in the heat of the day and built fires to keep away mosquitoes and no-see-ums that anesthetized when they bit so the itch, the pain came later. They moved from dirt roads and clusters of men on front lawns playing cards, fighting again, playing music that’s my song right there much too loud. They moved to escape it all. Sylvia told her children about her own poor childhood days. She could see on their faces that her lack had sounded to them like fairy tales, like weaving straw into gold. Her feeling of triumph was like nothing else she had ever known, though her children could not share it. What was more surprising was that her children didn’t see her accomplishments as particularly triumphant. Their life was their ordinary life, their working class, regular way of being. That very feeling, freedom from the drag of poverty, was what she wanted for them. No struggle, no strangling scarcity, no wishing to be somewhere, anywhere else. Was it too much to ask that they feel a little pride for what she’d been able to wrest from this stingy world?
Of course there were drawbacks. Douglas, the middle-aged man across the street, revved his motorcycle for his grinning friends. The neighbor Forrest kept a steady stream of down-and-out relatives at his place. Sylvia knew it wasn’t her business, but she was unnerved to not know who she might see puffing on a cigarette staring into the horizon from the next yard. But those were small pains. How soothing to have an answer to the young white women at the social services office when they talked about their own places and the hours they spent decorating, repairing, and improving. Before she’d owned the house that kind of talk hurt her, signaled her as an outsider. That little place with the too hot second floor gave Sylvia a way to relate to the women and share a lament about the high cost of this or that, a little taste of the pain at this particular lack, which she felt had scarred over more than less. One less fear in a life ruled by fear.
Sylvia thought many times that she’d spent her whole life tensed and waiting for the worst thing to happen. The list of fears was long: spiders, snakes, and death were all reasonable and easily understood, but like her long-dead mother Mabel—Mabe to friends and family—she was afraid of everything else too. How could that have happened that she ended up like her mother who cringed in fear from the threat of rapists, popping balloons, the shrill horror movie sound of wind chimes. Everything. Mabe spent the precious years of her youth scared and mealymouthed, always too accommodating, especially when it came to men. Maybe her fears came naturally or maybe they were forged from her interactions with Sylvia’s father. Fear as a symptom or causation? Whatever. But men and the fear of them took up most of the thinking in her mother’s life. She’d been scared into being a good girl, scared into staying with a man she wanted but who didn’t want her. Scared to be by herself even when that’s what her life had amounted to anyway. She thought she wasn’t going to get anybody and she didn’t. No damn body. Nobody who was anybody anyway. Who had ever counted on Sylvia’s father and had not ended up alone?
Nobody can say her mama hadn’t tried everything. They say there are only three reasons to go to South Carolina: to get fireworks, to get married, and to get dentures—or if you are having a good day, all three. They should have added to the list going to see people like Mrs. Janey. Once when Sylvia was just a girl she and her mother had taken a trip to get the potion that would make Sylvia’s father, Carl, love her mother once and for all. With ten dollars and the cost of gas, you could banish the darkness in your head, cast out demons, make him love like you needed. The old woman’s house smelled of cooked food and the coconut grease she put on her scalp, like most old women’s houses Sylvia went to. She had thought that she would be afraid of Mrs. Janey, but the woman was no more frightening than any other old woman she’d ever seen. The three of them sat at the small table in the small kitchen while Mabe told her story. Her mother wrung her hands, was teary eyed and softer than Sylvia remembered her ever being as she talked and avoided looking directly at Mrs. Janey’s face. Sylvia had kept completely still and couldn’t shake the feeling that she was someplace she did not belong, like she was watching someone on the toilet. Mrs. Janey shrugged her shoulders at Mabe’s terrible confessions of loneliness and lack. Mrs. Janey occasionally patted her mother’s hand like she was an old dog. No doubt she’d heard every pathetic tale, every permutation on the same sad themes many times. She gave Sylvia’s mother a cleaned jelly jar.