Celestial
Memory is a queer creature, an eccentric curator. I still look back on that night, although not as often as I once did. How long can you live with your face twisted over your shoulder? No matter what people may say, this was not a failure to remember. I’m not sure it is a failure at all.
When I say that I visit the Piney Woods Inn in my waking dreams, I’m not being defensive. It’s merely the truth. Like Aretha said, A woman’s only human. . . . She’s flesh and blood, just like her man. No more, no less.
My regret is how hard we argued that night, over his parents, of all things. We had fought harder even before we married, when we were playing at love, but those were tussles about our relationship. At the Piney Woods, we tangled about history, and there is no fair fight to be waged about the past. Knowing something I didn’t, Roy called out “November 17,” stopping time. When he left with the ice bucket, I was glad for him to go.
I called Andre, and after three rings he picked up and talked me down, sane and civil as always. “Ease up on Roy,” he said. “If you lose it every time he tries to come clean, you’re encouraging him to lie.”
“But,” I said, not ready to let go. “He didn’t even—”
“You know I’m right,” he said without being smug. “But what you don’t know is that I’m entertaining a young lady this evening.”
“Pardon moi,” I said, happy for him.
“Gigolos get lonely, too,” he said.
I was still grinning when I hung up the phone.
And I was still smiling when Roy appeared at the door with the ice bucket extended in his arms like a bouquet of roses, and by then my anger had cooled like a forgotten cup of coffee.
“Georgia, I’m sorry,” he said, taking the drink from my hand. “This has been burning a hole in my pocket. Think how I feel. You have this perfect family. Your father is a millionaire.”
“He didn’t always have money,” I said, something that I seemed to say at least once a week. Before my father sold his orange juice solution to Minute Maid, we were like any other family in Cascade Heights, what the rest of America thinks of as middle-middle class and what black America calls upper-middle class. No maid. No private school. No trust fund. Just two parents, each with two degrees and, between them, two decent jobs.
“Well, as long as I’ve known you, you have been a rich man’s daughter.”
“A million dollars doesn’t make you rich-rich,” I said. “Real rich people don’t have to earn their money.”
“Rich-rich, nouveau rich, nigger rich—any kind of rich looks rich from where I’m sitting. There is no way I was going to roll up on your father in his mansion and tell him that I’ve never met my daddy.”
He took a step toward me and I moved toward him.
“It’s not a mansion,” I said, making my voice soft. “And I told you, my daddy is literally the son of a sharecropper. An Alabama sharecropper at that.”
These conversations always caught me off guard, although after a year I should have been accustomed to this fraught song and dance. My mother cautioned me before I got married that Roy and I were from two separate realities. She said that I would constantly have to reassure him that we were, in fact, “equally yoked.” Amused by her language, I shared this with Roy, along with a joke about pulling a plow, but he didn’t even crack a smile.
“Celestial, your daddy ain’t sharing no crops now. And what about your mom? I wasn’t going to have her seeing Olive as a teenage mother, left by the side of the road. No way was I going to set my mama up like that.”
I closed the space between us, resting my hands on his head, feeling the curve of his scalp. “Look,” I said with my lips near his ears. “We’re not blackface Leave It to Beaver. You know my mother is Daddy’s second wife.”
“Is that supposed to be some kind of shocker?”
“That’s because you don’t know the whole story.” I took a breath and pushed the words out fast before I could think too much more about them. “My parents got together before Daddy was divorced.”
“You saying they were separated . . . or?”
“I’m saying that my mother was his mistress. For a long time. I think like three years or so. My mother was a June bride at the courthouse because her pastor wouldn’t perform the ceremony.” I have seen the photos. Gloria wears an off-white suit and a veiled pillbox hat. My father looks young and excited. There is no indication of anything but effortless devotion in their smiles. There is no evidence of me, but I’m in the frame, too, hiding behind her yellow chrysanthemum bouquet.
“Damn,” he said with a low whistle. “I didn’t think Mr. D had it in him. I didn’t think Gloria—”
“Don’t talk about my mama,” I said. “You don’t talk about mine, and I won’t talk about yours.”
“I’m not holding anything against Gloria, like I know you wouldn’t hold anything against Olive, right?”
“There’s something to hold against my daddy. Gloria says that he didn’t tell her he was married until they had been dating a whole month.”
She explained this to me when I was eighteen, when I was leaving Howard University after a messy love affair. Helping me seal cardboard cartons, my mother had said, “Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasionally this is in service of the good. Did you know that your father had certain obligations when we met?” I think of this as the first time my mother had ever spoken to me as one woman to another. Wordlessly, we swore each other to secrecy, and until now, I had never betrayed her confidence.
“A month, that’s not a lot of time. She could have walked away,” Roy said. “That is, if she wanted to.”
“She didn’t want to,” I said. “According to Gloria, by then she was irreversibly in love.” As I told this to Roy, I imitated my mother in the tone she used in public, elocution-class crisp, not the shaky register in which she had shared this detail.
“What?” Roy said. “Irreversibly? The warranty was up after thirty days and she couldn’t send him back?”
“Gloria said that looking back on it, she’s glad he didn’t tell her because she never would have gone out with a married man and Daddy turned out to be the One.”
“I can get that, in a way.” Roy raised my hand to his lips. “Sometimes when you like where you end up, you don’t care how you got there.”
“No,” I said. “The journey matters. Let my mama tell it. My daddy lied to her for her own good. I never want to feel grateful about being deceived.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “But think about it 2.0. If your daddy didn’t hide his situation, you wouldn’t be here. And if you weren’t here, where would I be?”
“I still don’t like it. I want us to be on the up-and-up. I don’t want our kid to inherit all of our secrets.”
Roy pumped his fist in the air. “Did you hear yourself?”
“What?”
“You said ‘our kid.’ ”
“Roy, stop being silly. Listen to what I’m trying to say.”
“Don’t try and take it back. You said ‘our kid.’ ”
“Roy,” I said. “I’m for real. No more secrets, okay? If you got anything else, spill it.”
“I got nothing.”
And with that, we reconciled, as we had so many times before. There is a song about that, too: Break up to make up, that’s all we do. Did I imagine that this was our pattern for all time? That we would grow old together, accusing and forgiving? Back then, I didn’t know what forever looked like. Maybe I don’t even know now. But that night in the Piney Woods, I believed that our marriage was a fine-spun tapestry, fragile but fixable. We tore it often and mended it, always with a silken thread, lovely but sure to give way.
We climbed into the small bed, a little buzzed from our jerry-rigged cocktails. Agreeing that the bedspread was suspect, we kicked it to the floor and lay facing each other. Lying there, tracing his brow bone with my fingers, I thought of my parents and even Roy’s. Their marriages were cut from less refined but more durable cloth, something like cotton-sack burlap, bound with gray twine. How superior Roy and I felt that night in this rented room of our own, enjoying the braid of our affection. I am ashamed at the memory and the hot blood heats my face, even if I’m only dreaming.
Then, I didn’t know that our bodies can know things before they happen, so when my eyes suddenly filled with tears, I thought this was the unpredictable effect of emotion. It washed over me sometimes when I was browsing fabric stores or preparing a meal—I would think about Roy, his bowlegged walk or the time he wrestled a robber to the ground, costing him a precious front tooth. When memory tapped me, I let go a few tears, no matter where I was, blaming it on allergies or an eyelash gone rogue. So when my emotion filled my eyes and closed my throat on that night in Eloe, I thought it was passion rather than premonition.
When we planned the trip, I’d thought we’d be staying at his mother’s, so I didn’t pack lingerie. Instead, I wore a white slip, which would have to do for our game of undressing. Roy smiled and said he loved me. His voice caught, like whatever had taken hold of me had grabbed him, too. As silly as we were, young as we were, we thought it was merely desire. This thing we enjoyed in abundance.
So there we were, not sleeping yet spent, occupying some in-between restful affection state, full of possibility. I sat up in bed next to him, inhaling the odors of the day—river mud, the musk of hotel soap, and then the scent of him, the marker of his personal chemistry, and then my own. It’s a fragrance that burrowed into the fibers of our sheets. I eased close to him and kissed his shut lids. I was thinking that I was lucky. I didn’t mean that I was lucky in the way that single women made me feel when they reminded me how fortunate I was to find a marrying man these days, and not lucky in the way of magazine features lamenting how few “good” black men there were remaining, providing a bullet-point litany of the ineligible—dead, gay, in jail, married to white women. Yes, I was fortunate by all those measures, but in my marriage to Roy, I felt blessed in the old-fashioned sense, in the way that anyone would be in finding someone whose smell you enjoyed.
Did we love so forcefully that night because we knew or because we didn’t? Was there an alarm from the future, a furious bell without its clapper? Did this hopeless bell manage to generate a breeze, causing me to reach to the floor to find my slip and use it to cover myself? Did some subtle warning cause Roy to turn and pin me to his side with his heavy arm? In his sleep, he mumbled something but did not wake.
Did I want a child? Did I lie in bed that night imagining an eager clump of cells dividing and then dividing again until I was somebody’s mother and Roy was somebody’s daddy, and Big Roy, Olive, and my parents were somebody’s grandparents? I did wonder what was going on inside my body, but I won’t say what I hoped for. Is motherhood really optional when you’re a perfectly normal woman married to a perfectly normal man? When I was in college, I took on a volunteer position at a literacy organization and tutored teen mothers. It was hard work and tended to be disheartening, as the young women seldom earned their diplomas. My supervisor said to me over espresso and croissants, “Have a baby and save the race!” He was smiling, but he wasn’t kidding. “If girls like this are having all the kids, and girls like you stay childless and fancy-free, what’s going to happen to us as a people?” Without thinking, I promised to do my part.
This is not to say that I didn’t want to be a mother. It’s not to say that I did. This is only to say that I was certain that the check would come due.
So while Roy slept with confidence, I closed my eyes with trepidation. I was still awake when the door burst open. I know they kicked it in, but the written report says that a front-desk clerk handed over the key and the door was opened in a civilized manner. But who knows what is true? I remember my husband asleep in our room while a woman six years older than his mother says she slept lightly in room 206, worried because the door didn’t seem quite secure. She told herself she was being paranoid but couldn’t convince her eyes to stay closed. Before midnight, a man twisted the knob, knowing that he could. It was dark, but she believed she recognized Roy, the man she met at the ice machine. The man who told her he had been fighting with his wife. She said that this was not her first time finding herself at the mercy of a man, but it would be the last. Roy, she said, may be smart, and he may have learned by watching TV how to cover his tracks, but he couldn’t erase her memory.
But she couldn’t erase mine either. Roy was with me all night. She doesn’t know who hurt her, but I know who I married.
I married Roy Othaniel Hamilton, whom I met for the first time when I was in college. Our connection wasn’t immediate. He considered himself a playboy in those days, and even at age nineteen, I was not one to play with. I’d come to Spelman as a transfer student after the one-year disaster at Howard University in DC. So much for me leaving home. My mother, an alumna herself, insisted that this was where I would cultivate new, bone-deep friendships, but I stuck close with Andre, who was literally the boy next door. We had been close since we were three months old, bathing together in the kitchen sink.
Andre was the one who introduced me to Roy, although it wasn’t quite on purpose. They had been next-door neighbors in Thurman Hall, on the far side of campus. I often stayed nights in Andre’s room, strictly platonic, although no one believed us. He slept atop the covers, while I huddled under the blankets. None of it makes sense now, but this is how Dre and I always were.
Before Roy and I were properly introduced, a sex-breathy voice on the other side of the wall pronounced his whole name. Roy. Othaniel. Hamilton.
Andre said, “You think he asked her to say that?”
I snorted. “Othaniel?”
“Doesn’t strike me as a spontaneous utterance.”
We giggled as the twin bed thumped against the wall. “I think she’s faking it.”
“If she is,” Andre said, “then they all are.”
I didn’t meet Roy in person for another month.
Again, I was in Andre’s room. Roy came by at 10 a.m., trying to hustle up some change to do his laundry. He came in without the courtesy of a knock.
“Oh, excuse me, ma’am,” Roy said in a way that sounded like a surprised question.
“My sister,” Andre said.
“Play sister?” Roy wanted to know, sizing up the dynamic.
“If you want to know who I am, ask me.” I must have looked a sight, wearing Andre’s maroon-and-white T-shirt and my hair tucked beneath a satin bonnet, but I had to speak up for myself.
“Okay, who are you?”
“Celestial Davenport.”
“I’m Roy Hamilton.”
“Roy Othaniel Hamilton, from what I hear through the wall.”
After that, he and I stared at each other, waiting for a cue to show us what type of story this was going to be. Finally, he looked away and asked Andre for a case quarter. I flipped over on my stomach, bent my knees, and crossed my legs at the ankle.
“You something else,” Roy said.
When Roy was gone, Andre said, “You know that Gomer Pyle thing is an act.”
“Clearly,” I said. Something about him was dangerous, and after my experience at Howard, I wanted no part of danger.
I suppose it wasn’t our time because I didn’t speak with or even think about Roy Othaniel Hamilton again for another four years, when college felt like a photo album memory from another era. When we reconnected, it wasn’t that he was so different. It’s just that what felt like peril then now morphed into something that I labeled “realness,” something for which I developed a bottomless appetite.
But what is real? Was it our uneventful first impression? Or the day in New York, of all places, where we found each other once again? Or did things “get real” when we married, or was it the day that the prosecutor in a little nowhere town declared Roy to be a flight risk? The state declared that though he may have roots in Louisiana, his home was in Atlanta, so he was held without bond or bail. At this pronouncement, Roy spat out a caustic laugh. “So now roots are irrelevant?”
Our lawyer, friend of my family but paid handsomely just the same, promised me that I wasn’t going to lose my man. Uncle Banks made motions, filed papers, and objected. But still, Roy slept behind bars one hundred nights before he was brought to trial. For one month, I remained in Louisiana, living with my in-laws, sleeping in the room that could have saved us this trouble. I waited and I sewed. I called Andre. I called my parents. When I sent the mayor his doll, I couldn’t bring myself to seal the flaps on the sturdy cardboard box. Big Roy did it for me and the memory of ripping tape troubled my sleep that night and many nights to come.
“If this doesn’t go the way we want it to,” Roy said the day before his trial, “I don’t want you to wait for me. Keep making your dolls and doing what you need to do.”
“This is going to work out,” I promised. “You didn’t do it.”
“I’m looking at so much time. I can’t ask you to throw your life away for me.” His words and his eyes were speaking two different languages, like someone saying no while nodding his head yes.
“No one is going to throw anything away,” I said.
I had faith in those days. I believed in things.
Andre showed up for us. He had been a witness at our wedding and a character witness at trial. Dre let me cut his hair, handing me the scissors to saw through the dreads he had been growing for the last four years. At our wedding, they had been rebellious little nubs, but when I cut them off they were finally responding to gravity, pointing toward his collar. When I was done, he walked his fingers through the choppy curls that remained.
The next day we took our seats in the courtroom, costumed to seem as innocent as possible. My parents were there, and Roy’s, too. Olive was dressed for church, and Big Roy sat beside her looking poor-but-honest. Like Andre, my own father groomed himself, and he, for once, appeared to be “equally yoked” to my elegant mother. Watching Roy, I could see he was an obvious match for us. It wasn’t just the cut of his coat or the break of his hem against the fine leather of his shoes; it was his face, shaven clean, and his eyes, innocent and afraid, unaccustomed to being at the mercy of the state.
The time in the county jail shrank him; the boyish chub of his cheek was gone, revealing a squared-off jaw that I didn’t know he had. Strangely enough, the leanness made him look more powerful than wasted. The only thing that gave him away as a man on trial, rather than a man on his way to work, was his poor fingers. He’d chewed his nails down to the soft meat and started in on his cuticles. Sweet Roy. The only thing that my good man ever hurt was his own hands.
What I know is this: they didn’t believe me. Twelve people and not one of them took me at my word. There in front of the room, I explained Roy couldn’t have raped the woman in room 206 because we had been together. I told them about the Magic Fingers that wouldn’t work, about the movie that played on the snowy television. The prosecutor asked me what we had been fighting about. Rattled, I looked to Roy and to both our mothers. Banks objected, so I didn’t have to answer, but the pause made it appear that I was concealing something rotten at the pit of our very young marriage. Even before I stepped down from the witness stand, I knew that I had failed him. Maybe I wasn’t appealing enough. Not dramatic enough. Too not-from-around-here. Who knows? Uncle Banks, coaching me, said, “Now is not the time to be articulate. Now is the time to give it up. No filter, all heart. No matter what you’re asked, what you want the jury to see is why you married him.”
I tried, but I didn’t know how to be anything other than “well spoken” in front of strangers. I wish I could have brought a selection of my art, the Man Moving series, all images of Roy—the marble, the dolls, and a few watercolors. I would say, “This is who he is to me. Isn’t he beautiful? Isn’t he gentle?” But all I had were words, which are as light and flimsy as air. As I took my seat beside Andre, not even the black lady juror would look at me.
It turns out that I watch too much television. I was expecting a scientist to come and testify about DNA. I was looking for a pair of good-looking detectives to burst into the courtroom at the last minute, whispering something urgent to the prosecutor. Everyone would see that this was a big mistake, a major misunderstanding. We would all be shaken but appeased. I fully believed that I would leave the courtroom with my husband beside me. Secure in our home, we would tell people how no black man is really safe in America.
Twelve years is what they gave him. We would be forty-three years old when he was released. I couldn’t even imagine myself at such an age. Roy understood that twelve years was an eternity because he sobbed right there at the defendants’ table. His knees gave way, and he fell into his chair. The judge paused and demanded that Roy bear this news on his feet. He stood again and cried, not like a baby, but in the way that only a grown man can cry, from the bottom of his feet up through his torso and finally through his mouth. When a man wails like that you know it’s all the tears that he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointment to teenage heartbreak, all the way to whatever injured his spirit just last year.
As Roy howled, my fingers kept worrying a rough patch of skin beneath my chin, a souvenir of scar tissue. When they did what I remember as kicking in the door, what everyone else remembers as opening it with a plastic key, after the door was opened, however it was opened, we were both pulled from the bed. They dragged Roy into the parking lot, and I followed, lunging for him, wearing nothing but the white slip. Somebody pushed me to the ground and my chin hit the pavement. My slip rode up showing my everything to everyone as my tooth sank into the soft of my bottom lip. Roy was on the asphalt beside me, barely beyond my grasp, speaking words that didn’t reach my ears. I don’t know how long we lay there, parallel like burial plots. Husband. Wife. What God has brought together, let no man tear asunder.