Sycamore Row

Charley began by dropping a few names, none of which meant much. He said he was from Chicago, where he worked as an entrepreneur, whatever that meant. He had a wide, easy grin, a glib manner, and his eyes twinkled when he laughed. The women warmed up considerably. In the past four months, many people had come to see Lettie. Many of them, like Charley, claimed blood kinship. Given the bareness of her family tree, it was easy to be cynical and to dismiss a lot of potential relatives. The truth was that Lettie had been unofficially adopted by Clyde and Cypress Tayber, after she had been abandoned more than once. She had no idea who her grandparents were. Portia had spent hours sifting through the sparse history of their ancestry, with little to show for her efforts. Charley rattled them when he said, “My maternal grandmother was a Rinds, and I think you are too, Lettie.”



He produced some paperwork, and they moved to a dining room table where they huddled over him. He unfolded a flowchart that, from a distance, more closely resembled a pile of scrub brush than a properly developed tree. Crooked lines ran in all directions, with notes wedged into the margins. Whatever it was, someone had spent hours trying to decipher it.



“My mother helped me with this,” Charley was saying. “Her mother was a Rinds.”



“Where did Pardue come from?” Portia asked.



“My dad’s side. They’re from Kansas City, settled in Chicago a long time ago. That’s where my parents met.” He was pointing at his chart with an ink pen. “It goes back to a man named Jeremiah Rinds, a slave who was born around 1841 near Holly Springs. He had five or six kids, one of whom was Solomon Rinds, and Solomon had at least six kids, one of whom was Marybelle Rinds, my grandmother. She gave birth to my mother, Effie Rinds, in 1920, who was born in this county. In 1930, Marybelle Rinds and her husband and some more Rinds took off for Chicago and never looked back.”



Portia said, “That’s the same year the property of Sylvester Rinds was transferred to the Hubbard family.” The others heard this but it meant little. Portia was not even sure of the connection; there were too many missing details.



“Don’t know about that,” Charley said. “But my mother remembers a cousin who she thinks was the only child of Sylvester Rinds. As best we can tell, this cousin was born around 1925. They lost touch after 1930 when the family scattered. But through the years there was the usual family gossip. This girl supposedly had a baby when she was real young, the daddy caught a train, and the family never knew what happened to the baby. My mother remembers her cousin’s name as Lois.”



“I’ve heard that my mother’s name was Lois,” Lettie said cautiously.



“Well, let’s look at your birth certificate,” Charley said, as if he had finally arrived at a critical moment.



“Never had one,” Lettie said. “I know I was born in Monroe County in 1941, but there’s no official certificate.”



“No listing of either parent,” Portia added. “We found this recently, down in Monroe County. The mother is listed as L. Rinds, age sixteen. The father is H. Johnson, but that’s the only mention of him.”



Charley was instantly deflated. He had worked so hard and traveled so far to prove his lineage with his newfound cousin, only to hit a dead end. How can you be alive with no birth certificate?



Portia continued, “My mother was sort of adopted by Cypress and her husband, and she was thirty years old before she knew the truth. By then so many of her relatives were dead and scattered it really didn’t matter anyway.”



Lettie said, “I was married with three kids when I found out. I couldn’t exactly take off and go chase down a buncha dead kinfolk. Besides, I really didn’t care, still don’t. I was a Tayber. Clyde and Cypress were my parents. I had six brothers and sisters.” She was sounding a bit defensive and this irritated her. She owed no explanation to this stranger, cousin or not.



Portia said, “So, under your theory, it looks like my mother might be a Rinds from Ford County, but there’s no way to prove it.”



“Oh, I think she’s definitely a Rinds,” Charley said, hanging on in desperation. He thumped his paperwork as if it held the unquestioned truth. “We’re probably seventh or eighth cousins.”



“Same as ever’ other black person in north Mississippi,” Lettie said, almost under her breath. The women backed away from the table. Shirley, a sister and one of Cypress’s daughters, arrived with the coffeepot and topped off their cups.



Charley seemed undaunted and kept up his barrage of chatter as the conversation drifted away from bloodlines and shaky family histories. He was there looking for money, and he had done his homework. His sleuthing had brought Lettie as close to her true ancestors as any efforts so far, but there was simply not enough hard evidence to tie up the loose ends. There were still too many gaps, too many questions that could never be answered.



Portia eased into the background and just listened. She was tiring of his diamonds and slickness, but she was enthralled by his research. She and Lucien, and now Lettie too, were laboring under the unfounded theory that Lettie was related to the Rindses who once owned the land the Hubbards took title to in 1930. If proven, this might help explain why Seth did what he did. And, it might not. It might also raise a hundred other questions, some of which could prove detrimental. Was any of it admissible in court? Probably not, in Lucien’s opinion, but it was worth their determined pursuit.



“Where’s the best place for lunch?” Charley asked boldly. “I’m taking you ladies out for lunch. My treat.”



Such a Chicago idea! Black folks in Clanton rarely ate out, and to do so on a Saturday for lunch with such a charming young man, and one picking up the tab, was irresistible. They quickly decided on Claude’s, the black-owned café on the square. Jake ate there every Friday and had even taken Portia. On Saturdays, Claude grilled pork chops and the place was packed.



The last time Lettie rode in a late-model Cadillac was the morning she drove Seth to his office, the day before he killed himself. He’d made her drive and she’d been a wreck. She remembered it well as she sat up front with Charley. Her three daughters sank into the lush leather of the rear seat and admired the well-appointed interior as they headed for the square. Charley talked nonstop, drove slowly so the locals could admire his car, and within minutes brought up the idea of a wildly profitable funeral home he wanted to buy on the South Side of Chicago. Portia glanced at Phedra, who glanced at Clarice. Charley caught them in the rearview mirror, but never stopped talking.



According to his mother, who was now sixty-eight and in good health with a fine memory, her branch of the Rinds family lived near the rest of them, and at one time made up a sizable community. With time, though, they joined the great migration and headed north in search of jobs and a better life. Once they left Mississippi, they had no desire to return. Those in Chicago sent money back to retrieve the ones left behind, and over time all the Rindses had either fled or died.



The funeral home could be a gold mine.



The little restaurant was almost full at noon. In a spotless white apron, Claude worked the front while his sister handled the kitchen. Menus were not needed. Daily specials were sometimes scrawled on a chalkboard, but for the most part you ate whatever the sister was cooking. Claude served the food, directed the traffic, worked the cash register, created more gossip than he filtered, and in general ran the place with a heavy hand. By the time Charley and the ladies settled into their seats and ordered iced tea, Claude had heard that they were all related. He rolled his eyes at this; wasn’t everyone related to Lettie these days?



Fifteen minutes later, Jake and Lucien ambled in as if they had just been passing by. They were not. Portia had called Lucien thirty minutes earlier with the heads-up. There was a decent chance Charley could be a link to the past, to the mystery of the Rinds family, and she thought Lucien might want to meet him. Introductions were made, then Claude sat the two crackers off to themselves near the kitchen.



Over grilled pork chops and mashed potatoes, Charley continued to tout the dazzling benefits of the mortuary business in “a city of five million,” though the women were losing interest. He’d been married but was now divorced; two kids, living with their mother; he’d gone to college. Slowly, the women extracted the details as they thoroughly enjoyed lunch. By the time the coconut cream pie arrived, the women were completely ignoring him and trashing a deacon who’d fled with another man’s wife.



Late in the afternoon, Portia arrived at Lucien’s home, for the first time. The weather had abruptly turned raw and windy and the porch was out of the question. She was intrigued to meet Sallie, a woman seldom seen around town but well known nonetheless. Her living arrangement was a source of endless condemnation on both sides of the tracks, but it didn’t seem to bother either Sallie or Lucien. As Portia had learned quickly, nothing really bothered Lucien, at least nothing related to the thoughts and opinions of other people. He ranted about injustice or history or the problems of the world, but was happily oblivious to the observations of others.



Sallie was about ten years older than Portia. She had not been raised in Clanton and no one was quite certain where her people were from. Portia found her to be polite, gracious, and seemingly comfortable with another black female in the house. Lucien had a fire going in his study, and Sallie served them hot cocoa there. Lucien spiked his with cognac, but Portia declined. The thought of adding alcohol to such a comfort beverage seemed almost bizarre, but then Portia had long since realized that Lucien had never seen a drink that could not be improved with a shot or two of booze.



With Sallie in the room, and commenting occasionally, they spent an hour updating the family tree. Portia had taken notes of things Charley had said: important things like names and dates, and throwaways like deaths and disappearances of people who were not related to them. There were several strains of Rindses in the Chicago area, and another bunch in Gary. Charley had mentioned a distant cousin named Boaz who lived near Birmingham, but he had no contact information. He also had mentioned a cousin who’d moved to Texas. And so on.



Sitting by the fire in a fine old home, one with a history, and sipping hot cocoa made by someone else, and talking to such a noted rogue as Lucien Wilbanks, Portia at times couldn’t believe herself. She was an equal. She had to constantly remind herself of this, but it was true because Lucien treated her as one. There was an excellent chance they were wasting their time chasing the past, but what a fascinating search. Lucien was obsessed with the puzzle. He was convinced Seth Hubbard did what he did for a reason.



And the reason wasn’t sex or companionship. Portia had gently confronted her mother and, with all the trust and respect and love she could humanly muster, had asked her the big question. No, Lettie had said. Never. It was never considered, not on her part anyway. It was never discussed, never a possibility. Never.



Randall Clapp slid the envelope into a drop box outside the main post office in downtown Oxford. It was plain, white, legal-sized, no return info, and it was addressed to Fritz Pickering in Shreveport, Louisiana. Inside were two sheets of paper—a full copy of the will handwritten by Irene Pickering and signed by her on March 11, 1980. The other copy was locked away in Wade Lanier’s law office. The original was in the file stolen from the Freeman Law Firm, two blocks down the street.