Kingsbury, where Mary Kerr was born, was a North Carolina city named for royalty and built on gold. There was gold ore to the east, in the hills and streams. All during the early years, people dug for gold and found it, until 1849 brought news of more elsewhere. These people were Presbyterians largely, Scotch-Irish, they called themselves. They knew what profit was. They smelted ore to get out the gold. What was left from the process they used to pave the streets of the new town.
Kate Harbison was born a McCanless. She came from a farming family over in Jasper County. She was the first of her family to live in town.
Kate had golden hair and was always like a princess. Her family knew in their bones she would be something that wasn’t ordinary. Yet she never exactly put her beauty on the block, not for anybody around there.
At school she discovered her great capacity for work. She got her highest grades in science. Things like history and literature were all right, she supposed, but you had to guess a lot. Kate preferred the answers. In the back of the book they stood in black and white. You could get them or not. She got them. She won a fellowship to Duke. At Duke she met Donald Harbison.
Kate was working through some chemistry notes before a quiz and was seated for this purpose on a stone bench built into an archway between the library and the chapel. She was wearing a brown skirt and a blue sweater with a simple strand of pearls which looked real. Her fingers, she would always recall, were stained with nitric acid. She had piled papers to one side while opening her notebook when a breeze stirred up some fall leaves, blowing them in a russet spill across the walk and going on to swirl up the papers. Kate McCanless said, “Oh!” Donald Harbison, a law student, was passing. He was already looking at her—the angle of the stone wall made a backdrop for her as good as any portrait—and was daring himself (he said later) to speak to her when here came the papers, whirling up and landing right at his feet. He doubted good fortune so long he almost missed his chance. Then he went for it.
“I don’t know how to arrange them,” he said as he evened up the edges.
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Kate. “Just as long as they’re all there.”
“Oh, I got them all.” He was anxious to reassure her.
She scrambled through the sheets, stacking with care, until, giving up, she stuck the whole lot in her notebook. “That was a help.”
He was standing there. Never mind. Lots of boys just stood there. Finally he said something. “I’m in law school.”
Kate, for some time, had thought she would like to meet a lawyer. The kind she wanted to meet flourished in cities. They dressed well and knew business people. It was something in itself to say, I’m a lawyer. She did not often smile, but she did so now. “It’s just this quiz,” she said.
“When?” he inquired.
“Oh, not till this afternoon. I don’t know why I’m worried.”
“Have you had lunch?” Don Harbison asked.
While they ate together, she noted that he was a little shorter, a little less heavyset than exactly what she had in mind. But learning later that Harbison was a grand name to have in Kingsbury (her own nearest city!), she was inclined to overlook his minor flaws.
He was never robust and his sensitive face aged sooner than it should have. Most of his hair went early on. But in evening clothes he looked the gentleman to be proud of: kind and intelligent, he had a manner of being wellborn. He and Kate took trips in the winter and stayed in nice hotels in France and Spain. Once they took a Caribbean cruise. People would have said that Kate was a “gold-digger,” playing on her family’s past days of actually doing just that, now marrying a Harbison. But Don was no great shakes at business—he seemed to lose more than he could make—and his family worried over him. It was Kate who kept at it, got her graduate science degree, went on to some sort of specialized cell work at a research lab contingent on the university branch at Kingsbury. She would talk about her job if asked, but who would go up to Don Harbison’s wife at club or dinner or cocktails, softly glowing in chiffon or silk, and ask about the cellular structure of the liver?
They got the Harbison house, a fine, Georgian-looking, two-story residence in an exclusive circle off Central Boulevard, where the trees grew lofty, fine, and full, looking down on other, distant trees whose names and kinship were unknown. A circular drive running up to the steps from the street was one of the very few in that area. Early in her marriage, Kate Harbison heard some mention of Scott Fitzgerald, whom she then read. What happened between her and the pages set in Long Island, New York City, Paris, and the south of France cannot be known, and she did not often mention the books, but something shone for her out of them with no sign of going out, became a guiding star, an idea of how she, when she wasn’t doing her job, was going to be.
About a year after Don Harbison’s death, Kate realized she had to sell the house. She expected a quarrel with the Harbisons, especially her sister-in-law Jane, who had her own ideas about what should stay in the family. For some reason Kate did not confide any decision to Mary Kerr but sent her away for the summer, back to Kate’s own family in Jasper County. Though Kate’s parents seldom came to Kingsbury, she had managed to “keep up” through the years; she hadn’t entirely snubbed them. Her mother was a brisk housekeeper, a small woman who raised prize chickens, and her father kept cattle, though he rented out a good part of his farming property nowadays. He also had once run a country store, now rented out, too, and was deep into supporting local enterprises, everything from the 4-H Club fair to Clean Up Our North Carolina Highways.
Kate had gone out to arrange things. “Certainly you can send her,” her mother said. “We’re going to have so many this summer anyway, she won’t even be noticed, let alone in the way.”
“Do her good,” her father said. “Never saw anybody this community didn’t help out.”
Kate sighed. “I don’t know if she needs helping out.” Then she considered. Don gone, and all that devotion? “Yes, I guess she does,” she added. “Would you mind if she danced? Practice, I mean.”
Mary Kerr was keeping on, studying with an ex-musical star who had come there with a travelling Broadway show. Al Bernstein. Maybe they had fired him there. He blithely claimed to have fallen in love with the place. Nobody had ever heard of him, so he couldn’t have been such a big star. But he worked up a group of students and even found an empty building, though for a while he had had to beg the use of the high school basketball court.
“She can dance in the pasture all she wants to,” Kate’s father had said. “Long as she don’t step in anything.”
Mary Kerr packed up her suitcase and went to a place she knew very little about. Several times she had been taken there on visits but she had never stayed overnight. Yet here she was approaching a two-story country house on the side of a hill with a lot of rocks cropping out of the grass, like giants’ bones, and porches tacked on the sides with steep steps going up to them. It looked as if the house were sliding off the hill. Some cows were grazing in the front yard. It wasn’t really a front yard, but more like a pasture which sloped all the way down the hill to the fence and cattle gap. The cows looked up at the car, which was driven by one of Mary Kerr’s uncles, her mother’s brother named Pete. He had had to come into the city anyway and had offered to drive her on his way back. One of the cows ambled over and stood in the road, directly in front of the car. Uncle Pete had to honk her out of the way. “Stubborn old buzzard,” he said.
In addition to Pete, there were Murray and Frank. Murray, it was whispered, had been in prison for something. Mary Kerr’s father had not talked about it, and her mother said she’d never understood it, but of course it was true. Frank, unmarried, lived at home. Pete lived in the nearest little town, their post office, called Browning. But Murray had his wife and two little children living right there with his parents. It was a lot of people, as her grandmother said. Nobody seemed to mind.
Mary Kerr got a corner room upstairs in the back. She had to go around a corner passageway to get to the bathroom, which she shared with Frank, whose room was farther along the hall. Murray’s family was in some rooms toward the front, and her grandparents slept downstairs. It seemed to be a house as full as a ship, but at night everything got tucked away and quiet. Then you heard the trees, a train far away, the hum of highway traffic two miles off, the buzz of a plane passing overhead, and maybe a calf running for no reason back in the barn lot. Out the window she could see the stars, all their arrangement.
At the table—it was yards long and took up most of the dining room because they had put in all the leaves—there was a lot of running back and forth to the kitchen and dishes passed every which way, over people’s heads and snatched out of your hand before you could see what was there, then given back with apologies. When she didn’t eat a lot they complained she’d starve to death, and they laughed at jokes about people she’d never heard of. There was business talk because Frank was starting up a Laundromat with money borrowed from the bank, his father guaranteeing the loan.
They were all so big, except Mary Kerr’s grandmother, who was small and active, with hair a sort of reddish color. “They say you take after me,” she told Mary Kerr. “I’m the only little one in the family.”
“Mother’s not big,” said Mary Kerr.
“Taller’n you’ll ever be,” said Murray. “There’s always one runt in the litter.”
“Kate never even had a litter.” Pete laughed with his mouth full. “Just one little runt ain’t no litter.”
Mary Kerr almost cried. Her father had never had any talk like this around him. Why hadn’t her mother told her what to expect? Her grandfather, at the head of the table, was a tall stooped man, who seemed to be leaning forward over the whole lot of them. Maybe he was deaf and had to bend closer to hear, but she thought it was his way of making sure he had control. At least he had a softer voice than the rest.
“Going to take her uptown,” he said. “Show her the sights.”
“Then you can drive in the pullets,” her grandmother said.
After dinner, they had to wait out in the hot sun in the pickup for the pullets. Murray brought them out in crates covered with wire, twenty-five to a crate, he said, six crates in all. They were packed in too close, Mary Kerr thought. Some were clucking and half squawking, but some were silent, panting, and all of them looked mindless but scared, with red rolling in their eyes and their heads flattened out.
“They know you’re coming,” said her grandmother, standing in the sun with her hand shading her eyes. “I called the plant and they know you’re coming.”
“Are you going to sell them?” Mary Kerr asked as her grandfather bounced along the road toward Browning.
“Sell ’em, kill ’em, eat ’em,” he sang out, bumping over potholes toward the highway. “They’re just good frying size.”
All for slaughter, she thought. No wonder they look scared. When they stopped at the plant, the smell of the process came all the way out into the driveway, something like scalding water and feathers, maybe blood and insides, too, who could tell? Two black men and a white boy came out and carried the crates inside. Soon after, somebody came out with a piece of paper to be signed. The paper had blood smears on it.
They rode around town and Mary Kerr’s grandfather told her a number of things about all the buildings and people there and the good projects that were going on at the school and community house, far and wide. He didn’t seem to have any other thought for anywhere but right there. Kingsbury might have been on the moon.
“Kate’s the only one went on to finish college,” he said. “The others did a year or two and settled in for the pull. It’s putting it off too long, finishing up, and farm work laying out to be done. Murray ain’t killing himself, but the rest are pulling their load. You get children on the way into the world and there ain’t no time to sit back and wonder what next you can learn about. Kate’s never been one to loaf, though, I’ll say that for her. Time you decided, young lady. I reckon she’s going to put you through school, though. She thinks like that. Likely she’ll marry again.”
Mary Kerr felt her breath go straight out of her. “Not after Poppy. She couldn’t ever find anybody else!”
The sharp glance from under the thick black and gray brows sought her out with something like curiosity for the first time. He had small dark eyes way back under there. They seemed to be hiding, coming out only when something called for them. They felt called on now.
“Anybody like Don Harbison, you mean? We can all hope not, that’s for sure.”
He said the last very low, the way her mother had of talking just beneath what you could hear clearly, but never quite low enough to be just to herself alone, though she still could say, Oh, you misunderstood me, I never said that. For the second time that day, Mary Kerr nearly cried. You’re just talking about money, she wanted to burst out. You don’t know what he was like. She pulled back hard within herself. She pretended not to hear. He was showing her the Presbyterian church. It had a sign out front: FOUNDED IN 1759, ONE OF THE THREE EARLIEST CHURCHES IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA. Mary Kerr’s grandfather was an elder there, was helping raise money to repair the old brick wall at the back just before you got to the cemetery. McCanless was a staunch name in that part of the state.
At night, these relatives all turned into other people; like a witch’s trick, the drop of sunlight seemed to give them a different rhythm. In the daytime, for instance, they went around in striped shirts, white and brown, white and purple, or gray, with work pants in khaki or denim, and shirts too small, their buttons straining over hairy flesh. It was all that food they ate. But at night, they looked washed and slicked up. They laughed and talked to Mary Kerr. They smelled like soap.
“They tell me you can dance,” said Frank.
“I heard tell,” said Murray.
“I can dance,” put in Murray’s little towheaded girl, Effie, but nobody noticed her.
“You and me,” said Frank, “let’s go out and dance. Tomorrow’s the weekend. We’re bound to do something.”
“Where you all going?” her grandmother asked.
“Well, there’s Johnson’s out on the highway.”
“I don’t know if her mother would like it. Kate’s particular.”
“I’m not in favor of anybody going out there,” said her grandfather. “Lots of trouble can start in those places.”
“Come on, Daddy,” said Murray.
“Come on where?” her grandfather said, and laughed. “I ain’t coming on anywhere, if you don’t mind.”
“Martha’ll go,” said Frank, meaning Murray’s wife.
She was stirring iced tea. “Sure, I’ll go. I’ll cooperate,” she added, mocking something they were always emphasizing.
“We got to show this girl off,” said Frank, and put his arm around Mary Kerr.
She knew she had to go with them, like it or not.
After that evening, Frank started waiting out in the corridor for Mary Kerr after the others had closed their doors. The first time, after going dancing, he was just drunk was all, but later it looked like getting to be a habit. Mary Kerr figured out a way to use a vase to pee in, and empty it out the window. She ran to brush her teeth soon after supper. She locked her door, too, but still he found ways to get closer to her than she wanted, and he would grin at her and make a panting noise. He went to church, as all of them did, sat in the row with the rest, even passed the collection plate. She thought he must be two people, but then she wondered if they weren’t all like that. Murray was always casting off remarks about him and Martha in bed. When Pete came by it was with his wife, who was expecting, and they made jokes about that. Part of it, Mary Kerr thought, was showing off for her, but a lot of it was just their natural way with each other. It was like they were all in a pan, scrambled up together.
One day Mary Kerr found her grandmother alone, out feeding the chickens. She hung around, not knowing how to begin.
“What’s the matter, honey? You look downright peaked some days.”
“It’s Frank. He’s started—well, at night. He tries to get hold of me.”
“Get hold of you!” Her grandmother straightened up. Then she laughed. “Oh, Frank’s just teasing you, child. He’s always been that way. Just laugh at him. Say, ‘Don’t leave me be, I’ll yell bloody murder.’ He’ll quit.”
But it’s not like that, Mary Kerr thought. “I don’t like him,” she said.
“Not like Frank! You’re just choosy. Everybody loves Frank.” She stuck a sack of feed in Mary Kerr’s arms. “Now, come on. Help me.”
Not if they knew, Mary Kerr thought. One night he had pushed it against her, she could feel it, hard through his pants. He was heaving out heavy breath. She had to squirm to get away.
She took to walking by herself toward a wood off to the north of the property, mainly in the late afternoons when the cows were grazing on toward the barns to the south. There was a line of woods there and a rise of ground, then past that a downward slope and a stream winding under a narrow plank bridge with a railing on one side. Farther upstream, nearer the house, there was a springhouse, she knew, where her grandparents had once kept milk and cream to keep them from spoiling, butter, and even watermelons to chill before they were cut. But now the springhouse wasn’t used anymore; it was half falling in, but still there, mossy and quiet, with the little gurgle of water seeping out of the old spillway, between the rocks. Her grandfather had shown it to her one day. He had stood regarding it. He said he ought to tear it out, but he remembered olden times. “This is just the prettiest country,” he said. “You been to the mountains?” Mary Kerr said that she had. “This country,” he went on, “was made by God’s own hand. I see the evi-dences of it.”
Alone, Mary Kerr sat on the bridge now and watched the water. She had been on the farm about ten days. Getting off alone, she intended to sulk about a whole list of things, because she couldn’t find any place in the house to be alone for a time without the others calling to her. People always seemed to be all over the place, and those two children of Martha’s were probably meddling in her suitcase right this minute; but now that she was here alone she didn’t want to sulk. She felt her own self again, contentedly.
Presently she got up and went beyond the bridge, through the woods to a part where she had not ventured before. Coming into the open, she saw a fence and beyond it an open space of ground with some trailers and tents set up. People were moving around them, and some of the tents were still lying on the ground waiting to be put up. A cluster of women in long skirts with some sort of odd scarf wrapped around their heads, which trailed down the back, stood talking. Two were holding children by the hand, and one had a baby strapped to her back. The baby was chewing on the tassels of the scarf. The men wore jeans and work pants, but they, too, had the strange scarf about their heads. They were picking up one of the tent poles and casting about for a place to set it up. There was a young man talking with the rest. He alone wore no scarf and it was he who looked up and noticed Mary Kerr leaning on the fence. His face seemed nearer to her than it actually was because he looked at her so long.
He crossed the pasture toward her. He was wearing tennis shoes, a pair of dirty white trousers, and a clean white T-shirt. He was blond, with hair growing long down the sides and in the back. It looked tangled. It seemed that he walked across the pasture toward her for a long time. When he got near she saw his tanned face and blue eyes.
“Come on over,” he said to her. “Meet some new folks.”
“I can’t,” said Mary Kerr, without even having to think about it. They seemed foreign to her, as foreign as gypsies or Indians.
“Why not?” he asked. He laughed. “They won’t eat you.”
He said they, she noticed, instead of we.
“Why don’t you wear one of those scarf things?” she asked.
“They do.”
“You don’t have to be like everybody else, do you?”
Over his shoulder, she saw some black people. They were getting out the back of a pickup truck which had just pulled up. They were wearing them, too, the strange scarves.
“I don’t know,” said Mary Kerr, by way of an answer. “What’s going on?”
He glanced back at the stretch of pasture, the growing assemblage of people moving about, arranging tents, discussing and pointing. The scarves the Negroes wore were bright red and orange.
“You might call it an experiment,” he said.
“About what?”
“Oh, let’s just say about life.”
“Are you in on it?”
“No. Just curious. Sympathetic, maybe. But so far, no.”
“Are you from out here?”
“No.”
“Kingsbury?”
“Sort of. But really I’m from—well, off.”
“Oh.”
She had been very lonely, she realized. She wished he wouldn’t go. When he turned around, she said it, surprising herself: “Don’t go.”
He turned back, looking quizzical for a moment. Then, “Come to town with me. We’ll have a beer—a Coke. Something.”
He had a car, though not much of a car, an old Buick convertible with ripped leather seats and junk piled in the back.
When Mary Kerr got home from town it was late afternoon. She got out of the car before they reached the farm, and walked up the drive. They asked her where she’d been and she said, “Just walking.” She went upstairs without saying much, thinking things over. She was seeing for the first time why she didn’t ever go out with the boys at school who asked her. If you told about yourself to someone else, even answered a question, they would change it a little, and it would never sound the same. You had to protect who you were. It was like her grandmother not quite listening, saying that everybody loved Frank. But when she answered the boy with the tangled hair, it was not like that. It was different. The difference made it seem that she had done something very important, maybe even wrong. Yet all she had done was have a Coke in the café uptown with a stranger. When the stranger had said “So what are you into?” she had replied straight out, without a pause, “I’m a dancer.” And a thrill went all the way down her. It was a proud thing to say.
The house was quiet and felt odd. There was talk from somewhere downstairs, but not the usual kind. At supper she found they were all mad, stirred up.
“Uptown and buying all sorts of groceries,” said Murray. “Asking for all this funny stuff. I saw Chuck Jordan shaking his head. I says, ‘What did they want?’ ‘Whatever it was, I didn’t have any,’ he said. ‘Some sort of fodder.’ He told them to go to the feed store. They said his heart would be changed. He said he wouldn’t count on it.”
“Has anybody told Watson?” the grandfather asked. “He may not even know what’s going on.” Watson, it would seem, owned the land the people had camped on, but lived away, up in Greensboro. He had moved when he got a divorce.
“Somebody ought to drive up there and see him,” Pete said. “Ron and Carson,” he added, mentioning neighbors, “are coming over after dinner. We don’t want to start no shooting, or nothing like that. It might get in the papers.”
It was Frank who suddenly took note of Mary Kerr and laughed. “Mary Kerr don’t know what’s going on, I bet. Where you been, girl?”
“I was just wandering around,” she said.
“It’s a bunch of wild folks,” Murray explained to her kindly. “They done moved in right over there.” He gestured with his fork, pointing. “Nobody’s quite sure what to do.”
“What’s so wrong with them?” Mary Kerr asked.
There was a dead silence at the table. Finally Murray’s wife Martha came out with it. “Living with niggers,” she said. “All together.”
“Well, if they want to—” Mary Kerr began, and then stopped as the silence went dead around her. She had just said it naturally, that was all.
But at school in Kingsbury they had talked about a girl who had gotten too friendly with a black boy whose mother worked for her family, and when they grew up they kept on being friends. “If you’re friends, you’re friends,” Mary Kerr had said to Poppy. “It wouldn’t be right just all of a sudden not to be.”
“I wish it worked like that,” Poppy had said, because he did like openness about what people felt. “It just doesn’t,” he added. “Not yet.”
Well, then, when? she had wondered.
Finally her grandfather said, “Nobody’s standing for talk like that.” He spoke quietly but firmly, not really looking at her, but staring grimly toward the wall.
Her grandmother sat up very straight. “Our people won’t put up with it.” But she, too, spoke in general, not really straight to Mary Kerr, showing she was still a guest—or was it that she was not really “one of them,” as they recognized?
And Pete, when he spoke, looked down at his plate. “No, ma’am.” It sounded like A-men.
“I am prepared,” her grandfather said, “to drive up to Greensboro and look up Watson.” Then he began to slice off more ham and changed the subject. There was a new town project for a public speaking hall. He was head of the ways and means committee. They had wondered aloud how you’d keep the Negroes out.
But Frank leaned close to Mary Kerr—he was always next to her at the table, crowding—and said, “Who was that type you were with uptown?”
Nobody heard him but her. She gave him a look that said, You tell on me, I’ll tell on you.
The telephone rang. It was Kate, to ask about her. “I’m just fine,” she said.
“Gaining weight,” they yelled from around the table. “Eating us out of house and home! Come on out on Sunday!”
That night, when she closed her eyes, she saw a face across a table in a booth, framed in a tangle of long, light hair, looking out of intense blue eyes. “What are you into?”
“I’m a dancer.”
That was good.