I’m Emmie. Emmie Mto wa moto Nettle. I was Flo’s older sister, Page’s great aunt. I’m gone now. Deceased at fifty-four. I’ve got my own headstone in the Nettle family’s plot. I lay proud among the others so long gone.
Ezekiel Reason Nettle was the first after slavery to own land, this land, in Acorn, Alabama. He named himself Nettle to remind him and all that followed to be an irritant to the white folks. It was Emilia Nettle Dillon who started the colored school on this land. Noah and Sara Hicks Nettle who sent the first child to college off this land. Ella Nettle was that child. Nettles from before and after. Lives. Stories.
This is how it was for me:
I started working for the Kimbroughs when I went into my senior year of high school. Mister and Missus Ethen Kimbrough. The banker. Kimbrough Savings Bank and Loan. I was innocent as creek water.
“Good morning, Mister Kimbrough.” Like Mama taught me. Mama was their “gal” during the week: cleaning, washing, and cooking, babysitting their two little hellions.
“Good morning, Mister Kimbrough.” He wouldn’t even grunt or look up. Cracker. Fine. They paid me my little money the same either way.
I cooked their breakfast and dinner Saturday and Sundays.
If he wanted something he’d tell Missus Kimbrough, off-handed, short, and she’d tell me. Hard to tell sometimes if he was being nasty to her, or just to me through her.
“Mister Kimbrough would like so and so, Emmie.”
“Yes ma’am.”
And I’d pour him some hot coffee, or get more grits. Fine. All the same to me. Cracker.
I was cleaning up the kitchen after their Sunday breakfast. Nobody there but me. And I hear the car crunch in their gravel side drive. And the motor cut off. Humph! They back early—no—just his footsteps. Crunching up the steps onto the front porch. That’s strange. He had taken Missus Kimbrough and the children to church, Grove Baptist, and like usual he didn’t stay. He always headed straight for his home office when he came back. He would work there til time to pick them up and come eat the dinner I’d cooked and left to warm in the oven. Ordinarily. But the front door opens and eases shut. He usually just let it slam.
Just another few minutes by the mantle clock, tick-tocking now like it’s mocking, and I would have taken off my apron, folded it into my bag, and locked the door behind me. Now Mister Kimbrough is standing in the doorway, still hasn’t announced himself.
Even in the kitchen smelling of roast, potatoes, string beans, she smelled his cigarette smoke, his aftershave. The warm summer morning air whistling in his nose as he slowly inhales and exhales. My back still to him, “You back, Mister Kimbrough?” He doesn’t answer, like I’m not even in the world. But I am. I’m standing there, humming a made-up tune, halfway between a spiritual and a fox-trot. The noon-nearing sun is making lacey-rose patterns on the drying dishes and glasses and utensils as it streams through Missus Kimbrough’s parted kitchen curtains.
I’m looking out at the river that runs along the back of the property, at the line of dead trees.
Soon as he took his first step I thought about those pictures.
Now I don’t know what it was had made me start fooling with his Kimbrough family portraits. Hanging all over the house. A gallery of hard-eyed, tight-jawed, stiff-necked racist crackers, proud of looking like the hard-eyed, tight-jawed, stiff-necked racist crackers they had been, and were. Make me want to spit just talking about them.
Crackers.
Now the Kimbrough family ruled Acorn, Mardalwil County, and all through northern Alabama. From the statehouse down to the country stores, going back to when all this land was first settled, from slavery forward.
Tintypes, paintings, and photographs in the parlor, the hallways, up the stairs, and I reckon in his home office out back. That’s where he spent most of his home time. Call his-self writing the history of the Kimbroughs. Had trunks of their stuff. Filled with their diaries, bibles, slavery logs and other business records, old newspapers, and books. Nobody allowed in, neither Missus Kimbrough nor their brats, not even Mama in there to clean it up.
I willed my trunks of Nettle’s things to Page, my nephew. It is to be opened when he’s twenty-one.
When the main house was built way back in slavery times, that was the kitchen, which was kept separate from the house because of the danger of fire. He had it fixed up. It stands there between the house and the river.
I don’t know if it was foolish or childish or the devil in me, but every morning when I went in, and I’d speak and he wouldn’t, Cracker, I took to tilting one or two of those pictures, just enough so it was out of lineup with the others, and go on about my business. If she knew it she never said anything. I knew he knew I was doing it, but he never said anything to me either. I knew it because I’d tilt one and sometime later I’d hear him pass that spot and stop, then when I’d look later it would be straight—and I’d tilt another one.
I would have been gone that morning if I hadn’t been standing there looking, mindless, out that window over the sink. His office, and beyond it to the riverbank, lined with dead oak. Over the generations the river’s floodwaters ebb and wane, eroding the land closer and closer to the house. The land where my people, the Nettles, and all the others once ploughed and plucked, slavery through sharecropping, for his people’s profit. Here I am standing with my back to him in the doorway, with the dishrag still in my right hand wiping the dry lip of the sink. Looking out at the line of leafless, no-bark, ash-gray oak. They were leaning tipped over, roots showing where the water had washed the land away to there. The river creeping up toward the house like haints, or night bandits.
Except for that hall clock signifying, it is quiet as one of those dead trees.
My heart is thumping like a mangy dog’s hind leg. And he clears his throat. Didn’t even say my name then. Like it was his right not to. It was his kitchen, his back window I was looking out of at his office; his Oldsmobile with the motor cooling from driving his wife and brats to church; his back yard with the clothes line where my mama hung his drawers that she picked off the floor where he dropped them; and his uprooted oak trees, in his Cracker town, where he ran his business, and the council meetings; in his south, where it was his right to make nigger men lower their eyes and step aside; his right to write the history of the men who had given him that right, the way it was his Cracker right to clear his throat and not call my goddamned name . . .
All I can do is tense myself so that when he takes that second and third and fourth steps across the black and white linoleum tiles, I am nothing but a knot, looking out that back window.
But when he touches my shoulder I know right away he is even more afraid than I am . . .
In the space of those few moments, several things came to me, quicker than I could think them.
We have our little struggle. He got me to the floor, him fumbling and pawing. . . . We both knew he didn’t want me so much as needed to prove something—to himself, to me maybe, or to those pictures, or his ancestors, but whatever nerve he had worked up wasn’t enough to see him through to the conclusion of what he didn’t have the capacity to prove—so he quit, without ever getting my hem up much past my knees.
“You through?” My saying that was better than killing him.
The hall clock mocking him now, because he looked pitiful as a dishrag, sniffling something about his “wife” or his “life”—it didn’t matter.
Standing with my back to the sink and the window, I said, “Your great great-granddaddy tried the same thing with my great great-grandmama, Hattie. He put his hands on her.” Looking him dead in the eye as I had the whole time. “He thought he got away with it.”
He was leaning against Missus Kimbrough’s kitchen table, like a tipped-over oak, roots bleached, dangling like dry bones after a lynching.
“‘Hattie, a negro,” he said, as if he was reciting his homework at the front of a class.
What he had tried, and then the way he said her name, like there was no life attached to it, and she was just another asset, like a bolt of calico listed in a yellowing ledger, was the last drop that caused the overflowing of a damn that had been building since maybe the first Nettle arrived in Mardalwil in chains.
I was seventeen going on eighteen, but in that minute or so that we tussled, I had got grown, because he had fooled around and let me know, for all his strut and assumptions, how deep our family roots went down, and what that meant, for each of us. I saw him lose his innocence while he was trying to take mine. And I knew his will wasn’t any more stalwart than mine, and that had let me get as strong as Bette Davis in the movies. Mama and me watched her from upstairs in the Noland picture show on Foster Street.
Miss Bette Davis was one strong, grown white woman. The ones that came along later, on television, were just housewives, like Missus Kimbrough. But Miss Bette Davis was so grown she could shoot a man in the back, till her pistol clicked on empty, and swear it was self-defense.
I told him, “Used to be a garden out back, years ago, a great laurel bush in it. Fatal if you eat even a little of it. Hattie, my great great-grandmamma, she put a half pinch of it in his chicory for months, until he didn’t wake up one morning in June.”
I don’t know if he took it as a threat, but for the first time he looked at me as if I had sense enough to know something besides just what he wanted me to know.
“1861,” he said.
I nodded. “Summer. He didn’t live to see harvest.”
“Cameron Kimbrough,” he said, “my great great-grandfather,” his mind slowly ticking up to the minute. “June 13th. Heart attack.”
I shook my head.
“He had a stomachache in the afternoon, vomited, had the shakes, then his heart quit before sundown.”
He took out his handkerchief and wiped at his face, as a long-dead colored woman rose up from a column of names in a slave log out in this office in the yard and became a presence.
The Kimbroughs’ and Nettles’ roots were tangled as tap roots. He knew some of his family history, but I knew all of it, and mine too.
Mama asked me, “Where you get the money for these tickets, Emmie?”
“Mister Kimbrough loaned it to me, Mama.”
“Why?”
“It’s an advance on my salary. He hired me to help him with his family book.”
That he had been working on since even she could remember. What he needed me for was to type and like that, and fill him in on what I knew about the Nettles and what they knew about the Kimbroughs.
And I told Mama that while I was doing that I could live with our cousins, Antonia and Sipp. They had said it was okay. And that way Mama could go up north to where Aunt Harriet and Uncle Otis were. They were a couple of the first Nettles in the chain that had left Acorn. They were old and needed looking after. I would follow soon as I was graduated.
As it worked out I didn’t get there until much later.
All that time him and me worked together he still didn’t call me by my name—except that once—at the very end.
I’m Page.
Grams my grandmother is Florence Nettle Thompson. Emmie Nettles was my aunt, Grams’ sister. My Grams is in hospice now. But I remember when they sent word to Grams from down south that Aunt Emmie was dying. Grams went down and got her.
I think it was right around the time that the man who ran Acorn, the town Aunt Emmie lived in, had burned up in a fire. In a place on his property I think.
Note to myself to look into that.
Aunt Emmie was almost gone by the time Grams got her up here.
One night I heard this sound. Coming from the back room where Aunt Emmie was. Where my Grams is now.
It was human, but—not words, or not that I can put into words. Two sounds: one a low-pitched steady moan-hum, so low I almost couldn’t hear it. Like whale music, or the wind-carving mountains. It was Aunt Emmie’s sound of pain. And Grams, she was on the bed, holding Aunt Emmie and rocking with her, the bed creaking, and Grams making her soothing, kind of sing-songy harmonic sound as she whispered to her sister—
And as hard as I listened I could only catch a word now and then . . . “Ishom . . .” “Crop . . .” I heard just enough to know Grams was soothing Aunt Emmie by anointing her in a home remedy of Nettle kinfolk stories.
And, at the same time, through her rocking and cradling, Grams was drawing the pain out of Aunt Emmie’s body into her own.
The sound of them—I had never heard such love before in my life.
So—Time’s running out, but I’m trying to get as much of the history of the Nettles as I can before—
My Grams has dementia.
Flo is sorting through letters and photo albums. She is fighting confusion with flairs of frustration.
—The first crop a Nettle made after slavery on their own land, it was great-grandmama, Lena, and papa Spencer, and their six-year-old, Florence, toddling along, holding that plow steady as a grown woman, with her daddy and mama in harness, pulling it like two mules.
That’s where—uh—uh—It was something I was saying about—
A mule?
I can remember a story from almost two hundred years ago and can’t—can’t even remember why I was telling it.
—It’s like the joke—uh—my—it’ll come to me—daughter—my sister I mean, used to tell—or tells—
She considers it, then moves on, trying to be light.
—About the two morons who find a good fishing spot. Fish are practically jumping in their boat. And the two morons decide they want to come back the next day. Get some more. Fish. So one moron says he’ll mark the spot. Only trouble was the way he marked the spot was to put an X on the side of the boat—did I tell it right?
—And what did I even tell it for? I had a point—
Damn it! It is so frustrating! I can’t remember anything anymore. Names, people—
Emmie was my sister! My big sister Emmie. She told the joke.
It was something I was saying about Emmie.
Iron Emmie they called her in the paper and on TV. She had another name too. African name they gave her. Swahili. Mto wa moto. Isn’t it funny I can remember that? It means River of Mosquitoes. They gave her that name. And that’s how she was on them white folks down there.
She was tough and daring.
Emmie come by her stubborn from Aunt Mule. They didn’t call Aunt Mule “Mule” because she let white folks work her like one, but because she was twice as hard-headed as two mules. Florence was her real name. I’m named for her, but Emmie should have been.
And Emmie’s daring? That goes back at least to great-uncle Otis. He’s the one they say put the copperhead snakes in the white folks’ Jefferson Davis Day picnic baskets.
We always had a big laugh at that.
They say white folks were vacating out of old man Henry Robert’s pasture squealing and squalling like they had wasps in their under-draws, leaving horses, wagons, buckboards, and babies behind.
They had a bigger shock than that some years later with “Emmie’s Army,” as TV and the newspapers called them. The newspapers and them got it wrong about when she got what they called militant. That flood started as a trickle right after Emmie sent Mama and me north.
I got the whole story because Emmie and me used to write each other at least two or three times a week, every week, regular.
Stamps were two cents. The mailman delivered twice a day, once on Saturday.
Her letters were always typed on Kimbrough letterhead stationary that she just turned over and used the other side. I remember her practicing typing when she was still in high school and I was a little girl. It sounded like hail on a tin roof. She could type a mile a minute. Think that’s why he hired her.
Emmie said her fight for fair treatment was a slow tide rising from the trickle, traceable back to the way she started to carry herself when she went to work typing for Kimbrough. That’s how she said it in one of her letters—I remember that.
In a way they couldn’t name people started to notice how she went about her business—wasn’t no pouting or uppity or hangdog or taking low in it—she was just Emmie Nettle. And she wasn’t any more concerned with white people than the spider was with the rain.
She wasn’t concerned about boys either. I knew before she even told me. We didn’t tell Mama.
But as much as Emmie didn’t care about them, I liked them twice as much.
I used to be sharp and fine and feisty, and there weren’t that many didn’t like me. Like when Winston first saw me.
He says, “You know you’re fine as corn silk, don’t you?”
I said, “I know what I know. What I don’t know is what you think you know.” Well, he told me. And I liked the sound of it. We were peaches and cream from then till the day he died.
I had on one of Mama’s black hats. “Taps” was playing. Somebody in white gloves handed me a flag folded into a triangle.
Winston died in the Battle of Chipyong-ni. Chipyong-ni, Korea.
He was my first husband. You mother’s daddy . . .
Korea wasn’t even a war.
But I wasn’t talking about that. Was it about Emmie’s letters? She wrote long, beautiful, funny letters. She was good enough to be a writer. I mostly just wrote about my husbands, and asked questions.
We used to write each other at least two or three times a week, every week, regular.
Stamps were two cents. The mailman delivered twice a day, once on Saturday.
No. I remember.
Meetings at Emmie’s.
They started meeting evenings at cousin Antonia and Sipp’s house where Emmie was living. Could have been quilting bees, or parlor socials, for all the white people knew. Wednesday evenings after choir practice, Thursdays on their nights off . . .
First it was the young colored girls.
Emmie told them whatever way it was she walked it was because there were all those people walking right behind her. Blood. Kin. Pushing her forward. So, no, she didn’t have time to be studying the little everyday slights and racist pettinesses of pitiful white people. And the girls listened and it woke them up to the same push behind and in them.
Then, seeing how the girls were carrying themselves caught the boys’ attention. Put salt water in their veins, made them dream the dreams of men, which in turn got noticed by the old heads, the “aunties” and “uncles.” They began questioning just grinning and bearing and enduring.
It was in full flow by the time white people noticed—something. The poor white people, them crackers, could not figure out what the hell was going on! Niggers still said “Yes sir” and “Yes ma’am.” Still went around the back, still obeyed all the signs, the laws, knew their place and their jobs, but it looked like their negroes had—they didn’t know—a new way they followed orders, or waited for their change to be counted, look like it took longer for water to boil, biscuits to bake, or hedges to get trimmed—not longer, but the water wasn’t as hot, the biscuits didn’t rise as high, there was a sharper snap when the blades came together . . . Something. It wasn’t spite or even sass. But they all noticed it: white housewives, store people, mailmen, the insurance agents, ice men, business owners, police. Everybody who came into contact with them noticed it. Felt it. Whatever it was, it was beyond the old way both sides had come to accept. There started to be—they didn’t know what to call it—if it was even anything—a difference.
Then coloreds would just not do something they had always done. Like not going into a particular store for a week or so. Just not even to buy whatever was being sold there. Emmie said it was like a test. And it would go on until the owner noticed and Emmie knew they had noticed.
Emmie said the white folks couldn’t name their misgivings, but they were spooked. They started reacting without knowing what they were reacting to.
Even in the heat of dog days, they’d have sudden chill-shivers. The riddle of whatever it was, or wasn’t, penetrated their sleep like the reek of mildew. Even in the daytime they thought they heard a faint, off-rhythmic leak from a rusty spigot in a closed off room, or the sigh of seepage from a cistern.
In bed at night they flopped about like fish out of water and in their dreams black gals were grinding maggots into cornmeal; there was the whisper of black boys’ straight razors being stropped. They tossed and turned till dawn, when they woke, weary, fretful, sweat-damp, wondering who, what, when, where, and how?
There were cloud-gray doubts where there’d been sunshine.
Emmie said there’s no stopping water once it starts.
Her letters would have me rolling.
I’ve got all the letters she wrote, stored in shoeboxes in my closet. They came twice a day, once on Saturdays.
That’s what I was trying to talk about. Emmie—
My big sister is Emmie.
Mama Janie was my mama. My mama Janie used to say, “We got to remember, but we got to forgive so we can move on . . .”
That made all of the sense in the world. Then! But now I’m lost as an ice cube in the ocean. When I can remember it’s never what I’m trying to remember—Where’s my X mark? What spot does it even mark? Where the fishing was good? Or just the boat I’m adrift in? So I have to change with the time and tide. I can’t be worried with what was. All that is, is what was.
These people around here are all morons! They don’t know anything, and try to tell me anything—or nothing—they don’t think I know what they’re up to.
“You, boy, who are you?”
“Page.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Do you?”
“Tell me.”
“Essie Nettle Fuller Williams. You’re my grandmother.”
“Oh.”
“That’s okay if you don’t know me, Grams.”
“What was your name, Sweetnums?”
“Page. Page Nettle.”
“—Was there a—Emmie Nettle—?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“—who—made a big name—?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“—somewhere down south?—Acorn!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“She here?”
“No ma’am.”
“Sweetnums, don’t you know anybody that’s living?”
Laughing. “Yes, ma’am.”
“This—It must be a movie or TV or something—or am I dreaming? Mama and—my sister used to like going to the movies. Emmie. We were colored. We had to sit upstairs. Was it a movie, is that what it is?”
“Yes ma’am. It’s just a movie. That’s all it is. Don’t even worry about it.”
“What makes you think I’m worried about it?”
“I don’t think you are.”
“Then why you say I was.”
“My mistake.”
“I remember I had men—but I don’t remember their names.”
“Bennie. My grandfather Bennie was one. Benjamin Fuller.”
“It was love both ways—In bed when he rolled over I rolled over. Then he too soon was also taken.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I could get maaaaad! You wouldn’t think it now, huh? It wouldn’t last but a minute, but I meant it while I was—at him especially—
“Most I was ever mad at him was when he had that heart attack—still mad at him for that—can’t help it. Wasn’t his fault, was it? He just worked so hard and loved so hard.
“He died before I was born.”
“It is so goddamn frustrating. When people remind me of things they want me to remember—Like they’re pointing out of a speeding train window, saying, ‘See! See?’ and all I can see is rushing darkness. Is their wanting me to remember for their sake or mine, I wonder?”
“I wonder.”
“Me too.”
“You taught me to forgive, but not forget.”
“I forget everything. And who needs forgiving? Just get mad then get over it. I think I used to get mad at him just so we could make up. He still thought I was sweet as a sugar dumpling.”
“You must’ve been.”
“Some things people tell me over and over—some things I don’t tell—Emmie never did like boys—she told me but I already knew—people thought it was because—but it wasn’t—that my mama and Emmie are dead—some things I think they don’t tell me at all—what’s the use, must be what they’re thinking. Why put perishable in a refrigerator that won’t keep anything? Or maybe they’re there and I forget to look. And who am I anyway, a fine and feisty young woman, sweet as a sugar dumpling—? It’s so goddamn frustrating—Where do I put the mark to know how to find myself? Tell me your name again, Sweetnums, and don’t get mad at me if I forget it.”
“No ma’am. I know. Page.”
“Page—like in a book?”
“Yes, ma’am. Page Nettle.”
“—Bennie—did you know him?”
“No ma’am. He died before I was born.”
“I guess I don’t know anybody but dead people either.”
“You were telling me about Emmie. Remember?”
“Emmie was my big sister.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We took care of her, didn’t we?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I held her in my arms. Crying. ‘Tell me the stories, Flo,’ she said. ‘Tell me the stories again—’”
“Do you know what she was talking about? I don’t.”
“You knew it when it counted, Grams.”