Relic by Kate Foster
Mrs. D. came up the stairs, her forearms moving up and down, her hands fluttering. She landed in the open space in the middle of the small community office. “Rhonda!” Her voice was a song sparrow, at once urgent and sweet. “The newspaper’s coming.”
Rhonda pushed herself up from her desk and hurried out of her office.
Mrs. D.’s circular pacing indicated the arrival of a reporter wasn’t good news. Unlike the announcement during Black History Month that Mrs. D. was receiving an honorary doctorate from the university. This for a woman who could never afford university, who had travelled across the city to finish high school.
“What is it, Mrs. D.?”
“Somebody hung a noose on Carleen Upshaw’s classroom door last month. Found it first thing in the morning.”
“Lord,” Rhonda uttered. The ends of her mouth spread downward. She turned her head slowly, levering it side to side.
“The school found out who did it,” Mrs. D. continued. “The principal disciplined the student, but nobody from the school said anything about it. Carleen told the school board, but they didn’t do nothing either. So she emailed the paper. We’re just finding out now.”
“What are you going to say?” Rhonda raised her fingertips to her short Afro. She’d cut her relaxed hair off in the middle of her divorce and kept it that way ever since. Small patches of dry skin on her palms felt rough against the softness of her hair.
“Some people will act surprised, like this don’t happen here. Call it a prank.” The pitch of Mrs. D.’s voice rose. “How many times have we been here before? I’m gettin’ too old for this. The school missed a chance to talk about the past. I’ll have to go through my repertoire. Bring me our community file on this stuff, Rhonda,” Mrs. D. sighed and adjusted her hair. Rhonda hurried to the filing cabinet and returned with a thick folder. She laid it on the catch-all desk in the centre of the office. Mrs. D. rapidly turned the pages.
There was a light knocking at the office door. Rhonda and Mrs. D. turned to see a young brown woman opening the glass door. “Missy! Are you the reporter from the Advertiser? I thought they were sending Mr. Scott over. Are we ever glad to see you.”
“I finished journalism at King’s, Mrs. D. I just got on with the paper here. Staying with my Mom for now.” Missy was the black daughter of a white single mother. She grew up knowing her father, but it was his sister and mother who had helped raise her. Mrs. D. had once helped both Missy and her mother find work. “How’s your mother? I don’t remember getting a call about your graduation,” Mrs. D. teased.
“You must be the first black reporter we ever had from around here, isn’t that right Mrs. D.?” Rhonda announced before Missy could reply. Rhonda grappled her into a bosom-crushing hug. Missy laughed while extricating herself from Rhonda’s grasp.
“I’m writing about the noose at the school and I want to put it in context. That’s why I came to see you, Mrs. D. You know the history of the black community here better than anyone . . .”
“I could tell you some stories, Missy. Make your hair straight,” Mrs. D. laughed. “How much time you got?” Mrs. D. clapped her hands once and became serious. “Let’s get to work, then. Come sit here with us.”
Missy pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket. “Carleen texted me a photo. She said the principal wanted to keep it quiet. But she wanted people—inside the school and out—to know what happened.” Missy opened the photo on her phone and passed it to Mrs. D. while Rhonda leaned in.
“Horrible. See how it’s tied, just like a lynching rope.” Mrs. D. squinted through her glasses at the image on Missy’s screen. “What kind of rope is that?”
“Looks like some sort of marine rope, Mrs. D.” Missy set her phone on the table and turned it on. “Do you mind if I record our conversation?”
“It reminds me of . . .” Rhonda closed her mouth.
“Of what, Rhonda?” Missy asked.
“Oh, never mind. Mrs. D. will tell you all you need.”
“Has anything like this happened before?” Missy asked.
“Of course. Too many things over the years. There was the hanging of a black statue in a furniture store.” Mrs. D. spread the file in front of Missy. “Last year someone spray-painted the n-word on Kim Sparks’ car. Giant letters all over one side. The police investigated, but never found who did it.” Mrs. D. held up a newspaper clipping. “There was the burning cross on the front lawn in Windsor. And the town councillor who said ‘I’m not your nigger!’ at his delivery job. Said he was sorry for using the word, but that it wasn’t ‘an obscenity’. He’s on the police board.” Mrs. D. flinched when she said the word.
“How does this incident compare to past racism in Nova Scotia?”
“Hard to separate the past from the present. This noose tells me we’re still dealing with the past.” Mrs. D. removed her glasses. “You know, when I was growing up in Preston, it was hard to get past grade eight. I had to go to high school in Halifax where I was the only black girl. One time, in home economics class, we paired up to practice manicures on each other. Well, my partner wouldn’t touch me. And wouldn’t let me touch her. I just wanted an education. I couldn’t even learn in a beauty class. I was so humiliated. And embarrassed. It still hurts. That rope hanging on the classroom door—that’s a line right back to our ancestors, how we got here, from slavery to segregation to now.” Mrs. D. paused. “How some people still think we’re less than. And sometimes treat us that way.”
“Do you think it was a threat?”
Mrs. D. sighed. “Hard to say. It might not be a threat of violence. But that’s what it represents, isn’t it? We don’t have the same history of lynching here like the States, but we do have a history of race riots and profiling. It’s out there in the minds of people—police officers, shopkeepers, everyday people. We’re still getting stopped and followed too often. Hard not to see that rope as terrorizing. It’s more than just a relic.”
“You want to come for supper?” Mrs. D. asked Rhonda when Missy finished her interview.
“No thanks, Mrs. D. I better get home. Got a headache.”
“Look at us. You got rashes and headaches. My hair’s so thin, I’m wearing wigs now. We got to find a way to turn this out.”
Rhonda rubbed at her elbows and forced a smile. “Talking’s the only way I know, but right now I need some quiet.”
“I should go home too. Going shopping instead,” Mrs. D. chuckled. “That’s my therapy.”
When Rhonda left the office, she found Missy still on her phone outside the door. “Want a ride home, Missy?”
“No thanks, Rhonda. I’m going back to work. I want to write this up while it’s fresh. Were you going to say something up there? What were you reminded of?”
“Oh, Missy. You didn’t know my brother Dennis. You weren’t even born yet.” Rhonda scanned Missy’s brown eyes for understanding. Missy stood still and waited. She had put her phone away. “I didn’t want to bring it up, but I can’t help it. That god-awful noose makes me think of Dennis. He hanged himself with a rope just like that.” Rhonda buttoned up her sweater and gazed across the street.
“I’m sorry, Rhonda,” Missy pressed her palm to her chest. “I didn’t know.” She reached for Rhonda’s forearm and held it lightly. “Would you like to get something to eat… and talk a bit more?”
“No, no, Missy,” Rhonda said with exaggerated cheer. “Don’t you worry about me. You go on. You got work to do.”
Rhonda rushed home to find a painkiller and gulped it down with warm tap water. After her divorce, Rhonda had moved back home with her widowed mother. Her mother was visiting family in Halifax for the week; the house Rhonda had grown up in was empty.
Rhonda went outside, sat on the back step and stared into the yard. The declining August sun highlighted the pine tree they’d planted for Dennis. The pine had grown tall and wide over the years, its arms reached up and out. Her older brother Tony lived in a trailer on the other side of the pine at the end of the lot. The lot her granddad bought back in 1921, after he’d moved from Annapolis to Kings. Away from his planter-father’s territory. Granddad had cleared the lot and put up the original house himself. Rhonda’s father and uncles had added pieces on to make room for her brothers and sister.
The yard was not as tidy as Granddad would have liked—she didn’t have time for that. The lawn was more wild than cultivated, more devil’s paintbrush than grass. Tony said he would seed it, make it green and soft. He was too busy tinkering with his ‘mechanics’ in his own part of the yard to get around to it. This year, Rhonda’s patch of green beans was damaged by not enough rain. Still, it persisted.
The orange and red and yellow paintbrushes that popped up when it got too dry reminded her of summers when Dennis was a small child, running and staggering around the yard. He’d fall into the rough ground and roll. “Look at them ashy legs!” Rhonda would scold him for getting his legs scratched and itchy. Reddish brown welts would rise on his sensitive skin. The child was allergic to just about everything. They’d laugh and pop the heads off the paintbrushes.
The week before Dennis died, a cedar waxwing flew into the kitchen window, and dropped down. Rhonda was washing dishes when she saw a bright flash and heard a loud thud. She jumped back, splashing water on the vinyl floor. Tea towel in hand, she slipped on rubber boots and went out the back door and around to the kitchen window. It was end of March. The air was brisk but two weeks of mild weather had melted the snow. A few stalks of green pushed through the dingy grass.
Rhonda was startled at the sight of the bird lying on its side. She sucked her breath in loudly and eased herself down on one knee. The bird’s lower back was a soft grey. Its wing tips appeared to have been dipped in brilliant yellow and orange paint. Cream and rust downy feathers softened its upper body and head and culminated in a neat tuft. Its eyes, nearly obscured by a black mask, were still.
Tony had walked into the backyard as Rhonda hovered over the bird. “What you doin’, girl?”
“Look at this poor thing, Tone. Hit the kitchen window and dropped dead right here. Maybe we should bury it.”
“It’s pretty but it’s just a bird, Ronnie. You going to make a cross for it and hold a service too? I know how you like to preach.”
“Stop it, you fool,” Rhonda switched her tea towel at Tony. “We need Dennis, he’d know what to do. Bet he knows what kind of bird it is too.”
Dennis was living in Saint John with Uncle Calvin. Well, Mom and Dad had sent him there, hadn’t they? He was working part-time at the dockyard while he took drafting at the Vocational School. He could have taken his course at home in the Valley, but they’d all thought a change of scenery would be good for him. Once, when he was still in junior high, Dennis had talked about being an artist. Nobody took it seriously. Dennis had a small bird identification book that a teacher had let him keep after a nature unit in grade eight. He’d been teased at school, for drawing birds on his math and English scribblers, for being a teachers’ pet after taking the book home. Curse that Shawn for ripping it out of his hands and tossing it in the ditch. Dennis never would fight back. “Birdie,” the boys called him.
“Know what?” Rhonda said aloud now, as though Missy had come back to interview her about her life, about the lives of her family. Voicing her thoughts helped her make sense of things. To say what she’d meant to say. To make up for the silence. Tony called her bouts of reflection—silent or talkative—‘going to the well.’ He’d come along, find her in a quiet trance or a low monologue and gently tease her out. “Pull the water up out the well now, Ronnie.” She’d chuckle and he’d shake his head and they’d carry on, almost, as though it never happened.
“Maybe those boys were jealous of him,” Rhonda wondered as the sky dimmed. “Girls befriended him from the time he was just a kid, through his teens, even if they weren’t after a date. He was quiet, but strong. He ran cross-country and hurdles and could fly over Pine Hill. Not that the boys didn’t like him. He had a few steady friends and Tony and his cousins. But those jock boys, they pushed around anyone that didn’t play hockey or basketball. Thought they were funny. They walked around like kings and nobody told them any different.
“Our boys were popular with the white girls. Even the rich townie girls. We had a good lookin’ lot coming up when Dennis was here. But even if they weren’t, if they were ‘young, black and male’ the girls still followed ’em around. That’s what they called them—YBM! Didn’t matter if they were good students like Dennis, or were selling weed out their back pocket, or busting heads for sport.
“What can you do, when the community is small and surrounded by white folks? Go to school with white kids, play sports together, everything. Only a handful of families in our community and half of us are related. Of course the boys are going to date white girls. We never said nothing about it. Well, Mum and her generation didn’t like it. I can’t say nothin’ now—I was married to a white man. We did have some words for Dennis. We thought we were helping him.
“If I could take those words back.” Rhonda scratched heavily on her breastbone. “‘What’s wrong with you?’ Dad would ask in frustration. We knew his head wasn’t right. We wanted him to move on. ‘Buck up, lil bro. Stand tall. We survivors in this house.’ I was thinking there’d be some nice black girl, you know, who’d appreciate him. Or even a white girl, only one from a better family. One that respected black folks.
“See, Dennis and his girl—Lucy—happened so fast. All of a sudden they were always together. Said they wanted to get married. Can you truly be in love at sixteen years old? I thought it was cute. ’Til her parents found out. They threatened to kick her out if she didn’t break off with Dennis. Lucy was over to our house a lot. I thought she was going to move in. Mom was prepared to take her in if it came to that. Then one day it was over. Lucy stopped coming. Dennis stopped going to school. Stopped going to church. Something changed in him. Took to wearing a hat, covered his eyes and face most of the time. Not in the house mind you. Dad wouldn’ta stood for that.
“He had hair blacker and skin browner than the rest of us. Like he came from somewhere else. Course he was ours. Only, he was different. Mom always said that his cord was too long, that he was born partly wrapped in it. He came out just fine, but the doctor said it was lucky he didn’t get tangled. After he was gone, I wondered. Us calling him different, from day one, did that plant a seed, set him on a wrong course?
“The men in our family were gardeners. Plantin’ seeds, we always joked. Granddad was a farm labourer. Son of a planter and a servant. Did he get the green thumb from his Dutch father, or one of his mother’s African ancestors? Mom grew up in the Home for Coloured Children. She’d wanted her own family so bad, she’d do anything for us. Me, Mom, her line, we tried to look after everyone, including the garden. Canned, preserved, weeded and tamed. Mom cleaned houses in town and looked after us in between those long days. Where’d we go wrong? How far back?
“My great-grandmother didn’t have no choice when it came to the father of her child. I did, but I messed it up. My husband was an ignorant fool. He used to tell jokes and talk about black folks like he was one of us. Being with me was supposed to make it all right. I was young and stupid. Should have known better. I smartened up, but by then I had two kids. I wouldn’t change them for the world. But their father,” Rhonda shook her head vigorously. “When I left, it was like I’d woken from a hibernation. And little brother. When his heart got broken, I was a newlywed. Even then I didn’t want him to get married young, to make the mistakes I was making. He had his whole life before him. See? He was only seventeen when he left us.
“After the funeral, Lucy came to apologize to my parents. She gave Mom the ring Dennis had given her. Mom, she didn’t say much to her. Never said much about it period. She’d sit real quiet-like, cup a tea getting cold in front of her. I knew she was thinking about him. Me, I talk to everybody about everything. I know what some people think. That I’m not all there. That maybe it runs in the family. If I didn’t talk about Dennis, how would I remember him? Mom, she’s got her ways, I’ve got mine.”
Rhonda’s headache had eased. She wondered whether it was the painkiller or the time she spent talking at the woods breathing in fresh air. Now here was Tony again, calling to her, carrying a woven basket.
“Tony? Mrs. D. send you over?”
“You know Mrs. D.,” he shrugged. “Was meaning to bring you this anyway.” He set the basket of purple and red plums down in front of her. “Traded some of our beans for these. Hoping you’ll make us some jam or cake.” Rhonda pulled a tiny plum out of the basket and bit into it. She was ravenous.
“You been fetchin’ water out here?” Tony asked in his lightly teasing way.
“Be thirty years in the spring,” Rhonda nodded. “Still remember when Uncle Calvin brought his body home. I still don’t know why.”
“We’re never going to know, Ronnie. We didn’t see it. Maybe we didn’t want to. Nobody ever used the word depression back then.”
Rhonda tossed the plum pit into the grass. “Or suicide.”
Tony shrugged his shoulders. “Carry on, Ronnie. That’s what we’re going to do. Carry on.”
Rhonda half smiled at Tony in the twilight. Her memories were too mixed with the present. Was this ageing? Maybe she was taking her musings too far. She looked at her hands, roughened by time and scratching, looked at Tony’s grey hair. Seeing Tony as an old man, sounding like their Dad, surprised her for a moment. Pulled her away from thinking about the past, the waxwing, the pine, Dennis’s passing. That word, ‘passing’, was a pacifier and a transition. But it wasn’t no passive thing. Dennis had hanged himself. There wasn’t anything more violent and final than that.
Kate Foster is an avid reader who lives in Dartmouth, NS with her family. Her writing has appeared in Room and The Centennial Reader.