The Last Ballad Read online

  I was very young when we lived there. I remember a field, thick with strawberries, and I believe there may have been a strawberry patch near the place where we lived, and my father would take me out in the morning and we would pick strawberries and eat them where we stood.

  Aside from the strawberries, I can recall apples, but I do not believe there were orchards near our house because most of the orchards are farther up in the mountains. But I remember apples, and it seems like I remember a man who delivered apples. I remember a man who gave me apple slices.

  Mother would wake me up late at night when she got home from the mill. She’d make me something to eat because Daddy never learned to make anything. I can remember her doing that, cooking, preparing food. And I believe I can remember her being pregnant with Otis. She worked at the mill the whole time she was pregnant. My father did not work in Cowpens. At least I cannot remember him working. He never cared much for work.

  Your father was born on April 10, 1920. I remember waking up one morning and a little baby boy named Otis just being there as if he had always been there. I slept right through it. I don’t know if Mother had any help with the birth. She may have done it all herself. Knowing Daddy, she probably did.

  In South Carolina, Mother and Daddy were like they always were, like they always were no matter where we lived: she’d run him off, let him come back. Run him off, let him come back. My father was a good-looking man, and he knew it. He probably always had somewhere he could go. He was always into things he should not have been into, and for some reason I think that is why we left Cowpens not long after Otis was born.

  I remember Mother waking me up and carrying me outside wrapped in a blanket and laying me down on a wagon’s seat while she and Daddy loaded the few things they wanted to take with them. I could hear the mule’s reins clink together when it shook its head. I could hear its feet stomp on the dirt road. They must have just purchased it from somebody because I do not remember us owning a mule. The night was cold and dark. Mother and Daddy did not say a word to each other. I remember hearing Otis cry out, and then hearing the sound of Mother soothing him back to sleep. She sat in the back of the wagon with your father in her arms, and Daddy climbed in beside me and took the reins in his hands. I remember laying my head on his lap and staring up at the silhouette of his face against the dark night sky as the four of us passed beneath it. I do not remember seeing stars up there, but that does not mean there were not any to see.

  We went to a farm after that. Mother worked in the field there, and there were black people there, the first black people I had ever seen. Daddy did not want to be there because blacks worked alongside whites, and we all lived together in a big bunkhouse, all the women and the children, black and white, the older children taking care of the younger ones. The men lived in a different house, even if they were married.

  Daddy left us there and went ahead to North Carolina to find somewhere for him and Mother to work, and it was just the three of us on that farm until he sent word for us to join him. I do not know how long we were there, and I cannot remember much about it except my surprise at seeing black people for the first time. I remember wondering if the color could be wiped from their skin, and then, when it warmed up, a bunch of us went swimming in a little pond that must have been somewhere near the farm. I wondered if the black children would turn white after they got wet, but of course they did not.

  The woman who owned the farm was an old woman named Miss Rose. Mother must have thought a lot of her because that is who my sister Rose was named after. Do you remember your aunt Rose? She passed when you were just a little boy, and none of us saw her very much because she lived so far away in upstate New York. But that is where her name came from: an old woman who ran a farm where blacks and whites worked together and slept side by side.

  We were not there long before Daddy came back and got us. We moved to North Carolina. Lowell first, and then a few other small towns where there were cotton mills. Mother always worked. Daddy worked sometimes.

  Mother gave birth to another baby boy when I was about five years old, which means your father was almost three. The baby only lived a couple of years. His name was Willie. I remember him, but not well. I can remember him crying, and looking down at his little red face, and I can remember your father pointing at him in Mother’s arms and saying, “Baby cry,” and Mother saying, “Yes, sweetheart, ‘Baby cry. Baby cry.’”

  I don’t know exactly why Willie died. I was too young for Mother to explain it to me, and I do not know where we lived at the time, so I never knew where they buried him, but I think about him often, and I always feel a great sense of sadness sweep over me when I do. I am sorry to be telling you something like this in a letter, but it feels good to tell someone about it now as I am thinking of things with a sense of clarity and purpose with which I have not thought of them in a long time.

  Your aunt Rose was born a few years after Willie died, and by then we had moved to Bessemer City, North Carolina, in a little community called Stumptown where our neighbors were all black. It was just like being back on Miss Rose’s farm, so maybe that’s how Mother thought to name this new little girl Rose.

  The clearest memories of my life before Mother passed away are of the years that we lived in Stumptown. I know that Daddy lived with us off and on there, but I do not remember him as well as I remember other things, other people. Mother had another baby, her last one, in 1928 when I was ten, and he was healthy. His name was Joseph, but we always called him Wink because he blinked his eyes one eye at a time, and it always looked like he was winking. You have probably never heard of him, but your father just doted on him. That was his little brother, but they took him away after Mother was killed, and they sent Rose, your father, and me to an orphanage at Barium Springs near Statesville, North Carolina. None of us saw Wink for a long time after that. Years. By the time we saw him again he had no idea who we were.

  There were five of us in a tiny, little two-room cabin there in Stumptown. Daddy would have made six, but he was gone much of the time, and before Wink was even born he left and never came back. I never saw him again, although I know he died in 1967. How I found out about it I don’t remember. I think your father may have told me. Maybe it was in the paper and someone showed it to him.

  After my father ran off, Mother spent a lot of time with a man named Charlie Shope. Just how she met him, I don’t know. He was a mean little man, an awful sort. We all hated him. But I suppose Mother was lonely, and I understand that now in a way I did not understand it when I was a child. Maybe I know more about being lonely than I first thought.

  Mother with four children to look after, one already passed away, working a full-time job at the mill there in Bessemer City, which back then meant she worked six days a week, probably seventy hours, maybe more sometimes if they needed her and she needed the money. She always needed the money. I don’t know how much she got paid, but I imagine it wasn’t much. We went hungry a lot, and we were cold in the winter and hot in the summer.

  I did not mean for this letter to turn into a “poor me” letter. There were good times. We had fun, especially your father and me. We had to look after Rose and Wink because they were so little, but we still had fun. We would play games, swim in the pond out behind the cabin, fish, panfry whatever we could catch. Your father was always trying to lure the neighbors’ chickens into traps he made in our yard. He once caught one while Mother was at work. I scolded him, but he said it was the chicken’s fault for coming into our yard, and I guess it was. He killed it, and I fried it for dinner. We begged Rose to keep it secret from Mother. She’d have worn us out if she’d known we’d killed and eaten one of the neighbor’s chickens. More than anything, it would have humiliated her to know that her children were hungry enough to do such a thing, especially because our neighbors would’ve given us anything we ever needed if they had it to give. They looked out for us. We all looked out for one another.

  My best friend, I guess she was my only f
riend at the time, was a little black girl named Iva Gingles. Her older sister Violet was mother’s best friend. If I was ten, Iva was probably twelve or thirteen. Earlier, I told you I was born in a wagon on our way from Bryson City to Cowpens. Can you even imagine that? When I think about it I think less about myself being born and more about Mother giving birth. Here she was, a teenager that had never left home before, had never been any farther from home than the church or the general store, pregnant by a man she could not have known that well, a man she may have never gotten to know. It amazes me, honestly. It always has. Everything about my mother has always amazed me.

  She was never able to remember the exact day I was born. She never wrote it down. I know it is hard to conceive of that now. I remember when Owen was born and I visited Sarah and you while she was still in the hospital. I remember knocking on the door to her room, and while I waited for a nurse to finish up with something, I stood in the hallway and stared at the form you had clipped to the door with all of Owen’s information filled out on it. It was the form the county would use for his birth certificate. I have never told you this and I am embarrassed to tell you this now, but I was jealous of Owen because he would have a document detailing everything about the day he was born. I chose not to say anything to you about it then because the last thing new parents need is advice, especially the advice of an old woman who never had children of her own, but perhaps I will say now what I wanted to say to you and Sarah then: Hold on to that paperwork, that birth certificate. Make sure Owen sees it often, especially when he is young. Those official pieces of paperwork may not mean much when you’ve seen them and you know they exist, but when you do not have them it is easy to imagine yourself as being somewhat less than validated in this world. I know there will be a slip of paper documenting my passing, but there will never be anything that marks my beginning, and something about this feels so fleeting to me, and it makes my time on this earth seem all the more impermanent. That sounds crazy, I know, but it is something I have spent much of my life thinking about: what it means to be on this earth, what it means to leave it, what of us is left behind once we are gone.

  When I was younger I was deeply hurt, deeply affected by not knowing the exact day of my birth. “It was June. I know that for a fact” was all Mother would say. She would say, “You can pick any day you want to be your birthday. A lot of folks get stuck with numbers that don’t suit them, and they pay for it for the rest of their lives.” But that was just mountain talk, all that stuff about signs and “haints” and old-time ways I suspect she never believed in.

  One day, a few years before Mother passed, I was at Iva’s house. I can remember being amazed that Iva could read. Mother had been trying to teach me, and Iva had been trying to help, but I struggled. You have to understand that, back then, a lot of people could not read. White, black, it did not make any difference. My own father never learned to read as far as I know, but Iva could read. She could write too. I remember thinking that was about the greatest thing in the world.

  There is one particular memory I have, one of the clearest of all my memories, which makes me wonder if I made it up, but surely not. Iva and I were sitting on the edge of her mother’s porch late one afternoon playing with some dolls we had made out of old stockings. Rose and Otis sat out in the grass by the road. Your father had found a puddle and was trying to float a little boat he had built from sticks with one of our old stockings for a sail. Rose was right there beside him.

  As you can imagine, it was unusual for whites and blacks to live so close together back then, and it was even more unusual for us all to play together the way we did, but we didn’t know any different. By the time we were sent to the orphanage after Mother died, all the children there had heard about us, who we were, who Mother was, what she had done. They had heard about how we lived with black people in Stumptown, and I remember some of the children at the orphanage whispering “nigger lover” and things like that when they were close enough for me to hear it. I had never once in my life heard that word. I had no idea what they were talking about until I made friends with a little redheaded girl named Lucy, my first friend at Barium Springs. She said “nigger lover” meant that you were friendly with colored people. I wanted to say, “Good Lord, Lucy, colored people are the only friends I ever had until you.”

  In this memory I am sitting on Iva’s mother’s porch watching a little old black woman come up the road at dusk. She walked right by Otis and Rose and stopped in front of Iva and me where we sat on the edge of the porch, our feet dangling off the side. The woman had on a purple dress and a hat that almost matched it, a big handbag on her forearm. When she spoke she spoke only to Iva. She would not look at me, which I remember thinking was strange at the time, but since then I have come to understand her reasons. I have forgotten what her name was, but Iva knew her. The woman said her daughter had just given birth to a son that morning. She reached into her handbag and pulled out an old family Bible and asked Iva if she would write down the baby’s name and the day of his birth inside.

  I tried not to stare at that old lady while Iva went inside the house for her pencil or whatever it was she needed. My eyes traveled down through the trees to the road where Otis and Rose were playing on the edge of the yard, and I watched them splash in that puddle for a little bit, but no matter how hard I tried not to, I couldn’t keep my eyes from falling on that old woman. Her skin appeared to be as frail as old newspaper and just about as thin. She must have felt me looking at her, because her eye caught mine and she lowered her head and stared at the cool, dark dirt beneath the porch.

  “Miss,” she whispered.

  “Ma’am,” I whispered back.

  And then the screen door slammed behind me and Iva was back on the porch. She took up that old woman’s Bible and scrawled out that baby boy’s name in just about the prettiest script I have ever seen, even though I was not able to read a word of it. Instead, I pretended that she was writing my own name—Lilly Wiggins—and my own birth date—whenever that was—inside that Bible.

  The next morning, after Mother got home from work, I slid out from beneath my blanket and followed her to the stove. She was pregnant with Wink then, and I remember thinking about how hard it must be for her to bend down to the oven with her belly as big as it was. I believe Daddy must have run off as soon as he learned she was pregnant. Your grandfather was not a good man, Edwin. He could be nice sometimes, but he was never good.

  I told Mother about the birth of that old woman’s grandson, and I told her about what I had seen Iva do. I asked her why we did not have a Bible with my name and my birthday written down inside it. She had just gotten the fire going in the oven, and she was rolling out dough for biscuits. Rose and Otis were still asleep just a few feet away from us. When Mother finished rolling out the dough she cut the biscuits, and then she looked at me.

  “Lilly,” she said, “it was just you and me and that man who called himself your daddy in that wagon on the way down the mountain. And there wasn’t hardly food or money to go around for two of us, much less three.” She opened the oven door and slid the pan of biscuits inside. “If you think I was worried about toting along some Bible then I don’t think you know your mother as good you should.

  “Besides,” she said, dusting her hands on the front of her dress, where her pregnant belly seemed to reach toward me, the dry flour and the cotton lint coming off her fingers like snow, “you don’t need no Bible to tell you that you exist in this world.”

  And she was right, Edwin. You exist whether it is written down or not, and you are dead whether it’s written down or not too. If I decide not to send you this letter, that will not mean that the things I have written down never happened, that they are somehow less significant because I am the only one who has seen these words. If you never show Owen his birth certificate or if you lose it and have to send away for a new copy, that will not mean he does not exist or that his life matters less than it would have otherwise.

  Maybe thi
s is what I was thinking when I went out to the Bessemer City cemetery on the morning after they buried Mother. Hundreds of people had attended her funeral, and there had been great heaps of flowers piled atop her grave, but the next day, before I arrived, someone had returned and taken all those flowers. I may have realized it then, and I definitely know it now, but those flowers had not been arranged for Mother. Those flowers had been arranged for the newspapers and photographers who took all those pictures of me and Rose and Otis and Wink standing before her grave. Less than twenty-four hours later there was nothing on her grave but a rock to mark the spot where they’d laid her to rest. About thirty years ago, the AFL-CIO erected a huge stone marker there. They paid for it and everything: a huge, expensive monument saying something about who Mother was, what she did. They spelled her last name incorrectly, Mae instead of May, which is ironic considering how much money they spent and how important they said she was to them.

  On this morning, the morning after she had been buried, there was nothing there but that rock. It was just a quiet place, with the earth still soft from her being put inside it. No words, no tombstone, no monument marking that she had ever existed, but she did, and she made me exist too, even though it was never written down. Here I am, Edwin, and here you are too.

  If Otis never told you any of this it is because it hurt him to talk about it, about Willie’s death, about losing our mother, about losing Wink after we were sent to the orphanage. And there was the shame of it too, the shame of being Ella May’s child. After she died newspapers across the state called her a communist for being involved with the strike, a loose woman for not being married, and any other number of terrible things. There were years when we did not want anyone to know who we were. I made myself forget. Your father chose not to talk about it. Rose moved away to a place where no one had ever heard of us or knew the name Ella May.