186
2020
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
clean off the snow and shovel the car out, though she worked at home and did not need to leave her parking space, but she needed to know her escape was in place. One winter, my mother was so sick, she couldn’t tend to the car. Charity was famously a non-driver. It snowed so thickly I couldn’t see the street lamp through the veil of flakes. Maybe my mother had what she called The Tail End of a Cold; maybe it was her teeth, which poisoned until they were all pulled one summer; maybe it was what she
Elegy, 2016 (archival pigment print) by Dawn Surratt
called “La Grippe,” which would seize her and send her to bed. The snow fell. My mother stayed in bed while our school resumed and Charity went back to work; the dogs had to be walked, mounds of dirty snow or not. My mother kept saying she would move the car, but stayed in bed, smoking, eating little, smoking, sleeping. The neighbor came to say the City had ticketed the cars. He offered to move the Studebaker, but trudged back up our stairs to say the battery was dead. My mother wanted to move the car, if it killed her, she probably said, but for want of that battery and for want of the will to assure her escape should it be necessary, she let the
car be hauled off by the City. She could not muster the money to retrieve it. We were a family whose sidewalk was occasionally chalked by hostile neighbors, a Jewish and Black family which had lived together for a year in pre-Duvalier Haiti. Eunice produced an NBC children’s show starring Charity. The show, teaching music through folk songs, rang with the sounds of guitar and autoharp, the Chinese gongs, the Haitian drum with its paintings on the side and stray hairs on its skin head, maracas, and tambourines. It was the first interracial children’s tv show, was a blow for everything our family believed in and everything we had lived in our years together. In defiance of the culture around us, our family, there on the tv screen, ghostly and fleeting in black and gray, but there on the screens of New York. Sunday morning, our family was up early to go to the studio. Sunday night, dinner over, we sat around the dining room table and read and answered fan mail. The network expressed concern that before World War II Eunice and Charity had been prematurely anti-fascist. Eunice thought it was those petitions she’d signed: Lift the Embargo on Loyalist Spain. Charity had friends. Talks in Charity’s room from which my sister and I were excluded. Phone calls. A lawyer met with the network. The threat of losing the show went away. What I learned as a junior high school child: the terror in my mother’s eyes, her fury that they were threatening her existence. Learned, there is a they and there is an us. That our family might have been small and isolated, that NBC could if it wanted cancel the show, but that we, not only our family of four, but those who were with us and like us, were right and true. Charity’s people in Rhode Island were descended of people who bought their freedom. Manumission papers: as a child I liked to say these words as if they were beads to count, or a small silk scarf I used to tie back my bushy pony tail. A green and white scarf: I chose it with Charity from a sparkling counter at B. Altman’s on Fifth Avenue. No one else in our family, except for Charity, shopped there. Manumission Papers. But I, Charity’s daughter by affection, who chose her, knew nothing of Rhode Island, would