At last, Deliverance, Part II.. (7/24 is Part 1)

IN ORDER TO HAVE A CLUE, READ "DELIVERANCE, IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE" from July 24. At long last, you shall find out the fate of our fair maiden, in her black flowered sundress and her orange cardboard camera...

....There was a loud sound of brush breaking and I stopped cold, in the middle of the road, heart pounding, more afraid than I'd ever been. A bear?

From the woods appeared, rather than emerged, a man about six foot three — my ex-husband's size. Flame red hair and a staff easily a foot taller than he. He had some sort of rumpled hat that looked like a Confederate cap, nn army shirt with the sleeves cut off, ripped off filthy jeans, and large muscled arms as glistening as my Mythic Man's. A gap showed between his brown teeth as he slowly grinned at me.

I had a different thought in mind when I said to myself, "May Day, May Day."  (Up "Deliverance" banjo and guitar duel.) He stood as still as a buck sensing danger, and lifted his head just a bit and looked down at me from the bottom of his eyes. I could not look away, and there we stood. His smile was close-lipped, but lingered, but he did not move toward me.

I'm renowned for my ability to slice a man off at the knees with this mouth. Many  a man who came at me armed with, "Hey, babe. I got a water bed," has left limping. I gathered my wits.

"Hi," I said.

He started, like an animal and, catlike, I sprang for my car, losing my pink shoe in the process, and slammed the entire side of my body against the side of the car as I tugged at the locked handle. The man stood there, laughing. Not chuckling, not snickering, no. Hyena like, with one of those shrieky machine-barrage laughs.

And there I was half shoeless and bruised, still clutching my camera.

I stood up straight and glared at him. Marched to my shoe and scooped it up in one deft motion, which would have been swell had my pocketbook stayed on my arm. At least when it fell, the keys revealed them and I crablike scooped up everything and scuttled to my car, not wanting to look back.

Once safely in, I hazarded a glance, because the laughing had stopped. He stood so tall, looked me straight in the eyes, clicked his heels together, then performed as graceful a bow as an Jane Austen gentleman, to complete my humiliation. He melted back into the woods, without seeming to move, and like the Cheshire cat, the last thing to disappear were his teeth.

And the damned laugh.

***

When I finally reached Charlottesville, I wanted nothing so much as a cool drink by the pool. The little pool was entirely rimmed in azaleas of every description, and I lost myself for at least half an hour in the humming of the bees and the beauty of magenta against the black wrought iron fence. It was a beautiful little world and I decided I  needed to walk around before dinner.

The sidewalks were pavers and narrow. I remember that they were, in my section of town, well above the street, but barely wide enough to fit two. I had just noticed my second hand-written cardboard sign "We do not support the KKK" in a shop window when I approached an African American woman coming toward me and smiled. She looked down and stepped into a doorway until I passed, and I felt my heart sink.

I was a full block from an African American man approaching when he crossed the street, and by then  I was noticing which stores did NOT have signs.

My walk was short.

Still, Monroe and Jefferson awaited for tomorrow...

And Monticello was a mass of tulips of every description. A note however, about grits and scrapple.

I once asked a young lady about scrapple. She said, "Oh, no. You need to not eat them. I was raised on a farm and... every nasty thing you imagine? They in there."

Since then, I just could not deal with scrapple. Then there's this thing with gravy... I thought it was just Pennsylvania, but not so much. And it's pale gravy. On waffles. On potatoes. On stuff I cannot describe. But I was not there for the food. I'm a Yankee, what do I know? Fortunately, in the south, I never had steamed ice berg lettuce served to me with some sort of yellow sauce. Really. All I can ask is "why?" Who dreamed it up and why?

But I digress...

My life was made when I saw the clock whose weights went through the floor because it was a twenty-four hour clock!  It's ten years later, and I should remember more, I suppose, but I mostly remember the grounds. I left the house and walked through the formal front courtyard , admiring the tulips, taking panorama pictures of them. People smiled at me and I thought, how friendly, until I realized mostly they were enjoying the woman who had her shirt on inside-out, intently capturing images through the cardboard camera. I wondered why the tag didn't tickle...

As I wandered further from the house, I began to hear a humming, very low and insistent, but it grew louder as I approached the giant shade trees. I don't know what they were really, but it didn't matter. They were heavy with wisteria vines... and they were a symphony of bees. Why bother with tulips when they had their feast in the sky. I stood paralyzed.

I am terrified of bees. I told myself they are not yellow jackets. They are honey bees. Be still. And I saw people on the benches near them, happily relaxed, even eating sandwiches, undisturbed. They were sitting beneath canopies of purple, white, blue, it's a blur to me now except for the light. Beneath the trees the light was blue, like sitting before Monet's water lilies paintings when I was in France. Except it was deeper.

I dared to sit beneath my fear, and drink in all that blue. And the sound blocked out all thought. And the sunlight found gaps in the vines, so I began to drift as the light shifted. And I began to dream of the magic of the humming trees. It starts with a single song... I fell asleep.

"LADY!" I jumped. And three pigeons took off. Apparently one had lighted on my shoulder, I had been that still. And the little girl turned to her mommy, "That homeless lady had a pigeon on her head."

I hoped she was exaggerating and I needed to fix my SHIRT.

***
I was going to Ash Lawn next. I heard the call of the peacocks as walked into the kitchen garden. Monticello was magnificent, but Ash Lawn was my favorite. It had the feel of a cottage, though it was  not small. But it was lower, seemingly part of the grounds themselves, and the kitchen garden was more the tumble of herbs and edible flowers and beauty I tend to prefer. With two peacocks that wandered freely and perched in the trees, screeching down at us. There is nothing like their call; it makes me shiver. It is a lonely, wild sound.

Below the garden were the slave quarters, and Ash Lawn offers and exhibit of what the slaves did for the plantation, from cooking to making candles, spinning, to black smithing to preparing the edible flowers.  There was a tour just ahead of me, so naturally I decided to approach from the opposite end. There was only one African American. He was tall, with skin almost as deep as obsidian, but softer. His voice was as deep as his skin and his hands were the size of dinner plates ... yet he was at the edible flowers. He was last on my route, so I wandered and listened vaguely to the lectures, especially at the lace making and spinning--only because I had seen other exhibits of smithing and cooking on an open fire. I came to the edible flower table just as the man was sitting to have his lunch.

I asked whether I could sit and join him, forgetting where he was. He leaped up and said, "No ma'am, but I'd be happy to answer your questions."

"Oh,  no, sir. You just eat your lunch. I can just sit and talk, unless you'd rather be alone."

I had made him uncomfortable and he wanted to show me his job, so I simply said, "I'm sorry. I'm not from around here."

"The North?"

"Yes."

"D.C?"

"Connecticut?"

He smiled and said, "Oh you really ARE not from here."  Then he relaxed. He was from Mississippi, he said and he supported his family by going all over the south with these demonstrations and he got good money, too, because he was Black. And he talked about how some didn't like that he did this but he looked up at me from his demonstration, straight in the eye. After one day there, it already startled me to have him do that. "I am not ashamed my people were slaves. It's nothing we did wrong. We built this country on our backs. Why shouldn't I be proud that we survived?"

I will never forget the look on his face and I said, "You should be proud."  There was an awkward pause, then I said, "Your family must miss you."

The moment passed, but he spoke about other things he did, making shoes, belt buckles and he was "studying on buttons. No one does that."

I was tired when I ended my tour day at a tavern that had been transplanted near these places.  It was an off-hour, but I hooked up with yet another tour and they let me join them. They had a long trip back to West Virginia and had booked the place. I sat between two women around my age.

They were from a garden club and I realized that I was ... well... I didn't match. I had on jeans, my Indian print blouse (right-side out at last) and a photographer's vest. The women around me had on... what my grandmother called "lawn dresses." They were all wearing dresses. I felt I had stepped into one of my nightmares as a ten-year-old child. A women's tea party. I had read about them, and heard of them, but they sounded like hell to me. I played football and liked hockey back then, so lady things scared me to death. My mother assured me that tea parties had gone the way of whalebone corsets, but I reminded her Grandma L still OWNED a whalebone corset.

I made do. The woman to my left, who had looked at me more askance than head on, visibly relaxed when I explained I was from Connecticut. And she kindly asked about my children and what had brought me to the South, and didn't I just love how friendly people are?

I looked at her and the hairs on my neck rustled.  "Well, I've found most people everywhere are friendly when we travel." She was tight-faced, with lips that must have grown thin from pinching them. And when she smiled, her face exploded in a fine network of creases that had nothing to do with joy. Severe bangs sliced her forehead and her chin-length perfectly smooth hair ended in two points, jutting forward. The delicate flowers of her dress did not suit her. I pictured her in high-buttoned sweaters covering shirts with peter pan collars. I doubt an earring ever dangled freely near her. Probably the first one in the church to bring food, kindness, and sustenance to the poor. But I wondered what it must be like to put the shoes on the other side of her bed. I shuddered.

My thoughts must have read; the woman to my right looked down.

"Well, yes, dear, I suppose they are..." I looked down at my food, which seemed to have that gravy again.

The sigh of the ages came from her soul, and she said, "My family has been in the same county for five generations, and our roots are proud.  I suppose your people are all from the North?"

"Well, yes. The Mayflower, in fact." I felt my hackles rising. "I see you are married. Do you have children or grandchildren?" I noticed she was older than I thought,  more likely in her mid-fifties.

"Why would you think I am old enough for that?" The tone was biting. The woman to my right snorted. I had no time to even try to apologize. "You Yankees do take liberties. No civil lady would say such a thing to a stranger, but you ARE a Yankee. You all ... well.  Let's just say that you all have been privileged to live with more ease that we have."

Still retaining my rapier wit from the previous day, I said, "Huh?"

Her lips had essentially disappeared and I was a little afraid of that hair.  "Well. We never did have a chance to recover like you all, after the war. After what happened."

Okay... I looked at her. Maybe she was older than my sister, and remembered more about the War than my sister did. "Did you have some sort of munitions plant in West Virginia? Or fighter plane factory or something? Did everyone lose their jobs?"

I got a furious stare for a moment, with which helmet-hair lady began to assiduously decimate her food with the tip of her knife.

I silently pleaded for help to my right, and  "The Civil War" she whispered.

All I could think of to say, was a ten-year-old's comeback. "You sure don't look that old." Fortunately, I didn't. But I'd had enough, ate in silence, avoiding the woman's glare, and I bolted as soon as I could. I'd had enough verses of this particular Song of the South.

 ******
Antietam was the next day's appropriate destination; I don't think I had ever appreciated that war more. You cannot see that place without being grabbed in the throat. Row after row after row of crosses.

... after that? North toward home — no matter what lay ahead — was my sudden, unexpectedly longed-for star.