It was the second September after I had ended my marriage. The grass around our dream house was way past due for a mow. The only problem was the cooperation of our, I mean, my John Deere. (Even after a year of being alone, the plural pronouns persisted.) Like almost everything we had owned with an engine, turning the key did not guarantee ignition. I did, however, have the number of an older Black gentleman named Mr. Williams who had helped us out before. Many Saturdays, through the odd angle from the kitchen window, I had seen him coaxing the older, crappier mower to start while lying in the grass, his legs and the soles of his shoes appearing to stick out from under the shed, not unlike the Wicked Witch of the East.
Mr. Williams arrived in his ’85 Chevy pickup at about six o’clock. It was the first Monday of the school year, the time when the reality of the relentless routine of the next ten months hits teachers hard. I was already exhausted. Knowing the drill, Mr. Williams drove through the high grass straight down to the shed. He bore a slight look of confusion as he exited the truck and went straight to the subject of my husband. When I revealed that we were separated, he pressed. I just answered that he had some issues with alcohol and employment. “That’s a shame. Always such a nice fella.’” I nodded, then redirected him to the dead machine. After methodically hooking up the jumper cables, he instructed me to get on the mower, my left leg at the clutch and my right leg way over on the other side for the brake. As Mr. Williams revved the truck engine, he signaled for me to turn the key. Nothing happened.
Then something did. Mr. Williams left the truck and, casually leaning over me, fully rested his late-sixties/early-seventies side belly on my mid-fifties, spread-eagle thighs. Looking downward with his face away from my crotch, he uttered something about the choke, which I almost did as I tried to suppress my laughter. With a Lucille Ball look of surprise on my face, I played to an imaginary camera in the woods. Here I was, upright on my lawnmower, staring into the woods, with an old man sprawled across my lap.
The dead battery finally resurrected. Hallelujah! I pulled out what I hoped would be enough money for Mr. Williams’s trouble—no one in the country seems to give you a price up front—and thanked him over the deafening noise of the engine. I engaged the deck, drove off up the hill, spinning my neck backwards over my shoulder to admire the first buzz of the yard’s crew cut. There it was. Just as I gave Mr. Williams a big thumbs-up, my hair whiplashed over my forehead and my whole body lurched violently forwards, lifting me out of the foam-exposed yellow vinyl seat. Dammit. In my elation, I had hit that pesky little stump I normally avoided. Of course, the mower had not charged up enough to restart. I was stuck. I saw the old Chevy’s brake lights flash, followed by the creaking of the old truck’s door. He backed up, and once again, with a couple of grunts from under his big salt-and-pepper moustache, hooked up the cables, started his truck, and revved the engine. To my horror, this time he got on the John Deere, cranked the ignition, and just took off to cut the grass for me. Like so much of my recent life, I had not bargained for this.
It was now about 7:20, ten minutes before Jeopardy was going to start, a longstanding signal for the end of my workday. I desperately wanted to go upstairs with a pretty glass of sauvignon blanc, rest my feet on one of the stools my grandmother Mema had needle-pointed, and yell answers at Alex Trebek to justify my existence. While Mr. Williams very slowly crisscrossed the yard, I, to not seem lazy, picked up sticks and begrudgingly threw them into the woods like I was ten and my father was making me. My legs were getting weary and prickly sweaty in my jeans. I was exhausted. We were approaching Double Jeopardy.
If it isn’t clear by now, I’m a white lady. I’m a white lady who was an artist in a past life and strives for a studious bohemian look, takes the greatest pleasure in life from funny turns of phrases and challenging intellectual ideas, and raised three sons in a pretty preppy neighborhood. You see—and then don’t see—women like me everywhere. Before retiring in 2021, I had taught for nearly twenty years at the very same public high school that I graduated from in the 1970s. Although, it is not the same school at all. John Randolph Tucker High is located in suburban Richmond, Virginia—the former capital of the Confederacy. When I attended, my class of about four hundred had only a handful of Black students. When I returned nearly three decades later as an educator, the school was one of the most ethnically diverse—with about thirty-seven languages spoken—in Virginia. Along with about 20 percent of Asian, Hispanic, and “other” populations who attended, Tucker now served close to an equal number of Black and white students.
Perhaps because of the tractor exhaust, or my own exhaustion, as I watched Mr. Williams cut the grass I had a mini hallucination. I suddenly imagined him as my husband. The plural pronouns resurfaced. Yes, the old comfortable feeling of marriage returned. Only in this other kind of grass-induced fantasy, as Obama’s first term was wrapping up, it was something altogether new: something akin to a truly New South, a New America, Yes We Can. Having a partner, working together, all felt so natural. We had shared a light dinner of arugula salad and grilled salmon before going outside to garden and keep up appearances. We had a party, after all, this coming weekend. This whole “working together” was so nice. Then, just as quickly as this paradigm arose, it shifted. Mema entered the scene; she entered me.
My personal time–space continuum became disoriented. It was 1965. I was the Lady of the House like Mema had been to the many young Black men she hired to do only the very few jobs she could not do herself. To the one thousand people in the little town of Norlina, North Carolina, she was “Mizhix” (Mrs. Hicks) who ran the big white rooming house on the corner of US Number One and Hyco Street. Now in this retro dream, I was Miznap, the lady in the big yellow house across from the horse farm and fancy bed and breakfast. (Never mind that in real time and real place Mr. Williams sometimes drove up in his beautiful new SUV, a car that surely started when you turned the key.) As I bent over in the flower garden, Mr. Williams wasn’t my “husband,” he was my hired help. I had deliriously reverted to a time when social and basic human equality—never mind a Black president—was still a dream. Only to most of my forebears, that would have been a dystopian nightmare.
Born in 1957, I am old enough to appreciate these remarkable changes in my old stomping grounds. I spent my childhood between a de facto segregated Richmond and Mema’s openly segregated small North Carolina town, where the races coexisted just fine, “as long as Blacks knew their place,” a common observation I heard more than a few times growing up in the 1960s. Hers was an era of matter-of-fact, unquestioned structural and personal racism. Yet I loved her so dearly. Her influence still gives me strength, especially when I have needed to fend for myself in life, to work three jobs, to cut my own grass. But I have had to reconcile this Mema with the one who never once questioned her white superiority, so blatantly displayed in her recounting of a 1921 race riot in Norlina after a lynching there.
As he puttered along on the riding mower and I was unnecessarily pruning the butterfly bush down to its larvae, Mr. Williams had no idea of the complicated hysterical historical thoughts I was having. Husband or help? Both roles have a root in my lifetime. Had I not returned to my old high school campus with its completely new demographic, the idea of being married to Mr. Williams may have been just that—an idea. Because something had been missing: actual, sustained, community-driven, multi-ethnic relationships on a human level. When I was growing up, most people in my old city, and perhaps many today, were scared to death of the very thing that I came to love about my old high school this second time around—as much as I did the first.
* * * *
To earn money for my first ever trip to Europe, I taught World History One during the second summer of my singleness. The course spanned eons of history between Lucy Australopithecus and her Early Man buddies up through the Late Middle Ages in all of six weeks. In that final unit, I showed a History Channel reenactment of frantic, desperate medieval villagers dismantling the glorious Roman aqueducts stone by stone and using them to build their meager dwellings. It was upsetting to see the destruction of such a glorious past achievement, but that glory was now literally ancient history. During my own medieval period, all of that applied to me, too. Even though my survival was at stake, I still felt—and sometimes still feel —overwhelmingly guilty about dismantling the great civilization that I thought in my early years I was building to last forever. I believed then that with Jesus’s guidance, my life would follow the upward spiral theory of history we studied the first day of school. I thought my family picture would continue to be as perfect as the one we took at Sears on a muggy July day in 1989, wearing our matching colorful Ecuadoran sweaters brought back as a gift from my brother-in-law. We were all together, united in our hot woolen itchiness in the back of the store’s third floor next to the toy department, the boys giggling and almost edible in their cuteness. But things would fall apart. But were those dismantled aqueducts any less glorious because they were later destroyed? Just because a civilization changes over time, does that diminish the beauty of its earlier manifestations? Can its influence persist without a tainted memory? That was the challenge: to resist the tendentious coloring of my own past, either with bright yellow or murky brown.
This dream house in the country was my aqueduct. It was to give life to a continuation of family, of children and grandchildren living within Sunday dinner distance. For a Southern person deeply affected by memories of childhood homes, I thought mine was next, a place where mother sits at one end of the big table and father at the other. Yet soon after we laid its cinderblock foundation, my boys lit out for the territories. That was their love destiny, though. Babies proceeded. A few years after they split, my marriage ended. So did much of my long cultivated personal identity from so many longstanding tribes, most notably my membership in evangelical Christianity, as my alma mater revealed a renewed way for me to love the world. Then I went back to the future in a way. My old school gave up something new, a second-chance relationship late in life. And just like in any story, of a person or a high school or a country, nothing would be the same again.
