crops to save the soil. The black airmen have endured hatred, but are proving themselves in airplanes that can fly faster than any bird ever imagined. They surpass the records of many of their white counterparts. Ethel and Joseph talk frequently about their hopes for better times and imagine that achievements like the soldiers’ flying and fighting and the Tuskegee professor’s farming genius will help set things right once and for all.
As the demands of war call for more wood, large swaths of bottomland forest disappear for the sake of Uncle Sam. Ivory-billed woodpeckers hold on until the last, but the “Lord God” birds finally disappear as another world war fades into promises of “never again.”
Just a few years later, however, Joseph and his wife are sending their drafted only son into conflict. President Truman calls it a “police action” but people are dying by the thousands over a line drawn in the Asian dirt and something called “communism.” The parents fret again over a war threatening to destroy something they love.
The only Lanham son skirts by the conflict, though, serving out a lucky deferment to Europe. After a stint in Germany, he returns to Edgefield to find his father ailing. There’s an uneasiness boiling up across the nation, too. A quiet seamstress sits down on a bus in Alabama and a man named Martin Luther King Jr. seems intent on making things happen for colored folk as quickly as the supersonic jets arc across the sky, leaving long trails of white and sound in their wake. A birdwatcher named Rachel Carson writes a book warning that our sins against nature—polluting land, water, and air with chemicals—will create silent springs and disaster for all living things. There’s talk in the newspapers about man-made machines circling the earth.
Joseph struggles to see the 1960s come in and doesn’t get to share in Dr. King’s dreams for equality. The veteran has done his part, though, training his people to lead, learn, and teach their way to better lives. My grandfather dies maybe hearing more saber rattling—of missiles on Cuba that fly faster than any airplane he’s ever known. This man, who once crouched in a trench and saw leather-helmeted men in open-air cockpits dogfighting over muddy battlefields in planes that moved barely faster than an automobile, might have mused sadly in his last days over a potential destruction that no one will see or hear coming.
Ethel is almost seven decades removed from the little girl’s disbelief that men were flying, and on some days the air over her gray-haired head seems more filled with the sound of airplanes than birdsong. Her husband has been dead eight years but there’s another Joseph with her now, a little namesake grandson only four years old. On a humid July night in 1969—only a little more than a year since the shocking death of Dr. King—there’s another war going on and young people protesting everywhere, for and against everything. The people seem restless. There’s a buzz about white men doing something in the sky again and Mamatha stops reading her Bible to turn on her small television. There in grainy black and white, a man in a strange suit walks on the moon. She ponders what her husband would’ve thought; she asks what little Joseph thinks. She thanks God, grateful for living to see humanity somehow get closer to the heavens. She wonders aloud in that prayer, asks Jesus for just a little measure of such progress in the lives of a people who still can’t find happiness because of the color of their skin.
In her ninety-six years Mamatha was a witness to the extremes of good and bad that humanity visits on itself. She watched war and peace cycle like the seasons. She saw night-riding Klansmen terrorizing to oppress a people and a tired Birmingham seamstress sitting down to help those same people stand up. She believed in the promise of a crucified Messiah who would return to save us all from sin and had faith in a man named King to deliver a different sort of salvation. She buried her only husband and somehow outlived her only son. Maybe it takes a bit of magic to get through almost a century of that kind of life. I can imagine that for all the miracles of flight she lived through, on some days a soaring hawk or a singing thrush was more than enough to measure her life by.
As Mamatha watched flight advance from feathers to fantasy over nearly a century, she remained steadfast in certain beliefs. As amazing as those technologies must have seemed to her, they were something tangible, requiring no faith beyond the witnessing. There were phenomena, though, that she set store in and lived by, which defied science and technology.
To say my grandmother was a witch might be a bit of a stretch. But she was at the very least a conjurer with a foot in two dimensions—this world and the spirit one. Why else would anyone have nightly conversations with the dead, live steeped in superstition, and use an array of concocted potions, herbal remedies, and incantations to treat illness as readily as anyone else would use over-the-counter drugs?
A hat tossed on the bed, dirt swept out the door past dusk, or a careless step over an abandoned broom were high crimes in Mamatha’s house. Beyond the bad luck were far worse things. Lying on the floor was forbidden lest someone step over you and stunt your growth. A broom swept across your feet could mean an early death. An owl hooting in the yard or a bird trapped inside the house warned of death to come. A “blood moon” meant end times were approaching. Spilled salt, broken mirrors, and things that went bump in the night were all a part of her daily routine, her dos and don’ts—the supernatural accepted as normal. The superstitions that controlled so much of Mamatha’s existence weren’t in the least confounded by her staunchly Christian faith. She never confused the two.
When I eventually left the Home Place, I entered the modern world still believing that ill-placed hats and road-crossing black cats could determine whether things went my way.
My grandmother was eighty-four when I left for Clemson University. She died twelve years later, but she had always seemed old to me, with her constant complaints of aches and pains. I can’t remember her ever standing fully upright. She ambled along with a shuffling gait, swaying slightly from side to side and stooped over like some spell-spinning witch from a fairy tale. Her joints were stiffened with arthritis. Even though she regularly lubed up her knees, shoulders, and elbows with strong-smelling balms and liniments, she never got anywhere fast. Maybe the difficulties came from working in the fields long ago. Chopping rows of cotton and too many hours bent over a boiling cauldron full of lye soap and dirty clothes had taken their toll.
Mamatha’s gently furrowed face reflected a history that spanned most of the twentieth century—all of its jubilation, pain, fear, wars, and “rumors of wars,” as she liked to say. She had lived through them all.
When Daddy Joe was drafted, he served in the American Expeditionary Forces “over there,” with one of the few black American units to see combat in that war. Although black men have served heroically in every American conflict since the Revolution, there always seems to be something more to prove. Daddy Joe was up to the task and true to the heroes’ legacy, somehow surviving the terrors of trench warfare; going “over the top” into machine gun fire, artillery barrages, and gas attacks; and living daily in fear and filth with rats, disease, and the threat of horrific wounding or death. When the 371st Regiment, Company C, went to Europe, the US Army assigned them to the French; blacks, they thought, didn’t have the mettle to fight alongside white Americans. But the 371st distinguished themselves in combat, killing, capturing, and conquering Germans in some of the most vicious battles of the war. In the Verdun they earned a unit award of the Croix de Guerre with Palm. The unit won not only medals but respect as men from their French commanders.
Daddy Joe came home with wounds to his body, scars in his memory—and a newfound respect for life, motivating a legacy of more peaceful pursuits. Mamatha married Daddy Joe in 1919, not long after he returned to a nation where black men were harassed and hanged for simply wearing their uniforms in public. And so Daddy Joe left the war behind and turned his attention to family and farming.
I’m sure Ethel saw her new husband’s pain, listened to his stories of the horrors of war, and maybe assured him—and herself—that times would get better. Mamatha
