There were other artifacts of his service around, too—the eerie gas mask, and a rusting soup-bowl-like helmet that had sheltered him from shot and shrapnel. But I was always most struck by a couple of colorized photographs of a proud, dark-skinned man in a doughboy uniform. He was lean and fit in his olive-green woolen jacket and pants, his overseas cap cocked to the side and the leggings they called puttees wrapped neatly like bandages up to his knees. Handsomely bookish in round, wire-rimmed glasses, Daddy Joe probably posed for the photo before the realities of life in combat took hold. I marveled at the courage it must have taken—to simply be a black man in Edgefield at a time when its political leaders were sanctioning terror for “negroes” who dared step outside the lines, and then to dutifully fight for a home country that despised him for his black skin. It was brave, beyond brave, heroic.
Daddy Joe used to wax on and on to Mamatha about his time in Paris, where his color was celebrated and rights weren’t restricted by race. It must’ve been a heady thing for a black man to walk those streets with no one paying attention to him, no one calling him nigger or boy. Mamatha said he’d even tried to convince her that they should move back there. I often wondered what would have become of me, of us, of the Home Place had Daddy Joe decided to become “Monsieur Joseph”—a man not limited by color or by America’s dim view of it. In the end, though, there was the pull of kin and familiarity. Maybe there was also something he missed about working the soil and watching things grow. He was better suited to nurturing life.
Mamatha was a gifted worrier and probably fretted over Daddy Joe’s fragile health. There were also stresses at home, children, crops, and cattle to tend to. Daddy Joe and Mamatha bore three children, a trio of girls: Louise, Pearl, and Ruby. Near the end of their first decade together, in the autumn of 1928, they welcomed their fourth child and only son, James Hoover. The little boy was a particular treasure, the sole hope that the Lanham name would continue. Almost exactly one year later, the Great Depression followed Hoover into the world.
Daddy Joe went on to teach and farm. He plowed and planted; herded, harrowed, and harvested. He became the principal of a school and trained a “who’s who” of the future leaders of the black community in Edgefield. He was respected by everyone and stood tall as a dependable man who did his best by his family, community, and country. I wish I’d had the honor of meeting him, but he died before I was born.
Most of what I know about Daddy Joe came through Mamatha’s stories of the flesh-and-bone man she called her husband for forty-two years. But I also came to know him in another way. His ghost roamed the Home Place. My grandmother communed with him—and other dead people—on an almost nightly basis, mostly on the quiet edges of the day, in the “witching” hours when things are still. Sometimes Daddy Joe tried to reclaim his place in their wedding bed, she said, stretching out beside her “icy cold as steel.” At other times a subtle shadow passing through the moonlight, or something mysteriously falling in another room, alerted her to ghostly wanderings. Whatever forms the visitations took, they were was scary as hell and I spent nights buried under a protective fortress of covers with only my mouth and nose exposed as breathing snorkels. Even in the sweat-wrenching swelter of a midsummer’s night, with nothing to cool the room except a window fan, I’d burrow under layers of bed linens thinking that they’d somehow keep the haints at bay.
One night, as Mamatha began one of her conversations, I finally mustered the nerve to poke my head from underneath the quilts. Sure enough, there was something standing in the bedroom doorway. Faceless and backlit by the tiny night-light in the next room, it stretched its arms across the doorway as if to brace itself between two dimensions. I opened my eyes wide to make sure it wasn’t a dream. Mamatha confirmed my fears when she addressed the thing by name: “Joseph? Joseph? What you want, Joseph?” I watched and listened, terrified, until it vanished into the darkness.
Mamatha talked about the visit matter-of-factly over biscuits and bacon the next morning, like she always did—the meetings were completely ordinary for her. I wonder now how much of the activity she solicited. There weren’t any Ouija boards or special incantations I ever heard, but I’m not sure Mamatha ever denied the visitors passage into her world, either. For years stories of ghosts and spirits were simply a part of nightly routines and family gatherings. Almost everyone had seen, heard, or felt something. Ghost horses and mystical mules galloped invisibly around houses. Children saw death angels and died soon after. The appearance of glowing green orbs and encounters with things that bumped and thumped in the night were expected. Even Daddy, typically a stoic tower of reason and rationality, told stories of inexplicable phenomena that gave me second thoughts about walking around anywhere on the Home Place after dark.
Daybreak was a welcome relief from the spooky socializing. Not that the magic stopped with the light of day—it simply changed form to something less frightening. Mamatha, like many other older people, depended on an assortment of drugs to quell various ailments. She took a familiar cocktail of pills, to keep her high blood pressure in check, her heart rhythm regular, and her back from aching. But Mamatha supplemented the standard stuff with remedies no store sold. She preferred out of the ground to over the counter.
A bounty of innocuous-looking plants grew right outside the back door and provided free and often effective alternatives to what the doctors prescribed. Things most would call weeds—mullein with its soft, wooly leaves; pokeweed, which grew head high and had purple berries; and feathery-looking dog fennel—all of it had a higher purpose in Mamatha’s world. Mullein tea and pokeweed, properly prepared, were both general tonics for whatever ailed a body. The pungent green plumes of the fennel, crushed and rubbed on insect stings, eased pain and swelling quickly. Mamatha removed unsightly moles by tying them off with cow’s-tail hair tourniquets and quieted coughs with a warm shot of whiskey and honey. A teaspoon of sugar did help the medicine go down—but even when sugar preceded a dose of turpentine to clear congestion, there was little to feel delighted about. I was often plagued with painful tongue ulcers that Mamatha diagnosed as lie bumps. She prescribed truth as the best cure, but beyond that she would either painfully snatch them off with her fingernails or paint my tongue with nasty-tasting tinctures that hurt as much as the malady itself. She boiled roots to make salves for my fungal infections and believed that ardent prayer could heal anything.
Being a growing, feral boy, my demand for calories was constant. What with all the running, jumping, climbing, exploring, wood chopping, hay stacking, and fence mending that might fill a single day, I needed as much fuel as I could get. I never met a cookie, pie, cake, candy bar, or slab of gravy-covered meat I wouldn’t eat. In truth I was a greedy kid, putting away as much as Mamatha would feed me and then scarfing down more for good measure.
But a half dozen butter-soaked biscuits swimming in molasses, accompanied by enough bacon, grits, and cheesy scrambled eggs to feed three people, can cause problems. Sometimes things bubbled and boiled inside me and became painful beyond what my physiology or anything from a bottle might cure.
Mamatha’s solution wasn’t pink and couldn’t be delivered by the teaspoon. Instead she turned to a different prescription—one filled from somewhere “out there.” The treatment began with a series of circles drawn on my bare belly, spiraling outward from my navel. With the abdominal art completed, Mamatha started tracing lines in the air to make two or three imaginary crosses. As my paunch rumbled she muttered words that I never understood. After the incantations, she drew an invisible string gently upward from my belly button, until the pain was gone. That magic never failed.
When I’m in an old field full of things most others simply bypass as weeds, I see healing. I can’t help grabbing a piece of dog fennel just to smell its pungent perfume. A mess of poke salad is better than any pot of gourmet greens, and a piece of cornbread alongside brings back vivid memories of times with Mamatha. I tell whoever will listen of the curative qualities of the botanical apothecary that grows all around us. Some relatives used to say that Mamatha’s cures and incantations came from ancestors who brought healing traditions from the Motherland or learned them as slaves. Other relatives claimed they were born of some American Indian connection. I call it
