years, we knew Private Cooper had been a migrant laborer and a country preacher.
Private Cooper was foreign born, she told us, a Jamaican, but when Gran’ma met him, he had been living in America for several years and spoke American English with only a slight accent. Upon hearing him speak for the first time, Gran’ma (who was known as Sister Mamie Culpepper back then, or Sister Mamie because she was still a maiden) had guessed incorrectly that he was from the Bahamas, where folks were known to talk funny. There were lots of Bahamians around South Florida back in those days working the agricultural circuit for the big fruit and vegetable farmers alongside the Mexicans and the regular American black folk. In fact, the small wooden houses with the slanted roofs and the porches out front that you see in places like Overtown, Coconut Grove, and Goulds to this very day are Bahamian-style houses.
My grandmother Mamie Cooper (née Culpepper) herself was the offspring of field laborers. She was born in Tifton, Georgia, but didn’t remember much about the place (or her own father who had stayed behind) because her mother had brought her to Florida when she was too young for it to stick. Her earliest memories were the series of small wooden shack homes in South Florida as they followed the crops through the yearly cycle of picking oranges and grapefruit and lemons and limes and tomatoes and peppers and onions, and chopping sugar cane with her mother and her aunti (who had no name that I ever heard of other than “Aunti”).
When she first met Cooper, Gran’ma knew right away he had come from somewhere else. It was not just the hint of accent. He wore his suit too tight, and he let too much cuff show. When he ran—and often he did run in his fervor on the pulpit at tent meetings—his knees didn’t bend enough, and his arms, with the Bible tucked tight under one of them, hung straight down at his sides. Some of the boys, the other cutters and pickers, joked: “He’s a big man, but he runs like a girl.”
“He does not run like a girl,” Sister Mamie would say in his defense. She knew the other boys were just being mean out of jealousy. He was a good preacher, a fast fruit picker, and he was not afraid to court Mamie, who was on fire for the Lord and had already dismissed a goodly number of the same jacklegged suitors who were poking fun at Cooper.
“He’s so young for you, Mamie. He’s got to be ten years younger than you, if not more. You know that means trouble,” some of the ladies would warn. But she knew where that was coming from too. These lady friends of hers believed that if a woman waited so long to marry she deserved only the slimmest of the pickings, but Cooper was handsomer and more gentlemanly than all of their ugly, old dried-up men.
She first saw him in the orange groves near Goulds, shirtless, swinging a machete. He cut quite a figure. When she found she couldn’t get him off her mind, she prayed and asked the Lord if he was the one. The Lord told her yes. They met formally at the tent meeting he was running with the permission of the local preacher, none other than Brother Buford Morrisohn, who had come from up north to build the Faithful flock down here in South Florida, where Catholics, AMEs, Holy Rollers, atheists, and Baptists were in abundance. Sister Mamie and her family had been mostly Holy Rollers and “jump up” Baptists until Brother Morrisohn arrived, but they had been among the first to convert and they were strong in their faith and brought many into the fold.
Their hands first touched as Gran’ma, the blushing Mamie Culpepper, dropped her coins in the collection plate.
It was around the time of the war, and there was a training camp set up down there. It was common to see men in jeeps or armored vehicles rolling through the old dirt roads. A lot of the boys back then were joining up. It was a great opportunity for black men to make some good money to support their families. It was a great opportunity for black women who were looking for husbands who could take care of them properly.
But Mamie was thirty-four, and she had just found love and she didn’t want her man leaving to go fight some war no matter how much money he might send back home. She warned Cooper that she would not marry him if he planned on joining the war. He told her he would not join because he was in love. Their two-and-a-half-week courtship was chaste and pleasant. Brother Morrisohn officiated the small ceremony, attended by a few friends plus Aunti and Brother Morrisohn’s first wife, Mother Glovine. Gran’ma’s mother, whom she called Momma, had passed away a few years earlier so she was not there to see her holy daughter finally marry. Shortly after the wedding, my mother Isadore was conceived. It was the perfect love.
Cooper was also a good cook, Gran’ma would tell us.
“He could cook a duck and make it taste like pork!” she would boast, as her tongue lolled in her mouth and her dentures clicked. “You should taste his curry goat!”
In the grainy black-and-white photograph of him that she kept in a locket she always carried in her purse—never on a chain around her neck, for jewelry is jewelry, and jewelry is sin—he was wearing a polkadot jacket and a striped ascot. He was a smiling, fair-skinned man with sleepy, wide-spaced eyes and his hair was slicked back and parted at a jaunty angle. He looked a little bit like the secular singer Cab Calloway. Neither my mother nor I bore any resemblance to Cooper. We were dark like Gran’ma, with close-set eyes and a rougher texture of hair.
Then one day Cooper suddenly up and joined the war. Times were very hard and patriotism was high. Gran’ma did not want him to go. She told him killing was a sin. Even the killing of Nazis.
He told her volunteering was his duty to his adopted country. It was a righteous war. And besides, the Lord would protect him. The Lord would protect them all.
The way Gran’ma explained it, “We fought. We were in love, we loved the Lord, but we were husband and wife, so we fought. That happens in a marriage sometimes. Even now I’m ashamed of myself. What Cooper wanted to do was good. It was a noble thing. I didn’t see it like that back then. I just wanted my man.” Gran’ma would admit sadly, “The devil got ahold of me. A woman should submit herself to her husband. Cooper was so mad. I’m sure if I hadn’t been pregnant, he would have hit me. I would have deserved it too.”
My mother Isadore was born three months after Private Cooper was shipped off to Europe with the other young men. Aunti was the midwife. Private Cooper sent his wife a letter reaffirming their love, in spite of it all. Gran’ma mailed him a photograph of their child. A month or so later, she received a letter from the government telling her how she should be proud to be married to a dead man who had served his country so bravely.
“What hurt most,” Gran’ma always said, “was that the letter I had sent him with the photograph of Isadore in it was returned unopened. Private Cooper had never seen his child.”
My grandmother, Sister Mamie Cooper, that great old-time saint, never remarried, but she still wore her wedding band or carried it in her bosom when her arthritis was acting up. It was the only piece of jewelry she owned.
“Jewelry is jewelry, and jewelry is a sin, but the wedding band is sanctified by God,” she would explain. “It shows a woman’s submission to her husband, who is the head of her house, as Christ is the head of the Church.”
It was about a half minute before my grandmother’s voice broke the silence: “But now I guess Peachie and Barry have to do what’s right.”
“I’ve seen them … they do love each other,” said Sister McGowan tentatively.
I felt a useless anger well up in me. This anger was an emotion I, the meek and forgiving Christian, was unused to. Anger obscured the obvious: Peachie was lost; and the other one, the one I had offended, the widow, should never be mine. I prayed for a clear head.
“It’s probably Elwyn’s fault,” my grandmother said. “He’s too serious for these modern girls, that’s what.”
“He
