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 often told me stories about Daddy Joe and the war, pulling out old photo albums and letters. 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