Mislaid & The Wallcreeper: The Nell Zink Collection. Nell Zink
built using a method commonly used to create cattle watering holes in areas without streams. But on the much, much larger scale made possible by slave labor. The Great Pyramid of puddles, concocted from a limestone depression by a forgotten megalomaniac. The lake bed was thousands of tons of clay, dug from riverbanks farther east, plastering an enormous hole.
Occasionally the lake would burp. A bubble of methane would rise from some unseen cavity and a circular wave would race toward the gloppy shores. Lee had not seen it happen because he was unable to look directly at the lake. It pained his retinas. He expected it to heave and drain completely any day now.
He could identify the culprit. He would have known her anywhere, kneecapped her with a high-powered rifle at four hundred yards. He knew everything about her. Except where she was.
The next year, Karen was four years old going on five and still blond. Nonetheless, registering her for first grade as a black six-year-old was easy as pie.
Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people. Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter, and eyes of deep blue green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the NAACP. The only way to tell white from colored for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule: if one of your ancestors was black—ever in the history of the world, all the way back to Noah’s son Ham—so were you.
Meg felt very clever as she handed over the birth certificate. The races of the child’s parents were marked right on it: colored and colored.
When the clerk saw on the slip of paper that that Mrs. Brown was colored, she glanced up in surprise. But a close look revealed that it was true. Meg’s coarse curls and knobby heel bones were dead giveaways to the connoisseur. The daughter was one of those pallid, yellow-haired black kids you sometimes see. Frog-belly white, no trace of pink, curly tendrils all around her hairline. Probably anemic and undernourished—a lot of rural black kids had worms—but very close to passing. “Was she premature?” the clerk inquired. “She’s so little.”
“She’s small, but she can read,” Meg said.
“I can spell ‘astronaut,’ ” Karen volunteered.
“That’s a third-grade word,” the clerk said. “You’re very smart for such a tiny little thing. You sure you don’t want to have her be white?”
“We’re black and proud,” Meg said.
“I’m blond,” Karen objected.
“There’s no blond race,” the clerk corrected her. “But it don’t matter. All God’s children attend the very same school. We like to know who’s black so we can help them out with affirmative action and a free hot lunch.”
The first day of first grade did not go as Meg had hoped. In the early afternoon, Karen descended from the raucous and chaotic school bus sniveling. White girls, she said, had called her “nigger,” while black girls had called her “half-white” and sung a song, “crybaby, crybaby.”
“Crybaby what?” Meg asked ominously.
“Suck yo’ mommy titty.”
“Did you slug them? You’ve got to slug kids who are mean to you. Like this.” Meg demonstrated. “You take and hold their shirt collar and punch them right in the nose.”
“I grab their collar and punch them in the nose,” Karen repeated solemnly.
“Never call them ‘nigger’ back. It’s a bad word. Just grab on tight to their shirt and hit their nose hard. Then let go and run away fast. Never hit anybody bigger than you, or anybody retarded. Only first graders.”
“Okay.”
“And never cry, or say mean things. Insults just aggravate them. If you want to cry, laugh. It sounds the same. They can’t tell the difference.”
The next day Karen came home early, in her teacher’s car. Her knees were skinned and she had a split lip. The teacher wanted to see where the ethereal yet scrappy representative of the sadly nonexistent blond race, whom she had freed from beneath a heap of children shrieking racist taunts, lived and with whom.
She was impressed with the simplicity and poverty of Meg’s life. There was something monastic and almost elegant in the neatly scrubbed cabin standing in four inches of water in a settlement that had been given up decades before. Meg offered her a choice between water from the pump and warm Fresca. As she drank the Fresca, she wondered silently to herself about the Lord’s mysterious ways, choosing an anemic black child with arms like twigs to demonstrate the ironies of nonviolent resistance. (She assumed Karen’s tactic was nonviolence, possibly because Karen pulled her punches to the extent that mosquitoes she swatted flew away stunned.) She told Meg that Karen was very special. They prayed together.
When she had gone, Meg said, “You should stop telling people you’re blond. There are a lot of mean jokes about blondes. It’s nothing to be proud of.”
Karen became the special concern of every adult at the school. Children instinctively hated her for being different, and adults identified with her for the exact same reason. To be perfect (adorably wee and blond) yet marked for failure (black and dressed in rags)—don’t we all know that feeling? The principal, who had voted for George Wallace for president, couldn’t watch her bounce away across the schoolyard without musing that a petite female with a white body and a black soul might in ten or twelve years’ time be a sort of dream come true, assuming she moved away to the city and pursued a career in show business, broadly defined.
He spoke about her at a teachers’ conference, and it was resolved that she would be groomed for export despite her handicap. It was decided to skip her over second grade, since she knew the names of the months and all nine planets. Skipping her would catch her up to the other smart black kid and save them from creating an extra independent study group later on. Her promotion would have the added virtue of raising black enrollment in the all-white “academic” track to two and acquitting the school of lingering charges of tokenism.
Karen’s sole black classmate was a boy named Temple Moody. They sat together at lunch the day they met—the first day of third grade—and every school day after that.
To look at, Temple was about as black as a person could get, as though the school were hoping to pack as much blackness as possible into each “token black” seat in each of his successive integrated classrooms. Initially he was chosen for his mannerly comportment and tidy clothes and resented only for making it impossible for his classmates to win at Eraser Walk. The eraser nestled in his hair like an egg in a nest. He could have hopped to the blackboard on one foot. The class voted never to play Eraser Walk again. One by one, his superior achievements were acknowledged with surrender. He called it “raising the white flag.”
By week five of third grade, Karen had forgotten what it was like to be bullied. Temple was not about to let competing children distract her.
It was soon a done deal among the children that they would marry. There was no question of a white boy’s teasing her or kissing her. No girls of either race played with her hair.
Meg bought a packet of thirty Valentines, enough for the entire class. Karen labeled and distributed them all, but she brought home only three: one from the teacher, one from Temple, and one from a Catholic girl whose exotic last name—Schmidt—regularly made the class dissolve in laughter. Birthdays were a nonstarter, since Meg couldn’t have kids over to that house. Plus the date and the year were false, so it seemed like tempting fate to make a big deal out of Karen’s birthday. Christmas depressed Meg, and she did her best to ignore it. Amber “Shit” Schmidt was not a big party-thrower either.
So for several years in a row, the high point of Karen’s year was Temple Moody’s birthday. Possibly it more than made up for the Neapolitan ice cream and Pin the Tail on the Donkey she missed by not being white. Temple’s birthday involved adults and older children—approximately fifty in all—along with hard liquor, catfish, chicken, trifle,