Letter #1
Subject: Home in the Frying Pan on the Range!
Date: January 1st, 1976
-
Dear
Simba,
5:45
am
How I miss you
and Tiger already and it’s only been forty eight hours! How am I going to make it without you both for three whole weeks????
Help, help! Exclamation mark! I hope you don’t mind the e-mail, I need to know I’m still in touch with you Darling!
Are you there?
♥
Dear Numba,
6:15 am
Hi
Honey, I’m still home sick with the flu. Charles said I could stay home and work, big of him, ain’t it? Troy is
taking a nap so I thought I’d check the electronic mail to see if you’d written me a love note. I guess you just
wanted to remind me to do the dirty laundry right?
♥
Dear Simba,
6:29 am
What
dirty laundry? Florence does it. And please don’t tell me she had to pick up your shirts and socks off the floor already!
I miss you so much! It’s frightening. So little has changed here since I grew up as a little girl.
I keep thinking that Daddy is just in the other room! I feel like a little girl again.
Your Nubian less-than-perfect-princess
♥
Dear Numba,
6:45 am
You are a little girl, my sweet! The phone’s ringing, it might be Charles. It’s almost
time for Troy’s breakfast. Write me again and I’ll answer it tonight, okay babe? Love you and miss you, got’
a go!
Lionel
♥
Dear One,
8:45 am
I almost hear the sound of your voice as I read your electronic mail but I... “
-
The petite
black woman set back in the chair, a trifle discontented. She wasn’t a ‘clingy’ person by nature, nor by
upbringing since her Dad was a single man trying to run a farm alone. Beau didn’t have the energy to pamper as active
a child as she was by nature, and he feared for her to look ‘weak’ in front of the Others, so he’d depended
on her naturally outgoing personality to help shape her into an independent thinker.. There were people who lived at the edges
of the beloved farm who’d looked at her and saw only a half-Black, half-Korean child, and used her as a target for their
bigotry and hate. He had wanted to prepare her for the joyful life he felt she deserved, in honor of her long dead but cherished
mother who died too early in that far away land she could never learn to think of as ‘hers’ despite Beau’s
best attempts. She’d learned to accept early, that she was different from the sea of white faces she around her in church
and in school, but suddenly it all came rushing back.
She half turned on her school girl’s chair to look at the dusty hatbox lying on her familiar quilted comforter.
It was all of her father’s letters to his mother and family during the ‘Korean Conflict’ in the Fifties.
Queenie thought there might be address or at least names and dates on the back of her father’s personal photographs,
the ones used by his publisher when the first two books were published. But it was more than that. More than letters he signed
“Beau”, rather than Richard, because he’d earned that nickname in the belly of the reconnaissance planes
filming the damage inflected by the bombers. It was her father as a young man with no young,
Korean wife and no strangely colored, slant eyed baby. It was as if she didn’t exist!
She could feel the pinch
of the softly and lovingly waxed chair as she leaned it, a scant two feet taller than she was when she could remember using
it for the first time, but she wondered if she did exist? Was her six-foot-two husband Lionel a figment of
her imagination, four year old Troy a dream of a little girl wanting to belong somewhere? She
stood up unwillingly and switched the computer off. She didn’t want to burden Lionel with these washed
up, washed out, fragmentary memories and fears. It wasn’t fair to her dad Beau, or to her!
Her fingers trembled as she picked up the wrinkled photograph from under the first of the thick, black paged photo
albums that her father would later use for his prize winning photo essays on war and the men who lived to fight them. It seemed
almost shocking to realize that she’d had a Korean grandmother, even though she knew the story by heart.
She picked it up and held it to the light streaming through the window but there wasn’t any emotion or expression that
she could read now which had escaped her the first three times. The older, short woman stood beside the sad eyed girl holding
a bundle which she knew to be herself as a newborn infant. The picture had been snapped by a war correspondent for an article
that had never been published when he found out the child, herself, had been born of rape. She tried to align
herself with the truth she’d been given wrapped in layers of love all her life. That her father, as young and foolish
and idealistic as her mother had tried to sneak her mother into America to hide her on his parent’s farm in the heartland
of America. But they wised up and realized that as a full blooded Korean woman who spoke only a few words of English, she
couldn’t just melt into the background, and before the military authorities could track them down, he made arrangements
for her to be flown back to her home village. But on the transport home four soldiers had mistaken her for a prostitute and
forced themselves on her. When a child had been born, black skinned, she committed suicide before her husband could see her
and the evidence and her shame.
Beau had resigned a promising military career, brought her home to Slumberbrook Farm to be raised as his own, dearly
loved offspring, and he’d used his GOD given gifts to give voice to the small soldier, the anonymous rank-and-file soldier
with his candid photographs and terse verse, much as Professor Louis Simpson did for the Black soldiers, or Ernie Pyle did,
with his compassionate words and candor from the front lines before he was killed by Japanese machine gun fire in World War
II.
Daddy had lived,
and died on this farm, and now his publishers were redesigning his first book ‘A Solder’s Story’. Despite
the American withdrawal from Viet Nam, there was a new oriental enemy, who was flooding America’s shores for the promised
good life given to other immigrants in early generations, such as her great-grandmother Caitlin O’Flarity.
A new reason why she had to be careful about who she smiled at, who she chose as friends. For the first time she was
grateful that her natural father had been black. It helped to break the initial stereotype when you first saw her.
Then she blushed, angry at herself. Hadn’t Beau taught her better than that?
The tall woman in the doorway knocked slightly to get Sunni’s attention, as she sat on the edge of the bed, looking
at the trembling photograph in her hand.
“ Uncle James is here to see you. Do you feel up to it, Sweetie? “
“
I need to help you with lunch, I’m sorry, of course Esther. “
Esther MacCafferty tried to hide her confusion. It was only nine o’clock in the morning. The beautiful woman
must still be on New York State time. There was only three years difference in their ages, but Esther had spent her entire
life in Crystal Springs, and she felt helplessly simple next to the sharply dressed petite dynamo She
stepped back, then smiled, to try and cloak her resentment that she would have to face James’ inevitable disapproval
when he saw her. As the oldest of the Webb boys, and the most severely injured in the War, he had seemed to feel he had to
push Papa Webb out of the way and be ‘the man of the house’, and Amos was too tender hearted to rebuke him, right
to the end. Now there was no one left of that generation to rein him in, and Molly Bea’s shocking announcement of divorce
left him like a bear with a bad tooth. They were all paying for a gentle man’s inability to rebuke his headstrong firstborn.
She fought the feeling
that she was being disloyal to the only consistent father figure she’d had growing up here on the Farm, but she felt
the gentle, stooped man would be the first to praise being honest to yourself, for without that, he often taught her in his
gentle way, you can’t be true to the people around you either.
“ Did you find what you looking for? “
“ Yes and no. “
Sunni answered truthfully, without looking back to see the confusion her answer left in her wake.
