Lazarus
Chapter One
My name is Lazarus Smalls. I was born in 1926 on one of the fertile islands strewn in a jagged line along the seaboard of South Carolina. My parents were Aletha Smalls and Philmore Washington, both native to Beaufort County.
My mother was fair-complexioned and bore a remarkable resemblance to the handsome offspring of a prominent white citizen of the township of Beaufort. She belonged to the ranks of blacks who strove to emulate genteel upper-class whites, had assimilated their most salient ways and accommodated to a glaring inequality of advantages. Philmore Washington was a loving father and affectionate though philandering husband.
My mother ardently desired a baby. Despite her young years, she had miscarried several times. When she was pregnant with me and nearing term, she was overcome by labor pains while working at a dock on Lady's Island, heading shrimp. Praying fervently for a live birth, she bore me in the shade of scrub palmettos where women working alongside her had helpfully led her. The day's catch had come from a weather-beaten boat christened Lazarus. The biblical name appealed to my mother and that is what she named me.
She was a devout Christian, a kind and patient woman. She accepted what fate meted out to her. She never complained about my father's episodic debauches and other shortcomings. To put food on the table in times of need, she placed me in the care of a relative or neighbor and performed menial labor. She worked in the fields or in the local canning factory. Because of her industry, unblemished character and easy-going nature, she was always able to obtain employment as a housemaid.
All she did was dedicated to a higher authority, for she saw in each commonplace event, in every happening, the hand of God. Her abiding faith in an ultimate good sustained her through my father's deviations from the straight and narrow path, through her many successive miscarriages and other tribulations.
While morally weak, my father was basically a good man, too bewildered by life to resist blind emulation of those around him. Like his peers, he drank at many wells. In some recess of his tortured soul, he must have harbored the illusion that his manhood was measured by the amount of liquor he could drink, the quantity of dope he could consume and the number of women he could inseminate. Although his skin was the color of chocolate, he was nevertheless labeled black in a time and in a place where negritude emasculated men, made them rebel, or drove them to achieve against all odds.
My father was neither a rebel nor an ambitious man. When he had spent every penny he owned or could borrow on symbolic compensation for his social castration, he would slink home, resume his customary humble demeanor, return to the stable job he retained only because of his employer's condescendingly tolerant attitude, and provide for us until his next slip from grace. He came home often enough to keep my mother almost perpetually pregnant despite her tendency to miscarry.
Root doctors and the beliefs they perpetuated played an important part in the lives of most blacks and some whites in Beaufort County. Despite her unwavering faith in Jesus and her awe of the Lord, my mother consulted those purveyors of occult powers to win back my wayward father's affections with counterspells, incantations and magic potions. Incapable of viewing my father's carousing and womanizing from the lofty vantage point of psychological or sociological insights, she never realized that his return to the fold invariably coincided with financial bankruptcy, physical exhaustion, or some combination of these. Trusting by nature, she never suspected charlatanism in those who practiced Beaufort County's particular brand of witchcraft.
My fondest and most indelible memories of my mother are of her beautiful face and shapely figure, or the smell of freshly ironed laundry blended with tantalizing kitchen aromas, of the feel of my cheek against her smooth, soft skin as she held me against her in the warm, southern evenings and rocked me to sleep. In her melodious voice, she would croon or hum as I dozed off into a secure world of peace and contentment.
When I grew older, she taught me hymns and spirituals. Their music remains engraved on my soul. With endless patience, she instilled in me a Christian ethic of universal love and charity, and instructed me in the etiquette prevalent in Beaufort at the time. Early on, I learned never to speak to an elder without punctuating whatever I said with an automatic "sir" or "ma'am."
Of my father I recall less. But I remember the powerful arms that hoisted me to his shoulders. How he taught me to fish and to hunt. How he instructed me in the ways of the world. How he wove local legends into hair-raising tales that thrilled me with fear. How he teased me and how much I missed him when he was away.
Until his death, he, my mother and I lived on family land on Lady's Island in a vaguely defined area known as Land's End. Lady's Island is separated from the county seat of Beaufort on Port Royal Island by a broad expanse of water known as the Beaufort River. It is in fact a wide sea channel, which enabled the two islands to live side by side in splendid isolation except in matters of government and organized religion.
To the east, Lady's Island is cut off from the alternating serenity and fury of the open sea by St. Helena's Island, Hunting Island and, beyond, Fripp Island. To the west, Port Royal Island is separated from Lobeco, the farming settlement on the edge of the continental Low Country, by an arm of the Broad River, another salt-water channel.
Much of the real estate in Land's End was owned by blacks. A philanthropist from Philadelphia had purchased property devalued by the ravages of the War between the States and distributed it to freed slaves, the closest they ever came to receiving the forty acres and a mule promised them by the federal government. From generation to generation, the size of holdings dwindled as tracts were divided among heirs. If family squabbles over ownership developed and, in the dispute, taxes were not paid in a timely manner, the land reverted to the state or, more frequently, was auctioned off at "sheriff's sales." As a result, the black landowners of Beaufort County rapidly caught on to the importance of paying taxes promptly.
The annual trip to the county seat to pay taxes was an adventure as exciting as a journey to the end of the earth, looked forward to for weeks beforehand. My mother's gentle father would appear one morning on the buckboard seat of a horse- drawn, flat-bottom wagon and my mother and I, together with relatives and neighbors, would climb aboard to travel the bumpy seven miles of dusty, sandy road to the ferry boat that would carry us over the Beaufort River.
Across the wide water, the shoreline of the city of Beaufort stretched out in a thin line dissecting the infinite sky from the vast expanse of the sea channel. As the boat approached the landing, white, columned houses on The Point, the historical heart of the city, and on the newer residential area known as the Bluff, rose like fairytale castles, shaded by straight, lofty loblolly pines, shaggy palmetto trees and gargantuan, gnarled live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. In the early morning sunlight, chill mists hovering over the water and low-lying land lent the scene an eerie, surrealistic beauty.
We spent tax-paying day window-shopping, buying staples and small necessities, renewing old acquaintances, chatting with friends and relatives from remote parts of the county, catching up on news and verifying rumors. In the late afternoon, we gathered, exhausted, at the landing to cross the wide water back to Lady's Island. In my grandfather's creaking cart, I would doze off in my mother's arms, as members of our party talked excitedly, ultimately settling down to recount local lore and ghost stories as the sun sank below the skyline and dusky twilight darkened into spooky, moonlit night.
My first toys were discarded wooden spools and cardboard boxes, twigs and stones that my fertile imagination transformed into brightly colored, shiny new vehicles: wagons, trains, automobiles, airplanes. My playmates were preschool children without regard to race, creed or sex. Blissfully unaware of the profound impact these qualities would later have on the course of my life, I was their friend or enemy according to whether they were on my team or the other side's.
At six, I was enrolled in the all-black school on St. Helena's Island. When I discovered the magic of reading and numbers, learning became my favorite pastime. I badgered my parents with questions. While my nearly illiterate father shamefacedly avoided my inquisitiveness, my mother encouraged my curiosity. Tirelessly, she challenged me to read the bible, patiently explaining obscure passages and the meanings of unfamiliar words.
When I was eight, a deputy sheriff did my father the honor of calling on him at home and personally escorting him to the country jail. It seems my father had come under suspicion of various indiscretions and oversights resulting in the disappearance of merchandise from the general store on Bay Street where he had been employed for fifteen years.
The worried look on my mother's brow betrayed her concern. Clasping the Good Book to her breast, she prayed for dismissal of the charges against my father. Despite her impassioned plea, he was arraigned and bound over for trial.
Unable to afford a lawyer, my mother drained the meager savings she had managed to accumulate and conceal from my father's notice and sought out Doctor Buzzard, the chief root doctor of Beaufort County. When she returned home, her mood had noticeably brightened.
At my father's trial, I sat next to my mother. She exuded an air of quiet confidence. Doctor Buzzard sat in the back of the courtroom, his eyes hidden behind the mirror-like purple sunglasses which were the panoply of his profession. He stared fixedly at the judge and placidly "chewed the root," a maneuver guaranteed to result in acquittal, a suspended sentence or, at the very least, a lesser sentence than would have handed down had the good offices of a competent root doctor not been retained.
My mother was not in the least shaken when she saw the sheriff lean toward the clerk of court and murmur with a smile that white powder had been sprinkled over the judge's desk. On the contrary, she seemed to be comforted and to sit up taller, for she knew the spell to be irresistible. Unfortunately, the magistrate was not aware of the powerful forces at work on my father's behalf and sentenced him summarily.
My mother was dismayed. For my part, my budding faith in the omnipotence of Beaufort County's famed sorcerers died then and there.
As a reward for giving his version of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, my hard-working father was sent on a long vacation to enjoy the fresh air of the county work farm, where he perished in an unfortunate shooting accident which occurred as he was making an unannounced departure to attend to urgent business in foreign parts.
At the time this unofficial act of justice separated my father's soul from his body, Beaufort County was being depopulated by the effects of the Great Depression, which had befallen the country a few years prior to my birth and first hit rural communities before culminating in the stock market crash of 1929. Lured by the illusion of escape from socioeconomic servitude, men and women of working age were migrating northward in droves to the bigger cities of the East Coast with high hope of survival if not of making their fortunes.
My father's death increased by one the statistics bearing witness to a dying community.
~End of Chapter One of Lazarus~
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