I read the line twice, and then I read it a third time with my finger under each word. Beside the name of my daddy, Josiah Lee Dunmore, in fresh black ink, were the words “Deed of gift, recorded the ninth day of September, to his daughter Ophelia Mae Dunmore: the pecan grove, the tenant house, and sixty acres of creek bottom, free and clear.” My knees gave out, and Bernice caught me by the elbow and set me in a chair. The room tilted. Somewhere down the hall a typewriter clicked, and I thought, that cannot be my name, because nothing in my life had ever been handed to me except work.
Bernice poured me a paper cup of water. “Augustus came in on a Tuesday last September, leaning on his cane, with his lawyer behind him,” she said. “He sat right where you are sitting and told me to keep it quiet until the funeral was over. He said, Bernice, Josiah Lee Dunmore pulled the truck of my daddy out of the Yazoo mud in nineteen fifty one and would not take a dime for it. I have owed that family for seventy years.” She laughed softly. “He said you would never ask for a thing, so somebody had to hand it to you.” I put my hand over my mouth and wept like a girl.
On Monday, the lawyer, a tired gentleman named Mr. Tolliver, read the will on the porch of the big house. Lorraine sat in the swing with her arms crossed, and Wesley leaned on the rail with a toothpick in his mouth. When Mr. Tolliver reached the sixty acres, nobody said a word. Then Lorraine stood up so fast the swing banged the wall. “That is the road to the highway,” she said. “That is the only way in. We signed a contract with a buyer in Jackson for the whole farm.” Mr. Tolliver folded his glasses. “Then I would call your buyer, Mrs. Whitfield,” he said gently. “The back land is landlocked.”
A line in black ink beside the name of her daddy gave one daughter the weekend to bring Ophelia back to the farm in Greenwood.
I did not gloat. My mama raised me better, and my daddy would have been ashamed. I stood up in my church dress and spoke slowly. “Miss Lorraine, I am not going to put anybody out of anything. You may keep the house, and the barn, and every acre that Mr. Augustus left you. All I ask is three things. You will hang my apron back on its hook by the door. You will say my name to my face, the way your daddy said it. And you will never again push a check through a screen door at a woman who held you when you had the croup.” Lorraine opened her mouth and then closed it.
The surprise came on Sunday at Mount Zion church, when the pastor asked me to stand. Word had traveled, the way it always does in Greenwood, faster than the collection plate. Every family who had ever lived in the tenant houses along that creek was there, children and grandchildren, some of whom had driven down from Chicago and Detroit. Old Brother Isom, who was ninety, took off his hat and said, “Ophelia, your daddy carried half this congregation through the hard years of the cotton price. We have been waiting a long time for somebody to carry him.” The choir sang until the windows rattled, and I did not hold back my tears.
The money consequences came quickly. The buyer from Jackson walked away from the contract the moment his surveyor drew a line on the map, and the developer who had promised Lorraine and Wesley three million dollars withdrew his offer in writing. Wesley had already borrowed against the sale for a lake house, and the bank called the note. Lorraine had mortgaged her condo in Destin for the closing costs. By the end of the month, they were sitting at that kitchen table with a stack of unpaid bills and a long silence between them, and for the first time in their lives, they had to ask me for something.
I gave them what I could. I sold no land, because the land was not mine to sell. It belonged to my daddy, and to the pecans, and to the creek. But I signed an agreement that let their farm trucks cross the grove road for as long as they kept the place, for one dollar a year, paid on the first of January. And my son Darnell, who had told me he had no room, drove down from the city with his hat in his hands. He stood in the tenant house and said, “Mama, I am sorry. I was afraid, and I was wrong.” I told him that fear is a poor housekeeper.
With the first pecan harvest, I started something I had thought about for years. The Dunmore Grove Fund sells the nuts at the Saturday market, and every dollar buys groceries and light bills for retired workers of Leflore County who gave their lives to the kitchens and fields of other people. Bernice from the courthouse volunteers every week with a clipboard. On the first Saturday we helped forty one households. A woman named Mavis, who had cleaned the same bank for thirty years, held a sack of pecans against her heart and said, “Ophelia, nobody has ever given me anything.”
Lorraine came out to the tenant house on a gray Wednesday afternoon, alone. She was holding my apron, the faded blue one, folded as neat as a flag. She said she had found it on the hook behind the back door, right where I left it, and that she had not been able to stop looking at it for two months. I hugged her before she could finish. She cried on my shoulder the way she did when she was seven and fell out of the pecan tree, and I patted her back and said, “Hush now. The dishes will wait.” She laughed through her tears.
That fall, on the first Saturday of football season, I sat on the porch of the big house with the old radio and a glass of sweet tea. Lorraine sat on one side of me, and Wesley, with a toothpick in his mouth, sat on the other. Down at the edge of the pecan grove, the tin roof of my tenant house sang in the first October rain. When the Rebels kicked off, I smiled at the empty rocking chair at the end of the porch. “Mr. Augustus,” I said quietly, “the dishes can wait. The Rebels will not.” And the radio crackled, and the wind came through the pecans.