DUSTY MEMORIES OF A WHITE BLACK GIRL

A DEAL IS A DEAL
Dusty Memories of a White Black Girl
Shirley Moyer

Imagine the look on my father’s face when I barged into the bathroom, his urine strong in midstream. Embarrassed the hell out of him. A four year old, seeing his purple penis - didn’t bother me. I slammed the door and thought no more about it for forty years.


Poems, short stories and a novel I’ve written about this man. He lived his life concealing the fact he was black. How black is black? Black enough to pull a powdered chamois from his rear pocket and lighten a Texan tan. Texas, as Texas could be, drawl and all. Dallas is where he said he was born. His mother, Alice Murphy, was a schoolteacher and his father dehorned cattle. What a crock. Alice Murphy was the one, the only, truth he uttered. His parents were born to slaves, and he was born in Rappahannock County Virginia. It took many decades for me to get there. I didn’t realize I had been there before – in 1941, when I was four:

Gene Autry’s music blared in the bus station. I loved the song. ‘I’ve Got Spurs that Jingle, Jangle, Jingle’. The tune shadowed me and my father, racing into the Greyhound. Spurs played inside my head until the deep green trees along the highways faded and I couldn’t tell what color they were any longer. Looking at Dad’s hands, I mentioned, “Dad, you forgot your rings.” “Not wearin’ them today,” he said. Before falling asleep I hummed the song until he looked over the paper he had no intention of reading. “Toni, enough.” A simple man of few words.

I would remember this day forever, me and my god, on a trip he thought I’d forget. I didn't and would later discover what chunk of the puzzle it played in my life.

A day is a lifetime when you’re four and the ride felt like days. Finally, we got off the bus, at the top of a hill, in the middle of the night. “Wait here,” he said, leaving me to stand by the roadside. I froze, breathless and frightened of someone snatching me from the scraggly trees. With his back to me he walked diagonally across the street then he returned. “Now, I know the way,” he said, as if he’d performed a magical feat in the darkness. (After years of analyzing that incident, I laugh now - his bladder was about to burst.)

Taking the chamois from his back pocket he wiped my face as if it was fine crystal. It smelled like baby talcum; that was the smell of my Dad, baby powder, nice. “Don’t be sticking out your tongue and don’t forget your manners. Hear?” Well, I never stuck my tongue out unless someone needed it and I’d do it anyhow when he wasn’t looking. I’d spit too.


We walked a long way in the gloom with rarely a car passing for reassurance that we were not alone. Distant lights flickering in three small houses made me feel a little better.
“People live there?” I asked, as we got closer.
“Have, for years.” He said.
“Kinda small, ain’t they?”
“Kinda.”
“Where we goin?”
“Church.”
“How far is it?”
“Mile or so.”
“Who we gonna see?”
“Friends.”
“How long we stayin’?”
“Not long.”

His usual five words stopped my inquisitiveness. “Did you bring clean underwear?”

The place was scary. Pine trees galore and houses needing paint. Toilets outside and water had to be cranked from the ground. Lights were dim, they may have been candles or lanterns but everyone looked brown and dusty. They came running when they saw us and said we made it just in time. “She’s in there,” someone said, pointing to a little room.

“Go on,” Dad said, pushing his knee into my back “Walk in.” I didn’t understand why I should have to go first. What if someone would grab me and I’d never see him again?

“Well,” the old lady said, half sitting – half laying in a big fluffy bed, “this must be your Toni. Ain’t she cute?” Her voice trailed to words I couldn’t hear or understand and I thought she had a lot of white hair around her brown face. “Do you want to sleep with me tonight?” “No, thank you,” I answered, afraid Dad would make me.

The next day she was in another room and in a fancy outfit, a golden gown, and everyone was crying. “Why she sleeping in front of everyone?” I asked. No one answered.

We left right after and the trip home seemed just as long and I could see Dad wipe his face pretending to dust it with his chamois. He never liked a shine on his nose but this had nothing to do with a shine. I couldn’t wait to get home, hear him play the piano again and tease my cat, Elbows.

That was the time I made up lies to the alley kids about a trunk full of gowns in my Daddy’s furniture store. The brown lady’s golden gown had made an impression and as I grew older and was moved from one foster home to another the gown became more beautiful and the brown woman became whiter in my mind.

By the time I was a teenager it all had become a daydream, a figment of my imagination, in a life far from normal. My parents had split when I was five. Dad took me and my mother took my baby sister. Being in the furniture business he came in contact with many people. That’s how he found my first Foster Family and my second and third. By the time I was sixteen I’d had enough fostering and run off to live with him. It was a happy day. I felt freedom for the first time. However, my poor father had no choice. I was there and he’d run out of options of what to do with me.

I cherish those days that can only be known to a foster child. His piano playing brought back scenes from the alley days. And his goodness and godliness live with me. I knew he was perfect. He always was. He always will be. Except for one chunk of the Daddy puzzle.

By the time I married, the memory of the dead lady had faded into a picture in someone else’s album. My hectic life raising four children and keeping a needy husband in clean socks was everything I wanted. I was rewarded with good citizens and loving children. They have made me proud. My family is normal in every way. Almost.

After they had grown and I was knee deep in a data processing career the call you never want, came. “We don’t know if it’s a homicide or suicide.”

On the flight to Pennsylvania there was a pain in my shoulder that couldn’t take away the pain in my heart. It tried. I knew he would never kill himself. He loved life and he loved me, more than life.

I recalled our conversation weeks earlier. He asked if I thought he should spend two thousand dollars and put a new roof on the little house he used for storage. “Why not?” I asked, “What else do you have to do with your money?”

“It’s your money.” “No, Dad, it’s your money.” At eighty-seven he was still trying to take care of me.

When Bob, my husband, Mary, my youngest daughter, and I arrived, the hill around his trailer was covered in officers in stages of investigation. Wires poked from the ground. Picture taking, note taking and official chatter stunned me. They said there had been a robbery and he had been murdered.

I entered the trailer, passing a pan of cold Dinty Moore beef stew. Papers were scattered outside his small safe and officers were doing whatever they do. I was in a fog. Dad wasn’t there, they had removed him. Broken glass covered the floor and I don’t know how I managed to gravitate to where he took his last breath. Only parts of him remained. Red bits on the wall. I fell to my knees and pushed my palms over the reddest part. Then, for the longest time, I held my fingers in my mouth. I would never get to feel him again.


Too often I’ve written of my grief, wallowing in it. I buried him a hundred times and threw myself in the grave with him. I looked at the world through mirrors that reflected death and dying and hatred and revenge for his killers. Thoughts of how those murderers should be castrated consumed me. And I wrote until I couldn’t cry anymore.

It took twenty years for me to accept his death. Maybe I never have. It took another ten years, and a guilt trip I’m still traveling, to put a stone on his grave. Ready for the grave myself, I’ve finally realized - he’s gone and he isn’t coming back.

During those many years, and with our computer savvy, Mary and I started a path – down the devastating road of Genealogy. The color of my insides began to change. With every word I’ve morphed into something I never fathomed. A white black girl.

No one read the clues. Dad had no relatives or family. Not one cousin. He said he was an orphan. His name - William Wallace Williamson – born in Texas. Every Williamson in Texas became a dead end. Of course we couldn’t find them. They didn’t exist. He had been in World War One. Where he entered the service was a mystery. Census records were examined as if we were searching for pots of gold. The fact he was born in the late 1800s made the job a little easier.

All the while, a little song and a dusty memory haunted me. ‘I’ve got Spurs that Jingle, Jangle, Jingle.’ I call it a breadcrumb.

Mary called one evening. She saw an interesting message online about a Williams family. They were looking for relatives. Keywords – Alice Murphy and Pendleton Williams. I dismissed it. I’m not a Williams. I’m a Williamson, always have been, always will be. I could ignore it no longer when I received a call from Atlanta. The woman claimed to be my cousin and the person placing the online message years earlier.

In the meantime, Mary was sleuthing information from the message with roots in Virginia. Census records for the Williams family – Alice, Pendleton, seven kids and Willie portrayed a shocking picture. “Mom,” Mary remarked, “I think he was black.” From that moment my life was never the same.

I refused to accept this information as gospel. I’m not sure when it finally sunk in. But our adventure took us across the United States to attend a Williams reunion and research my father’s family in Virginia. In the air I felt on a mission, being sent by some unknown source. Could that old man be guiding me, decades after his death? Arriving in Alexandria I discovered I’d forgotten underwear. I could hear his five usual words and felt him somewhere, watching every move. In the rental car, on the way to Walmart at midnight, we laughed, knowing he was the cause of all of this.


Our first day at the Library, into Census records, was an eye opener. The name, Willie Williams, among his family still did not register as truth. Wrong person. Worse – their color – Mulatto. Denial veiled my thinking, posture and attitude. He can’t be. I can’t be. No. Mary, on the other hand, knew all along. She has a seventh sense; her sixth has yet to be defined.

A puzzle begins to form. Three corners – Rappahannock County, Amissville, and Virginia leading to the fourth – the mansion at BenVenue, where records indicate Alice Murphy worked as domestic help.

Our week in Virginia was spent in the Court House, libraries, cemeteries and traveling the woodsy highways of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Our goal that day - visit the mansion of BenVenue. A morning recollection of a dream - a gigantic red brick building – lingered, during our travel. Turning off the highway onto a country road we looked for the BenVenue Road. Through heavy wooded sycamores and past three tiny, vaguely familiar cottages on the left, we almost missed, on the right, what we were looking for. “That’s it, Mary,” I said, “The house in my dream.” She made a sharp U-turn, jarring me and my memory down Memory Lane. As if we knew where we were going, she pulled into the rocky drive leading to the huge building. A weathered sign mounted in the brick pillar read ‘BenVenue Est. 1805’ and barely legible, through the rust, the name Thos. Eastham.

A man in blue jeans walked down the hill toward us as we parked. “Can I help you gals,” he asked, in a soft Southern drawl.

“This is BenVenue Bed & Breakfast, isn’t it?” I asked.

“BenVenue, alright. Not your Bed & Breakfast. It’s down the road a piece.”

We had come to the wrong place but it was the right place. If it weren’t for the dream we would have ended down the road and missed this critical piece of the puzzle. I recall the moment as my inoculation into the belief of divine intervention.

During this odyssey guilt plagued me: The guilt of a man, the most important one in my life, buried under the crying earth, for so many years, without a marker. Combined with shame, what he would think? My lack of respect for the dead - I rationalized. Simple, he never died. He would live forever, like he promised.

As the gentleman walked toward us, he reminded me of Dad: His gait, the soft drawl of his voice and the comma of Maalox on the corner of his mouth. I explained my grandparents worked in the BenVenue mansion in 1870 and was the reason for our visit. He treated us as neighbors coming to borrow a cup of sugar.

“Where you gals from?”

Simultaneously, we answered, “California.” “Nevada.”

“Long way from home. You by yourselves? How far is it?”

“About thirty-five hundred miles,” I answered.

“Tell me once again, who you know, lived here?”

I repeated what I said earlier, detecting a slight touch of dementia.

“Follow me,” he said, starting up the hill. “Louise knows all about this. But, let me warn you gals – whatever you say, don’t mention the word slaves.”

I was in another world, walking on air, following the gentle man with a slight limp. I caught my daughter’s eye. We shrugged our shoulders and rolled our eyes in disbelief.

Stopping halfway up the concrete steps, overgrown in spurge, he introduced himself.
“By the way, I’m Thomas. Thomas Eastham.” A little further he stopped again, “What did you say your names were?” By the time we reached the veranda he had quizzed us every two steps and I surmised his age as ninety by the speed our ascent.

“Have a seat. I’ll go see if Louise is ready,” he said, stepping behind a set of French glass doors.

Rusty containers of cheerful geraniums were in the oddest of places and hung haphazardly from the balcony. We waited in awe of where we were and how we got there. But especially why. Bill Williamson now had to be known as Willie Williams whether I liked it or not.

Peeling white paint on the metal benches revealed an undercoat of black – ironically mirroring my life. Miles of unkempt acres portrayed a sad picture of an energetic
past when so much depended on the earth for survival. Perhaps, that’s what I wished to believe as a throng of kittens played at my feet.

When she stepped onto the veranda, tying a ribbon around her small waist, I could tell she had been awakened from an afternoon nap. We introduced ourselves, apologized for interrupting her day and explained the reason for our visit. “Williams, yes that name is familiar,” she commented. As the lengthy conversation progressed from Louise and Thomas’ affluent ancestry to the names of the kittens, she invited us to dinner at the old school house, a few miles away. On our way down the concrete steps Thomas made it clear, as little bubbles formed at his mouth - the playful cat insisting to be next to me was his. “Her name is Mary Elizabeth but I call her Fluff Fluff. Louise is trying to lay claim to her.”


The old schoolhouse looked more like a church. I was expecting a run down building similar to the Historical Society, not a majestic structure spreading tall across a vast lawn.

During our meal I noticed a few desks from Dad’s era. While Louise enchanted us with stories, I imagined my father, at one of them, practicing his distinctive cursive writing. I faded in and out of reality, going back a hundred years then coming to the present to hear Louise talk of her teaching days. She couldn’t know that many of the ancestors of whom she spoke were well known to Mary and I, through our diligent research.

Once outside, amidst the glorious green, lily covered hillside, Thomas shook his arm and imaginary brass bell. He bragged of his boyhood job – calling the children after recess. His arm shook the bell long after the subject changed to the willow trees. My mind raced a mile a minute. I could see Dad everywhere. In the trees, at the token desks left for posterity, and I imagined his name carved deep in each of them forever, as Willie.

My afternoon ended on a high as if I’d had several more than my one glass of Merlot. Our goodbyes were warm and sincere and I’d thank them in a special way when I arrived home, just as Dad would have wanted.

But the best was still to come: A party with the Williams clan and a reunion out of Ripley.

Back at the Sheraton, the following day, Mary and I, still in shock and awe, began readying ourselves for the next adventure – dinner in the Officers’ Club at the Andrews Air Force Base. We studied our fingernails and controlled our apprehension by discussing recipes for dishes we would never serve. I consoled myself to the fact that I was about to meet relatives I never knew existed. What if they weren’t the same color or wished they had never met me?


Navigators are marvelous inventions. We named ours Mabel. She took us almost to the doorstep. “You have reached your destination,” she repeated several times. I shivered at the dichotomy of her words. Destination. Destination in life, for the day, forever? The destination I’ve been seeking for decades?

Mary and I took big gulps of air. Show time. Our looks of High Five camouflaged deep anxieties as we made our way into the building of many rooms. I was relieved to find a happy crowd in celebration, many blacks, many whites. I felt a lot better - we wouldn’t be the only white people there. Perfect.

Perfect, until we were told the Williams family was in the larger room down the hall. It wasn’t what I expected. It was a rainbow, a rainbow of every shade of black – Hershey’s deep chocolate to faded beige. I looked for white. The only other white person there was Mary. I was up to my ears in Nat King Coles and Tina Turners and guess what? No one gave a damn. Shocked the hell out of me.

I never had a cousin. Not until now. Now I had a jillion of them and like one cousin said, “It’s our tribe.” And now, after a lifetime of foster homes pretending I belonged somewhere, I really felt like I belonged somewhere – to my tribe. I didn’t care if they wore polka dots and they didn’t care if I was a zebra. No one looked on the outside. This family was beyond carrying the baggage of slavery. They treated us like what we were – long lost cousins. What a party. But it wasn’t over.

The following day, at the park, bronze arms carried in trays of coconut cakes, deep fried pies, lasagna, fried chicken and would you believe, catfish? Lined trash barrels held watermelons chilling in ice and I was in heaven. Pictures of my dad working in a cotton field were on a table with all the hundreds of relatives. Another of my dad and mother when they were married, which I provided, was lost in the menagerie. She was eighteen, fair and innocent, he was thirty years older, his ways set in concrete. No wonder it didn’t work.

I was a hummingbird, flitting table to table, sucking up visions and memories like honey. It’s beyond my understanding how and why my father concealed another part of his life, living, successfully, disguised as a white man. I could not reconcile those who knew the man before I was born, and the stories I was hearing. But most exhilarating - meeting Marion, an old woman who was a youngster when Alice died. She remembered a little white girl asking, “Why is she sleeping in front of everyone?”

It all made sense; the breadcrumbs worked their magic. It’s no surprise why Dad did what he did. He wasn’t the only one. Years ago many felt ‘crossing over’ would insure a better life. The phenomenon continues today. I won’t be part of it. I’m disappointed Dad lacked the courage to remain true to his heritage and culture. I’ll live with his legacy of lies, his unique sense of humor and strive to understand why humans do the things we do. I’ll continue till doomsday to write about him, as I knew him, a loving, imperfect and deceptive father.


Before leaving Pennsylvania an important matter needed to be settled. In previous years, after my father died, I couldn’t bear to see his name carved in stone – gone, final, unacceptable to me. Even if I did, what would I put on it? What name, after all this, could it be? Many years ago, in an old dream, he made me a deal, “Toni,” he said, “The truth for the stone.”

I carried his deal for decades along with the guilt of what is right. A respectable stone now proves he existed to two worlds, Williamson is on the front, that’s how he would want it and although Williams should be on the back I didn’t want to anger any gods he may have coerced, because he was good at it. At last, I can finally say, “A deal is a deal.”

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"Writing is the way I keep those I love alive."....Shirl Moyer

Read my book, "Ginkgoes of BenVenue."