Colors

Colors

We are stories.
This is my meditation on color.

My parents are white.
I am white.
My sister is white.
But when I think about the three or four black and white photographs
That I have seen,
Of my Grandfather Hart’s mother,
Cora Mills Hart,
I wonder if I may also be a little bit black.

I consider her powerful build,
The same crossed arms,
The “Just Try It and See What Happens” posture,
That facial structure,
That fierce workplace look,
Under and radiating from her inarguably white skin,
Like a warning.

I remember hearing that when her husband died,
In Cohocton, New York
“During the tuberculosis epidemic”,
As well as her sister’s husband,
Leaving a throng of unfathered cousins
And little hope,
That she took the whole local bloodline in
To her refurbished chicken coop of a home,
Just as black grandmothers so often do,
And provided a spiritual beacon
And a strong back,
At the turn of the last century,
During a terrible economic time,
For that flock .

And my grandfather,
Who was born in 1897,
Looked very much like his mother,
Who was widowed
When he was
Only seven

During the 1960’s,
We would drive the forty minutes
North-west to Naples, New York
To fish for pike and pickerel and sunnies
In one of the Finger Lakes;
Or in that river,
Bookended by fat vineyards,
Where a boy might wrestle-in a battered salmon
Every once in a great while.

And it was magical;
One of many childhood memories that I share with millions of men,
All around the world.
Fishing with Grandfather.

Sometimes we would stop
At Uncle Ward and Aunt Onnolee’s little house.
The mailbox said “Artlip”.
They lived on the Hornell-side of Naples
Onnolee was my grandmother’s younger sister.
During the Depression, they had to move-in with my grandparents
“Ward didn’t like working, much.”
One Christmas, a customer of grandpa’s bakery
Gave him a two-tied box of one hundred Cuban cigars.
“Your Uncle Ward asked me if he could have a cigar
Every now and again.”
The following April,
The top tier of cigars being almost gone
Grandpa lifted out the separating paper-thin piece of redwood
To discover that there were no cigars beneath
In the empty, lower tier
“I think your Uncle Ward helped himself to a few extra cigars.”

These are the kind of stories I’d hear
While returning from fishing.

And then we would be driving back to Hornell
It would be late-afternoon and cooling
And sometimes we’d stop at a produce stand
And buy ripe fruit for baking
For pocket change
From the vegetable man with the slimy green moss on his teeth
And his surreal, hyena-like smile;
And I would get to wrestle a glass-bottle RC Cola,
Out of one of those old, horizontal, refrigerator-sized, vending machines,
To sip on the way home

And Grandpa Hart’s Olds 98 would
Grip the hills like a champ
With those steep slopes to the right
And no-longer managed apple orchards
“Probably no good for eating.”
Thick and grassy dairy pastures
“Hey, Girls!”
And fruit and vegetable farms
In the verdant valley below.
Pennsylvania-Dutch circular mandalas
on many of the barns.

And on one of those farms,
There were often a score of black fieldworkers
In the verdant valley below.
I saw them at intervals;
Maybe during the summers when I was 6, 7, 9 and 11.
Some women and children,
Straw hats and plaid cotton shirts,
Suspenders,
Bent and harvesting.
I always figured they lived nearby.
And my grandfather would
Invariably say the same thing as we passed,
Looking out the passenger side windows at them working,

“Bret, take a look at your colored cousins.”