Good Dirt

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E d is still trim enough to sit on the swing where he and his sister, Kandy, used to play. It dangles from an oak tree that has been in his family for as long as anyone can remember. He listens to the creak of the swing. Remembers his own kids playing here. He loves this yard. Loves his hometown. He drove here seeking relief from the doubts that have been tearing him apart. He was certain he would tell his parents he was ready to move back to Refuge County. But by the time he pulled into the driveway, he realized it still wasn’t what he wanted.

Ed believes there is something at the core of each person that works like a compass. It should tell them who they are and where they belong. But compasses can malfunction, and lately, Ed has been feeling as though the directional needle in his head has gone awry. Of one thing he is sure: More than anything, Ed’s home is with Soh. Only he’s messed things up with his wife. He came to his parents’ house without telling her first. Kept his phone turned off all the way up here.

Ed could have changed his mind while he was still on the Post Road. He could have told Soh he’d gone to the grocery store earlier than planned. They were supposed to be having friends over that evening. He even went so far as to stop and pick up a half dozen oranges, two bottles of wine, and a sack of barbecue briquettes.

After putting the groceries in the trunk, he sat in his car, engine idling where the parking lot met the street, thinking. But instead of turning left to head back home, Ed turned right and just kept on going. The next thing he knew, he was two towns over and heading up Route9 along the Connecticut River. Later, he would see all the unanswered calls from Soh and think of Henry. Had it been this easy for Henry to drive away on the day he was supposed to marry Ebby? When, finally, Ed tried to call Soh that night, she wouldn’t answer. She’d already talked to his mother.

And his mother has been giving him the side-eye ever since.

“These things happen,” Ed’s father said. “You stay as long as you need to work things out.”

His mother said nothing. Her mouth looked tight.

His kids used to have fun playing in this garden. Both his folks and Soh’s parents had yards far bigger than their own. But Ed was always certain nothing made Baz and Ebby happier than when he took them down to the water back in Connecticut. There was a gamy smell that used to come up from the beach as the tide went out. It was the smell of marine life exposed, and when the children were small, they would hover near the door like hungry young birds stretching their beaks out of a nest.

All right, Ed would say, let’s go clamming.

Yaaay! the kids would cry, and skip down the garage steps to grab a bucket and a short rake or stick. The older the children got, though, the rarer those moments were. Moments when there was no tennis, no piano practice, no kiddie groups, no fundraisers, no working late. Nothing pressing enough to keep them from walking down the road and striding across the sand as the tide reached its low point.

Ed nods to himself as he thinks of his great-grandfather. He and his brother were seafarers in their youth, just like their father before him. But the truth is, by the time Ed was born, none of his ancestors had worked on board a ship for nearly a century, and places like Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and New Bedford were no longer dependent on whaling. For Ed’s parents, being at the seashore was a purely recreational pursuit. But for Ed, it became essential.

Every summer, his parents would take the whole family over the water to Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard, which was especially popular with middle-class and well-off black families. There was a particular stretch of coastline that welcomed them at a time when black folks were discouraged from congregating at most beaches in New England. And Ed could not remember a time when his summers weren’t marked by a longing to live on the coast permanently.

When Ed and Soh finally started looking at real estate in Connecticut, they found the search to be simple enough, as most homes were not being shown to African Americans, not even in 1989. Still, there were a few nice possibilities. Later, Soh would tell people she knew which house she wanted the moment Ed pulled the car to the curb. Ed thought that sort of thing happened only in the movies, but no. Soh gazed up at the five-bedroom, split-level home with gray siding and white shutters, and as they breathed in the scent of fallen pine needles mixing with the salt air, she nodded.

“Why there?” Ed’s cousins would ask periodically. Like Ed’s mother, they never did approve of his move to the overwhelmingly white coastal enclave, though he noticed his cousins weren’t above driving down for a barbecue on a holiday weekend. Which was a good thing. Ed didn’t want to lose touch with his family. His roots. He just wanted to live in that house near the beach.

His sister, who still lived in the same county as his folks, never said anything. Kandy would just show up once in a while and hook her arm in his while they walked along the sand. And for this rare quality of hers, this ability to refrain from adding her voice to the perennial debate, he cherished her all the more. She was the quiet one in the family, which likely meant she was the wisest one.

His mother had been more specific than his cousins in expressing her misgivings, even years after he and Soh had moved.

“I am not trying to live like a white man, Momma,” Ed told his mother one day, during one of their more frustrating discussions. “I am living the life that I would like to live. As a black man. Which I have the right to live, by the way.”

“No one is saying you don’t have the right to make that choice,” his mother said.

“Well, good, because I choose to be in that particular house, not too far from the trains, where I can walk down to the shore and sit on the rocks and put my feet in the water. This is fundamental for me. Is that too much to ask? Isn’t this what you and Dad have always wanted for us? The freedom to live where we wish, and to make a living as we choose, no matter how people think African Americans should be living?”

“Now, Ed, you know your dad and I have wanted many things for you and your sister, and we have been blessed because you have had access to it all. But the thing we want most for you is your safety. If you move down there…”

“ Down there, Momma? Less than two hours away?”

But you could not tell a mother who had raised black children in the sixties and seventies, not even in their prosperous, quiet corner of New England, that her children would always be safe. You could not grow up to be a black man, no matter how successful, without knowing, in some quadrant of your brain, that you were more vulnerable to potential harm than other men. You had to watch your back. You had to teach your son to watch his back.

Ed had seen this firsthand, even in his own county. This was the other reason he’d left when he had. The thing he would never tell his parents.