Soh
Soh
S oh is convinced there is something her husband isn’t telling her.
There have been some rough days, lately, between them, and she isn’t sure how to handle this. Soh and Ed used to have a way of communicating. Even after they’d lost Baz, they managed to muddle through together. They had their daughter to thank for much of that. Watching her grow. Watching her live! Because of their daughter, Soh and Ed still had love and laughter and pride in their home, even after everything they’d lost. And wasn’t that something? In the beginning, Soh used to wish that she had been the one to die, instead of her son. That she had been the one at home. That her children had already left the house. Now, she thinks, what she really wants is simply for her son to be alive.
Why should she have to wish for one thing, to be spared the pain of the other?
After Ebby’s wedding, or, rather, the wedding that never was, Soh began to see a kind of backsliding in her husband’s attitude. Outwardly, he encouraged Ebby to keep moving forward. Still cracked his jokes. Cussed at the sound of Henry Pepper’s name. Still took his morning walks on the beach, then went to work in his study. But it was as if Ebby’s disappointment in love had caused him to lose ground. Ed had been robbed of the chance to ferry their daughter through this important rite of passage. A union of love. The beginnings of a new branch of the family.
And now Ebby has taken off for France, and Soh and Ed don’t seem to know what to do with themselves.
Soh, typically a clear-eyed calculator in her legal work, has always been the one to worry more at home, while Ed has been more of a what can we do now? kind of person. Ed was the one who had booked them into a hotel on the night that Baz died. Later, he had dared to go back into the house alone to pick up a few personal belongings and to take stock of things for the final move, while Soh couldn’t bear the thought of walking into the building. Instead, she wrote lists for Ed. What to look for, what to consider. They had handled that awful period differently, yet together, somehow.
But even before Ebby left, Ed had less to say to his wife. He was spending more time down in the basement by himself. Tinkering with Lord knows what. Spending more time walking on the beach. Alone. He even left town a couple of times on his own, saying he had consultations down south.
“Consultations about what?” Soh wanted to know.
“Just business,” Ed told her.
And Soh has been wondering about that. Could Ed have found someone else? Is that what this extra business is? Another woman who is easier to be around? A relationship without the history that she and Ed will always have, for better or worse? Soh leaves the house more, to give him space. She goes to volunteer meetings, to choir, to the gym. She’s almost always kept a legal client or two, and that takes up some of her time. But the more she stays away, the less Ed seems to notice. Hardly asks her where she’s been or when she is coming home. Doesn’t ask her, anymore, what she is reading. Doesn’t ask her, does she want to go to a film or a concert? No, she has no doubt. Whatever it is that Ed isn’t telling her, it’s something important.
Of course, there’s plenty that Soh doesn’t tell Ed. This is the only way she knows to be a woman in this world, by leaving much of who she is unsaid. This is why she still sees her therapist. To be able to say certain things. To admit how bitter she feels at what happened to her daughter on her wedding day. Soh had dreamed of a happy ending for her baby. She had wanted her daughter to marry for love, and she’d been open, even, to accepting someone from a different background.
“Is he white?” Soh’s mother had asked her when she’d told her that Ebby was getting serious about a certain young man.
“Well, Momma, most folks around there are white.”
“My point exactly,” her mother said, pointing an elegant, pink-lacquered nail at Soh. “How could he not be? With you raising my granddaughter in that little gated community on the beach.”
“It is not a gated community, Mom.”
“You know what I mean. It might as well be.”
“Plus, who are we to talk, Mom?” Soh said, sweeping one arm around her mother’s gleaming kitchen. “Look at your house.”
“Oh, so now this is my house, is it?” her mother said, smiling. “You mean to tell me you didn’t grow up in that room up there?” Her mom pointed at the ceiling, in the direction of Soh’s childhood bedroom. Soh tried not to smile. She wanted to be irritated with her momma.
“You know what I mean, Momma, you’re deflecting the argument,” Soh said. “You are criticizing where I live as if you do not live in an eight-bedroom, five-bathroom home that tour guides refer to as a manor.”
It was in moments like these that Gwendolyn Bliss showed herself to be the superior debater of the two. Her voice lost that hint of a smile it usually had, dropped an octave, and became so soft it was barely audible. Because it was not the volume of a voice but the sharpness of its logic and its emotional weight that could tie up an argument. She tipped her head slightly, as if to flirt.
“You, Isabella Bliss, know exactly why my great-grandfather added those extra rooms. You know the story of his large extended family, where they came from, and how all those so-called relatives were fugitives from an unjust law, hiding in plain sight.”
“Yes, Momma,” Soh said.
“Furthermore,” her mother said, “you know very well, Isabella, that when I say gated community, I am not referring to monetary wealth, I am talking about exclusivity of another kind.”
“And our being there is helping to change the racial balance,” Soh said, cringing at the petulant tone in her own voice.
“Hardly,” her mother said. “You’re still the only ones on that stretch of shoreline, aren’t you?”
Soh felt like a little girl around her mom. Chastised. She knew better than to go any further down that rocky road. Still, it wasn’t fair for her mother to bring this up. Again, and again. Yes, Soh was proud to know that her ancestor, back in the 1800s, took runaway slaves into his home and forged papers to camouflage them as siblings and cousins. This did not mean that Soh had to remain tied to that house for the rest of her life.
“I love this old home,” Soh said, “and I am proud of our family’s history in Refuge County and proud to be married to a Freeman. And, yes, I wish I had more black neighbors. But if my great-great-grandfather worked so hard and risked so much to flout the Fugitive Slave Act back in the day, then am I not living out his legacy by insisting on raising my family wherever I choose?”
“Your father and I choose to live out that legacy by staying put.”
“You and who, Momma? It’s only our family, anymore. Almost everyone else has gone to Boston, or D.C., or Atlanta, or what have you.”
“But they moved to mostly black neighborhoods, baby. Places where you find other black families.”
Soh had thought about this often. Stay put or go? She thought about it whenever she sat down to counsel teenagers of color about ways to improve their prospects of getting into competitive law schools. For Soh, the point was not that she had moved to a place where other African Americans did not live, and her daughter had been the only black student in her class. The point was that other black people might not have access to the wealth and social leverage that would allow them to even consider the choices she’d made. And if they did, they still might not be welcome.
Her mother’s principles aside, the house was way too big for one person. Soh had tried to convince her mother to downsize, but her momma had refused. Where, her mother always asked, would people sleep when they came to visit and drank a bit too much to make the drive home? Or got snowed in? Where would the grandkids hold their slumber parties? And what about the tourists? People needed to know about the black families of Refuge County. Especially when there were so few of them remaining.
Soh felt her sense of guilt heating up the sides of her face. Her mother, still in that big house alone. At least her cousins lived close by. Ed’s people, too. And it was true, there was always someone stopping by, sitting down for a meal, lolling out back on a deck chair with a glass of something perched on the flat wooden arm while the children ran around the yard, burning off the excess energy that came with growing bodies.
Soh’s mother, now, softened her posture.
“Do you at least like the young man?” her mother asked.
“Ebby’s happy, Momma. My little girl is happy.” She felt her eyes growing prickly around the edges. No tears, she willed herself. “And happy is all I really care about after everything that girl has been through.”
“Come here, baby,” her mother said.
Soh kept her lips pursed as she approached her mother, but her mom had that light, floral hug that could melt a person’s resolve. It was one of her secret weapons. Soh had inherited a different strength from her mother: her determination. She had made the move to the Connecticut coast because it had been her husband’s dream but also because she, too, had wanted to live there. She had stayed in the area after what had happened to Baz. So much of Soh’s life was beyond her control. Whenever she could, she would keep on doing things the way she wanted.
In time, Soh’s mother grew to like Ebby’s fiancé well enough. Henry was, after all, the likable type. He was very good-looking, there was no denying that. He did not, thankfully, have one of those flat behinds, but a boxy, sporty back that gave him a look of substance. And Henry was very kind to her mother when she finally came down to meet him the first time. You would have thought he’d been raised in a black family. Helping Momma out of her coat. Pulling out her chair at the dinner table with a slight bow of his head. Fixing a plate for her. Calling her Mrs. Bliss.
Soh noticed that Henry laughed readily, but never too loudly. And he looked at Ebby in a way that made Soh’s heart swell with hope. Still, Soh harbored a secret doubt. She worried that Henry might not have the backbone needed to go through life with her daughter. Henry had always been propped up by the social and financial scaffolding of the Pepper family and he had never faced a personal trauma like Ebby’s. Soh worried that Henry might be fine only until truly put to the test. And marriage, if nothing else, had a way of putting a person to the test.
Looking back, now, Soh is grateful that Ebby didn’t end up staying with a man who, it turned out, did not have the decency to break up with her in person. Thank goodness Soh and Ed didn’t become tied to Henry’s parents for life. Can you imagine? Those Peppers should have tracked down their son after he disappeared and pulled him by the ear to Soh’s front door. At the very least, the Peppers should have shown up alone once they realized that he had run off without warning. Instead, it was left to Ed to telephone the Peppers that morning to find out why they were running so late.
There were many families like Henry’s. People who had perfected the art of shying away from blame. They did not understand that as a result of Henry’s failure to accept his responsibility in this matter, the Freeman family, automatically, would be considered suspect. Because this was the subtext of every question that had been asked in the media since the afternoon that their son was killed, eighteen years earlier: What had the Freeman family done to bring this upon themselves?
What had they done? This was the question that hung in the air above every black family that had ever run into misfortune. And not only. It was a subtext understood by so many women, of any color, who had ever been harmed. It was the question that few dared to ask out loud but many had in mind, with regard to families that struggled to pay the bills. It was the question asked by those who wished to avoid acknowledging that responsibility might lie elsewhere.
What did you do?
Henry’s parents finally showed up one week later, making the expected noises about “deep regret and embarrassment” that their son had left Connecticut but stressing that it would have to be up to “the children” to sort things out between themselves. And Soh did what she needed to do, cloaking her rage in chilly courtesy. Soh pulls a prayer from deep in her gut, now, and sends it upward. She prays that she will never lay eyes on Henry Pepper again. Except, maybe, once. Just long enough to walk up to that boy and slap him in his face. Which, of course, is just a fantasy. Soh would never do such a thing.
Because this is what it means to be Isabella “Sojourner” Bliss Freeman. Daughter of one of New England’s oldest and wealthiest African American families. Top honors at both universities. Attorney and mother. Lifelong volunteer. Champion fundraiser. Still the only black woman in her neighborhood, after all these years, with all that this unfortunate statistic has entailed. Alas, Soh needs to be above slapping that superficial fool in his face, because there are people who are just waiting for a sign that a woman like Soh is beneath them. There are people who still believe that her family and her pride are worth less than theirs.
People who believe that her history is not their history, too.