Green Grass

By Frances Rose

The heart of Green Grass spans 1885 in the Deep South to Upstate, New York in 1927. Anna, a key narrator in 1945 tells us the past of her family and friends. The story intersects people who have suffered loss, and abuses inherited down through the decades, and how they chose to handle them. It is also a s

• Language: English
• Publisher: Double J Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781735347936

Frances Rose

Frances was born and raised in Hudson, New York. She spent time working at Brookwood Annex, New York State Training School for Girls, and numerous years in human services. She earned her A.A. from HVCC in Troy, NY, and a BS in Education with minors in English and Psychology from SUC Cortland. Her novella is a complexed story compressed through her poet's voice. Her short stories and poems have been in periodicals and university presses, including her own website that had over 40,000 hits for the five years it was up. Her poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives on an island in Maine.

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Copyright © 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanized, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, except as provided by U.S. Copyright Law.

IBSN: 978-1-7353479-2-9 Paperback

IBSN: 978-1-7353479-3-6 eBook

Green Grass is a work of fiction. Hudson, NY is a real town where the author was born and raised. Some of the locales depicted in the novella are fictionalized. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters apart from some well-known historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents and dialogues concerning these persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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There’s a moment when you have to choose whether to be silent or to stand-up.

Malala Yousafzai

CONTENTS

The Blacksmith’s Fire

Phil’s Pandemic, December 1918

Deeper Branding

Seedy Side of Law

Looking for a Scoop

Sniffing Out the Story7

Customer Service

A Change is Coming

Face to Face, Again

Getting Closer

Undercurrents

Scars Are Revealed

Reaching Out

Pinky’s Busted Windows

Friday Night Delivery

Sharing All

The Grill

Convergence of Past to Present

The Release

Acknowledgements

1945: Monstah, monstah. A long-ago family story welled up deep from Anna’s consciousness. Her late Auntie Sweets had told her the story when she was a little girl. Leafy shadows played on cotton-fibered paper as sunshine dappled through the large window. Anna’s mahogany desk was pushed up against the windowsill as she faced out, pen in hand, she was lost in thought. Gray flecked her wavy hair; whose texture encapsulated the White blood that coursed through her more predominant Black blood. Nineteen forty-five, the world war had ended; but Anna’s was just about to be fought. Putting pen to paper she began to write, cleansing and reorganizing her internal world.

THE BLACKSMITH’S FIRE

C ome here, girl, come sit on Auntie Sweets lap. Anna was seven in 1913 when her great aunt said she was a hundred years older than Anna. Her eyes looked like bulging grapes covered in light gray ash as she felt Anna’s face with her hands. What color is your skin, Anna? Is it g reen?

No. Anna giggled at her very first meeting at the old people’s home where her mother, Esther, had taken her to meet her father’s aunt. Anna’s father, Harold, refused to come. He said he ‘never like the old hag.’

Is it blue like the sky? She rubbed Anna’s arms.

No. Laughter erupted as Anna rubbed her hand where she had been pinched by Auntie Sweets.

Well, honey pie, what color is it?

I don’t know. Anna looked over at her mother Esther who shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

Dark like blackstrap molasses… like your daddy’s or like clover honey, like mine?

Anna had never looked at her skin very much. She had ignored it because her father hated it. It was too white for him. Clover honey, I think.

And it sounds like you’re sad about that? Sweets hugged Anna. I think it is beautiful skin. All skin is pretty to me.

But I thought you couldn’t see? Anna waved her hands in front of Auntie Sweets’ eyes.

Oh, but I could see long ago before these cataracts veiled my eyes… when I worked for the general… when Harold and your Uncle Pinky were just little boys.

Sweets went right in to telling a story about her father and Uncle Pinky.

I was dusting my master’s library, well he wasn’t suppose to be a master anymore but he still thought he was… after the war. Any hoot, I saw a blur of two children running outside.

She said the children also had General Brandreth’s attention when he looked up from his 1885 financial ledger. Auntie Sweets watched him put down his pen and take a harder look out the library window to the lower fields of cotton. She watched him rise up and cross the room, passing a slew of Confederacy emblems lining the wall. She recalled the photograph of Abraham Lincoln with the dried blood of an ex-slave drawn across his bearded face, and a framed picture of Robert E. Lee adorned in a wreath of dried flowers to either side of the windowpanes that climbed from floor to ceiling.

I hated washing those windows every day… and I had hoped he didn’t see that I’d been wiping a bit of that dried blood off of President Lincoln back then. She laughed in the telling of that secret.

On that day in 1885, Auntie Sweets watched the old general take a closer look at the two children running side by side. The two little ones were holding hands.

‘God damn it to hell,’ he had yelled.

Auntie said, I jumped as he beat on that window frame and stormed out of the house to the blacksmith’s shed. He yelled to your granddaddy, loud enough for all to hear on the plantation.

‘Gospel Fulton!’

Tobias, Gospel’s son, laughter was infectious to Lucy as they stepped high and fast along the woods near the working fields. But on that day, eight-year-old Lucy led the chubby five-year-old by the hand. Tobias laughed so hard he had to work in extra breaths to suck in the spittle forming around his lips.

Lucy did not let go of his hand as they played their familiar game. ‘We’re almost to the green grass, Tobias. We’ll be safe from the monster.’ Everyone on the expansive grounds had known their monster always lurked at the edge of the dense woods. The plantation’s front lawn flowed before the children, downhill from the mansion, a carpet of green moisture to tumble down.

After the general had left the house, Auntie Sweets said she had tossed her rag into a bucket and ran outdoors where she heard Tobias and the general’s daughter squeal in playful fears. Several ex-slaves looked up from bended backs. Some shook their heads, some smiled, and some soured on the spot. Sweets heard it all.

‘Monstah, monstah,’ Tobias yelled as he tumbled along with Lucy.

‘That ain’t good,’ an old man mumbled to the ground he felt bent to forever, his gnarled hands pinching cotton. ‘White hand touchin’ Tobias. None right. Nuttin’ but trouble.’

Auntie spoke like it had happened yesterday. Her sister, Victoria, heard Brandreth yell for her husband, as Sweets ran to the lye-making near the piles of dirty laundry Victoria bundled beneath the elms earlier that morning. ‘Oh Lord,’ her sister had said. They both knew that tone of the general. It was never good. Victoria told her sister that her stomach churned, like she had drunk a cup of lye instead of the sassafras tea she made for herself earlier that morning.

Auntie Sweets explained to Anna, that she, Gospel, and her sister, had been born on those deep southern grounds with white blood mixed in their veins. And everyone knew how that blood flowed into their mothers. Victoria had given birth to Tobias, and his older brother Harold. They were both dark-skinned, which Sweets said pleased Gospel. The family were former slaves by law, but they remained plantation workers, still chained to an unchanged South. Sweets, Gospel, and her sister, often whispered to each other, ‘There’s more lynchin’ since the war ended. We ain’t free. When’s that gonna come? In another hun’red years?’

Back then, your grandmother and me watched the General through the steam rising from that lye kettle. Gospel, wearing his leather apron, stepped out from his blacksmith’s shed… his arm was shielding his eyes from the bright day. Then we saw the General point toward the fields. The men walked off together toward the sound of those children playing.

Sweets said it seemed like hours, but it was only minutes when they saw Victoria’s husband drag Tobias up to the shed. Gospel had one of his large hands wrapped around both of his son’s wrists. Behind him the General carried his daughter Lucy.

"My sister’s gut spewed bile into her throat as we waited for the General to go inside his