Mandy & Charles

From 1955 to 1975 I spent most holidays and summers at my Grandparents house in Charlottesville Virginia. They lived in the woods, just outside of town, on family land. Having grown up in an affluent suburb of New York City, where my father practiced law, I welcomed my time in the woods, and in rural Virginia. That's where I got to know Mandy and Charles, two people I became close to, both from a world that I had ever been exposed to before...

The inscription on the brass bell tells only of its origin. 1705, Mexican, well Spanish essentially. I don’t know any more about it except that it was on my Grandparents dinner table for as long as I can remember. They used it to call Mandy into the dining room. Now that bell sits quietly on a little marble topped table in my house. One ring launches be back in time, 50 years vanish before the clapper can even come to rest.

Less than five feet tall, Mandy was built like a brown pear with an old red bandanna tied around the top. My understanding was that she had no hair under that patterned scarf, even though a pad of dense fir stuck out from under it like a well used Brillo pad. Grandma told me it was something that Mandy pinned to the underside of her do-rag. I wondered about that thing. Was it something she bought? In what store? Did it sit on her bed table at night like a dead mouse? It was just one of many mysteries about Mandy for which I would never have an answer.

She said her name was “Mandy Motin” but I suspect it was Mandy Mortin. No “r”. in her pronunciation though. Not a surprise really, coming from a woman who didn’t know how old she was or the date of her birth. She had never gone to school, couldn’t read nor write and had never seen a TV set until my Grandfather put one in the room where we all gathered at 5pm for “cocktail hour”.

The downstairs TV room was between the kitchen and “Mandy’s Castle” so she frequently passed through it. For the first year after Grandpa placed the TV on Mandy’s flight path, it sat dark and silent. She was afraid to touch it, even though Grandpa had shown her how to turn it on many times. But eventually, after the first year or so, Mandy stretched her wings and turned the TV on. After that the TV was on every day but it was always the same channel and with no sound. It took another year for Mandy to get comfortable with both sound and channel changes. Ultimately she wallowed in TV, of course, and if she was awake, the TV was blaring.

Even then, when I was 12 or so, I wondered what effect a total immersion in TV would have on a 63 year old woman who had basically lived her life in a darkened cave. Before coming to live with my Grandparents as their cook and housekeeper, Mandy had always been relegated to the most menial jobs in homes of white people who had “kept” her since she was little more than a child. Her last job was in the home of a distant relative of ours who was bedridden, taking many years to rot away from cancer. Mandy’s job was to take care of that living cadaver, until the doctor signed off on the paperwork to go ahead and finally put the woman into the ground. For ten years up until that time, Mandy lived in the shadowed corner of that bedroom, quietly shuffling bedpans of waste in the damp air of human decay. No TV, no radio, and, of course, she didn't read. Prior to that horrific void of a life, Mandy had known only more of the same, having been passed from one white custodian to the next since she was a young girl. Never married, never schooled, she had lived a life filled with death and dying at the whim of her white caretakers, little more to them than a mop in a closet.

I first got to know her in the late 1950’s when she became the live in housekeeper and cook for my Grandparents. Although she knew nothing about housekeeping and even less about how to cook, my Grandmother was more determined to teach her than Mandy was reticent to learn. By “housekeeping” I mean she vacuumed. Anything more complicated than pushing the vacuum around after one of us carried it into the room, plugged it in and turned it on, was simply expecting too much of her. She knew almost nothing about anything and she had a very stubborn and nasty attitude to compliment her overwhelming lack of ability. I think my Grandparents looked at her as their “rescue” who had no other place to go and who was, in their eyes, incapable of living on her own.

Spending most summers and school holidays at my Grandparents place in those Charlottesville woods, I often went down to the kitchen and spoke with Mandy. The furnace room opened into the kitchen on one side and that is where she would be. Sitting on a high stool, next to the furnace in that tight  black closet, alone. She didn’t turn on a light or a radio. Just sat there in the black doing nothing. Much like the years spent in the corner of the bedrooms of dying white people. Mandy was damaged goods, like fruit that never even had a chance to ripen before it spoiled.

Glancing to the left as I entered the kitchen, the furnace room door would be ajar if Mandy was in residence. She wouldn’t say a word unless I called her name. then the door would slowly open into the darkness and I could just make out her ebony shape after my eyes adjusted. At first I asked her things that revolved around her immediate tasks: “What are you making for lunch?” “Do you know who is coming over for dinner?” “Have you seen Charles?” Stuff like that. Over considerable time, Mandy’s monosyllabic answers evolved into the rudiments of two-way conversation. Once in a while she would smile if the topic of conversation turned to something that pleased her. She got excited when she thought I may catch some bream for her. She said: “I want to make me a mess.” Meaning a “mess” of fish I guess. Mandy just loved those bream. She would make a huge picnic lunch for me without being asked to do so just to encourage me to spend time down at the dock. Fried chicken, potato salad…real food. I would go grab the fishing gear from the bay in the 4-car garage where it was kept and get Grandpa’s black rubber bucket before starting down the gravel driveway to the dock. Mandy’s picnic basket, fishing gear, black bucket, 22 rifle…heading down to kid paradise to help Mandy make a mess.

The pond was at the end of a mile long driveway. The other end terminated at the mailbox on Rt 29 South just across from Raymond’s gas station and country store. The mailbox was topped with a wrought iron sign that announced one’s arrival at “Shepherd’s Hill Farm.” The name was punctuated by a bright red cardinal sitting in the branches of a Dogwood tree. This was Virginia after all, and the land my Grandparents owned had been in the family for more than 100 years.325 acres of rolling woods with a driveway running stem to stern. Mighty Mouse rock, a granite boulder the size of a grey blimp with its head planted in the ground, That marked the half-way point to the pond. A clearing for the main house and the guest cottage was another 1/4 of the way in, where the woods opened up, and then it was another ¼ mile down to the pond. I usually tried to walk it barefoot. My feet had thick calloused pads by summers end but the large granite stones still threw up sharp edges and never failed to challenge them to a tough man contest.

That’s how I set out for the pond, barefoot and loaded down with supplies. Three hours later I reversed my path and headed back up to the main house complete with Mandy’s mess. A bucket of bream.

I never knew anyone else who ate bream. Even the largest of them were too small and bony to fool with. But like a lot of poor blacks who grew up in the country, dinner was just an afternoon spent with a cane pole away. And she could eat the soft flesh with no teeth.

When Mandy came to be with my Grandparents, Mandy had severe problems with her teeth which had never seen a dentist. My Grandparents took her to their dentist after hours so the white clients wouldn’t see her go in the back door. He pulled all that was left of her rotting teeth and fitted her with a set of dentures. But she hated her dentures and took them out whenever she thought she could eat without them. Bream were perfect for a toothless meal and Wonder Bread dough balls mashed onto the end of a hook were the perfect bait to catch them. Drop the line and watch the bobber go down. Drop the line and watch the bobber go down. Swirling on the surface like a school of Piranha playing “B“ movie extras, those bream were voracious and plentiful. They always put their back fin spikes up when I tried to take them off the hook so I used a large towel to wrap them up and get them off the line and into the bucket. I was a pussy. You should have seen Mandy go to town on them though. She would empty the rubber bucket into her kitchen sink and be oblivious to the splashing and the spikes, picking each one up firmly with her bare hands and cutting the head off with one quick slice. Guillotine operators would have been proud of her quick and efficient removal of heads.

Just prior to her move into the house, Grandpa built a ground floor addition with one bedroom and one bathroom. He called it “Mandy’s Castle”. I never went in there and neither did they. When Mandy wasn’t expected to be available for meals or housework, basically from 7pm to 7am, she was in her castle. I guess she just sat in there too since she couldn’t read and had no TV or radio. During the day when she wasn’t working, she gradually learned to use the TV though. Through the eyes of the TV screen, Mandy’s view of the world beyond hers provided for an interesting perspective. She became quite addicted to soap operas and thought they were real, becoming totally immersed in the tumultuous relationships of “rich” white people. One afternoon it was obvious that she was concerned about something and I managed to coax it out of her: “Mr. Roy is goin to see Miss Betty at the party with Mr. Steve and they's goin to have a fight!” It was pointless to try to tell her that she was watching fiction. She knew better. In the late 1960’s when Neil Armstrong made his “one small step for man…” I asked her if she had watched the moon landing but she dismissed the whole thing as just a “movie show’. She didn’t like that pretend stuff. Mandy did watch the occasional Western though and was concerned when I told her that I had joined the Air Force and was going to San Antonio, Texas, for basic training. She asked me if I was going to “strap on a gun”. Her TV education had taught her that was customary to strap a gun to your hip if you were headed for Texas.

Mandy wasn’t the only help that lived at Shepherds Hill. On the Southern-most part of the land, about 50 acres of cleared farmland had been christened “Charles’s Farm”. Charles, according to Mandy, was a “field nigger” someone of much lower status than the “house nigger” she called herself. She often reminded him of that and treated him poorly. When he was doing yard work and she allowed him to come inside the kitchen area for lunch, she slopped his meal out into the same battered pie tin that she used to feed the dogs. Charles never took offense, grinning and talking nonstop as was his nature. Unlike Mandy, Charles was an upbeat, friendly man who had taught reading and writing in a makeshift black school in town. He was constantly smiling, warm and talkative, and a good friend to me. I walked over to his house almost every day just to see him and hang out. Charles was happy to drop whatever he was doing and welcomed an excuse to play.

One hot, very dry summer day, I mentioned to him that I was having no luck in shooting the groundhog that was digging holes in his back field. Charles didn’t want his horse to step in a hole and break a leg, so he encouraged me to shoot the groundhog if I could. But we were both worried that even if I was able to shoot it, unless I made a perfect head shot, the animal would scurry back down into its hole and just die there. That wasn’t a good plan for Charles who wanted to eat the groundhog. So the two of us, geniuses that we were, decided to pour water down the Groundhog hole and shoot him when he was forced to come out. But here’s the fly in the ointment of that plan…the hole was about a city block from the water, burrowed down in the middle of a field so hot and parched the brown straw covering it looked as though it had never been green nor had a drink of water in years. We didn’t stop to question the plan and plunged right in. Charles hitched up his plow horse to a heavy wooden sled. He still plowed his small vegetable and corn field the old fashioned way, by hand. “Buck” the horse pulled an old metal plow blade through the impossibly rocky soil as Charles sang out “Buck! go Buck, go Buck!” For our flush-out- the groundhog project Buck pulled the sled with a large open oil drum sitting on top of it. We went down into the valley to the spring house and filled the oil drum with buckets of fresh cool water. No easy task in itself, but then we would start back up the hill and out to the groundhog hole to the shouts of “Buck, go Buck!”. Dump the water down the hole and turn around to go back for more. We did that all day and never saw a groundhog. Even from the first oil drum it was obvious that the field was so dry and the hole so large that the water was absorbed immediately into the soil as soon as we dumped each load. But Charles never said anything and neither did I. We just enjoyed the ride, chasing windmills.

Charles had been “given” to my distant great Aunts when he was 12 years old. He had a family in town that thought he would have improved chances at a better life in the employment of the two old maids. They lived in a huge Victorian house that was falling apart by the time I first saw them when I was a little boy. Both were ancient, one in her late 90’s, her deaf sister over 100. I remember going there with my mother for some reason when I was around seven and being just wide-eyed at seeing these two old women in that dilapidated, cavernous house. It was nighttime and their few hanging light bulbs couldn’t have been more than 25 watts each. As upper floors in the house became too ruined by water that seeped in through the leaking roof allowing mold to grow unchallenged, they were abandoned. By the time I met the old maid sisters, they had set up their beds in the ground floor dining room next to the kitchen and lived between those two rooms, never even going outside anymore. With no bathrooms in the house, Charles was in charge of dumping the chamber pot although both women were so skeletal and dried I doubted that they had any water or waste to pass. They smelled of dirty laundry and wore long flowing dresses that had once been white. Wedding dresses for grooms that had never come. Both had heads like the dried apple dolls sold along the Virginia back roads and at any Stuckey’s on our way South, topped by hair torn from a mop that was too stringy and foul to be of use to anyone. They scared the shit out of me.

That was the only time that I saw those women and I didn’t see Charles at all. I do remember seeing an old broken butter churn in a pile of junk as we left, knowing it was no reproduction and that the antique store at home had one in it’s front window.

The old ladies, and that house, were long gone by the time I started going to Charles’s farm regularly. Their house torn down when Rt 29 South was widened, and the cistern filled with trash. A large crawl space under the ruins of the foundation was packed with old bottles and broken plates. I still have a teardrop shaped bottle that I pulled out from there that was manufactured in the early part of the century. It reads: “Christo Cola” “5 cents” and “Sparkling, Delightful” with “Charlottesville, Va” written on the bottom.

There were only two ways to get to Charles’s house on foot. I could walk a half mile down the driveway and then take a direct path that brought me out onto a hillside behind the old barn, or I could take the long, circular  way around through the woods on the old stagecoach road. That path required a walk down past the pond and then up the other side of the hill past the dam. Halfway up was the old stagecoach road. Two parallel scars cut deeply into the earth by wagon wheels rolling West. It was a very pronounced path along the side of the mountain that would often get grown over but never loose its identity. The ruts where coaches had traveled one and two hundred years before were as permanent as the valley below, part of the landscape. I cleared the path of new growth almost every year for a while there. With that done, the walk was an easy trek through hardwood forests that hadn't been cut in a very long time if they had ever been cut at all. A high tree canopy discourage the growth of brush on the ground below. It was park like, some 10 to 15 degrees cooler than out in the open fields, breezy and fresh. For the almost twenty years that I went to my Grandparents place, no one knew that land better than I did. You could have dropped me in by parachute and I would know immediately just where I was in those woods. No one else living at that time could do that, they were my woods.

The Stagecoach road made a circular path around the side of two mountains before it touched the back of Charles’s farm. Half way to his place it opened up to picnic rock, a five story granite bowling ball of a vantage point that looked out over the treetops in the valley below. It was open and sun-drenched, cooled by the breezes you could see coming as they blew their waves along the sea of green leaves and up over the warm granite. If family was visiting, we would gather there, feasting on Mandy’s fried chicken and stretching out luxuriously on beds of lichen, lazily throwing chicken bones into the tops of the trees below.

Often I would find Charles in his house, 600 square feet of unpainted cinder block that sat in isolation on the top of a bald hill surrounded by dry scrub. It was something my Grandfather took pride in building for Charles, who had mostly lived in a dilapidated out building prior to that. He had a small bedroom with a tarnished brass bed in it and his Sunday-go-to-meeting suit hanging on the wall. He didn’t need a dresser, as he either wore his work outfit or his church outfit. One or the other. Next to the bedroom was a storage room with a door to the back, and in the main room was a table, three chairs, a gas stove, refrigerator, and a large sink. The storage room had a tall water tank to hold well water drawn up from the spring house by way of a thick black hose that lay exposed on top of the ground like a blacksnake with no head or tail as it slithered down the hill, past the outhouse that we stole and put up for Charles, and ended in the spring house. “Spring house’ is really a misnomer as it was actually just a deep spot in the stream that ran through the valley there. Charles had put a roof over it to keep out the leaves and debris. A long handled steel ladle hung on a peg to the right as you stooped down and entered, encouraging all to take communion. On some of those devilishly hot Summer days the shaded cool of the spring house and the clear holy water it guarded offered a transforming, a purifying, a cleansing experience…a little walk with god as much as in any of the great cathedrals of England I was destined to visit many years later..

Charles’s house smelled of beans and ham hocks and was decorated with countless fly strips corkscrewing down from the ceiling encased in their winged victims packed together tightly like mummified revelers on a Times Square New Years eve. With no air conditioning, Charles kept the doors and windows open so that every fly that especially loved ham hocks and beans came visiting. He kept the pot simmering all day, every day, and added more meat and beans as necessary. That, and a refrigerated six pack of Yoo-Hoo chocolate drinks from Raymond’s store, kept him going. He kept a fly swatter on the table and flattened each fat bottle fly with a precise and decisive swat if it made the mistake of landing on his vinyl table cloth. When the table cloth got too thick with fly jam, Charles added another vinyl table cloth over the old one. I always thought that you could cut a sandwich sized square out of those vinyl layers, it would be the his version of some kind of multi-layered pastry from hell.

“Bat” was Charles’s dog. He looked like “Old Yeller” from the popular Disney movie of the day. Like Charles, he was very friendly and always happy to see me…wagging his tail furiously and bending his body into a tight curve while walking in circles and grinning with one side of his mouth. A sturdy, short haired dog, with lumpy tan hair. His lumpy coat was due to the huge population of fat gray ticks that covered him. In the summertime Bat’s coat was more like a cluster of sickly gray grapes packed gently in tan fir to prevent breakage. I often brought over a large cleanser sized can of tick powder and dusted Bat down from nose to tail. Ticks or no ticks, Bat didn’t seem to care either way.

Charles didn’t buy dog food so Bat lived mostly on rats he caught in the old barn, and any other varmints too slow to escape his hunt. Certainly he was a better groundhog hunter than I was. One summer, 22 rifle in hand, I spied on a groundhog hole daily, hoping to get lucky and catch Mr. Groundhog out in the open where I could get a good clean shot. As I walked up over the hill where I knew to crouch down and look toward the center of a small field where his hole was, I saw dirt flying up from the flat ground in all directions, building up a circular moat of fresh clay as it splattered back down. I was dumbfounded. I knew that groundhogs couldn’t throw dirt five feet into the air like that, it’s not how they dig. But something was down in that hole throwing the dirt out high and fast. As I approached, I realized that it wasn’t even a hole anymore, it was a ten foot deep, cone shaped, pit. And who was at the bottom of that pit? That’s right, it was Bat. He was digging furiously with his front legs and biting big chunks of dirt out with his mouth, super excited and apparently getting close to his lunch, and dinner, and breakfast, and lunch again. Pausing to look up and smile at me with that odd crooked smile, Bat’s nose and mouth were one big clump of red Virginia clay. Although I didn’t stick around to see the inevitable, that particular groundhog was never seen again. Bat just lay around in the shade for a week and did no dog work at all other than letting his own internal peristalsis push groundhog parts through his digestive tract and out into scary looking piles of sharp bone and a few small feet with bristle hair intact.

When it was time to butcher one of the few hogs that Charles fattened every year, Bat ate well for days on entrails, feet, skin and skull. Those hogs were half wild, kept in a well shaded makeshift pen of old fence slats and big pieces of multicolored tin that had once encouraged drivers on Rt 29 to chew Red Man Tobacco. Bat also feasted on chicken parts when it was time for them to loose their heads and go into the bean pot. Coming from a very white suburb of New York City where my father practiced law, this was all wonderful stuff for a boy from that pasteurized world of Wonder Bread America. And when it was time for a chicken to be abducted from the yard and brought around back to have his head removed, I was there. Charles would laugh as the chicken flapped and squawked in protest until the ax did its job. Then the body continued to run around and put on a show, still flapping its wings, but now without the squawking. That part always amazed me, to see those chickens continue to run around without their heads for a few final minutes of headless, mute protest. Bat hung around politely, knowing that there was a fresh chicken head in it for him. Once when Bat caught the head tossed in his direction he chomped down so hard that both chicken eyeballs popped out of their sockets and flew out of the sides of Bat’s mouth simultaneously.

Grandma and Charles built stone fences and walls all around the main house, along much of the driveway and even down around the dock at the pond. About three feet high and two feet wide, the fences were made entirely of hand-fitted stone that Charles picked out of the woods and wheel borrowed down to Grandma. She knelt on the ground and fit them together like jigsaw pieces. Central Virginia is very rocky and has been used for farming since colonial days so similar stone walls and fences are seen encircling properties all over Charlottesville. None of them used any kind of mortar and most look just as good today as when they were built 200 years ago. Grandma’s walls were only around 50 years old when I last saw the place, but they look just as good as when she and Charles worked so hard and built miles of them around the property all those years ago.

Given the fact that I visited regularly when school was out for holidays or summer time, Grandma and Grandpa often left me in charge and went to a favorite spot of theirs in Mexico. San Miguel Allende was like a second home for them. That’s when I became lord of the manor by default. Mandy made sure that Charles and I obeyed the rules about how we were allowed to interact when we were inside the house in her area. So if Charles was over at the main house digging and dumping piles of stone to await Grandma’s return, he would come inside for lunch. Since he and I were buddies, I wanted to eat lunch with him but Mandy would have none of it. Charles was to sit at the utility table in the TV room and I was to sit in the formal dining room next to it, the door between the two rooms shut tight.  Mandy slopped Charles in the tin pie plate that I doubt she even washed after feeding the dogs the night before. He got leftovers that no one else had eaten that were destined to go to the dogs if Charles didn’t finish them first. I was served at the big mahogany table decked out with full linen, silver place settings and good china. I could see Charles through the window in the door between the two rooms, eating with a large spoon, laughing, talking non stop as Mandy hovered over him, scowling and dark. Her moods were just water off a duck to Charles. But I wanted to sit with him rather than by myself in those stuffy upholstered chairs surrounded by dark antiques whose lineage Grandma offered as frequently as that of our own ancestors. Genealogy was Grandma’s passion and her immediate question upon meeting anyone for the first time was always; “who are your people?” But I didn’t want to sit and eat with the ghosts of my people and jealously watched Charles relish every spoonful of his questionable lunch, knowing that there was a lot more fun going on in that room than there was in mine.

Charles was impervious to Mandy’s gloom, or the world’s for that matter. He was a happy guy and loved to talk, even when he was alone. He was that tree in the forest that did make a sound even when there were no ears to hear. It wasn’t unusual for me to walk over to his place and find him by simply standing still and listening for his chatter. If I couldn’t hear anything, Charles had gone out. Probably in his old pick up with the bald tires and the broken back gate. On Sundays he went to church all day. As is true with many rural black churches, Sunday was a social day filled with food and laughter that took parishioners all afternoon to get their fill of. If Charles was gone during the week it was probably just a run down to Raymond’s store. On Saturday nights he went into town to go “spoonin” with one of his many girlfriends.

I believe Charles held a position of some status in the black community given his involvement in his church, his connections to friends and relatives in town, and his own situation at Shepherds Hill. He was viewed as a man of substance. My Grandfather had given him title to twenty five acres of the land we all referred to as “Charles’ Farm”, the same land Charles had worked since he had come to live with the two old maids when he was just a boy. As he had for Mandy, Grandpa set up a bank account for Charles and deposited wages in it every month. In the past, neither Mandy nor Charles had ever been paid for their work, they earned their keep, room and board, but no money. If there was something they particularly needed the previous white caretakers would buy it for them. Grandpa insisted on wages though. Both he, and they, were getting older and he foresaw the need for a retirement plan. Their bank accounts built up substantial savings over the months and years, so that they both appeared rich among their peers in the black community.

Charles was thrifty and didn’t really want much while Mandy would spend every dime she had if she had been allowed to do so. Grandma often took her into town on Sunday afternoons so she could buy things at Woolworth s. A pint of perfume, a pink scarf…she couldn’t buy useless junk fast enough and seemed to think that money was something that you get rid of quickly if you happen to have any at all. Once a month Grandma drove Mandy to Standardsville about 30 miles away. That’s where Mandy grew up and still had some family. Her brother had passed away, leaving Mandy a shack of a house that had fallen into disrepair. Over the years, Grandpa had work done to make it habitable for Mandy’s eventual retirement. A new tin roof, new well, new outhouse, new flooring for the porch…it was Mandy’s castle away from her castle in Charlottesville. On her monthly visits, Mandy would sit on her porch and receive visitors. Neighbors and relatives came to pay their respects to the lady that had done so well for herself (she had money). Mandy lorded it over all of them and gave out Woolworth trinkets like beads to Indians on Manhattan Island. She couldn’t wait for her monthly opportunities to show everyone what a grand lady she had become and, conversely, what lowly scum they themselves were. She just wasn’t a nice person but given her background, I guess that’s no big surprise.