Nigger fate.

Almost a year ago, just before my dad died, when his bladder cancer had already spread through his body, he insisted that we go to the Metropolitan Museum. He wouldn't explain why. He flew up from North Carolina without my mother. At the museum, we stood in front of an ancient Egyptian relief depicting a ceremony presided over by the Pharaoh Akhenaton and his queen, Nefertiti. "Well?" he said. He was rubbing his chest with both his hands like he used to when he was excited. By then, he had grown a scruffy beard to mask his gaunt cheeks and graying skin.

"Well, what?" I replied.

"What do you see?"

"Two Egyptian monarchs in profile. A lot of servants around them."

"Look closer at those profiles."

Then I saw what he meant; my mother looked like Akhenaton. They had the same almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and long, looping neck. We laughed. My dad said, "I first noticed the resemblance when I was a music student at N.Y.U. I'd seen your mother dance up in Harlem and was already madly in love." He held my shoulder and said, "I just thought you should know these things ." As he took his hand away, he caressed my cheek. Time ceased its flow as we stared at each other; we were both aware that we would soon be separated.

My dad died when he was just 58. I'm an only child, so it's just me and my mother now. I wasn't ready.

My mother had studied ballet as a girl growing up in Charleston but switched to modern dance after moving to New York when she was twenty. As the story goes, my father finagled his way backstage after a performance of the Harlem Dance Ensemble at the Apollo Theater and presented her with a black silk rose. It wasn't love at first sight for my mother, but my dad was persistent.

My parents were married in Charleston in June, 1958. My mother was twenty-five; my father, twenty-three. They moved into an apartment on West 84th Street.

In 1961, my mother joined Alvin Ailey's American Dance Theater and my father started playing violin with the Brooklyn Symphony. I was born August 21, 1966, in Roosevelt Hospital and was given the name David, after my father's grandfather. My mother resumed her dance career two years later and stayed with Alvin Ailey until 1970, then started giving private classes. In 1977, just after I finished fifth grade, the three of us moved to Durham, North Carolina; my parents had accepted teaching positions - my mother at Duke, my father at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. My dad also played in the North Carolina Symphony until he started getting real ill in 1990.

When I was very small, I got to watch one of my mother's performances from the wings of the stage. Maximilian, one of her friends in the troupe, lifted me up onto his shoulders as she was dancing and told me, "Your mamma ruffles the air behind her when she walks. And when she jumps, she splits it open. You're a lucky boy."

After my dad died, my mother lost these powers. I'd never before realized that it was love which gave them to her. These days, she only leaves the house to give dance classes and go food shopping at Kroger's. At night, she boils up some pasta and eats it with canned sauces while watching television. "Just give me time," she keeps saying. Then she warns me not to give her encouragement. "I just can't get used to anything less than the excitement I had with your daddy. When I was with him, I felt that I was at the center of the world."

I managed to avoid depression myself until three months ago. It was then that my first novel was returned to me by my literary agent. He enclosed a two-line note saying that he'd shown the book to nine publishers and thought it hopeless to keep trying. Editors, he said, kept finding the novel either "too filled with complicated characters, like a Russian novel," or "too rough - too crude in language and tone." How could I help feeling abandoned and betrayed? I'd spent more than three years researching and writing the novel. It tells the story of two slave families during the 1840s and '50s, one living in Arkansas and the other in South Carolina. I had based the book on twenty-seven letters written by a distant ancestor of mine on my mother's side named Evelyn Carter to an uncle of hers, George Washington Robinson. The letters had been discovered in a Gump's shoe box inside the linen closet of Charlotte Robinson Hilfer's house in Charleston, after her death in 1979. Charlotte was my grandmother Patricia's cousin several times removed. If our family's oral histories are to be trusted, she was also the great-great-great-great granddaughter of George Washington Robinson. Since nobody else in the family was very keen on having the letters, my mother snatched them up. Before my agent's note had arrived, I'd been halfway through the first draft of a follow-up novel about my great-great grandmother's oldest sister, Cecilia. In 1893, when Cecilia was only twenty-two, she'd ridden in a covered wagon from Arkansas all the way out to Portland, Oregon. There, she'd married a white logger of Norwegian ancestry and had four surviving children. Their descendants, distant cousins of mine, lived mostly in Eugene and Seattle. The Eugene half of the family had held onto the diary Cecilia had written on her journey. My novel was going to be structured like a Bruce Chatwin travel book, with vignettes about what Cecilia discovered along the way and how she felt. I couldn't see any point in working on it if there were no chance that my first novel was going to be published. I hadn't been able to write a word in over two months. And I suddenly missed my father so much that all my emotions other than hopelessness seemed faked.

I'd kept all this from my mother, but finally told her because she sensed I was shutting her out of my life. She told me to come to Durham right away because she had something important to show me. "I don't know if it'll cheer you up or make you more upset," she said. "But you'll want to see it." She wouldn't tell me what it was. She and my father have always been nuts about surprises.

I work as a graphic designer for a small ad agency, and my boss is good about giving me time off when it's really necessary. So I got a week off without too much fuss.

My mother, wearing sweat pants and a Duke t-shirt, picked me up at Raleigh-Durham airport. She smiled real big when she saw me. We hugged, and she started crying. We walked arm in arm to her car. She looked tired but good, had clipped her hair real short and stopped dyeing the gray patches in front. When we were ready to head off, she squinted at herself in the rearview mirror and wiped the tears from her cheeks. "Lord," she sighed, "I'm getting old," adding a Southern drawl to her words as if that might convince me that she was really over the hill.

"Cut the Carolina grandma act," I said.

She smiled like I was evil, then smacked my thigh. "That's for staying away from me for four months!"

At home, she sat me down on the sofa in the living room and said, "Wait here a second, baby." She went upstairs, and when she came down it was with one of the letters from Evelyn Carter to George Washington Robinson.

"Which one is it?" I asked.

"You've never seen this one," she told me.

"What?" I was suddenly furious. "I thought you showed me them all. I sure as hell needed them all to write the book! Why'd you hold one back from me?!"

"Hush a minute! I kept only one letter from you. And for a good reason. But now you can read it."

"Why now?"

"Just read it and then we'll talk."

The letter, dated July 7, 1855, was one of the last Evelyn Carter had ever written.

Dear Uncle George W.,

Tragedy. Does it sneak up on you in South Carolina, too, or is it only like that in Arkansas? Hereabouts lately it seems that we got tragedy like stalking cats. First there was my daddy's sickness and death. Then Old Finley's accident. All of which you know about if you received my last letter. That's a hint for you to write, in case you finding yourself too trapped in your own troubles to look underneath the words I'm using for what I got hidden down there. I ain't heard nothing from you these past seven months, and now I got to tell you about Digger and Elvira. Sorry I got to tell you all this, because I know you liked Digger when you visited back in May, 1837. He was a little boy then, the proud-faced one who carried Little Henry's butterfly net like it was a flagpole, the one I chose for the reading and writing. I ain't had much reason to tell you about him these past years because everything seemed to be going along like a simple melody for him. Then, when things started going wrong and trouble done buried itself in him, I didn't have the heart to pass on his bad fortune to you. But now that the worst has happened, I ain't got no choice.

It all began last Tuesday at the cook-shack. You remember where it is - you walk down the oak pathway from the big house toward Christmas Creek. Elvira was serving up supper, and though the smell of her pea and porkfat stew was a powerful discouragement to even the hungriest laborer, the girl's face done lit up the place. You never met Elvira, because she ain't been even so much as a thought when you were here. But as I said to you before, she was a bright, honest girl. She was just seventeen when all this happened, skinny and healthy as a summer weed. Her step was quick with happiness and a smart answer was always hiding inside the pink of her tongue. She had big goldfish eyes, a long lean neck - the kind of neck the purest singers always seem to have. Uncle George W., I tell you one thing, that child's voice just kept getting finer and finer. Of late, it could reach all the way up to heaven and grab the angel Gabriel by his hand and pull him right on down to our crooked old church before you could find time take a breath in astonishment.

The men said it felt good to pinch her behind when you passed, not because it was especially big - it was anything but that - but because you could always count on a yelp and then her unflinching warning, "You want this stew in you or on you?"

This kind of boy and girl playfulness increased a bit of late because she finally started to get some meat on her in all the right places. And I seen more than one man covered with peas and pork-fat. I liked the girl. I should have tried not to because she was beyond my help, but I did just the same. I remember you and mama both used to say, "Never love anything beyond your protection." Only much later did I realize that expression had to come down to you from your mama or daddy and the times before slavery, because we all know that there ain't nothing safe inside a slave's or slave-woman's protection!

The row of men sitting at the table were enjoying Elvira dishing out the bowls of food, and the cruelty of our Arkansas sun and the future the white folk got planned for our children and our children's children were forgotten for a moment in the pleasure of a mouthful of food. Sometimes I think that if God ain't allowed us food, our lives would be one misery after another without no break at all. And don't you talk to me about love! Yes sir, Uncle George W., I still believe in God, but not love. And no, they ain't the same thing. Love is made for white folk and for slaves bred in fantasy tales. I ain't got much patience for either of these the older I get.

While Elvira was sewing up lunch, Digger came up behind her real quiet like and had both hands around her waist before she could jerk away. You of all people know how men are when they want you but ain't about to declare themselves, but Digger was sweet on her, that was one thing I knew for certain.

"Get them killer hands off me before I dunk you in the stew!" she shouted.

The men laughed, but Digger got upset, just how upset I only realized much later. Weaver said he done seen it in the young man's face. Weaver, as you know, is a hunter, and he notices little movements that other men ain't able to see. And I know why Digger felt so bad - because of his hands, you see. They were his fate. You know the first time he ever realized he had hands bigger than a normal man rightly should? He was working in the fields, just a boy of eleven. Mr. Arthur Broadman, a mud-minded slavetrader and friend of Big Master Henry's from Charleston, had been riding through the fields and made him come up to him and hold them up in the air. He said to Big Master Henry, "The hands on this nigger boy could choke the life out of a horse."

I was stooping over some cotton nearby and heard that. Yes, I did. And I know the worry that creased that boy's face, because you can bet he was thinking, I'm a slave and I ain't even a normal one. He was clever too, that Digger, and maybe he was even thinking, Them white folk got plans for me.

Even our babies know that bad things happen when white folk got plans for you.

The seed of his fate had been freed into the soil that day. A seed which would lay dormant for seven more years, but which he knew would come to grow and bud and finally flower. We ain't allowed love, as I say, but we sure as hell get a great load of fate. Nigger fate, my daddy's mama used to call it. You never met her, but she still remembered Africa, and she was the one person I ever met who could spot fate the moment it targeted its falcon eyes on you.

Because of his hands, they turned the boy into a fighter. Little Henry trained Digger with his wrists tied to a trotting horse, and he'd run behind the horse up and down the road to Wynne mile after mile till he dropped like a discarded rag. Two years ago, he had his first bout, just eighteen he was then. I told you about them matches that Dr. Green sets up on his farm outside Helena, but I only found out Digger was one of them contestants because he came back one Sunday morning all bloody from a rip in his cheek two inches long, like he was cut open with a knife. Little Henry asked me to do my best to make it stop bleeding, and when I asked Digger how he got it, he told me that he was fighting in a stable and that the other boy had worn a special ring. That ain't allowed, of course. But white men like to see blood or the fight ain't worth nothing, and Digger and the other boy had skin too tough, so they gave some kind of iron ring with studs to the other boy for his middle finger. They ain't found a ring like that big enough for Digger's finger, so they let him keep a nail between his knuckles. He won the fight, but I ain't got the courage to even think about the shredded ribbons of skin that other boy had to show to his mama.

Digger began fighting the last Saturday of every month after that. Three years now, almost, and they say that he killed two men in the ring. He never talked about it. When he wasn't working or training, he was always reading. You know I recognized the light of a story-lover in him early, and I taught him well. Little Henry gave him the books. Digger used to read just about everything from travels at sea in sailing ships and white folk up in Boston to the history of France. Of late, he was reading over Mr. Francis Parkman's "Oregon Trail" and memorizing sentences from it like they was from the Bible. He told me just last week before church, "Mama Evelyn, Mr. Parkman says that the West is all mountains in primeval sleep. Don't that sound just fine?" Digger told me that he was planning on buying his freedom someday, and that then he would fix it up so he could go live by the Pacific Ocean. Way out there beyond Texas and everything rise, he said, he'd become a writer. "Mama Evelyn, maybe the real reason God gave me such big hands is so I could be a writer," he told me. "After all, any writer who got big things to say must surely need big hands."

Uncle George W., ain't that a fine thought for Digger to have had?

Anyway, when Elvira shouted about his "killer hands," Digger must have thought: Even Elvira knows I'm a murderer who ain't fit to be a husband. It had to have twisted his heart into a knot because he was so sweet on her. When he looked at the men, they were laughing and telling him to pay her no mind.

I should describe Digger for you, so you can see what happened. He was short but broadly built, had legs and arms on which the muscles shimmied when he walked, like strings on a guitar. He had big, moon eyes, a flat, broad nose, and the darkest skin of anyone in his family. "Shade," his mama Gloria had always called him, but when he was real little, he could dig for fishing worms in the soil better than all them other boys and the name "Digger" had stuck and ain't no one could get it off.

Lord knows when this letter is going to find its way to your hands, but July the 7th has come to Arkansas today, and when tragedy snuck up on us, it was last Tuesday as I already said. Big Master Henry was in Memphis to pick up some fabric ordered by Miss Caroline. She just had her 19th birthday, is real pretty and proper. Little Henry was in charge of the plantation in his absence, of course. And Miss Julia was at home, too, since she was jealous of Miss Caroline and ain't wanted to go to Memphis to see her new fabric. Miss Julia is going to be sixteen in September, and she begrudges her big sister everything that comes her way.

Little Henry had grown up with Digger, and they were as friendly as white and colored could get without breaking the law until all this happened. When Little Henry walked through the fields, he even shook Digger's hand like he was a man. It was funny to see the two of them together - Digger so powerful, Little Henry so lean, looking like a thistle because his thick red hair is cut real short by Mr. Brickman, the barber over in Forrest City who everybody says is a Jew. Little Henry has big white teeth like a rabbit and a laugh which people like, but which I ain't never trusted. The men think we all going to be lucky when he inherits River Bend, but the women know better. Big Master Henry may be hard, but he sticks to the rules and believes in God. He seems to me like a long long road you got to walk down in the mid-day sun before you get home and rest. You know just what to expect from him and can see the landscape coming up ahead. But Little Henry ain't got belief in nothing but dressing up fancy and dancing in Memphis. And he ain't got rides. His road is all twisted and ugly with stones. If you can be patient another minute, you're going to know just what I mean.

Tuesday night fell and we ain't had no moon, so it was real dark. Digger thought it was safe to sneak off and do some fishing in the creek that skirts by Big Master Henry's property and which rightly belongs to Mr. Morgan Davis who lives over in Clarendon and who ain't had nobody working on his land since I don't know when. The wind was blowing hard from the west. Ain't that interesting? Because if it was blowing from any other direction, the girl's screams would never have reached Digger. Somebody else might have heard them, but that somebody ain't likely to have had the urge to do anything about them, and this letter would be talking about something else entirely. That's nigger fate for you. It does things like change the direction of the wind.

Little Henry asked Elvira to come to the house because Miss Julia was going to play the piano and needed a singer. But it ain't worked out like that.

So Digger heard screams. Even if the house slaves ain't heard, we'd know that for sure she done screamed because how rise could Digger have known that she was in trouble inside the house? And we'd know that she screamed something fierce because she had that voice of hers that could tug the angel Gabriel from heaven right down to Arkansas. As I say, we ain't heard nothing because of the direction of the wind, but Crow was polishing the furniture in the sitting room and said that she let out a couple of shrieks that were enough to wake the dead.

Digger came in through the back entrance and shuck through the larder. We know that because they had me cleaning up the mud from his boots the next day. And he walked right up them stairs to Little Henry's bedroom, all the time with Crow telling him, You better not, you better not because if you do you's going to end up in a real bad way.

At first I thought that Digger had to have thought he was invincible with those big hands, that he considered himself a colored boxing champion who was going to save the girl's honor and make it out to Oregon to be a writer. Only just before I decided to write you this letter did I realize what he was truly thinking and what he did.

So he marched right up the stairs and found Little Henry lying on top of Elvira and lifted him up by his scrawny neck. Little Henry was struggling and shouting, Let me go you damn fool nigger! And Crow kept screaming, Leave him be, Digger, leave him be! Elvira was reaching for her clothing and crying.

The first shot hit Digger square in the chest and before he could bleed to death in the house, he held up his hands, looked at them for a real long time and shook his head like he was wondering why they'd been given to him. Then he walked on out onto the verandah and jumped down into the yard. Do you suppose he preferred to die outside rather than in a white man's house?

Anyway, what I realized for certain just before I started this letter is that Elvira's words about his killer hands had to have upset him more than I originally thought. He had to have realized that no one, not even the innocent little girl he loved, could see him anymore as anything but a murderous prizefighter. That was what his white master had wanted, and that was what he was.

That boy had to know it would be the end for him when he decided to walk up the stairs. Because even if he done succeeded in killing Little Henry and running for his life, he was not so foolish to think that he was going to make it even as far as the Mississippi border. Not with the whole Cross County out hunting for him. So dying had to be what he wanted, ain't that what you think? Or maybe not what he wanted, but the only way out of his predicament that he could rightly see.

It was Miss Julia who fired the shot. Big Master Henry made sure his children knew how to shoot since they were little. She was standing in the doorway in her nightgown with her daddy's pistol. Crow and Little Henry were so surprised by it all that they ain't gone over to her, and she got off a second shot that hit Elvira in the hip. The girl fell backward with a kind of surprised expression on her face, never said another word and bled to death on the way to Dr. Morgan's slave infirmary in Wynne.

I don't know where this leaves me. I mean, I counted on Digger being the one to read and write for the next generation, to pass on the gift just as you passed it on to me before you were sold and left for Carolina. I guess I'll pick another of the young ones, one like Digger, with the light of curiosity shining from his eyes. But I'm an old lady, and I ain't got the patience I once had, and I confess, Uncle George W., that I ain't looking forward to it.

When Big Master Henry got back from Memphis, he was real angry with Little Henry because he done lost him a cook and his champion prize fighter, and a big match for Digger against some Cajun champion all the way down in New Orleans had been set up for the first week in August.

A bullet is so small, but I figure it might as wall be the biggest wall in the world. Because no matter how big your hands may be or how well you can sing, you just ain't ever going to get past it.

Digger's hands and Elvira's voice. One thing's for certain, Uncle George W., the white folk use our joys against us and turn them into nigger fate.

Your niece, Evelyn

P.S. Wren, Martin, Crow, Lily, Weaver, Thomas, and Martha send their love.

Write!

My mother was in the kitchen making tea when I finished the letter. I was moved by Evelyn Carter's writing, as I nearly always was. This letter also put some peripheral puzzle pieces into place; it explained why she had never written anything again to Uncle George W. about Digger or Elvira. Also, it was clear now why she suddenly began teaching her little niece, Tillie, how to read and write. Her last three letters are filled with her frustrations and joys with the girl. Tillie was my great-great-great grandmother. She'd had three children, and her eldest was Cecilia, the central character in my second book. Now, of course, I thought I knew why Cecilia had chosen Oregon for her destination; probably, she'd read Digger's copy of Francis Parkman's Oregon Trail. I, too, had read the book, and it pleased me that she, Digger, and I had similar taste. But I was still puzzled why my mother hadn't shown me this letter earlier. When she came into the living room with two steaming cups of tea, she said, "Well? Are you still angry with me? I hope you won't have to change the first book now." She sat down next to me, sat up real tall as she always does, and handed me my cup.

"No. There's nothing I need to change. Digger and Elvira are both just minor characters. I could go back, add a chapter if I want, but not for now."

"So you're not angry?"

"Just puzzled. Why didn't you want to show it to me before?"

"This is the letter that makes it clear that, in every generation of our extended family, one child was chosen to learn to read and write. There was George W., then his niece Evelyn Carter, then Digger. When he was killed, Evelyn had to teach little Tillie. Then Tillie passed it on to Cecilia. When she went out to Oregon, I don't know who she trained."

"Her middle son, Randolph," I said. "When I went out to Eugene, I was told that Cecilia taught him how to read and write even before he got to school."

My mother stared down at me over her nose and nodded like she does when she's impressed with someone's professionalism. "That's good to know," she said. "Anyway, your daddy and I were both worried that until you decided for sure that you wanted to be a writer that this letter would make you feel that you had no choice - that you had to be a writer in order to make up for Digger's death. Or to carry on some tradition. Your daddy and I didn't want you to feel burdened. We couldn't risk that."

"But weren't you both sure that I was serious about writing when I had my first few stories published? That's already four years ago now."

My mother rested her tea cup on the arm of the sofa. She brought her hands together into a gesture of prayer like she does when she's angry at someone's stubbornness. "Was Evelyn Carter a serious writer?" she asked.

"I think she was a great writer."

My mother frowned. "I didn't ask that. I asked if she was serious."

"I don't know what you mean."

"I mean, if Big Master Henry had forbidden her from sending letters to Uncle George W. or anyone else in her family, would she have gotten desperately depressed."

"She'd have done everything she could to get letters to him."

"And if she couldn't?"

"She'd have been very upset. Obviously."

"Well then, I'd say she was serious. And yet, she didn't have any stories or letters published, did she? Not a damn thing. Baby, publishing doesn't make you a serious writer. From those stories you had published, your dad and I knew you were good. And that first novel of yours proved to us that you were damn good. But there's a difference between damn good and serious." She ran her hands down the long curve of her neck; she was gathering her thoughts. "This depression of yours, this inability to write - that's that difference. You can only tell if a person is serious about something when there's big trouble. If he moves on to something else, he isn't serious. Depression happens when people can't move on, when they're dedicated to something that's getting away from them. It can be a woman or a man. It can be dance or music . . . or a child. Most anything you love. Maybe I'm crazy, but it's precisely how bad you feel right now that's convinced me that you're really dedicated to this writing of yours. I couldn't show you the letter before I knew that. I just couldn't. But now I know that Digger and Evelyn won't make you feel any extra burden, because the truth is, you're already burdened. You love writing. And love is the biggest weight you'll ever carry. It changes everything. And it can't be replaced." She brought her hands over her mouth suddenly, as if she'd said too much, and started to cry. I sat on the floor at her feet like when I was a kid. I put my hands in her lap. She closed her eyes. Tears were trapped in her lashes. She whispered, "The bastard left me all alone."

We locked hands. Then she started rubbing my fingers, and I was sure she was remembering when I was a baby, "You always had real big hands. And because of Digger, I guess I've been afraid that you'd be forced to do what you don't want. Maybe that was the real reason I didn't want to show you the letter."

"I'm not about to become a boxer at this point," I said to make her laugh.

She let go of my hands, took a sip of tea, wiped the tears from her cheeks. "No, but those publishers might take your books and make you shave all the rough edges from them so that they can get neatly packaged. What they don't understand is that Evelyn Carter, Uncle George W., Digger - all of them are complicated people. Just like in your book. If you shave their black edges off so that they can fit into a nicely printed white page up in New York, all you're going to have left for both them and you is 'nigger fate.'"

When she said that, it was like some bell had tolled. Neither of us talked. I'm sure that my mother was remembering my father. I was looking at her, wondering how much she resembled Evelyn and Tillie and Cecilia. She said, "Just give me time, baby. Evelyn Carter and Uncle George W. needed to wait a hundred and forty years for their story to be told. I need a few more years myself before I'm ready to go on with my own. People have to simply coast along sometimes." "I understand," I said.

After that, I started picturing Cecilia in the middle of the Utah desert. It was a scene that I hadn't written yet. She was sitting on a sand-colored boulder, a young woman of twenty-two, all her future in front of her. She had dark, dark skin, my mother's almond-shaped eyes, and was as lovely as midnight. She was reading Digger's copy of Oregon Trail. It was July of 1893. Her mother Tillie was back in Arkansas, still living at River Bend, but now as a freed servant. Evelyn Carter had been dead for thirty years, was buried in an unmarked grave near Christmas Creek. I wouldn't be born for another seventy-three years, the great-great-grandson of Cecilia's youngest sister, Nellie.

Gratitude for all this history made me kiss my mother's hand. She kissed the top of my head. The sun was setting out the living room window, and for no reason at all, I was as happy as I've ever been.

Richard C. Zimler, a freelance writer and editor, holds a master's degree in journalism from Stanford University and is currently teaching that subject in Porto, Portugal. His stories have appeared in London Magazine, Margin, Panurge, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere.