The Pecan Man by Cassie Dandridge Selleck
For Nicholas
Lighter of candles and finder of lost things
One
In the summer of 1976, the year of our Bicentennial, preparations for the Fourth of July were in full force. Flags hung from the eaves of every house along this stretch of Main Street. The neighborhood women were even busier than usual. I watched them come and go from a rocking chair on my own front porch.
Every now and then a slight breeze moved the heavy, humid air and, if there was no traffic going by, I could hear the flags rustling along the row. I sat with a piece of cardboard in one hand and a glass of sweet tea in the other. The ice always melted before I emptied the glass. I used the cardboard to augment the gentle blowing of the ceiling fan, which I was sure put out more heat than cool with its low purring motor constantly going. I kept it on though. I liked the sound.
Back then, the streets of our small Florida town were not unlike the streets of Andy Taylor’s Mayberry, or Atticus Finch’s Maycomb. We even have a similar name, Mayville. I always like to say, “That May sure got around, now didn’t she?”
There’s no one here to laugh at my jokes anymore. I used to have a maid who came every day. Blanche was black as pitch and twice as heavy. I asked her once how she got her name, seeing as how Blanche is French for white and she wasn't even close. She said she was born as light-skinned as me and that her daddy had left soon afterwards saying no baby of his could be that pale.
Her mama waited a couple of days before naming her. Just held her and rocked her and sang her own tears dry. Seems she was more than positive she had never lain down with another man since the day she was born and she felt certain he would believe her and come home. When he didn’t, she carried the baby in her arms all the way to the public library just off Main Street. Libraries back then wouldn't check out books to Negroes, so she found a book of baby names and sat right down on the floor. Nestling her sleeping infant between her crossed legs, she started on the A’s. When she got to Blanche and saw what it meant, she reckoned it was as fitting and pretty a name as she had ever seen, so Blanche it was.
Had her daddy stuck around a bit, he’d have seen his baby girl turn darker and darker as the months rolled by. Blanche once told me she figured he was the one who lost out, not her, and I thought that was a right healthy way to look at it.
Blanche worked for me through birth and death, joy and sorrow, and Lord knows we had a lot of sorrow in all the time we spent under this roof. Most people figured she was crazy to put up with me all those years, but Blanche and I had an understanding. It was a vow we made those long years ago. Neither of us spoke of it afterwards, but it hung between us like a spider web, fragile and easy to break, but danged hard to get shed of once the threads took hold.
It’s been a quarter of a century since fate sealed the two of us together. Blanche got fatter, but never looked a day older than she did back then. I, on the other hand, have managed to get thinner and more fragile, if that’s possible. I’m eighty-two years old. I was fifty-seven then, and recently widowed. I’d tell you about my husband, Walter, but he doesn’t really play a part in this story so I reckon there’s not much point. Funny, I don’t remember what color Walter’s eyes were. I’ll chalk that up to what age does to an already feeble mind. But I remember every single detail about what happened with the Pecan Man.
Though mostly vacant these days, the buildings on Main Street once housed dress shops and jewelry stores with diamonds and gemstones glistening on oceans of blue velvet in the front windows. Ezell’s Department store survived the arrival of J.C. Penney, with its shiny tile floors and ornate marble staircase, but they went to mostly rugged men’s wear for years afterward. Penney’s could never compete with the smell of denim and leather and the creak of wooden floors when it came to the male populace.
In 1976, the bank was building its new home out on the highway and their old four-story relic downtown was sold to a company that provided counseling and other services to alcoholics, drug addicts and the like. They called it Lifeways, but that was just a euphemism for nuthouse and most of the residents weren’t going to stand for that kind of element in our neighborhood. Dovey Kincaid got up a petition to keep them out and we all signed it, but we lost in the end. Frank Perley was head of the city commission and he made sure his wife’s cousin’s company got in. After that our neighborhood went downhill fast. People moved out by the truckload and practically gave their family homes away.
It’s still a beautiful, if somewhat ragged, neighborhood and I do what I can to keep my own house looking stately and neat. Our streets are lined with pecan trees so large that two men could wrap their arms around their trunks and only barely touch fingertips. The trees used to look majestic, but now they just look tired. Their limbs droop miserably and the Spanish moss that once served as regal attire now hangs limp and shaggy like the beards of the homeless old men who pass by daily on their way downtown.
Several blocks from there, the opposite direction of my neighborhood, is what we call colored town. Oh, I know it’s not right to call it that these days, but that was what we called it then and I’m too old to relearn the etiquette I had drilled into my head from the time I could hold a spoon.
Blanche raised five children of her own there, plus the two grandchildren she took in when her youngest daughter ran off with a drug dealer. She might have been mad at that child if she hadn’t known what she did about the whole situation. As it was, Blanche couldn’t find it in her heart to blame her daughter for any of the bad choices she made, considering the role she played in this story.