On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon : A Novel

by Gibbons, Kaye

• ISBN13: 9780060797140
• ISBN10: 0060797142
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

In the year 1900--on the afternoon she suspects might be the last in her long, eventful life--Emma Garnet Tate Lowell sets down on paper what came before, determined to make an honest account of it. She recalls her life on the plantation, her marriage to a Boston surgeon, her survival of the Civil War, and the terrible secret which shaped her father's life.

Excerpts

On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon
A Novel

Chapter One

I did not mean to kill the nigger! Did not mean to kill him!

This my father shouted out loud on slaughter day of 1842. I heard him from the kitchen, where I was shaping sausage into little rounds, a pleasant job for a girl of no domestic training. I ran to the kitchen door at his bellowing and wondered at his raging, bloody presence, but I did not go to him. His arms were uplifted as though he were prophet to the clutch of Negroes who stood about him, a hand still holding a blade. I recall, fifty-eight years thence, my extreme horror of recognition that the man standing underneath the spready sycamore had probably done wrong, that he had probably murdered with vile intent, and that all my night-fears of atrocities incited by the Turner rebellion would come true now--for vengeance, my family and I would be slit ear to ear in our sleep. That was the class of talk we heard those days, all I overheard through closed parlor doors. Even among the children of the James a rumor abounded, repeated as hard fact, of a Negro who had murdered a farmer and then dipped the man's wife and children in his blood. I was of an impressionable nature, and my heart quailed within me each time I heard the tale told. The servants will rise, and they will cut our throats, and they will laugh and drink red whiskey and go about with our bloomers on their heads.

Weighing the two, my surety that my father had indeed meant to kill whoever had ailed him and the prospect of Negroes murdering us all in the moonlight, I had more faith in the Negroes, more trust in their inherent and collective sense of right. Even then, at twelve, I knew that my father was a liar. Although he had served two terms in the legislature and was known all over Virginia to be an honest, upright, hearty, and earnest Episcopalian, I knew he had a dark secret. Children see into the recesses of the soul. They are rarely fooled, seldom duped save at rummy and shell games, so it was not extraordinary for me to stand in that doorway, while my father demanded of God and a brace of Negroes that they acknowledge his innocence, to see that he was lying to all, for I knew him. I was not now struck down in sudden disillusionment of a beloved parent, for I had heard him delivering my mother his fury in the nights.

Like the servants, we, his children, were beneath him, and so we were left oftentimes standing with his lies in our hands like baffling presents, not knowing what we were to do with this collection of things, his words, whether they should be used or displayed or hidden like a broken toy in a corner of the nursery armoire. I did not mean to kill the nigger! Was I to trick the words apart the way a patient mother will sit and tease the knot out of a tangled necklace? Were they to be left for when I was older, the way so much of my life then was lived, in a knowingly, deliberately superficial fashion, until I could nurse the time and free peace of mind to revisit and decipher what was happening to me and around me? I heard Clarice, the chief cook and housekeeper, behind me moaning, heard as if in half-sleep, "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my goodness," but I could not arouse any response, any spoken word. I felt heavy in my body, and over and again in my head, one idea whirled a dervish--I do not know what to make of this now, because I am too young. I am too young for this. I did not believe I would ever forgive my father for making me withstand more than I could bear.

Always, in a moment of import, such as the day memory has now furnished me, Father seemed to speak the utter and ardent truth because he was so very loud and so commanding in his bearing and demeanor. His style was bullish, though he never seemed desperate that he be believed. On that awful day, and at every other time when his method or intent might be questioned, he struck a tone of extreme willfulness, steady and wrathful, without any urgent pleading or begging to be understood, to be followed into whatever mendacious reckoning he might construct. And that is what he was doing as Clarice and I watched him. He was constructing, building a notion of thorough blamelessness that whoever had witnessed the killing or might hear of it later would let him own as a certain verity. No, he did not mean to kill the Negro. Perhaps, even, the Negro asked to be killed, by his insolence or indolence or impudence, the three faults that Father trusted to be at the heart of the reason why the race was inferior and not included in the tenet that all men are created equal and seen as such by the eyes of God. But still, he found it necessary to say again and again to the people who ganged about him underneath the spready sycamore--I did not mean to kill the nigger!

When he was tired of hearing himself say it, tired of waiting for what did not come--the Negroes to say, "Of course you did not"--he told them all to go to Hell and then jabbed the knife into the tree and strode toward the kitchen. He had on hogkilling clothes, wool and muslin with a skin over-jacket, and they were bloody with the gore of man or pig--l could not tell where one stain started and the next began. He came blowing in hard through the door, like a tempest raging into an open window.

On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon
A Novel. Copyright © by Kaye Gibbons. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon: A Novel by Kaye Gibbons
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