Page 46 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #10

ChArlotte holmes
Klavern
when they lived in Florence. When I ask what happened to the photo, she says she burned it in an ashtray.
I imagine a grainy newspaper face, my father fire- lit, his eyes almost calm as he stands against a background of night. He’s thirty, younger than my own son, and already a father, though not yet mine.
I contemplate. You must’ve torn it out of the pa- per first. Were you planning to keep it?
In his white robe, he could be awaiting Baptism at one of those Holiness churches we used to pass, set off by itself in a white-dirt clearing, on a state road through the pines.
I don’t remember. Maybe somebody gave me the newspaper clipping.
Vespers in winter, with the sun long gone behind the trees.
Because they recognized Dad and Grandpa. Did you know they were in the Klan? She says, We never talked about it.
He might be a member of the choir. The men on either side of him seem to be singing. Their mouths form zeroes of dark against their faces. One of them is my grandfather, whose girlfriends call him “The Duke.” My father calls him “the old man.” Firelight. Singing. Night fallen down all around them. Everyone looks happy. It’s Florence, South Carolina, 1948. The caption under the pho- tograph reads Protesting Civil Rights.
My parents and grandparents lived in the same apartment building downtown. My grandfather had trouble holding a job. Anti-Semitic, anti-im- migrant, anti-black, he was a jeweler from Ohio who moved to Detroit, then to South Carolina before the Depression. My father apprenticed with him before the war.
In this field outside town the men exercise their right to assembly, their right to sing stupid songs, their right to wear hats that look like upside down ice-cream cones made of spun sugar, to wave guns that look only like guns. They can call one another dragons and Cyclops, kleagles and wizards, and march around their bonfire all night long; it’s their right to do this.
This is what my father believed: that his grand- parents came from Virginia; that his grandfather fought with the Confederates; that his mother’s folks were born in Scotland.
Their uncovered faces suggest they have nothing to hide, that they know everyone here, even the photographer concealing a Rolleiflex under his robe, the lens a dark button at the center of his chest. Or maybe the meeting is so ordinary—the Kiwanis Club, the Jaycees, the Klan—that the photographer lifts his Graflex to his eye and takes this photograph my mother swears she saw, of my father and grandfather in the daily paper back
All untrue, but he will be long dead before I dis- cover the documents that prove it. The truth is here in black and white, I will wish I could tell him. You’re not what your father told you. Take off that ridiculous hat and go home to your wife and children, who are already in doubt that you love them.
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Holmes is a writer, a poet, and a teacher of creative writing. Her rst book, Gifts and Other Stories, was published in 1994. Her new collection of stories, The Grass Labyrinth, has been hailed as “a contemporary classic.”