Bitter in the Mouth

George Moses was eventually taught to read and write by a woman he called “Professor Ma’am.” She began with the Bible, which he already knew by heart, then turned to the Declaration of Independence, which he believed “had a lot of good ideas”; the professor tried telling him that those were the founding principles of the country, but George, naturally, couldn’t believe that (242). The professor was an abolitionist who hoped to buy George’s freedom using the proceeds from his first published book of poetry. However, although the proceeds should have been enough, his master refused to sell him out of spite. Nevertheless, the Civil War broke out and ultimately freed the slaves: “Fates fell on the battlefield. Masters became men again. Property became men and women and children again too” (243). George, a newly freed, 69-year-old poet, left Chapel Hill for Philadelphia.

Linda states that she “met DeAnne Whatley Hammerick for the first time when she was sixty-six years old” (244), a kinder woman whom Linda distinguishes from her mother, DeAnne. “DWH,” her mother’s current incarnation, reminds her in countenance of Iris and in scent of Harper. The two sit and get to know one another, effectively for the first time. As a child, DeAnne had reprimanded Linda the first time she had tried to explain her synesthesia, telling her there was no room for “mental illness” in the family; now, Linda plays the PBS program for her, which DeAnne watches several more times after Linda goes to bed that night in an effort to understand. The next day, she asks Linda if it hurt her “not to be believed” (245); she tells Linda about the hateful notes Harper had given her as a baby, and how it hurt when Iris didn’t believe her.

DeAnne and Linda begin their mornings with coffee and simple breakfasts, foods that involve no cooking. In their conversations, DeAnne demonstrates a hyper-awareness of Linda’s synesthesia as they talk and unpack themselves for one another. Linda also has an opportunity to meet Clay, Cecil’s nephew, and Gregory, Clay’s partner, to whom she takes immediately. They spend the night drinking and getting to know one another. DeAnne stays home—this time, though, to let the younger folks have their time.

DeAnne and Linda begin making arrangements for Harper’s funeral, choosing to hold everything in one location in order to accommodate the elderly who were likely to attend. 35 invitations were mailed out, plus a notice posted, but 127 people attended the service necessitating an impromptu catering order from Bridges in addition to their original plans. Later that night, the remaining family gather at Harper’s in order to drink and dance the night away in honor of Harper and Cecil: “What would Iris have thought,” Linda wonders: “Here was her sixty-six-year-old daughter, drunk and shoeless and sleeping in the living room. Here was her thirty-year-old granddaughter, hair flying, sweat dripping down, dancing up a summer rainstorm with her fat best friend and two gay men” (253).

In her older life, DeAnne now has a coterie of older female friends, for whom she has become something of a leader—DeAnne was the youngest to lose her husband, so the older women begin to look to her “for guidance on what to do next” (256). Kelly and Linda lunch together most days, during which they discuss what their own next moves will be. At one point, Kelly finally shows Linda the inside of Harper and Cecil’s bedroom, which “was a jaw-dropping example of high camp” (257). They realize, after matching the embroidered rose on Harper’s dresses with similar ones on Clay’s tablecloths, that Cecil had been providing Harper with his womenswear for some time.

One evening, Linda and Kelly decide to drive to Shelby and spend the night on one of the benches in the courthouse square, although the courthouse is no longer a courthouse. Kelly had kept Linda apprised of their classmates’ comings and goings, and when she didn’t know what had happened to someone, the two simply made it up. The one person they hadn’t discussed, though, was Wade, Luke’s secret father. Kelly admits that she knew Linda and Wade had been together, and she apologizes for it. She never told Wade about his fatherhood—although he knew she was pregnant—because Wade didn’t mean very much to her. When Linda wants to go home, Kelly says no, that she wants to stay there until Linda forgives her and accepts that that may be a very long time.

Kelly and Linda don’t return until sunrise. DeAnne is already in the kitchen with coffee waiting for her. DeAnne asks Linda if she had received the photographs from Harper; as it turned out, DeAnne had been the one to ask Harper to send them to her. She tells Linda that Thomas loved Linda’s mother, and that’s why Linda came to be with them. When Thomas was in law school, he met Linda’s mother, Mai-Dao, who was from the south of Vietnam and studying abroad. They dated briefly, though Mai-Dao was engaged to a man back home. She couldn’t keep the photographs, so when she left, she gave them to Thomas. Thomas wrote to her after she left, but she didn’t write back while she was in Vietnam.

A year before the fall of Saigon (what is now Ho Chi Minh City), Mai-Dao had moved to the United States with her husband and daughter, as her husband, Khanh, had been able to secure a postdoctoral position at UNC Chapel Hill. The day after the fall of Saigon, Mai-Dao wrote her first letter to Thomas; she had been keeping track of the things she enjoyed about the South so that she could write about them. She delayed her first letter, though, until after the fall, during the ensuing chaos, when she and her husband were frantic trying to find a way to reach their families back home.

They continued to write to one another, and Thomas even offered to use his contacts to help track down their families. At one point, Khanh discovered their correspondence and accused Mai-Dao of cuckolding him from the start; Mai-Dao then began writing from her work address, instead. Thomas received news on April 29th that they had managed to track down what was left of their families. Mai-Dao wrote her last letter to Thomas on July 3rd, in which she told him that Khanh had found their old letters, grown enraged, and told her that if it weren’t for Linda, he would leave her; Mai-Dao asked Thomas not to write to her again as a result. Thomas received the letter on July 7th, by which point Linda was already in their care.

On July 5th, 1975, a fire broke out in the trailer in which Linda lived with Mai-Dao and Khanh. The memory is lost to Linda, but no one else knows what happened or how they died. All that is known is that Linda was found outside with her passport and a letter with Thomas’s phone number. The police in Chapel Hill contacted Thomas, who drove up to collect Linda, telling them that he was related to Mai-Dao by marriage. Thomas took Linda home and formalized the adoption; DeAnne consented under the conditions that Thomas come completely clean with her and that they never speak of Linda’s birth parents or history, though DeAnne knew she really didn’t have much of a choice. As she grew up, she began to look more and more “like the young Vietnamese woman whom her husband had loved” (280), driving a rift between her and DeAnne: “Thomas and DeAnne didn’t have to mention my birth mother’s name. When I was in the house, Mai-Dao was in the house” (281). DeAnne turned to Iris—and to Bobby—in her grief and frustration; Thomas turned to Harper and entrusted him with the letters and photos.

DeAnne tells Linda that the letters are waiting for her, which explains to Linda how her mother had been able to remember their contents with such clarity. For a moment, Linda had thought she might have been making it all up. She decides, though, that it doesn’t matter: “We all need a story of where we came from and how we got here. Otherwise, how could we ever put down our tender roots and stay” (282).