THE BOOK KEEPER
THE BOOK KEEPER
A MEMOIR OF RACE, LOVE, AND LEGACY
Julia McKenzie Munemo
SWALLOW PRESS / OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Swallow Press
An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 ohioswallow.com
© 2020 by Julia McKenzie Munemo
All rights reserved
To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Swallow Press / Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).
Printed in the United States of America Swallow Press / Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Munemo, Julia McKenzie, 1974- author.
Title: The book keeper : a memoir of race, love, and legacy / Julia McKenzie Munemo.
Description: Athens: Swallow Press--Ohio University Press 2020. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019040686 | ISBN 9780804012218 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780804041065 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Munemo, Julia McKenzie, 1974---Family. | Authors, American--21st century--Biography. | United States--Race relations.
Classification: LCC CT275.M865 A3 2020 | DDC 920.073--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040686
for Ellen, who knew how to live
and for Gogo, who knew how to love
Author’s note: This is a work of nonfiction. In some cases, I have changed names and identifying details to protect the privacy of people who never asked to be in this story.
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
—James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross”
Contents
Prologue
I’d like to show you a snapshot of my family. It will reveal a fact you need to know. Otherwise what follows doesn’t matter. No, that’s wrong. It does matter, but without knowing this—without seeing this Polaroid I keep on my fridge—you won’t know why it matters quite so much to me.
We’re all dressed up for a wedding. Our elder son is four, and he leans against his dad’s hip, squinting unsmiling into the camera in a sharp seersucker suit. The baby is one and I’m holding him. His considerably more rumpled seersucker is all bunched up around his neck, and he looks cross. I want to reach back through time and pull it down, let him breathe a little better.
My husband and I stand a hairbreadth apart—there’s a slash of green grass hill between us. My pale white skin looks washed out in the October sun, but my thick brown hair falls nicely against my face and my rust-colored dress is fabulous and I’m smiling at the camera. My husband isn’t smiling, but not because he’s unhappy. He never smiles for a picture. His suit is dark gray and his tie matches my dress and he looks fabulous, too. I don’t know if it’s the quality of the film or the slant of the sun, but even after all these years on the fridge, in this picture the shades of light and dark on his black skin are perfectly rendered.
There it is. The fact you need. Why didn’t I just come out and say it? I’m a white woman married to a black man—our children are mixed race. My intention wasn’t to fool you, but to take you there slowly. Normally, you’d just see us on the street and know. You’d decide whatever it is you’re going to decide. And this is a story about how some things take time to come clear.
PART I
WINTER SKIN
1
LATE ONE NIGHT the winter our children are nine and twelve, I settle on the green couch in the den of our rural New England farmhouse holding an old softback book in shaking hands. Its title is The Wrath of Chane, and the teaser copy promises “the most shocking portrayal of slavery ever written,” but the image under those words reveals a tale as old as time. There’s a tall, muscular black man trying to pull his wrists apart, but his chains don’t allow it. He’s got no shirt on and his pants are unbuttoned. A white woman in a yellow dress with carefully curled blonde hair clings to his arm and gazes up at his face. I keep looking at the author’s name and trying to pull out a memory from the distance. I know it’s one of my father’s pseudonyms, printed there on the cover of this thick piece of pulp, but I can’t remember ever hearing it spoken out loud. Tonight—with my family sleeping upstairs—I open it for the first time.
My father wrote this book, and I know very little about my father.
Right away I see the name of my mother’s mother penciled in the right-hand corner of the first page. It’s handwriting that brings back birthday cards and grocery lists, handwriting I haven’t seen since childhood. My father’s mother-in-law didn’t just keep this book he wrote, she marked it as hers. Laid claim to his work, even when it was slavery porn. Her tidy name in the corner of that brittle yellow page softens me to the book, softens me to my dad. It allows me to begin.
“The young black man sat for a long time within sight of the house of the overseer. It was almost morning when he first stirred, changing from a sitting to a kneeling position beneath the large cypress tree hung with Spanish moss like a shroud,” I read. These are the first words of my writer father’s I’ve ever read. “The chorus of spring stars was still loud in eulogy in the heavens,” I read. “Loud in eulogy.” I run my eyes over the phrase again, there at the bottom of this first page. It’s not so bad, I tell myself. I can do this, it is time to do this.
But then there are torn clothes. There is a “wide forehead.” There’s a “thick chest.” There is Chane, speechless and superhumanly strong. A slave with sex appeal.
His large black nostrils flared and his heart pumped fury through the veins Iwana had given him. The son of Iwana and the high medicine stood in the Louisiana night and felt a great pounding beneath his forehead and behind his eyes. He remembered the white woman who was asleep not fifty feet from where he stood and tasted the heavy