CHAPTER 1

Mary Lee's Vision

She hopes the ferry won’t come, but if it does, she’ll climb aboard. She’ll tremble as she steps off the landing because she can’t swim, and she can’t forget the many times she’s crossed this ugly brown river only to meet more ugliness on the other side.

But fear has never beaten Mary Lee Bendolph, and no river can stop her. She’ll board that ferry, if it comes, because something tells her she must, and because all the people she loves most will board with her, and because if there’s one thing she’s learned in her difficult life, it’s this:

When the time comes to cross your river, you don’t ask questions. You cross.

It won’t look all that dramatic, just a new ferry taking a 63-year-old great-grandmother and her cousins across a Coca-Cola-colored river. But in this damp cellar of the Deep South, where the river has separated blacks and whites for 180 years, where even the living and the dead are less divided than the black and white towns camped on opposite shores, a new ferry will be like the river itself: more than it looks.

Some say the ferry won’t ever come, others say any minute now. Either way, Mary Lee has already seen herself crossing. A round woman with a giggle like one of the river songbirds and a speaking voice pitched between a lullaby and a prayer, she often sees the future in her dreams and trusts these visions as she does her cousins. They never lie. ‘The first mind you have when you get up in the morning,’ she says, ‘that the right mind. Then another mind come and tell you something else, that the wrong mind.’

Family in Home

Photo by Ameen Fahmy on Unsplash

"When the time comes to cross your river, you don’t ask questions. You cross."

This morning, her right mind tells her something’s coming, something big. Maybe a ferry. Maybe death. Maybe the end of her holy place on the river, the only home she’s ever known. It all seems the same in Gee’s Bend, Ala.

Gee’s Bend is where the Civil War came and went, but the slaves stayed, and their children stayed, and their grandchildren stayed, and their great-grandchildren, and so on, until today, Mary Lee and 700 of her kin cling to this bulb of bottom land that their ancestors were chained to. They bear the surnames of the last slaveholders to live here. They grow corn near the slaveholders’ headstones. They come and go amid the ghosts and dust devils that dance on the site of the old Big House. The South was once dotted with such places, where slaves lingered long after Lincoln freed them, most famously the sea islands off Georgia and South Carolina. But Gee’s Bend is the only place anyone can think of where the slaves did more than linger. They conquered. They outlasted the masters, bought back the plantation and lived upon it in blissful isolation, not a collection of historical anomalies, but a vast family, sharing the same few names and the same handful of fables, like some hybrid of Alex Haley and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Some of their isolation owes to geography. The Alabama River all but encircles Gee’s Bend, carving from the caramel soil a Ushaped peninsula 8 miles wide and 16 miles long, a virtual island set apart from the 20th century, as it was from the 19th. Some of their isolation owes to personality. ‘Benders’ have always held themselves aloof, a regal clan proud of their capacity for solitude. But most of their isolation owes to white folks across the river, who have done everything possible to make Gee’s Bend lonelier than a leper colony, and who now--suddenly, oddly--want to bring Gee’s Bend a brand new ferry.

White folks. Mary Lee wonders what they’re up to now. Every few decades, they remember Gee’s Bend, and so begins another spell of hard times.

White folks say a ferry would bring the modern world at last to this rural wilderness 60 miles southwest of Montgomery, where the heat-crazed insects sound like a million clocks ticking; where only two businesses exist, a post office the size of a phone booth and a general store with nothing on its shelves; where the night sky is unbroken by a single street lamp or stop light, and Orion feels close enough to gather in your fist, like a cluster of fireflies.

Old Boat Old Boat

Photo by João Pedro Henrique on Unsplash

Mary Lee knows better. A ferry would also bring tourists and hunters and developers and criminals and snoops. In other words, the end of Gee’s Bend, the last place on Earth still safe enough for children and dead folks to go walking after dark. ‘When you can sit in a place,’ she says, ‘and everybody be lovely--no fussing, no killing. To me, this don’t even seem like the USA.’

Then why not fight the ferry? She might. Except white folks never take no for an answer, and even some of her cousins are insisting, because a ferry, after all, would settle old scores. ‘It’s a symbol of what we had,’ she says, ‘a symbol to what was taken from us.’

A ferry would close a 180-year-old circle, and Mary Lee is made of circles. Her body is round, her face is round, her river is round. In Mary Lee’s world, everything is round, because it’s not until the end of something--a century, a story, a sentence--that you really understand the beginning. Maybe it’s all this ferry talk that’s got her mind circling back. She’s always had a gift for dreaming the future. Lately, she can’t stop reliving the past.

Also, her mind is busy with something else, something more pressing than a ferry, though it feels connected. Mary Lee is sick, violently sick, and her sister recently foretold doom. ‘Cancer,’ her sister said, and Mary Lee could only agree.

She’s spent her whole life in this timeless place. How did age manage to find her? She still has the flirty giggle, the smile that makes men trip over themselves in church. How can her hair be sprouting tufts of gray like summer dandelions? Walking down the dirt lane, swinging her arms and looking up at the clouds, she could be a sixth-grader coming home from school. And yet, Mary Lee’s life has been a series of sorrows and betrayals, and some days every bit of it shows on her face, despite the faraway look she wears to keep people from her deepest thoughts.

‘Some people have a good life,’ she says. ‘But I had a rough life. But I thank God that he helped me come through, and I ain’t dead.’

While among the living, she plans to keep moving. Every day, she does a dozen chores, then makes rounds, seeing to the needs of her lovely people, which is how she describes those inside the circle of her heart. She has a mother to nurse, a brother to mind, grandchildren to raise, cousins to bury. Most of her life she picked cotton, now she tends people. If death or a ferry means to stop her, there’s nothing to do but wait. Like dreaming the future, waiting is one of Mary Lee’s special gifts.

Every Bender knows how to wait. Living here, you learn that fate is like a ferry. It comes when it comes.

And when it gets here, everyone must cross.