It is summer, any summer in the 1940s. I am with Momma and for two to four weeks we will be here, staying with her mother outside Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

Grandmomma lives with her brother, my great-uncle Rudolph, in a frame house whose unpainted boards have absorbed sun and rain, frost and dew until they are as gray as restless sleep and as weary as the sleeper who awakens to a day for which he has no love.

Grandmomma's house stands alone, removed from its neighbors and back from the main road like the monarch of an impoverished kingdom. To the east is a large field, "the orchard," Momma calls it still, because when she was a girl (and I can't imagine that), rows and rows of peach, apple and cherry trees flowered where now an infinite variety of weeds flourishes like immorality. On the other side of the "orchard," beside the railroad tracks, is another house, smaller than Grandmomma's, and even more weary. Grandmomma's sister, my great-aunt Rena, lives there with her husband, Fate McGowan.

Behind Grandmomma's house is the chicken yard, henhouse and outhouse. Beyond these are deep woods, somewhere in the midst of which is the family cemetery. In all, there are forty acres of fields and woods enclosed by a sturdy wire fence, whose gate no one ever enters and we seldom go out.

Beyond the fence, on the west, is a dirt road leading to and from the main one on the north. It is wide enough for a mule wagon as far as Grandmomma's gate; then it narrows to a dusty footpath and winds into the innards of Pine Bluff's black community. (We were "colored" in those days when Hope was the name some dreamer bestowed on a daughter, when change was what the white man at the store might give you when you bought something, and progress was merely another incomprehensible word on a spelling test.)

I sit on the porch each day and watch children go back and forth to the little store on the main road. I am a child yearning to be with children, but these wear dirty and torn clothes. How am I supposed to play with someone whom dust coats like roach powder? They look furtively at me sitting on the porch in my clean and well- pressed clothes, socks and shoes(!). (Only now, looking back, do I realize that in the fifteen summers at Grandmomma's, no child ever came to the gate to ask me who I was, where I was from and did I want to play. I realize only now, too, that I never went to the gate so that they could ask.)

I accept such separateness as unquestioningly as I do the air my body breathes. There is something different about us — Grandmomma, Uncle Rudolph, Momma and me. In the evenings we sit on the porch and watch as trucks, filled with fieldhands who work the white man's cotton, stop on the main road in front of the store. With much laughter and loud talking, they jump or climb off and meander down the side road that leads past Grandmomma's to their houses scattered over the fields behind like neglected thoughts. Their loud voices soften as they near Grandmomma's. "You niggers hush! Don't you see Miz Smith setting on the porch?" (That was Grandmomma's name when she wasn't Grandmomma.) A quietness as stifling as the heat falls upon them, fifteen, twenty, men, women and children, hoes at forty-five-degree angles across their shoulders, fraying straw hats or red handkerchiefs on their heads, and as they pass the gate, that gate they never enter and through which we seldom go out, someone calls out loudly, "How y'all this evening?" We call back, "Fine, and you?" "Tol'able, thank you." Only after the last one passes do their voices rise again like birds from tall grasses.

We are different. Daddy is a Methodist minister and I was robed in a mantle of holiness even before the first diaper was pinned on my nakedness. I cannot do what other kids do — play marbles for keeps, go to the movies on Sundays, listen to popular music on the radio, play cards. Momma cannot wear makeup or pants. Only sinful women do that. We represent Daddy and he represents God.

My brother hates all of it. He is nine years older than me. But he does not come to Grandmomma's and I do not know where he is or what he is doing.

I do not hate holiness. Sometimes I wish I could do what other children do, but Daddy tells me, "God has special plans for you," and I wonder what they are. I cannot imagine, but I will never know if I do not nurture separateness as if it were my only child.

We are different, too, because we do not depend on white people for our economic survival. Daddy does not work for white people and we do not have to talk to them or even see them, except when we go to town. We go to town as infrequently as we can.

There is something else different about us, too. Grandmomma and Momma look like white women. Both have thick, wavy long hair and skin like moonlight.

(Summer 1982. Daddy has been dead a year. My oldest son, Malcolm, and I go to Nashville to help Momma sort through the remains of fifty-seven years of married life, sell the house and prepare her to move in with a relative in Washington, D.C. I cannot imagine being eighty-five years old and Life asking me to begin again. I look at her and learn what it is to submit to Life's requirements and create oneself anew as Death takes your hand in his. For Momma, part of beginning again is to go to Pine Bluff and visit the family cemetery for what might be the last time.

("Your daddy was supposed to bring me down last summer but he died before he got to it," she says several times.

(We drive in silence. Neither Momma nor Grandmomma ever had much use for words. Grandmomma died at age ninety-one more than twenty years before and she never spoke of herself, to her children or grandchildren. Momma is not very different. So I am surprised when into the silence she says, "It was hard growing up looking white. I had a hard time in school. The other kids were always beating me up. And when we went to town, the white people acted like they hated us because we looked white but weren't. I grew up being afraid all the time."

(Silence closes around her again like an enemy. It is a silence I know too well, a silence she has bequeathed me like an antique family ring of dubious value. It is the silence of Grandmomma's solitary house and of how solitary we were in that house, in that community and with each other. We were different, Grandmomma, Momma and me, holding ourselves back from the world and all in it — reserved, polite, formal — acknowledging salutations with the fingertips of white-gloved hands while longing for an embrace.)

At night we sit on the porch and I listen to the sounds of Momma's, Grandmomma's and Uncle Rudolph's voices telling of people now dead, and their dead walk through the silences between their words, and I miss people whom I have never known.

Silence acquires the dimension of space at night. There is no electricity in the black community and the lights from coal-oil lamps flickering in the windows of houses in the distance are like matches before the force night is. Night is an absolute, an irrefutable mathematical equation to which one submits with grateful awe. Night and silence are palpable presences I love.

The only time I go outside the fence is to sit by the mailbox and await the mailman. I am not expecting mail but want to decipher the name on Grandmomma's box. I read almost as well as an adult but cannot pronounce the name painted crudely in black on her box. A-L-T-S-C-H-U-L. Grandmomma's name is Smith....