Silver Sparrow

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MY FATHER, JAMES WITHERSPOON, is a bigamist. He was already married ten years when he first clamped eyes on my mother. In 1968, she was working at the gift-wrap counter at Davison’s downtown when my father asked her to wrap the carving knife he had bought his wife for their wedding anniversary. Mother said she knew that something wasn’t right between a man and a woman when the gift was a blade. I said that maybe it means there was a kind of trust between them. I love my mother, but we tend to see things a little bit differently. The point is that James’s marriage was never hidden from us. James is what I cal him. His other daughter, Chaurisse, the one who grew up in the house with him, she cal s him Daddy, even now.

When most people think of bigamy, if they think of it at al , they imagine some primitive practice taking place on the pages of National Geographic. In Atlanta, we remember one sect of the back-to-Africa movement that used to run bakeries in the West End. Some people said it was a cult, others cal ed it a cultural movement. Whatever it was, it involved four wives for each husband. The bakeries have since closed down, but sometimes we stil see the women, resplendent in white, trailing six humble paces behind their mutual husband. Even in Baptist churches, ushers keep smel ing salts on the ready for the new widow confronted at the wake by the other grieving widow and her stair-step kids. Undertakers and judges know that it happens al the time, and not just between religious fanatics, traveling salesmen, handsome sociopaths, and desperate women.

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