The Secret Women

by Sheila Williams

  Joanie and Cricket were two lonely children who had played in a crib together when their mothers visited, who walked to school together each morning, and who shared the Sunday school lesson paper at church because they were in the same class. Joanie was the youngest child of the Adams household, a hodgepodge of children from Mr. Adams’s two marriages, all boys and all older than Joanie. After the first Mrs. Adams died, the second Mrs. Adams—Joanie’s mother—took over, raising her husband’s sons and then adding two of her own plus one daughter. From her brothers, Joanie had learned to be tough, but she was not their friend. They avoided her like the plague. John—or Jack, as he was called—was two years older than Joanie, but he pretended not to see her when they were at school. And as far as Hubert Jr., Jack, Marshall, and Allen were concerned, she barely existed.

  Cricket, on the other hand, was an only child, a much-wanted baby born to mature parents who had given up on the idea of having children. Overjoyed, they set about making his life as carefree and abundant as possible. Nona Adams teased Eleanor that the baby’s poop barely got into the diaper good before Eleanor wiped it away. Cricket’s mother also put off letting him walk outside because she didn’t want him to get the soles of his shiny white baby shoes soiled. Called Cricket by the neighborhood children—because, they said, he looked like Jiminy Cricket in the Pinocchio movie—the boy was so pampered that he might have become a spoiled brat had it not been for his friendship with Joanie Adams. She was his conscience and his courage.

  Where Cricket was hesitant, Joanie was bold. If Cricket was afraid, Joanie pulled him along, surprisingly strong considering how skinny she was, and made him do whatever it was that frightened him. And so he sprained an elbow when she pushed his swing really high; he climbed trees even though he was terrified of heights; and he skinned his knee when Joanie gave his bicycle a shove to help him go faster. She was with him to face down a pack of bullies who called him a sissy. Cricket had been so scared of the boys that he turned and ran. But when Leander Shaw pushed Joanie down onto the sidewalk, Cricket ran back and gave Leander a solid fist to the jaw, much to everyone’s surprise. But not Joanie’s. She knew that Cricket would die for her if she asked him to. They would be friends forever. He’d even promised to protect her from dragons, although they hadn’t found one yet.

  But even Cricket couldn’t protect Joanie from her mother. Nona was not going to be happy when she saw how dirty Joanie was.

  Joanie used a handful of leaves to wipe the mud from her knee. It still looked a little dark around her kneecap, but that was okay. A quick spit bath took care of the scratch on her shin. It wasn’t even bleeding now. Well, not much. But the grass stains on her dress were a worry.

  “You’re never gonna get that out,” Cricket said, leaning down to get a better look, his hands on his knees. His voice had been full of satisfaction.

  “Oh, shut up!”

  He shook his head, an expression of doubt on his small face. “No, look.” He pointed at the stain with his mud-tipped finger. “The more you wipe it, the bigger it gets.” Cricket frowned and squinted. His mother was taking him to pick up his new glasses next week. He dreaded it. “And now it’s turning gray.”

  Joanie held up the front of her skirt for a closer look. No. It didn’t look good. And it wasn’t really gray, more of a brownish-greenish color and . . . it did seem to be spreading. There were blue cornflowers on the fabric. She bit her lip. Would Mother notice?

  “Who’s Dorothy Mae, anyway?” Cricket asked. “Why is she somebody special you got to keep clean for?”

  “She’s my cousin. From Cleveland. Her mother, Aunt Ava, she’s my momma’s big sister. Dorothy’s all grown up now. She went to college in Atlanta.”

  Cricket shrugged. “It’s called Atlanta?”

  “Nooooo, dummy, it’s in Atlanta,” Joanie corrected him. She couldn’t remember exactly what the college was called.

  “Is that good?” Cricket asked.

  Joanie wiped the front of her dress with the back of her hand, dismayed to see that the once brownish-greenish stain was now just plain brown.

  “Uh-huh. All my momma’s aunts and sisters went to this college in Atlanta. Dorothy, she’s smart. And pretty. She knows things.” Joanie wasn’t even trying not to brag. She was crazy about Dorothy Mae. Dorothy Mae was everything Joanie wanted to be when she grew up. She was not only smart. She wore beautiful clothes, and she went places and did things. Dorothy Mae had visited San Francisco, she’d been to Mexico to study art, she’d been to a city called Accra—that was a place in Africa—and she’d been to Montreal, a cold place up north where people spoke French. Dorothy could speak French too.

  Cricket was impressed. “What’s French?”

  “It’s a . . . language,” Joanie said, pronouncing the word carefully. “They use words different from the ones we use, but they mean the same thing. Like . . .” She touched her top lip with the tip of her tongue. “Like ‘chapeau.’”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “‘Hat,’” Joanie said, looking again at her skirt. Half of the front was now damp and gray embellished with a semicircular stain of deep brownish-gray with streaks of vivid green. The tableau might have made an interesting finger-painting. As a dress, it was a disaster.

  Cricket followed her gaze and laughed.

  Mr. Adams’s oilcan was desperately needed.

  The back screen door screeched as it opened. “What’s going on out there?” Nona Adams yelled.

  The children looked at each other.

  “Nothing!”

  Chapter 10

  Joan

  Mother was not pleased when Joanie came in, because her dress was a mess, her knees were skinned and grubby, and her hair had worked its way out of the braids and now stood out like a crown of corkscrews encircling her head.

  “Joan Ann Adams.”

  Oh Lordy. It was never a good thing when Mother used her full name.

  Nona’s expression was grim. She pointed toward the back staircase.

  “March upstairs, take off all of those . . . grimy clothes, and put ’em in the basket. Wash your face, hands, neck . . .” Nona grabbed her daughter’s ear and looked. “And behind your ears.” Her gaze lowered to Joanie’s knees. She sighed. “And your knees. Take off those socks, and polish up your shoes . . . Joanie! What were you and Cricket doing to get so filthy?”

  Joanie didn’t answer at first because she wasn’t sure what to say.

  Nona smiled and nudged her toward the stairs. “Never mind. Just hurry up, girl. Aunt Ava, Dorothy Mae, and them will be here shortly.”

  Joanie scampered up the stairs.

  “And bring me down that comb and brush. Your hair’s come a-loose.”

  Washing up and getting her hair combed and braided was a small price to pay for getting a front-row seat at the dining room table when company like Aunt Ava and Dorothy came to visit. Mother’s dinner would be a gut buster—all of Joanie’s favorite foods: fried chicken and perch, green beans, coleslaw, mashed potatoes, and pies—peach and banana crème. Her mouth watered just thinking about it. But the real treat had nothing to do with food. If Joanie behaved herself, was quiet and didn’t ask too many “’pertinent questions” (her grandmother scolded her for asking those), then Mother would let her stay up late and listen to the grown-ups’ conversations after dinner. That was almost better than Christmas.

  * * *

  “Joanie! Honey, are you sick? You hardly ate your dinner!” Nona was clearing the plates. She set the stack of plates down and placed the back of her hand gently against her daughter’s forehead. “You feel all right?”

  “Yes, Momma.” Joanie absently picked up the chicken leg before her mother could pick up her plate. She took a bite and chewed but didn’t taste a thing. Not because her mother’s cooking wasn’t phenomenal but because she was mesmerized by her older cousin: the way she looked and her manners as she ate. Dorothy noticed her little cousin’s stare and smiled. Joanie grinned and thought, I want to be jus
t like her when I grow up.

  All eyes were on Dorothy’s face, including Joanie’s. But unlike the adults, Joanie was concentrating on the way Dorothy looked and spoke, and not as much on what she said. She had a beautiful oval-shaped face framed by stylish dark brown waves—a “coiffure,” she called it. Her dark pecan-colored skin was flawless and glowed, and she wore lipstick! A red color that made her look like a movie star. It was a warm day so Dorothy’s sleeveless cotton dress was light and cool looking, and she wore a pair of white sandals. Her toenails were painted red too. Joanie thought that was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen. So amazing that she barely heard what Dorothy had said until her cousin winked at her.

  “Joan! I don’t think you heard a word I said!”

  Joanie blushed. “No, I heard you. Honest!” the girl sputtered out, embarrassed. Nona was giving her “the eye”—a look Nona often used on her daughter in church when Joanie wasn’t paying attention. “Sorry,” she murmured.

  “But is it all right?” Joanie’s father, Hubert, asked. “You all get along, do you?”

  Dorothy nodded, still smiling, a pair of dimples—the “Henry dimples,” as they were called—appearing in her cheeks.

  “Of course! We’re all students. We’re serious about this work and want to do well. Besides, discussion is part of the course evaluation.” Dorothy looked across the table at her mother. Aunt Ava was frowning. “We’re graded on the way we discuss and debate the topics in class as well as on our papers.”

  Aunt Ava didn’t look convinced. “Uh-uh,” she said, her reaction duplicated by one of the cousins and Hubert. She locked eyes with her daughter. “You watch what you say ’round them.”

  “Mother, this is New York City.”

  Ava pulled her elbows off the table and sat upright. She glanced at her sister and continued to shake her head as if to say, See what I’m talkin’ ’bout, Nona? She doesn’t understand me!

  “You think because it’s New York City, because it isn’t Georgia, that it’s all right? That all these white kids like you and respect you? That they don’t have the same thoughts in their heads that their cousins do down south? The ones that wear sheets and put ‘Whites only’ signs on their shops and restaurants? You foolin’ yourself, girl. I say be careful. I mean it. You find out the hard way.”

  Dorothy lowered her head slightly and bit her lip. Joanie was sympathetic, but not because she knew any white kids—the schools in Cincinnati were mostly segregated. She was in Dorothy’s corner because she loved her and looked up to her. And because she was drooling over the red lipstick Dorothy was wearing.

  Joanie started to listen more intently because she didn’t know anything about white folks either. She hoped her mother, Aunt Ava, and the others would enlighten her. White people were a puzzle she could not figure out. They seemed harmless and ordinary. She saw them on the sidewalks and in stores downtown, in automobiles and on the streetcars. They didn’t look much different from anybody else except their skin was white. They wore the same clothes and seemed to eat the same food—Joanie had seen a little boy eating an ice-cream cone; she liked ice cream too. Then there was Brady, the man who picked her daddy up for work sometimes. Brady seemed friendly; he smiled and waved at her and her mother from the front of the truck. He called Daddy “Hubert,” and Daddy called him “Brady,” not “Mr. Brady,” so Joanie thought that was fine. His bright red hair and freckles made him look funny, but lots of people Joanie knew had red hair, and even her mother had freckles on her nose, so maybe he wasn’t so different after all. But that was where the puzzle was. Because despite the ordinary appearance of these people, something about them was dangerous, according to her parents and Aunt Ava, something to be wary of, to avoid at all costs. And Joanie was curious to find out what that was. So she took a deep breath and asked.

  Her mother said, “This is grown-up time, Joan,” and sent her into the kitchen to eat her dessert. If Mother called her “Joan” or “Joan Ann,” instead of “Joanie,” it was best not to ask more questions. Defeated, she set her bowl and spoon on the kitchen table and gazed longingly at the open dining room door through which laughter floated. It seemed miles away. Joanie couldn’t hear anything now but low murmurs. For a few moments, she contented herself with her ice cream and dreamed of the day when she wouldn’t be sent to the kitchen, when she was grown up and sophisticated like Dorothy Mae—that was her new favorite word, “sophisticated”—living in a faraway place, traveling to even farther away places, and wearing red lipstick.

  The murmuring got louder, and Joanie thought she could make out Aunt Ava’s voice. She looked at the door to the dining room. Her mother had almost closed it, but not quite. The latch hadn’t caught and instead the door had creaked open halfway, which was both good and bad. It was bad in that it still blocked the sound. But it was good because it also blocked Nona’s view into the kitchen and left just enough room for Joanie to slip into the triangle of space behind the door. From there she could hear just fine.

  * * *

  Joanie loved listening to her parents, aunts, and uncles talk about “the old days,” the family stories so different from the ones she heard in school but better somehow. In these stories, the heroes were people her family actually knew and the situations were true—as far as it was possible to know—and nearly always exciting. Sometimes she’d fall asleep on her father’s or Aunt Ava’s lap, the murmur of harmonious voices a pleasant substitute for a lullaby. The best stories of all, though, were the ones told after she’d been excused from the table. Sometimes Joan would eavesdrop from the back hall; other times she would pretend to go upstairs but instead crouch on the staircase midway up. The stories were many and various, and yet they were woven together like a knitted scarf with yarns of many colors.

  These were the stories Joanie liked best. They were colorful and dramatic, filled with suspense, fire, forbidden love, and gunfights. The best ones involved her mother’s grandmother, “Big Ava” Collier, daughter of an enslaved woman, Mary, and the man who owned the land that she worked, whose name was spoken with reverence, whose exploits were recounted with awe. The saga of Ava’s life had taken on mythic status, expanding with each telling: Big Ava had followed Sherman’s army through Georgia until she was forced to stop to deliver a baby. Big Ava, along with her husband, Harrison Henry, had fought off night riders (she had been interrupted again by childbirth, the fourth of her ten children), and for many of Ava’s one hundred years (even reports of her age approached Old Testament length) she and her family had fought her half-brothers and their descendants both in court and at gunpoint to hold on to the two hundred acres bequeathed to her in her father’s will, a deathbed bequest that the Scotsman had made to his only daughter following a belated baptism into the body of Christ.

  The land remained in Ava and Harrison’s hands—several of Joanie’s aunts and uncles still lived there, and Big Ava and Harrison were buried there. The stories, and others like them, overflowed with embellishment, accentuated by laughter. But there were points to be made.

  “You just cain’t trust ’em,” Cousin Eugene repeated, shaking his head. He’d come in through the side door, listening to the story through the open, screened window. He’d put his cigarette out, but the smoke swirled around him like the cone of a tornado. “No, sir, you just can’t. Don’t matter how nice they are . . .”

  “Gene, don’t say that!” Dorothy interrupted. “Ames Preston over at the lumberyard would do anything for you! Thinks you walk on water!”

  “Yeah, he do,” Eugene agreed. “And he’d be satisfied if I walked on water too, just as long as I didn’t walk ’long the sidewalk when he passed!”

  Laughter erupted, and Dorothy swatted at him as if he were a fly.

  “They just people,” Hubert murmured. He glanced at his wife. She knew he was thinking about Brady.

  “We know that, they know that. But it don’t mean nothing,” Ava chimed in, rubbing her daughter’s back. “Momma and Papa fought those Colliers for year
s. They were like ants—just kept coming back. Didn’t matter what the will or the judge said, didn’t matter how much it cost ’em.” She inhaled and turned her gaze toward her daughter. “Until things change . . .”

  “Momma, they have changed!” Dorothy exclaimed in frustration. “In the city—”

  Ava shook her head slowly. “City or country, it don’t matter. Until things change . . . you can be friends with ’em, live near ’em, work with ’em. Even marry ’em.” Ava gave a snort to indicate that this was not going to happen. “But when it comes down to it, they still white, honey. And you got to be careful ’cause they can use that against you.”

  Joanie thought about the boy with freckles she’d seen downtown, the one who’d been eating an ice-cream cone, and she wondered.

  Chapter 11

  Joan

  New York City, 1958–1966

  “I still don’t know how you did it,” Dorothy said as she and Joan unpacked the suitcase. “Uncle Hubert was dead set against you coming here. He said it all the time.”

  Joan grinned and smoothed the stack of neatly folded slips with her hand before putting them into the bureau drawer that Dorothy had thoughtfully lined with tissue paper. Then she held up her hands and wiggled her fingers as if she were a conjurer casting a spell. “Magic!” she said, then giggled, remembering her father’s expression when he realized that he’d agreed to what he had said he would never agree to: letting his “baby girl” move to New York.

  Dorothy swatted at her with a brassiere. “Fiend!”