by Chris Wiltz
“God, she was an exasperating person,” Thea said. “You'd think she would have tried not to be such an old busybody herself, especially after my parents died. She was on me about everything from my clothes to those damned dolls.”
“Well, honey,” Zora said, “she was jus dealin with her grief, doin all that.”
Thea stopped folding a dress. “She never acted like she was grieving. The way she talked about my mother . . . like she was mad at her. She'd say something about her, then snap her mouth shut, you know, Zora, the way she did that, like she was furious.”
“But she missed your mother, honey. You musta known that. They was close, them two, talked about everything under the sun.”
Yes, Thea knew her mother and aunt had talked, mostly over the phone, sometimes for hours. Her mother would ask Thea to leave the room sometimes, and her father would tell her mother that whenever she talked to her sister, she was always upset afterwards, and her mother would say that wasn't true. She would defend Aunt Althea, bur her father would say that her sister thought she was superior because she was older and she had married money.
Thea sat on the bed, holding her aunt's dress, thinking that her father, the way he'd talked about Aunt Althea, had somehow convinced her that her aunt had only used her mother, had bullied her. And after her mother was gone, Thea had assumed that Aunt Althea was angry that her mother was no longer there to be used and bullied. She had never thought of her aunt as grieving for her mother, missing her in any way similar to the way Thea missed her. Or that she might have grieved when Thea left as well.
“Is that why she couldn't bear to see me leave?” Thea remembered that awful day, her bags packed and waiting in the hallway, Michael driving up to get her, and Aunt Althea closed up in her bedroom in a sulk, refusing to say good-bye. It was Zora who'd stood on the front porch waving, wiping a tear away as she and Michael drove off. “I was the last one,” Thea said. “She didn't have anyone else.”
“She took it hard,” Zora told her. “Mighty hard.”
It was the only time Delzora had ever had much sympathy for her employer, a malcontent who was so unhappy all the time about small things that she didn't know how to be unhappy about the large things. Delzora knew it had nearly broken Althea's heart to see the girl go, yet Althea had never been able to let her niece know that, just as she'd never been able to grieve properly over her sister's death.
Thea sat there a long time, holding the dress, while Zora folded the others and put them in boxes. She thought about her aunt growing old all alone, no husband, no children, no relatives left, despised by her in-laws, a classic southern story of an old woman whose maid and gardener were the people in the world she was closest to, but who could not be true friends even with them because, in her mind, they were not equal, could never be, it simply wasn't possible in her frame of reference. They were servants first and finally, who did things right most of the time but not all of the time and had to be told when they didn't.
Thea put her hand on Zora's shoulder. “I think I understand it now, Zora. I understand why she just decided to die.”
Zora straightened up from one of the boxes and said, “Why's that?” She was in fact very interested in why, since she couldn't understand it at all.
“Well, look,” Thea began. “She was old and she was tired and she didn't have anyone left to care about. All she had to care about was this house, but a house can't care back. She just didn't have anything to look forward to anymore.”
Zora was looking hard at her. “That ain't no reason to decide to die,” she said belligerently. “I'm old and tired and I ain't got nothin to look forward to neither ‘cept comin and takin care of this house every day. And it ain't even mine.” She went back to packing.
“But Zora . . .” Thea put her hand on Zora again, to make her stop and look at her. “You have Burgess, Zora.”
Delzora said nothing. She reached for another dress, folded it, bent over to put it in the box, her movements a little slower, her bones feeling a little older. She'd been angry, but it was silly to be angry with the girl, she still thought of Thea as a girl, who meant well but didn't understand, not about Burgess—she didn't want her to understand about Burgess, didn't want her to know—and not about the rest of Delzora's life either.
Thea wanted to see through Delzora's eyes, but for Delzora, that was only another way Thea had of looking at her own self, feeling her own feelings and putting them on someone else.
They's them and they's us, Delzora thought. And she wished they would just realize that and stop trying to make us into them.
Burgess finally did come that afternoon, to tell Thea that the carpenters would be there the next morning. He came after Zora had left, as if he were trying to avoid his mother.
When he rang the doorbell, Roux barked once and bounded to the door. Thea was making her way slowly down the stairs, carrying one of the boxes she and Zora had packed. When she saw Burgess through the leaded glass she was afraid there would be a scene similar to the one with Jared, that Zora could possibly be right in thinking Roux might not like black men. But Burgess came in without hesitation, with his wide friendly smile, talking easily to Thea, and Roux sat relaxed watching them.
“Decided to get yourself a dog too?” Burgess asked, his irony making a seemingly casual statement uncomfortably poignant. He patted Roux on the head and Roux's tail brushed lazily back and forth across the floor.
“Yes,” said Thea, “and bars on the windows and over all the doors and invisible light beams that trigger alarms and guard snakes patrolling the grounds.”
“That's good,” Burgess said. “The only place I see you still be vulnerable is up on the roof. I got a retired fightin cock you can borrow, pretend he a weather vane, do some serious damage to them UFOs.”
Thea had meant to light into Burgess about the carpenters the moment she saw him, but that smile of his had disarmed her immediately. A good thing too, since “We get on it tomorrow” had meant just that: Burgess had been out buying the wood, picking up a load of it along with the new saw, and now was hauling it into the house, Roux shadowing him, romping alongside him to the red pickup and back, Burgess pausing now and then to play tag with her in the front yard.
He was putting the last of the wood in the library when Bobby arrived. Roux saw Bobby and left Burgess to jump up on him and lick his face.
“Down!” Bobby yelled. Burgess came out of the library and into the foyer. “Hasn't she got this dog trained yet?” Bobby asked him. He brushed off the front of his clean polo shirt. “I just got out of the damned shower. Sit,” he commanded Roux. Roux stood there wagging her tail. Bobby shook his head at Burgess. “I gave her the dog this morning. She's had all day.”
Burgess started with his deep, rumbling laugh. “She been too busy with them guard snakes outside.”
“Guard snakes, of course,” Bobby said. “I didn't think it could be the DT's.” He and Burgess strolled back to the kitchen and were popping beers open when Thea came down the rear stairway. “First beer of the day, Tee,” Bobby called out to her. He lifted the bottle toward her as she joined them in the kitchen, then he said to Burgess, who was mopping his sweaty forehead with the sleeve of his dirty white shirt, “Looks like you've been working hard, my man. Showing an awful lot of energy for a brother, aren't you?”
Thea made a sound of disgust, which they both ignored.
“Yeah,” Burgess said, drawing out his words, his upper lip tipped back as he grinned. “Guess I should learn to conserve energy like you rich white boys. Try not to work at all.”
21
About thirty years earlier many white people had felt it necessary to flee the inner city and move to Jefferson Parish, which in some places is a stone's throw across a drainage canal from New Orleans. It seemed far away then, a new frontier being conquered by developers who built modern brick bungalows atop what previously had been a salt marsh on the southwestern shore of Lake Pontchartrain. If it was hard to leave the exotic charms
of the old New Orleans neighborhoods, huge oaks and magnolias, wrought iron, high-ceilinged houses, it was easy enough to move into a neighborhood where the neighbors were all like you: white.
The white flight out to the Parish was caused by the integration of schools and by blacks’ inching their way into middle-class neighborhoods, either by moving in or breaking in. The blacks out in the Parish lived in small, isolated areas; they kept to themselves, or it was easy enough to see to it that they did. Out in the Parish, too, there were lots of new private schools for whites being started by various Protestant and fundamentalist religious organizations.
Everything out in the Parish was new and safe and mostly white. And the people in the Parish meant to keep it that way.
Thirty years passed and the Parish changed considerably, growing larger—more people, more houses, more high-rises, more commercial enterprises—becoming a small city unto itself, but still it was safe and mostly white, and still the people meant to keep it that way.
No one understood this better or believed in this more than the sheriff of Jefferson Parish. But as Christmas neared, there was an unprecedented, parishwide rash of burglaries. It caused fear, anxiety, and a general feeling of violation. The people demanded action. The sheriff, in response, called a press conference to announce that any suspicious-looking black males seen in all-white neighborhoods would be stopped and questioned, especially those driving shabby, disreputable cars.
It was early evening, but already the atmosphere in the Solar Club was smoky. The patrons, most of them men, were doing some serious drinking, some hunkered down over the bar, some sitting at small tables lined along the walls of the large, low-ceilinged room. Christmas-tree lights were strung up around the lounge, not because the Christmas season was approaching but because they and the edging of silver tinsel hung just below the ceiling and running the entire width of all four walls were never taken down. The lights twinkled and blinked and seemed more numerous than they actually were because their twinkling and blinking was reflected in the large sheet of gold-veined black mirror behind the bar.
Burgess and Dexter were at the bar drinking beer. The TV above the bar was tuned to the evening news. They had already seen the sheriff of Jefferson once on the local news, and now they were hearing his statement to the press again on the national broadcast. The bartender turned up the volume, and all the men in the club gathered in a tight group around the bar to listen.
Sherree walked into the Solar Club just as a spokesman for the NAACP labeled the sheriff and his mandate racist. Sherree was tired from fooling with the kids all day and she wanted a drink but she could see that no one was going to get her anything until they were finished watching the news. She went up beside Dexter, who slipped his arm around her and, his eyes glued to the TV set, absentmindedly patted her rear end. Irritated, Sherree bumped his hand up against the edge of the empty barstool behind them to get him to stop. Dexter hardly noticed: a plan was beginning to form in his mind.
As soon as the report was over, the men shuffled back from their tight knot around the bar and began grumbling, an angry voice rising out of the low growl of protest every once in a while. Dexter remained silent until his plan worked itself out. Burgess listened to what the men had to say. Sherree told the bartender to get her a margarita.
All of a sudden Dexter stood up from his barstool and shouted above the drone of discontent, “So they gon stop any suspicious-lookin black man in a beat-up car? How many men an how many cars you think they can stop at once?”
The men drew back in to listen to Dexter. After he told them his plan, the mood in the Solar Club changed. The grumbling turned to laughter as they all got behind Dexter's idea. Drinks were ordered and there was the sound of their palms slapping the bar and one anothers’ backs. They started listing all the people they knew who had especially bad cars. A line formed at the pay phone.
Sherree was the only person in the Solar Club not caught up in the spirit of fun and protest. “I don’ like this, Dexter. You jus screwin around, an it's gon be nothin but trouble.”
“Aw, relax, Sherree,” Burgess told her. “Let em have their fun.”
Sherree said emphatically, “I ain't gon bail him out.”
“It ain't gon come to that, you'll see. An anyway, if it does, you know I'll take care of it.”
Sherree shrugged, flipping Burgess off with one shoulder. She turned to the bar and her margarita. Sometimes Burgess really pissed her off. If he hadn't liked the idea, one word and it would have been dropped. He was like the goddamn pope, and the minute she thought that, a little laugh rose inside her: the Bishop of Convent Street—she'd called it right.
But that one little laugh was all Sherree was going to get. She sat sipping her drink and feeling a kind of uneasiness. Or maybe it was irritation, being tired of their childishness—all she ever did anymore it seemed was fool with children—or maybe it was discontent, being just plain tired sometimes of everything. She rested her elbows on the bar and tried to concentrate on the taste of the margarita. She licked at the salt around the lip of the glass. She read the neon-pink lipstick writing slanted across the gold-veined mirror behind the bar—The Solar Club, So Hot It's Kool!—and tried to feel pleased that she could read it. She looked at the little Christmas-tree lights framing the mirror, the edging of silver tinsel. She tried to feel the way she did sometimes at night when the place was jumping and the jazz was playing and looking at the lights and tinsel made her happy, excited, made her think life was all right after all.
So big deal. If they wanted a parade, let them have a parade; if they weren't doing that, they'd probably be up to no good, drinking their lives away like they all seemed to do if they weren't on drugs, like her daddy did, drinking and banging his head on a table corner—dead drunk. Everyone in this city was parade-happy anyway. She'd just keep doing what she'd been doing. Maybe she didn't dance anymore, but that didn't mean she couldn't have her secret ambitions, that she couldn't be somebody again someday.
Sherree finished her drink and felt her misgivings begin to wash away. She told the bartender to get her another.
At noon the following day Dexter's parade of cars lined up on Convent Street across from the Solar Club. Some of the cars were shabby and disreputable—pitted and rusted, bumpy Bondo jobs, fenders and doors that didn't match, fenders missing altogether, peeling vinyl tops, hoods that wouldn't close all the way, cracked windshields, broken windows replaced with plastic held on with duct tape. And some were disreputable in other ways: rolling works of street art, graffiti on wheels, murals, swirls of color, licks of fire, Malcolm X on the side of a van, midnight-blue velour carved with gold stars and slices of moon, a Volkswagen with a Continental kit and the grillwork of a Rolls, and at the very head of the parade, Dexter in the customized Cadillac. Streamers and balloons flew from the antennas.
The caravan moved slowly down Convent Street toward the river, to take River Road out to the Parish. There the drivers would cut through the black Shrewsbury section—so they could show off—then work their way across the white suburban neighborhoods of Metairie until they got out to the big posh houses on the lake.
Burgess and Janine watched the parade leave, nearly twenty cars, waving them on their way from the Convent Street Housing Project. But Burgess didn't like the idea of hanging around the Convent on that particular day. In spite of what he'd said to Sherree the day before, he was afraid there might be trouble, if not in Jefferson, then after the parade. He didn't want to be at the Convent then and he didn't want Janine there either.
“I'm feelin jumpier than usual,” he said to Janine.
Janine thought maybe that was because he had the baby to think about now, and she thought that was the way it was supposed to be. She left in the pickup truck with Burgess, feeling more in love than ever. She didn't know how she'd gotten so lucky, to have somebody like Burgess in love with her, glad she was going to have a baby. He wasn't like other men, lazy, indifferent to babies, living off women, men wh
o were drinkers and dopers, who got hold of money and had to be hot shots, pissing it all away like there was no tomorrow. Never mind how Burgess got his money, he was doing something with it. He had a plan, he told her, for the baby. For our son, Janine said; Janine was sure the baby was a boy.
And she would make sure the boy grew up to be like Burgess, not like those other men, not like Dexter, that ass Dexter, thinking he was such a rebel because he had dreamed up this parade of cars as a protest against some honky's racism, as if that could make any difference. Burgess was the real rebel, the one who made the real difference. All you had to do was look at the difference in the Convent.
No, Janine thought, moving across the seat closer to Burgess, not a rebel: a revolutionary.
Burgess the revolutionary, the Bishop of Convent Street, his conviction growing stronger by the day that it was time to get out of the Convent altogether, took Janine to a sandwich shop for lunch, for a stroll through the Audubon Zoo to kill time, and then headed over to the cloistered safety of Thea Tamborella's house.
“Damn nuisance,” Delzora said, armed with a broom, fighting her ongoing battle against sawdust, “keepin this house in a uproar.” All around her was chaos and noise: the shrill of the saw, the pounding of hammers, men shouting, the radio blaring, Jared wailing, the dog barking to be let in, the cat mewing and clawing at Zora's legs, trying to climb up her as if she were a tree.
She took the broom and went back to the utility room to get some peace and quiet. She might as well change her clothes anyway; it was getting late, almost quitting time. She took off her wig and pulled the white uniform over her head.
While Delzora was in the back, Burgess and Janine arrived. As soon as Burgess was in the house, Jared was at the head of the stairs, yelling down to him, “They headed back, Burgess!” He meant, of course, Dexter and the cars, their route having been reported all afternoon by WYLD radio.
