The Search for Belle Prater

by White, Ruth

  “Maybe we can get him to come up here and sit with us,” Woodrow said in an excited whisper.

  “I don’t think so,” Cassie said as she took the seat behind Pap again.

  “Why not?” Woodrow asked.

  “It’s the law,” Cassie said in a low voice. “Coloreds have to sit in the back of the bus.”

  Pap climbed into the driver’s seat and stuck up one thumb to Cassie, which was his signal to her that we were ready to move on. Then he started the engine.

  “Next stop is Bluefield!” Cassie announced.

  Woodrow couldn’t keep his mind or his eyes off the colored boy.

  “Maybe we should go and talk to him,” he said after a while. “He’s all by his lonesome.”

  “Woodrow,” I said. “You go talk to him if you wanna. There’s no law against that.”

  “Why don’t y’all come with me?” Woodrow said.

  “If we all three go together, it’ll scare ’im,” Cassie said. “He’ll think we’re gonna hurt him.”

  “Why would he think that?” Woodrow asked.

  “Well, some people are just plain mean,” Cassie said, “and when they catch a colored person alone, they gang up on him.”

  “It’s in the paper all the time, Woodrow,” I said. “Don’t you ever read what’s going on in other places?”

  “Yeah,” Woodrow said, “but I don’t pay much attention, because things like that don’t seem real to me. They happen somewhere else. They don’t happen in my world. It’s like reading about the cowboys and Indians in the frontier days.”

  The boy had taken off the plaid jacket, and was sitting there in a long-sleeved green flannel shirt that was open at the neck. He was staring out the window, deep in thought.

  “I’m going to talk to him,” Woodrow said, suddenly determined. “Come on, girls, go with me. He won’t be scared of us. It’s broad daylight and there’s other people around.”

  Cassie and I looked at each other and reluctantly agreed. Nearly everybody stared at us as we stood up and approached the colored boy. He watched us suspiciously.

  “Hey there, what’cha doin’?” Woodrow greeted him as friendly as could be.

  “Doin’ nothin’,” he replied, looking us over. “Whadda you want?”

  “Nothin’,” Woodrow said as he perched on the center of the long seat, and Cassie and I took the other end. “I never saw a colored boy in person before, and I thought I’d just say hey.”

  “Say what?” the boy snapped, with a combination of anger and disbelief. “You never saw what?”

  “A colored boy,” Woodrow replied innocently. “Nor any colored person. Never saw one before. Never did, and that’s the truth.”

  “Huh!” the boy grunted. “Colored? You still ain’t seen one!”

  “Meaning what?” Woodrow said.

  “I mean colored is red and green and yellow and blue. This skin here …” He held out a hand to demonstrate. “This skin is black! It ain’t colored! It’s black!”

  “Well, it looks more brown to me,” Woodrow said, and it was the truth. “To me it looks about the color of a pecan.”

  Now, people in our neck of the woods were in the habit of pronouncing that word PEE-can because that’s how we had always heard it said.

  But apparently we were wrong, because the boy said knowingly, “I think what you want to say is pe-CAN. You say CAN harder than pee. A pe-CAN is a nut. They grow ’em in Georgia. A PEE-can is something you put under your bed at night.”

  “Well, shut my mouth,” Woodrow said.

  And that’s just what he did. What can you say after a speech like that? So we rode along in silence for a minute, then Woodrow thought of a retort.

  “Well, my skin’s not white either!” he said. “Just look at it!” Woodrow spread one hand out flat against his thigh. “I’d say that skin there is more the color of … Now, what would you call it?”

  “An English walnut!” the boy said as quick as that. “Your skin is the color of an English walnut.”

  “Hmmm,” Woodrow muttered, studying his own hand. “An English walnut, huh? Well, I guess that makes us just a couple of nuts, don’t it?”

  Cassie and I giggled, but the boy didn’t crack a smile. He was ignoring us and sizing Woodrow up.

  “We want to be called black,” he said then, real serious.

  “Okay, black it is,” Woodrow said.

  He touched the material of the plaid jacket, which was folded neatly on the seat between him and the boy.

  “I sure do like this,” Woodrow said.

  At once the boy snatched the coat up and stuffed it between himself and the window.

  Woodrow was not discouraged. “That’s what I said to my cousin Gypsy and our friend Cassie here, when we first saw you,” he went on. “I said you looked snappy as all get-out.”

  Woodrow gestured to us as he said our names, and the boy glanced our way.

  “Hey,” we said, and he nodded at us.

  “Did your mama buy you that coat?” Woodrow asked.

  “My mama’s dead.”

  “Oh. What about your daddy?”

  “He’s dead, too.”

  “Then who do you live with?” Woodrow probed, but the boy didn’t answer. Instead, he turned and stared out the window.

  “What’s your name?” Woodrow plowed on.

  “Joseph.” He answered that one. “Joseph Lincoln. What’s yours?”

  “I’m Woodrow Prater. Where you from, Joseph?”

  “Asheville, North Carolina,” Joseph replied, “and I’m on my way to Bluefield, West Virginia.”

  “We’re going to Bluefield, too. How old are you, Joseph?”

  “Me? I’m … well, I’m fifteen, almost sixteen.”

  Joseph pulled his frame up as big as it would go and looked down his nose at us. “How old are y’all?” he said.

  “I’m thirteen, and so’s Gypsy,” Woodrow said. Then he laid a hand on Cassie’s arm and added, “And Cassie here is a wee lass, but she’s older than the hills.”

  Cassie laughed good-naturedly, but Joseph remained stone-faced.

  “What are you going to Bluefield for?” Woodrow asked.

  Joseph ignored Woodrow’s question again but asked one of his own. “How come you never saw black people before? Did’ja grow up in a cave?” “Just about,” Woodrow replied. “I spent my whole life in a real backward place—Crooked Ridge, Virginia. Never been anywhere else but Coal Station, and it’s just a wide place in the road. I live there now with Grandpa and Granny. But my grandpa is gonna take me to Baltimore, Maryland, in about a month.”

  Joseph said nothing.

  “You wanna know why we’re going to Baltimore?” Woodrow said.

  “why?”

  “He’s taking me to a famous hospital. It’s called Johns Hopkins. A doctor there is gonna look at my eyes and see if he can make ’em straight.”

  Woodrow pushed up his glasses, and didn’t even blink as Joseph squinted into his face, and examined his crossed eyes.

  “Have you ever been to Baltimore?” Woodrow asked.

  Joseph shook his head.

  “I guess you’re in the ninth grade now, Joseph?”

  “No, I’m in the seventh …” Joseph said. He paused. Then the hardness of his face melted. “Okay, Woodrow, you caught me. I lied about my age ’cause people say I look older’n I am. I’m just thirteen, too.”

  “Well, you sure had us fooled,” Woodrow said. “Didn’t he, girls?”

  Woodrow turned to me and Cassie. We nodded.

  “Are you going to an orphanage?” was Woodrow’s next question to Joseph.

  “No, I am not!” Joseph said emphatically.

  “Well, I know you can’t live by yourself,” Woodrow said. “There’s a law against it—or something.”

  “I was living with that stinkin’ Roosevelt Hale!” Joseph said.

  “Was?” from Woodrow.

  “See, I have a brother named Ethan,” Joseph started explaining, “and after M
ama died two months ago, Ethan had to make a living for us ’cause he’s sixteen and he could get a job where I couldn’t. We had no more kin nearby to do for us, but I thought we were doing just fine by ourselves.

  “Then Ethan got a chance to go to California with his buddies, so he dropped me off at Roosevelt Hale’s, who was no more to us than a neighbor we’d hardly ever spoke to before. And Ethan left me there with nothing but a few clothes and a ten-dollar bill. He told me he would send for me someday.”

  Joseph paused and swallowed hard.

  “Someday?” Joseph’s voice broke on the word. “What does that mean? A whole month went by and he didn’t even write. Next thing I knew, Roosevelt had my coat hanging with his own things. Said he would keep it ‘safe’ for me. Safe, huh! He aimed to have it for his own self. I knew that!

  “He made me do all the work at his place … to earn my room and board, he said. And if I didn’t do it, he’d whoop me.”

  I entered the conversation. “Gee, that sounds like the Joseph in the Bible, who was sold into slavery by his brothers.”

  “You’re right!” Woodrow exclaimed. “And he had a coat of many colors, too!”

  “Can you interpret dreams?” Cassie asked him. “Like the Joseph in the Bible?”

  Joseph shook his head.

  “Well, I can,” Cassie announced proudly. “So if you have a dream you want interpretated, you just let me know.”

  For the first time Joseph showed some interest in somebody besides Woodrow.

  “Where did you learn how to do that?” he asked Cassie.

  Cassie shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve always known.”

  “Did you run away from that stinkin’ feller?” Woodrow went on with his interrogation.

  “Yeah, I did,” Joseph said. “Yesterday, while he was at work, I pulled my ten-dollar bill out of its hiding place, took my coat from Roosevelt’s closet, and headed to the bus station.”

  “And what’re you gonna do in Bluefield?” Woodrow wanted to know.

  Again Joseph ignored the question. Nobody said anything for a spell, and Woodrow certainly could not put up with that.

  “Let me tell you about my mama,” he blurted out, emphasizing my like it was the most important word in his sentence. “She just disappeared.”

  He crossed his arms, looked at Joseph, and waited for the inevitable reaction. He was not disappointed.

  “Whadda ya mean?” Joseph said, perking up all over.

  “Well, me and my daddy, we got up one morning and she was gone. That’s all. Nobody’s seen her since.”

  “But you don’t mean like poof!” Joseph said, snapping his fingers. “And she vanished into thin air?”

  “Prob’ly not, but we didn’t see her go,” Woodrow said. “So we don’t know what happened.”

  Then Woodrow abbreviated the story about his mother for Joseph, added the New Year’s Eve phone call, and told him what we were planning to do in Bluefield.

  “No foolin’?” Joseph said, and you could tell he was immediately sucked into the Belle Prater mystery, just like everybody else.

  “Here’s a picture of her,” Woodrow said and drew the snapshot from his pocket. Joseph looked at it and handed it back without commenting.

  “Wanna come along and help?” Woodrow asked Joseph hopefully.

  “I reckon so” was Joseph’s surprising reply.

  And the Belle Prater search team grew to four.

  8

  The sky had darkened by the time we got to Bluefield. Pap removed suitcases from the luggage bin under the bus, and Cassie answered the passengers’ questions as they disembarked. Woodrow, Joseph, and I stood outside the door, waiting for her to finish up.

  As the toothless man passed he said, “Now, you young’uns don’t forget to read the signs!”

  We assured him we would not forget, and he struck off walking down the street.

  The Lucky brats appeared and paused beside Woodrow, while their mama barged on, still lost in her own world.

  “That’s right, I promised somebody a nickel, didn’t I?” Woodrow said.

  The children were all eyes as Woodrow rummaged around in his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. He was always proud to show off how much money he had these days. Before coming to live with Granny and Grandpa, he never had two nickels to rub together.

  “It was nearabout impossible to tell who was the best,” Woodrow said, as he plucked three nickels from the change. “So I’ve got one for everybody, how’s that?”

  The children grinned as they took their nickels and ran to catch up with their mama.

  Woodrow turned to Joseph. “Don’t you have to be somewhere at a certain time?”

  “Don’t worry ’bout it,” Joseph mumbled. “I got time to help you look for your mama.”

  Cassie kissed Pap goodbye, and said to us, “Let’s fly.”

  Taking our cue from Cassie, we all acted like we had wings. Chirping and flapping our arms, we swooped down on Bluefield and landed on a corner, where we stopped and looked around.

  It was a pleasant, cozy town with sidewalks running along in front of neatly painted houses, and big old oak trees growing beside paved streets. It seemed like a place you could snuggle up in.

  On the next block there was a homey eatery with a red-and-white-striped awning over the entrance. The front window was filled with cute baskets of fruit, and on the glass were the words JILL’S CAFÉ.

  “Let’s go in here and get something to eat first of all,” Woodrow said. “It’s nearly lunchtime, and I’m starved.”

  Woodrow was always starved. Grandpa said he had hollow legs.

  When we started to go in, Joseph said, “I’ll just wait out here.”

  “What for?” Woodrow said.

  Joseph pointed to a sign: WHITE ONLY.

  “We’ll find another place,” I said quickly.

  “They’re all alike,” Cassie said. “Gypsy, let’s you and me go in and get everybody’s food and bring it out here.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll stay with Joseph,” Woodrow said.

  Nobody mentioned that it was too cold to eat outside, but that hateful sign left us no choice.

  “You can get me a hot dog and some pop in a cup,” Joseph said to me, and handed me a quarter.

  “Same for me,” Woodrow said, and gave me a quarter as well.

  So Cassie and I went in together, placed the orders, then carried them outside. Woodrow and Joseph had found a bench at a bus stop, and we huddled together with our food, girls in the middle and a boy at each end of the bench.

  For a while we were too busy eating to talk. Before long, over the noisy smacking of our lips, we heard Woodrow say, “Joseph, you workin’ for the FBI?”

  “No!” Joseph replied with a laugh. “Why’d you ask me that?”

  “I thought maybe that’s why you can’t tell us what you’re doing here,” Woodrow said. “Maybe it’s top secret.”

  “Woodrow!” I snapped at him. “Maybe it’s personal!”

  “No, it’s okay,” Joseph said with a big sigh. He must have figured Woodrow was not going to let up. And he was right. “You see …”

  Joseph studied his fingernails like he saw something interesting there. He picked a piece of lint off his jacket and stared across the street at a house where a refrigerator was being delivered. I knew he was searching for the right words. Even Woodrow managed not to hurry him.

  Joseph tried again. “You see … my daddy …”

  He stalled again.

  “Your daddy’s dead, right?” I tried to help him.

  “Not exactly,” Joseph said.

  “Not exactly means he’s alive, right?” Cassie said.

  “Mama always told us we should think of him as dead, but he’s not really,” Joseph said.

  “Is he in a coma?” Woodrow said.

  “No, he’s not in a coma!” Joseph said, and laughed again. “Woodrow, you really are a nut, you know that?” Then he went on quickly, running all his words together, “
MydaddydisappearedtooonlyitwaswhenIwasababy. HedesertedMamaandmeandEthan.”

  Silently we unscrambled his words and absorbed them.

  “And you still don’t know where he’s at?” Cassie said at last.

  “I didn’t for a long time, but two Christmases ago, he sent me this coat, and Ethan a watch. It was the first and last time we heard from him in all those years.”

  Joseph put his hand into the pocket of his coat and brought out a tiny brown scrap of paper. He sat there staring at it.

  “Mama let us keep the presents, but she threw away the package, because his address was on it. Later I dug it out of the trash, and tore away this corner where the address was printed. I’ve been carrying it around ever since.”

  “Did you write him?” I said.

  “I wrote about twenty letters,” Joseph said. “But I tore them all up. Never mailed a one. I was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?” Cassie said. “He’s your daddy, ain’t he?”

  “Yeah, but what if …” Joseph started and stopped.

  “I know how you feel,” Woodrow interjected. “After all, he deserted you.”

  “Yeah, but then he sent the Christmas package with this address on it, like he was trying to reach out.”

  “The same with Mama’s anonymous phone call,” Woodrow said. “You just don’t know what to think, do you?”

  We were each inside our own thoughts as we finished eating in silence.

  “So what’s the address?” Cassie asked after a while. She reached for the scrap of paper in Joseph’s hand and read aloud, “One-eleven Appalachian Street, Bluefield, West Virginia.”

  For a split second I guess I absorbed some of Cassie’s talent for seeing into the future, because I knew what she was going to say next.

  “I know exactly where that’s at, Joseph. It’s on the other side of town, but this is a small town, so it’s not far.”

  “Well, let’s go! Let’s go!” Woodrow cried, jumping to his feet. “We gotta get started. Now we got two people to find.”

  We left the bench and headed in the direction of Appalachian Street, agreeing to ask people about Aunt Belle along the way, and show her picture. Joseph suggested we take our time and do a thorough search. He wanted to tag along with us and shore up his confidence before going to his daddy’s door. He was nervous.