Guardian

by Julius Lester

  “At least Zeph knows how to have fun and make a girl laugh. You’re always so serious, Ansel. I get depressed just thinking about you.”

  Ansel turns away. “Let’s go, Willie.”

  Mary Susan watches Ansel climb up to the seat, Willie following reluctantly. She knows she should not have said what she just did, but she doesn’t know how to make the words go away.

  Willie climbs up and takes the reins, pops them against the mule’s rump, and the wagon starts to move.

  “Ansel! I’m sorry!” Mary Susan calls out. “I didn’t mean what I said. I’m sorry!”

  Ansel hears her. He wants to tell Willie to stop the wagon.

  “Don’t you hear Miss Mary calling you?” Willie asks.

  “Mind your own damn business, nig…,” and he stops.

  Willie knows what Ansel was going to call him. He is hurt. He knew better than to let himself start to trust.

  Neither boy is old enough to understand that Ansel’s stopping himself from uttering the word is more important than the fact that he almost said it.

  2.

  Esther Davis is a tall, thin, and not very attractive woman, a fact she has no illusions about. Her hair is a dull brown that she put into a bun when she was sixteen and hasn’t changed since. Her nose is long and sharp, and her lips are so thin that if a male had ever tried to kiss her, he would not have known where.

  She lives in the large house her father built on the town side of the railroad tracks, the house in which she was born.

  Her parents sent her to prep school in Massachusetts when she was twelve, and neither they nor she had expected or wanted her to come back. An ugly girl with a sharp mind might have a better chance of finding a career for herself up north. As for a husband, well, no man wanted an ugly wife, especially if she was smarter than he was.

  But her father had a stroke the year after she finished Radcliffe and had started teaching French at Boston Latin. Her mother needed her to help care for him.

  The stroke had left him paralyzed and unable to speak, which she took as God’s punishment of a man who treated his hunting dogs better than the Negroes whose work had made his father and him wealthy. Given a choice between shooting a deer or a Negro, her father would have been hard-pressed to choose.

  She had thought she would stay a year. But near the end of that year, her mother died.

  It took him ten miserable years to die, also a sign of God’s punishment, but it became hers, too. She had been away from teaching too long. And the colored children on the plantation needed her.

  Her brother, Zeph Jr., the new “Cap’n Davis,” didn’t want her teaching “my niggers how to write and do figures.” He wanted her out of Davis.

  But her father’s will left her the house and money enough to live comfortably the rest of her life.

  So she stayed to do penance for the deeds of her father, brother, and nephew.

  Of the three, Zeph the Third was the worst, and that was saying a lot. She went to the cabins after his “visits,” bringing cotton and salve to help tend the girl he had violated.

  She hated her brother and nephew, not only because they were evil but also because their evil was nonchalant and devoid of passion. A cold evil was a frightening thing.

  She did what she could, taking care of the old ones who couldn’t tend cotton anymore. The groceries and supplies from Anderson’s each week were almost exclusively for the Negroes.

  But it was past time for her to go back where she belonged. She missed walking around Harvard Square with her choice of bookstores to enter, missed being able to see the latest movies, go to restaurants, or even something as simple as turning on the radio and being able to find classical music.

  But there was one thing she had to do before she left. If she succeeded, she would not go back alone.

  3.

  Willie pulls the wagon up to the back of the Davis mansion. The back door opens and a young black woman comes out. She is as pretty as Esther Davis is ugly. This is Amanda, Willie’s mother.

  After helping Willie and Ansel unload the wagon, she asks the boys, “Do you have to hurry back to the store?”

  “No, ma’am,” Ansel answers. He knows that he isn’t supposed to say “ma’am” to a colored lady, but this is Willie’s mother. Willie says “ma’am” to Ansel’s mother. Why shouldn’t he say “ma’am” to Willie’s?

  “Miz Davis would like to talk to the two of you.”

  Ansel and Willie exchange worried glances. What could she want to talk to them about? What had they done wrong?

  Amanda leads them from the kitchen, through the dining room, and to the parlor in the front of the house. The two boys sit on a settee covered in a deep red, brocaded velvet. Neither has ever sat on something so fancy, and they perch themselves on the very edge.

  Amanda returns from the kitchen carrying a tray with glasses of milk, plates with large slices of pound cake, forks, and napkins. She sets everything on a coffee table in front of the settee. “Help yourselves,” she says. “I’m going to go tell Miz Davis you’re here.”

  Ansel and Willie look around the room. Sunlight streams through the lacy curtains and reflects off the glass-enclosed cases of books. Neither boy has ever seen so many books in one place.

  “What do you think Miz Davis wants with us?” Ansel whispers to Willie.

  “I don’t know. We haven’t done anything. Have we?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  Not knowing quite how to act, they remain balanced on the edge of the settee. They look hungrily at the milk and slices of cake, but they are afraid to touch either.

  Esther Davis enters. She moves quickly, as if she has more energy than she can use in a day or a lifetime.

  Even though Willie sees Miz Davis, both here and in the quarters, and Ansel sees her at church every Sunday and sometimes when she comes to the house to visit with his mother, neither boy can remember ever seeing her eyes on fire like they are now.

  She sits down in an armchair facing the coffee table across from the boys on the settee. Amanda sits down in the companion armchair.

  “Don’t be shy,” Esther says, smiling. Her voice is soft and deep. “You won’t hurt that settee, and please, help yourselves to the milk and pound cake.”

  The boys relax, and placing napkins over their laps, they each take a plate and a fork and start eating the cake.

  “Ansel? What do you want to be when you grow up?” Esther asks abruptly.

  Ansel quickly swallows the morsel of cake he is chewing and wipes his mouth with the napkin. “Ma’am?”

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Esther repeats.

  Ansel looks at her, bewildered. He does not understand the question. He is going to work in the store with his father, and one day it will be his.

  “Willie? What about you? What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  Willie has been thinking about this for a long time. He has never said it aloud, not even to his mother. But no one has ever asked him. Until now. He looks into Esther Davis’s eyes.

  “A doctor,” he says simply.

  “A doctor,” his mother repeats, unable to believe what she is hearing. “Where did you get such an idea from?”

  Willie looks at his mother. “Every time somebody in the quarters gets sick, and the white doctor don’t come from town. I heard you say that Grandmamma wouldn’t have died if the white doctor had come as soon as he was sent for.”

  Amanda’s eyes get large, then fill with tears as she remembers what she believes was the unnecessary death of her mother. But she cries also because her son is dreaming, because in the time and place where they live, to dream is an act of courage.

  Ansel did not know Willie wanted to be a doctor, did not know there was such a thing as a colored doctor.

  Willie’s saying he wants to be a doctor causes Ansel to remember the books he likes to read about a lawyer named Perry Mason. Ansel thought it might be fun to be a lawyer and solve murder mysteries.r />
  “Ansel? What about you? Have you thought of what you might like to do when you grow up?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe a lawyer. But Papa wouldn’t let me. I’m supposed to take over the store.”

  “That’s what your father wants. What do you want?”

  Ansel shrugs again. “Never thought about it. My papa took over the store from his papa, and I’m supposed to take it over from my papa, and then my son will take it over from me.”

  “Is that the life you want for yourself?”

  He doesn’t like all these questions. No one has ever asked him what he wants. What was the point in wanting to do something if you couldn’t? Seemed to him it was better not to want anything if your parents didn’t want it, too.

  Esther sees the look of bewilderment on the boys’ faces as they turn their attention back to the milk and cake.

  “If the two of you stay in this town, you will die but you won’t know you’re dead,” she says with too much intensity. Her words come out as if she is angry with them when it is the town, the South, and life itself that make her furious.

  But Willie and Ansel giggle.

  “How can you be dead and not know it?” Willie asks. His question explains their giggles.

  “Just look around!” Esther continues, even more animated. “Look at the people! There’s not a dreamer among them. They are content with life in Davis as it is. Even your father, Ansel. I’ve known him all my life. I had high hopes for him. He has such a fine mind. He sat right here in this parlor, and we talked about going to school and never coming back to Davis. But his father convinced him there was nothing out there in the world, that everything he needed was right here in Davis. He was wrong, Ansel! Wrong!”

  How could his father be wrong? Fathers were always right. Weren’t they?

  “What do you want for your life?” Esther continues insistently, desperately.

  Ansel decides he does not like her. Who does she think she is to say his father is wrong? “What I want is not important. What Papa wants is what’s important,” he says flatly, stubbornly.

  “Don’t let your father do that to you!” Esther exclaims heatedly. “It’s your life! Yours! Do you hear me? Yours!”

  She is scaring them. She can see it in how their bodies have stiffened, in how they are looking at her, fear in their eyes, in how they have moved back to the edge of the settee like tiny birds about to take flight.

  “Ma’am? We have to get back to the store. We have a lot of deliveries today.”

  Everyone knows Ansel is lying, and they are grateful for it.

  Willie and Ansel get up, thank Esther and Amanda, and leave the house quickly.

  4.

  Each morning after Bert and Ansel leave for the store, Maureen stands in front of the oval mirror atop her dresser and stares. What she sees is a woman who is not as thin as she used to be, a woman whose body is becoming soft and round. Even her face is more fleshy. What has not changed are her eyes, which are so dark they seem to absorb light instead of reflect it.

  For some moments she stands there. Repeatedly, she forces her lips up so that they curve at the ends. She parts her lips to reveal her teeth. That is what people do to make a smile, but she looks like she is grimacing in pain.

  Because she can’t smile, Bert stopped her from working in the store except on Saturdays.

  Colored people don’t seem to mind that her smile is filled with pain. They have an instinctive understanding of what it is to smile when you want to cry. They have to smile at any and every white person they see, no matter how young.

  If they don’t, somebody might complain to Cap’n Zeph that such-and-such a nigger has a sullen look on his face. A nigger who didn’t smile was an uppity nigger, and there was no place this side of heaven for an uppity nigger.

  But many of them looked forward to seeing Mister Bert’s wife’s face as much as whites looked forward to seeing Bert’s.

  It takes Maureen a while to understand why she looks forward to seeing the colored faces every Saturday. Their lips turn up at the ends and their lips part to reveal their teeth, but she sees only sadness in their eyes.

  One Saturday morning she understands. Smiles begin in the eyes and flow downward to the lips.

  Her eyes are dead.

  She wonders: “When did I die?”

  And that leads her to ask: “Was I ever really alive?”

  “I breathe. My heart beats.”

  “But there is more to life than that. Isn’t there?”

  She has never been sure. When she was in high school, the girls talked about their boyfriends and what they did with them and when they were going to get married.

  That must be like what it is to be alive, she had thought.

  When Bert Anderson seemed interested in her, her spirit brightened.

  She didn’t know why Bert was interested in her. Her father didn’t have a lot of money like his. Her father was a straw boss on Cap’n Zeph’s plantation. That was only a little better than being colored.

  Maureen had wanted to ask Bert what he saw in her. If he told her what that was, perhaps she could see it, too.

  But she had been afraid to ask, afraid he would say he didn’t see anything besides how big her breasts looked behind her starched blouses.

  His eyes looked at them more than they did her face. But the other girls envied her when they realized she wasn’t stuffing her bra with tissue like they were. They said she was lucky Bert was interested in her because he was a good catch.

  Maureen thought her breasts must be bait.

  The girls said she could let him do anything but never to go all the way. Not until they were married.

  So she tolerated sitting in the backseat of his father’s car, his hands groping at her blouse, one hand trying to unbutton it while the other tried to pry open her clenched knees.

  She had thought his hands on her breasts would make her feel alive. But his hands were sweaty, and his slobbery kisses on her neck only made her feel wet with spit. What she had hated most of all was the wetness in her underpants, as if she had peed on herself, only she hadn’t.

  He had called her a tease, said she was torturing him, said if she loved him she would let him go all the way. But she couldn’t.

  What if she did and afterwards, he lost interest, having gotten what he wanted? That was what the girls at school said would happen if she let him.

  One night he took her hand and placed it on his pants, against the hardness beneath. She didn’t want her hand there, on that thing, and she took it away, but he grabbed it, put it back, and placed his on top and held it there, pressing with all his strength. She wanted to get out of the car, to go somewhere, anywhere, and die. He began to move his hardness against her captive hand, breathing faster and faster until he gave a small cry. His breathing slowed. The hardness beneath his pants went away like a balloon that all the air had come out of. He took his hand off hers. Her hand returned to her, but she did not want it.

  One night, not long after this, it happened. Even now, even on this morning when she, a thirty-two-year-old woman, stared at herself in the mirror, she did not understand why, except she remembered thinking that maybe she would feel alive if she let him.

  And so she did. And he did and it was over so quickly and all she had felt was pain. She remembered lying there in the backseat, glad she was wearing a dark skirt so the bloodstains would not show, wondering how she could get rid of her underpants without her mother knowing, and she was seized by a loneliness far deeper than the one she had lived in before that night.

  Bert did not speak to her in school the next day. She saw him standing with some boys, a smirk on his face, and his friends turned to look at her as she walked by, and she knew that they knew, that everybody in school knew.

  And when her period did not come, she knew.

  She had thought her parents would be angry, but they seemed almost pleased. Her father, a crude and bitter man, said, “I’m glad you put them big titties of yours to g
ood use.” And her mother added, “You done good, girlie! The son of the second richest man in town is going to be your husband. You done good!”

  They had not had a church wedding, nor had there been any guests, just her parents and his at the judge’s office in the courthouse in Shireville.

  Bert’s parents were angry their son had let himself get trapped by a piece of white trash, which they told her to her face.

  Bert said it was her fault, that she had led him on, that she had teased him so much that he had lost control and couldn’t help himself.

  She had not thought loneliness could get any more vast than it had been that night in the back of his car, but when the judge pronounced them “man and wife,” and went on to say, “You may now kiss the bride,” Bert had turned away from her, reached in his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes, took one out along with a book of matches, lit it, inhaled deeply, then, turning back toward her, slowly blew a stream of smoke in her face and walked out.

  Her loneliness expanded until it devoured all possibilities of life.

  Maureen blinked her eyes as if waking from a trance. She hurried downstairs and quickly washed and dried the breakfast dishes and utensils.

  She had just finished when she heard a knock on the door. She hurried to the front of the house, opened the door, and Esther Davis came in.

  Maureen looked at her. “You’ve been crying,” she said flatly.

  Esther nodded, and tears gushed from her eyes.

  Of all the people Maureen had ever known, Esther was the only one who had always been kind to her. Maureen had been surprised to get a letter from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Dear Maureen,

  I know you are not what everyone is saying you are. You must be feeling very alone because no one understands. You are not alone, because I understand.

  Your Friend,

  Esther Davis

  And so began a relationship through letters, letters that had gone back and forth from Davis to Cambridge, from Cambridge to Davis. When Esther moved back, the letters continued. Both women found that words flowed more freely from the nibs of pens than their tongues, though they were together on their weekly trips to the library in Shireville.