“And they all got maids, too?” Vida asked. “Them Pearl and Hertha women?”
“Sho! What you think? They do for theyselves?”
Vida’s mind was working a mile a minute. “No, I jest. . .who—”
“Speaking of the devil!” Sweet Pea said, pointing. “See that big red woman down yonder sitting on her porch? That Creola. Miss Pearl be her white lady.” A large freckled woman, her frame completely hiding the chair that was propping her up, waved a meaty arm in their direction.
“Miss Pearl,” Vida repeated, carefully considering the prospects. “The Senator’s very own sister.” Then she asked anxiously, “Where the sheriff’s maid live at?”
“The sheriff?” Sweet Pea gave Vida a sideways. “Seems to me you always asking about the sheriff.” Sweet Pea pointed farther down the lane. “See that painted house up on river stilts, looking down on everybody else?” Sweet Pea paused a minute while her red lips curled up in a look of obvious disgust. “That Missouri’s house. We all call her Misery for short. She never let you forget who her white boss be.”
“Missouri,” Vida said slowly and deliberately, determined to remember it.
“Yeah, ol’ Misery about as whitewashed as the house she stay in. She so color-struck she think she poots Franch perfume.” Smiling contritely at Levi, she said, “Pardon my language, Reverend.”
“Fact of the matter,” she went on, “she was bragging about helping the Senator’s family get ready for their cook’s funeral.”
“Lillie Dee?” Vida asked. “She done passed?”
“You know her? That sounds like her name. Misery say the Senator loved her like a mother. You know how crazy them white folks is about their colored mammies.”
Vida’s pang of grief for Lillie Dee turned quickly into excitement. Lillie Dee had died and there would be a funeral! Everyone would be there. It was as if the sassy woman had taken a stick and stirred up a wasp’s nest in Vida’s head.
In fact her thoughts were buzzing so, she hardly noticed when Sweet Pea stopped at a tarpaper shack with a vine-strangled yardgate. As she lifted the wire noose from the post, she cut her eyes up at Levi. “Well, this be where I stays. All by my lonesome.”
Vida could have sworn she saw the woman wink at Levi.
“It was sure nice meeting you, Miss Sweet Pea,” Levi said. This time it was Sweet Pea who seemed to be blushing.
It struck Vida that though her father was almost sixty, he was still a very good-looking man. His face was creased with age, but he was tall and lean, and his features were still sharp. When he looked at Sweet Pea his eyes seemed to twinkle. She had never thought of her father as a regular man with regular-man needs, nor had she considered the effect of taking Levi away from his self-enforced isolation. Life was a lot closer here. People would be watching. Things could easily get out of hand. She had to buy some time before she made her move.
As she continued down the lane with her father, Vida returned nods to neighbors who were sitting out on their porches, escaping from the heat of cookstoves and enjoying the cooling of the early evening. For the first time, she felt she belonged. There was purpose for her here. She noticed how pleasant it was down in Tarbottom. How every porch was a poor man’s Hanging Garden of Babylon. Ferns and mother-in-law’s tongues and impatiens and verbena rose up from old enamel washpans, while petunias and moss roses and wandering Jews, planted in rusted syrup buckets and coffee cans, spilled down from eaves and railings. The yards, kept clean and grassless by the regular sweep of dogwood brooms, were filled with chickens pecking and dogs trotting and boys and girls racing around in games of chase. For the first time in a long time, she noticed the music that lives in the laughter of children.
Chapter Twenty-One
PLOTS AND CONSPIRACIES
The first thing Vida did upon getting in from her day at the Grahams’ was to open the front and back doors of the shotgun house to get a breeze channeling through the two rooms. Then she pulled a couple of straight-back chairs up to the wooden table that sat on a ragged patch of linoleum. She called to Levi, “Supper’s ready, Daddy. Come on and eat.”
Levi stood over the table and prayed, “Lord, bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies and—”
In the middle of the blessing, Vida plopped herself down and forked up a bite of squash. This didn’t go without her father’s noticing.
Levi finished his prayer and seated himself. “It wouldn’t hurt to give Him His due, Vida.”
“Hurt Him a lot less to give us ours,” she said with her mouth full. “He the one got everything. I reckon it’s up to us to get our own.” Vida had a plan, and needed neither God’s nor her father’s permission.
“We got food to eat.”
“Ain’t even our food,” she said, thinking of Johnny’s meanness today. “If you got to bless it, put Mr. Floyd Graham’s name on it. It’s his holdovers we eating.”
A long silence followed while Levi stared at his plate. Vida knew she had shamed him again. She couldn’t help it. Looking at him was like staring defeat right in the face. Sometimes she had to take a swat at it. Her father was lost without Jesus or the white man propping him up. She couldn’t afford to think that way. Not now.
“All I’m saying is we on our own, Daddy. We got to be strong. Ain’t nobody going to save us but us. You understand that? Time for wishing and praying is long gone. We got to start being smart with what we got. And careful. If we make a mistake, ain’t no sweet by-and-by for us.”
“You want me to leave, I’ll go. You don’t have to feed me. Anyways, I’d just as soon starve than hear you blaspheme the Lord.”
“Where you going to go, Daddy? Tell me that. Down to the bayou to do some preaching to the frogs? We too far away for that now.”
Levi stiffened. “What I mean is, I can find me a revival somewheres. Things ain’t always going to be this way. Things going to be set right again.”
“We been all over this,” she said, knowing it would do no good to say it again. She did it anyway. “The sheriff done put the evil eye on you. Ain’t no board of deacons in this county going to stand against him. You can leave the county if you want. But I ain’t going. I still got business here.”
Vida studied her father as he sat there, his eyes cut down at his plate. What would he do without her? It was too late for him to start all over.
“Now, Daddy,” she said, trying to soften her tone, “you need to be with your family. I going to look out for you.”
“I need to be doing something. I can’t sit around on that bench all day. With that boy staring at me.”
At that Vida tensed up in her chair. “Which boy?” she asked, her voice hard again. “That white boy say you call him Nate. What you think those fine white people going to do if they catch you talking crazy to one of their precious little lambs. Be back to the fields for both of us, picking scrap cotton. Or worser if it be the sheriff hearing you.”
“I took the boy for Nate’s all,” Levi explained. “He came up on me sudden.”
Vida angrily crumbled a wedge of cornbread over her peas, wondering if her father even remembered what Nate looked like, after years of pretending he didn’t have a grandson. “That boy don’t look nothing like Nate,” she said flatly.
“Same coloring. Them thin lips—”
“Ain’t nobody in they right mind going to mix Nate with that boy,” she snapped. “Ain’t nobody looks like Nate.” Vida stopped herself, biting her lip. They both knew that wasn’t true. If it were, Nate would be sitting at the table with them tonight.
In a calmer voice, she said, “I’ll talk to Mr. Floyd. Maybe he can find you a little piece of work to keep you busy in the yard.”
Levi squared his shoulders. “I ain’t no yard boy,” he said. “I’m still a preacher of the Word.”
Vida’s temper flared again. “And I ain’t got no business being no maid. And Willie weren’t supposed to be no two-bit bootlegger just to settle your sharecropping accounts with the Senator.”
>
Damn! she thought. Why couldn’t she ever stop short? Why did she always have to come out fighting? Seemed sometimes meanness was the only thing she had plenty of. She silently cursed herself again. Then she cursed her father for taking it from her, wondering when exactly it was that she had become the adult and he the child.
“It’s been a fall for the both of us, I reckon,” she said. “And neither of us can’t pick ourselves up from no place but where we fell. We ain’t got a bushel basket of choices.”
“One day it’ll be different, Vida,” Levi said, now sounding as confident as ever. “When the Senator finds out the truth of it all, things will get put back the way they was. The bottom rail will be on the top.”
“I know, Daddy,” she said, scraping a few more peas into her plate. “You lay more faith on the Senator than Jesus. And the both of them ain’t listening. Now, my own self,” she continued, shaking her fork in front of her, marking her words in the air, “I find it best to keep my head down, my eye clear, and carry a ice pick in my tote sack. That way I kin get a quick handle on my faith when I needs to. When the sheriff find out I’m working next door, all hell going to break out. We got to be careful living amongst white people. And smart. Least till I can make my move.”
“You study too much on revenge, Vida. All white people ain’t bad.”
“Humph. They raised to be bad. Leastways to the colored.” She chortled to herself, thinking of the fierce look on Johnny’s face that afternoon. “You know, I figger that white boy would kill me if I kept my back turned long enough. He’s some nasty.”
Johnny eased open the door to the darkened room. A shaft of light from the hallway caught his mother’s face, and her eye opened to the light. He tiptoed over to the edge of her bed and carefully removed the tray with her uneaten supper from beside her. Then he stood staring into her face until she managed both eyes open. At last she recognized him with a half-smile.
Johnny pulled himself up into the bed with her and burrowed into the space under her outstretched arm, putting his back against her ribs. Tucked up close to his mother, he dutifully reported to her the day’s events, including the part about the strange old man on the bench and the jumble Vida was making of their kitchen.
With outrage he told her of all the time Vida wasted. About how she would walk out to the front porch and stand there staring off into the distance at the sheriff’s house, as if she were waiting for him. And how sometimes, after the sheriff got in or out of his cruiser, she would head back to the kitchen, walking very slowly, like all that looking had worn her out, and stand over the sink saying and doing nothing. Wasting his daddy’s money.
“And Momma, one day she disappeared. She was out standing on the porch looking at the sheriff’s house, and then she was gone.”
When his mother didn’t ask where to, he offered his guess. “I bet she been over sneaking around the sheriff’s house. She’s sneaky mean, Momma.”
Johnny went on to list Vida’s offenses and then waited for something to happen, as if his recollections would make his mother whole. Or mad. Anything. But she didn’t seem to care.
He had only one item left, one even he knew was minor. “She took some food home.”
His mother gazed at him with clouded eyes. Then from out of that dimness, he thought he saw a faint, familiar glimmer.
She whispered to him, “Nothing else?”
Johnny’s heart began to beat faster. “No ma’am. I even checked her bag.”
“You know your daddy won’t tolerate stealing, don’t you?”
Johnny nodded again. They both knew that was one thing Floyd could not abide. He had fired other maids when he only suspected they had taken something from the house. One time he told the sheriff. Floyd hated it when he thought he was being taken advantage of by the colored.
“But it needs to be something bigger than food,” she said. “Something valuable.”
“Yes ma’am!” he said happily, interpreting this as a full-out declaration of war on the maid.
His mother’s breathing became even again. When she closed her eyes, Johnny kissed her on the cheek and climbed down off the bed. Checking to make sure his mother’s eyes were still shut, he carefully reached into her nightstand, picked up a little garnet brooch, slipped it into his pocket, and tiptoed out of the room.
Chapter Twenty-Two
LILLIE DEE’S FUNERAL
Down the bluffs and out in the Delta, a multitude of mourners dressed in their finest were on their way to pay their last respects to the most sainted church mother in the county. Lillie Dee Prophet had passed on the stroke of six, sitting alone in the Senator’s kitchen having her supper. The Senator himself had heard the platter of cornbread shatter against the floor and found his cook, the woman who had raised him and his sister, Pearl, and after them his own daughters, slumped over the kitchen table.
The road to the church was dry and unshaded, and after half an hour, the morning sun was bearing down on Vida as she walked, setting like a weight on her shoulders. Every now and then a car or a wagon pulled up, the driver offering a ride, and each time she refused, wanting to be alone with her thoughts. This morning there was much to think about. She had been so impatient for daylight, she had rolled from pillar to post the whole night through. The biggest part of it had nothing to do with mourning Lillie Dee.
Another car approached from behind. Vida closed her eyes and lowered her chin, waiting for the cloud of dust to billow over her. With her head bowed, a breath of air locked tightly in her chest, she prayed that by the end of this day she would be one step closer to Rezel.
Most of the mourners in Levi’s rebuilt church paid Vida no mind, pretending they didn’t recognize this common colored woman wearing lye-scrubbed gingham. However, a few looked at her woefully, certainly remembering a girl from years ago who used to come to church dressed in white organdy, her plaits tied with satin bows. Avoiding their pitying looks, Vida sidled over to a side of the church where ladder-back chairs from half the porches in the county had been carted in for the overflow crowd and lined up against the wall. There, off to the side and unobserved, she could focus on her business.
First she scanned the church, trying to take in all the faces at once. Where was he? Surely Rezel would come home for his mother’s funeral. Unable to pick him out on first glance, she started with those at the back and methodically surveyed the crowd, one face at a time. How much can a person change in six years?
She worked her way to the front of the church. There was still no Rezel. Refusing to give up hope, she tried to recollect the faces of his brothers. Maybe the one who left his wife in Memphis had come. Toby was his name. Vida recalled him being lighter colored than Rezel. Or maybe the oldest boy had come home; Pinetop, they called him, because he was tall and lean. Was he there? There were seven boys in all. One was bound to know Rezel’s whereabouts.
Since the one letter years ago, there had not been another word from Rezel, nor from any of Lillie Dee’s sons for that matter. Probably ashamed, Vida guessed. They all moved to and from cities with cold, iron-hard names that scraped the back of your throat to say them. Akron and Scranton and Chicago. In and out of jail so many times, they probably didn’t have the heart to tell their mother nothing except the same ol’ bad news. Yet surely they would come to her funeral.
But no, she saw not a one. To keep her tears at bay, she told herself maybe later, at the graveside.
The whispering around her hushed. Levi’s successor had risen from his chair and was striding up to the pulpit. He was a soft-looking man with raised brows, lids that seemed to never blink, and rimless spectacles that magnified his eyes, all working together to grant him a frozen look of surprise. As he mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, he opened his mouth to speak. Before he could utter his first words, the back doors were flung open and heads whipped to the rear of the church.
In streamed a procession of white people marching down the aisle as if they owned the building. The sight of that many
whites in a colored church was so off-putting, it took a moment for Vida to recognize who they were. When she did, her insides shivered. The large man with the shock of white hair and thundering footsteps leading the group was the Senator. On his arm was his sister, Pearl, who breathed through a lace handkerchief pressed against her powdered white nose. Behind the two of them was Delia, the Senator’s pretty daughter, whose cobalt-blue eyes flitted recklessly from the face of one young man to another, tempting them. That was a woman bound to get some colored man lynched, Vida quickly decided.
Bringing up the rear was Hertha, the Senator’s older daughter, as dark and scary as any midnight visitation. She seemed to be fuming mad, casting menacing looks back toward the open door. A cold dread settled on Vida’s chest. She knew the procession had not ended. There was one member of the family unaccounted for. Sure enough, it was the sheriff who finally sauntered in.
The man didn’t bother to remove his Stetson. His hands were crammed in his pockets like a child in a sulk. With what appeared to be much reluctance, he joined his wife where she had halted midway down the aisle, her stone-hard stare telling him she refused to take another step without him.
Farther down the aisle the Senator had stopped beside one of the pews. The people began shifting uncomfortably about, but he didn’t glance to the left or right, keeping his red-rimmed, watery eyes straight ahead on the dove-gray coffin draped with gladiolas. As the entire pew stood up and emptied to make room for the white people, the preacher stumbled over his words. “Ain’t this an honor, now? Such a great honor. . .an honor to us all. . .to Sister Prophet, that is. . .” He paused to wipe his brow and then continued. “The Senator and all his kin coming to pay they respects. I know we all happy to have them amongst us today as we praise the life of our dear departed sister.” He paused again, allowing a murmur of agreement to course through the church.
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 14
