While the preacher continued praising the white people, Vida studied them one by one. First, the Senator, looking like God without His beard, all-powerful yet now weeping like a baby for his old colored cook. Lillie Dee always said he would mourn her like a mother once she was gone. She said she only wished she didn’t have to be dead to see it.
Next Vida eyed the three white women. Their skin as slick and sallow as a slab of fatback. Haughty and pampered. Dressed like queens in silks and satins and looping chains of gold and pearls. Vida ran her hand over her own dress and felt the rough scratch of the fabric.
The one Vida was most curious about was blocked from her view by a large church mother’s white-scarved head. Building her nerve, Vida edged over in her chair and furtively crooked her neck to steal a look.
She saw him in clear daylight for the first time in years. His arms were crossed, and he glowered down at his boots. He had changed little since that day at the store, a little thinner maybe, more hard-bitten. But it was still there, in the almond shape of the eyes, in the uplifted corners of the mouth, in the fine-boned cheeks—the beginnings of Nate. Vida trembled inside. Something so innocent peering through a countenance so evil. How was it possible to fully hate the man, when Nate’s goodness shone through like foxfire?
The sheriff, as if sensing her gaze upon him, looked up at Vida. The man still had eyes resembling burned-out cinders. At first his expression revealed no sign that he knew who she was. Then Vida saw the trace of a taunting smile.
When she could get close enough, she swore to herself, she would drive an ice pick through his black heart. And it didn’t bother her one bit that she had made this promise in a church.
The preacher called out, “Let that be a testimony to us all! By carrying her corner for Jesus, Lillie Dee touched many important lives.” Then, shaking his head sadly, he said, “It is a piteous thing that Lillie Dee’s own children won’t be with us here today. They done scattered to the four winds. Only God Hisself knows where they are, and only our prayers can reach them.”
Vida bit her lip. The words cut across her heart like a razor.
As the mourners muttered about the shame of it, Vida heard a high thin voice pronounce a word that sounded like “Rezel” and then giggle. She frantically scoured the church trying to find somebody capable of being so irreverent at a funeral and finally settled on a high-toned man toward the back. It had to be him. She memorized his face just in case, yet in his green pongee shirt and sharkskin suit, he would be hard to lose. When he noticed Vida staring, he winked.
After the preacher was done with the service and Lillie Dee had been carried from the church, he asked everybody to show respect and let the Senator and his kin pass first. Vida stood anyway, trying to catch the flirty man’s eye again, but he wasn’t looking in her direction.
When the last white person was gone and the rest of the church rose up to leave, Vida struck out like a hound on his trail. Once outside she spied him under a pecan tree, alone, studying the crowd moiling about in the churchyard. Vida sidled over next to him, and he smiled, seeming pleased to have her company. Looking around to make sure no one was listening, Vida said carefully, “I heared you say something ’bout Rezel. You know Lillie Dee’s boy?”
The man pulled an ivory toothpick from a special pocket in his satin vest and eyed Vida wickedly. “Sho. I know Rezel.”
Vida’s heart was racing. “How you know him?”
He grinned. “What’s it to you, good-looking? He your boyfriend?” The stranger worked the toothpick between his long white teeth. “If he is, you might better find you another man to tide you over.” He winked again. “How about checking me out?” He flicked the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.
Vida gasped. “What you mean I better look for anothern? What happened to Rezel?”
Surprised she didn’t know, he told her that he and Rezel had done time together. “In Joliet,” he said. “But don’t look for him back here. He say he ain’t never coming back to Mississippi.”
The man must have noticed the stricken look on Vida’s face. “That’s all right, baby. How about letting me soothe your broken heart.” He reached out to stroke Vida’s face with the back of his well-tended hand. She slapped it away.
“He never said nothing about Vida Snow? Or my father, Levi? Or a little boy named Nate?”
The smile caved on the man’s face. “Rezel was a daddy? Sure nuff?” He took a step back. “Rezel never said a word ’bout being no daddy. How many children y’all got?”
Vida moved a step closer. “Where he go off to?”
He returned the toothpick to his pocket. “Looka here. Me and him wasn’t best buddies or nothing. Rezel didn’t talk. He did his speaking in his cornpone blues songs, not to me.”
“So what he sang ’bout?” Vida asked, moving closer still. The man’s back was now against the tree.
“Damn, girl. Give me some room. If you got to know, he was always singing about a sweet deal waiting on him when he got out of the pen. A meal ticket, he called it.”
“A meal ticket?”
“Yeah,” he said, waving to someone across the yard. “ ‘Drivin’ a big black car for a big white man.’ That’s how it went. Sang it over and over till I told him I’d sure nuff cut him if he didn’t shut up.” The man took another step back. “Now I got to go see somebody about a dog.”
Later that evening, Vida put away her gingham dress and changed into a plain cotton shift. Her father slept soundly on the bed next to the stove. It was time to think about supper.
After lighting a fire in the stove, she got down on her knees and, using the handle of her old parasol, hooked the edge of a wooden potato crate she kept under her bed. She carried it to the eating table. There she ferreted through the contents—her mother’s cotton gloves, empty thread spools. She quickly leafed through photographs and yellowed sheets of piano music, crayon scribbled pages in a child’s hand. A white satin ribbon Rezel had given her, now dingy gray. As she searched she kept repeating the verse the man had told her.
Drivin’ a big black car
For a big white man.
What was the music that went to that song? she wondered. What were the rest of the words? Maybe something that went with car or man. Hand. Can. Land. Promised Land.
She came upon what she had been looking for. After carefully removing Rezel’s letter from the ink-smudged envelope, she smoothed the page out flat on the table. The only word she had had from since he took off to Chicago. Bits of the oilcloth showed through from all the folding and unfolding. Reading the letter she knew by heart, she tried to weave its contents with the information she had received today, hoping it would add up to something new.
The thought was like a cold wind whipping through Vida’s chest. What was it Rezel done for the white man? Was the answer in the rest of that song? Car. Star. Far. So far.
Vida folded the letter and dropped it back in the box. There were no new answers, only more questions. She was no closer to Rezel. Maybe one step farther away. Feeling the tears well up, she rose from the table and walked over to the stove. With a stick of kindling she furiously poked at the embers, raising an intense heat.
She drew her skirt above the thigh. The old scars had grown ashen and tough, but beneath them was still lodged the buckshot, ever working itself closer to the surface. Vida stepped up to the stove. As the burn bit into her leg, she clenched her jaw and swore a silent oath to God. She had stood by and let others take away all that she loved. Nate. The father she used to know. Next time God tested her, He wouldn’t find her weak and pitiful. She swore that if only He would give her a second chance, if only He would lead her to Rezel, God would find her tough-minded and strong, fierce enough to strike anybody dead who tried to take what was hers.
Chapter Twenty-Three
DREAMING NATE
The day after Lillie Dee’s funeral, the last thing Vida wanted was company. That pesky Sweet Pea had other ideas. That morning she met Vida at
her cabin door and said she would walk Vida to work. Though Sweet Pea chattered mindlessly all the way, Vida didn’t bother responding once. It nearly took until they got to Delphi proper for Sweet Pea to comment on Vida’s sullenness.
“Miss Hazel done wearing on you? I told you, she a pure-dee mess. Don’t blame you for being down in the mouth.”
No way would Vida entrust this woman with the truth of her grief. She hadn’t even told her father about going to Lillie Dee’s funeral. Vida shook her head. “It ain’t Miss Hazel. She sleeps in her room all day.”
“How ’bout her little boy?”
Vida rolled her eyes. “Mean as the day is long, always trying to get my goat. But I guess the worst of it is figuring out how to work them fancy machines. Washing machines and cooking machines and the coffeepot and the beaters and mixers. I ain’t never been ’round nothing such as that.”
“Now, why don’t I drop over today? I’ll show you everything you need to know. Ain’t that hard. You pick it up in the time it takes for us to have coffee.”
“Coffee?”
“Sure, I’ll be by around ten, that when Miss Cilly goes to her beauty parlor.”
“I don’t expect Miss Hazel be happy ’bout me having company and serving them her coffee.”
“How she going to know? You say she sleep all day. We be real quiet”
Vida had a hard time believing this brassy woman could do anything quiet.
Loud or not, Sweet Pea was a good teacher and in less than an hour had Vida working most of the kitchen gadgets. Miss Hazel didn’t say boo, and the boy was off to vacation Bible school.
“And if you ever get stumped, come get me. I can always get away, mostly. I visit my friends all the time while they white ladies is out. And Miss Cilly don’t never stay at home.”
Vida poured them both another cup of coffee.
“No, being a maid to Miss Cilly ain’t too bad, once I got her trained in. Course some white ladies is worse than others. Work you to a frazzle. And none of them pay as good as what I used to get from their husbands. You got any cake to go with this coffee?”
Vida’s mouth dropped. “With their husbands?”
“Now, don’t look at me thataway. Anyhow, I’m a churchgoing woman now. I don’t do that no more.” Sweet Pea leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “What’s it like living next door to the law? You see him much?”
“The sheriff?” The question startled Vida. “Why you want to know about him?”
Sweet Pea laughed. “Oh, I thought I told you. Him and me go way back.” Then she winked. Sweet Pea slid her empty cup away.
Vida was about to clear the dishes when Sweet Pea said, “I remember you asking me once if he talked in his sleep about some boy. I got to thinking. He did ask me the beatin’est thing the first time he brung me to that old shack.”
Vida looked up. “What? What he ask you?”
“He was yelling out in his sleep. I shook him awake and I could tell he was coming out of some kind of bad dream. Ask me if I ever heard tell of a light-skinned colored boy in these parts. Ask me if I ever seen one so light he could pass for white. Wanted to know if such a thing was possible.” She laughed. “Ain’t that curiousome? Never knew what he meant, he was crazy drunk when he asked it. Probably a nightmare of some kind. Don’t you reckon?”
Vida didn’t answer. She picked up the dishes and went to the sink, turning her back on Sweet Pea to hide the stricken expression on her face. However, Sweet Pea gathered enough to know it was a good time to say her good-byes.
It would be like her father’s God to be this heartless, Vida thought, staring blankly out the window.
When Vida closed her eyes, she could barely recall Nate’s face. Even when she pulled his picture out of the crate underneath her bed, he seemed more like a dream she’d had one night long ago than a flesh-and-blood boy who had once tugged at her plaits, the fussy little child who couldn’t get to sleep unless he was holding on tight to her father’s gold chain.
“Hands, Momma. Hands,” he would cry. She remembered his words but couldn’t hear his voice.
How cruel, that after all her praying to see her son in her dreams, to touch his face, to catch the smell of his skin once more, it was the sheriff Nate came to. He appeared to the one person whose dreams she could never get close enough to overhear.
Yet that night, for the first time in years, Nate did come to Vida.
Vida is perched in her swing, the one that hung from the porch of her childhood home. Pushing off higher and higher, she kicks up her baby-doll shoes and ruffles her petticoats for the world to see, for Vida delights in the envious faces of the plantation girls as they walk by on their way to chop cotton, dressed in raggedy field clothes and nappy-headed.
Her father in his best preacher’s suit, with the golden hands hanging from his chain, tells her, “You are truly blessed to be the daughter of the Reach Out Man.” He smiles upon her proudly as she reaches for heaven with the tips of her shoes.
From somewhere comes the shrieks of a baby, and the smile vanishes from her father’s face. “Is that baby yours?” he asks. She is too frightened to speak.
By now the plantation girls have come up into the yard, giggling wickedly. In the dream they play their ring games, holding hands in a circle and dancing and kicking. They chant those mean rhymes made up about Vida:
Vida was sewing a hole in her dress
From popping her tail so high,
White man thread her needle,
Right through the eye.
Vida looks up at her father, hoping he won’t hear, wanting to deny their accusations. They begin to sing louder, almost shouting:
Vida got her a baby boy,
Bright as a ’lectric light.
That’s why she be grinnin’
Cause all she totes is white!
The crying starts up again. And then she sees Nate. He is at her father’s feet, grasping for the golden hands. The hands seem to be alive, reaching down toward Nate. They almost touch.
“Tell me the truth, girl,” her father says angrily. “Is this baby yours?”
Vida’s throat is so dry she can’t speak. She desperately wants to put the smile back on her father’s face. Finally she blurts out, “No, Daddy. He ain’t my baby.”
The crying and chanting grows louder, yet the refrain has changed. The girls are singing and Vida reaches up to cover her ears.
When she awoke from the dream, it was Vida who was sobbing. “I’m sorry, Nate. I’m sorry,” she heard herself moan. Through her tears, she saw the darkened form of her father standing in the doorway.
“Vida? You all right?” he asked. “You been calling out in your sleep.”
Vida wiped the tears away. “No, ain’t nothing wrong,” she said. “Get on back to bed, Daddy. I be fine.”
He returned to his room. Vida bit her lip. What was Nate trying to tell her? Was he asking her to fix the past? To put things right?
As sad as it made her feel, she would not wish this dreaming to stop. It was proof that Nate was still working in her life, doing his best to reach out to her, to show her the way.
When she fell asleep, she dreamed once more. But not of Nate. Rezel came to her. She saw him clear as day. He was strumming his old beat-up guitar, smiling sweetly at her. His music made her want to dance. He began to sing “Driving a big black car for a big white man,” and for some reason it filled Vida with a joy so rare, she smiled in her sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Four
WORD FROM UP NORTH
A hundred miles north of Delphi, the man’s headlights washed across the road sign: WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI, THE HOSPITALITY STATE. When he read it, he got the distinct feeling that it didn’t mean him, so he slowed the old Caddy to five miles below the speed limit. He’d heard about the kind of hospitality Mississippi served up to colored folks visiting from the North. Last year the papers couldn’t say enough about that boy from Chicago they found at the bottom of one of those unpronounceable rivers of the
irs. Sent that god-awful-looking corpse back to his poor momma. They put him out on display. Thousands of people snaked by that casket to get a look at what Mississippi white people could do when they got it in their minds to welcome you properly.
And Jesus! The stories those Mississippi boys in Joliet told about home-sweet-home. No wonder they ended up in adjoining cells. Life spent bent over double in a cotton field, yassuhing and nawsuhing every white man that could knot a noose—such a life was bound to shortchange a fella when it came to making sound business decisions. Of course, his own crime was the result of an understandable miscalculation. Cutting a man for drawing five of a kind out of a deck he himself had stacked. He figured if the brother could magically come up with an extra ace, he shouldn’t have any trouble producing a new ear. The law thought different.
Daylight shifted ever so slowly across the Mississippi landscape, carried on the back of a thick, ghostly mist. As the shapes of trees emerged from the mist, he peered through the vaporous air to see if there really were bodies hanging from every limb.
Nope, he thought, if it wasn’t for Rezel, you sure wouldn’t catch my ass in this backwoods hell of a hole. But a deal was a deal. Anyway, Mississippi was on the way to the Big Easy, a town tailor-made for an expert gamesman such as himself. In New Orleans, they never stopped dealing and the dice never stopped rolling. The best thing was, nobody knew his face or his con. Be taking candy from babies.
On top of anteing up a C-note, Rezel told him he could keep the car, and the only thing he asked was to drop off a message to some girl he used to be sweet on. Must still be after all these years. Acted like it was the most important letter he ever wrote. Didn’t even have an address. Drew out a map to some hick town called Delphi and said to begin asking about her there. “Make sure you stay away from that sheriff,” he told him. “Don’t let him catch you.”
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 15
