Sarah Phillips

by Andrea Lee

  Five of us—Ellen, Chen-cheu and I, and two other girls—jumped up and, against the strict instructions left us by our absent counselor, took off toward the rec hall. We didn’t take the path but ran dodging like Indian spies through the underbrush, stifling occasional nervous giggles and trying to avoid the poison ivy. When we got to the edge of the clearing, we stood discreetly back in the bushes and observed the scene. The midday sun gave the clearing a close, sleepy feeling. The Thunderbirds, their spirits apparently undaunted, stood in a rambunctious platoon behind a grim-faced Ned Woolworth, and the familiar graffiti-covered school bus was just coming to a halt in the parking lot.

  We could see that the same tall, curly-haired man who had delivered the Thunderbirds was coming to pick them up; this time he was wearing a green eyeshade, as if he’d been interrupted during a stretch of desk work. He came quickly down the bus steps and strode over to stand in front of the assembled Thunderbirds. “Well,” he said, clapping his hands together, “what the hell have you guys been doing now ?”

  The Thunderbirds, all of them, broke into loud laughter, as if he had just told them the best joke in the world.

  “We ain’t been doing nothing, man,” answered Marvin Jones, rocking on his heels. “Just being ourselves!”

  The curly-haired man pulled off his visor and sighed so that even we could hear him, fixing his weary, skeptical gaze for a second on Marvin Jones’s scarred face, and then on the golden hills and fields of the Delaware countryside rolling into the distance. He talked to Ned Woolworth in a low voice for a few minutes and then turned back to his charges and sighed again. “Come on, get on the bus. We’re going back to the city,” was all he said to the Thunderbirds.

  When we five girls heard the bus start up, we did something we hadn’t planned to do. Without any one of us suggesting it, we all took to our heels again and ran through the woods to a dusty crossroads far from the clearing, a spot we knew the bus had to pass. Through some extraordinary, even magical, coincidence the same plan had occurred to all of us. When the bus came rattling up to the crossroads a few seconds after we got there, the five of us, like guerrilla fighters, dashed out of the bushes onto the road. “Stop the bus! Stop for a minute!” we shouted.

  The bus slowed and halted, with a squeal of gears, and the Thunderbirds stuck their heads out of the windows. We could see Marvin Jones’s platinum streak shining beside Belinda’s patch of dyed red hair. “We wanted to sing your song,” said Ellen, and without further ado we all began clapping our hands and chanting the profane verses that belonged to the Thunderbirds. “What the word / Thunderbird …”

  We probably looked ridiculous—five girls in cutoffs, football t-shirts, and moccasins, clapping and trying to perform like a group of tough guys on a city street corner—but we felt natural, synchronized, as if we were doing a good job. When we had finished, the Thunderbirds—still hanging from the windows of the bus—gave us a burst of grave, polite applause. Marvin Jones leaned farther forward out of the window. “That sounded good,” he said. “And we’re sorry to leave.”

  The two groups looked at each other, and it seemed for a minute that some obscure misunderstanding was about to be cleared up. Then the bus started up and moved slowly away through the trees.

  An Old

  Woman

  Early one Saturday morning my mother and I had a long, monotonous argument about a nifty pair of French jeans that I wanted to buy at Saks. My mother said that the jeans were overpriced and indecently tight, and that she and my father didn’t give me an allowance to have me waste it on any fad that came along; I contended that the jeans were a necessity, that I had fewer pairs than any other girl in the neighborhood, and that she just wanted to keep me badly dressed and looking like a child.

  We were driving around doing errands. Mama sat up very straight behind the steering wheel, looking prim and slightly ruthless in a dark-green suit, and I slumped in the seat beside her, biting my nails and tapping the toes of my sneakers with boredom. After stopping in at Saks, we had bought some groceries, picked up some flats of marigolds at Korvettes, dropped in at my orthodontist’s office to see about a possible crack in my retainer, and stopped at Mrs. Rindell’s house to deliver some tickets Mama was selling for a benefit given by her club, the Wives of Negro Professionals. It was a hot, hazy morning, one of a spell of unseasonably warm September days in Philadelphia. Along City Line Avenue the trees were slowly turning brown, and in the diffused light the big street with its crowded shopping centers and dense streams of traffic looked as if it had been lightly powdered by a fall of yellowish dust—it was the same yellow tint that comes over old Polaroid snapshots.

  There was one more errand left to do: my mother indicated a brown bag that held a quarter of a poundcake wrapped in wax paper. “I want to take this over to poor old Mrs. Jeller,” she said. “Roosevelt Convalescent Home is only five minutes away, and we can just duck in and say hello, and then we can go home.”

  “Oh, God, Mom—do I have to go in?” I asked.

  “You certainly do,” said my mother emphatically. “Mrs. Jeller was one of your father’s most faithful parishioners a long time ago—possibly in early Christian days—and it would be a pleasure for her to see you. Sit up straight, and stop gnawing at your thumb.”

  The convalescent home wasn’t five minutes away, it was twenty-five, the amount of time it took to go from the crowded thoroughfare of suburban shopping centers at the edge of town to a run-down, oddly deserted city street lined with boarded-up row houses and brick apartment buildings. The wheels of our car rattled on the cobblestones between the trolley tracks; at one end of the street I saw a group of little girls jumping double-dutch, their thin brown legs flying between the whirling ropes.

  Old Mrs. Jeller’s room opened off a shiny red linoleum corridor on the eighth floor of a tall, dismal building of pale, graffiti-covered brick. The room was a tiny cubicle half filled by a double bed covered with a yellow satin spread; a big television with the picture on but the sound off flickered in the corner. The air was smotheringly hot and smelled strongly of liniment. When I came with my mother through the doorway, I was embarrassed to see Mrs. Jeller seated bare-legged on the bed, wearing a short, rather tight cotton shift that revealed the shape of her large, limp breasts. The old woman was brown-skinned, with a handsome square face; her loose gray hair bounced in a wild frizzy mass around her shoulders, and she kept tossing it back from her face with a petulant gesture that was like a macabre parody of the way a flirtatious teenager might behave. Her expression, which had been drawn and querulous, brightened somewhat when she saw us.

  “Come on in, pastor’s wife, and sit down!” she called out to my mother in a voice that seemed over-loud and silly to me. She gestured us toward two rangy oak side chairs that looked as if they had come out of a country parlor. “Me and Miz Bryant was just watching TV.”

  Mrs. Bryant turned out to be the resident social worker, a white woman of about thirty, wearing an Indian-print dress and with a hairdo of untidy curls over a face with a receding chin and a mild, regretful expression, like that of a sheep. Mama handed her the package for Mrs. Jeller, and then all of us sat down. For a minute or two the old woman stared at Mama and me with bright eyes and an unsmiling mouth, still tossing back her hair with that petulant gesture; then she gave a small chuckle. “I can tell you all is mother and daughter,” she said. “They ain’t no way you could deny that.”

  “Is that your mother over there in the picture, Mrs. Jeller?” asked my mother, indicating an almost indecipherable yellow daguerreotype of a woman that stood on a table beside the bed.

  “Yes, ma’am, it is,” said Mrs. Jeller. “But she didn’t raise me. I came up the hard way.”

  She moved laboriously backward on the bed and then stretched out her bare legs on the mattress until they lay stiffly in front of her like a doll’s legs. On the other side of the bed, the social worker had turned her mournful sheep’s face toward the silent television, where a game-show host
, like a genie, conjured up prize after prize for a woman who seemed to be weeping with excitement.

  “Oh, dear,” began my mother. “What a shame. How—”

  “The hard way,” repeated Mrs. Jeller, striking the mattress with a loud whack. She flung her bushy hair back impatiently and turned to address me as if we were alone in the room. “How old are you, missy? Fifteen?”

  “Sixteen,” I muttered, abashed. The sight of this wild old woman with the bare legs and shamelessly tossing breasts both disgusted and fascinated me; seeing her was shocking in a curiously intimate way, like learning a terrifying secret about myself.

  Mrs. Jeller sat up a little straighter and went on staring at me. Her gaze was severe, as if she were about to chastise me for something. “You’re a pretty thing,” she said in a reproving tone, and was silent for a minute, her eyes glittering like two black beads in her dry brown face.

  “Do you know, girl,” she continued abruptly, “that I had my first man—that a man first had his way with me—when I was twelve years old? Twelve years old!”

  The old woman drew out these last three words into a plaintive wail that sounded like the voice of an abandoned child. As she spoke, she suddenly turned her head from me and began staring out of the window.

  My mother gave a dry little cough and asked, “What town did you grow up in, Mrs. Jeller? Was it Philadelphia?”

  Mrs. Jeller shook her head. “No, ma’am. It was out in the back of nowhere in Kentucky. Mama worked for the white folks, so I lived with Uncle Mills and Aunt Treece. They were country folks, and up until I was twelve, they kept me innocent. I was so innocent that when I first got Eve’s curse, my monthly flow of blood, I thought I had cut myself in the privy. I came running back to the house, shouting to my uncle and aunt, ‘I’ve hurt myself!’

  “Aunt Treece took me upstairs and showed me the cloths I must use to catch the blood, and how I must boil and wash them. And Uncle Mills called me into the parlor and told me that now I was a woman, and from that night on, I must only take my pants down for two reasons—to wash, and to go to the privy.

  “Both of them warned me never to allow any men or boys near me. But strict as they could be, a man did get to me. He was the brother of two girls who lived down the road. They were fast girls, bad girls, older than I was; they used to smoke little violet-colored cigarettes. They would always say ‘Come on!’ to me whenever they went places, and like a fool I’d go. And then their brother took to hanging around, and one night the girls left the two of us alone, and he did something to me. He hurt me, and I didn’t even know what it was he was doing. I ran home and didn’t stop to speak to my uncle and aunt—I just went right on up to bed and cried. Three weeks later my uncle looked at me and said, ‘Honey, you been with a man. Who was it?’

  “I started to cry and told him all about it. It turned out that I had gotten a baby from that man, from just that one time. A man’s seed is a powerful thing. It wiggles and jumps until it gets where it’s going, even inside a child who was a virgin.

  “The next morning my uncle went out, and when he came back, he said to me, ‘Hattie, we are going to have a wedding here, so go and invite whoever you want.’

  “I invited my teacher from school, and a girl I played with from next door, and I stood in the parlor, and the preacher married me to that man—his name was John. And after that, John lived in our house, and slept in my room, though I hardly spoke to him. Oh, it was frightening, I tell you, to wake up with that strange head alongside of me on the pillow. One night he touched me, and I felt a leaping and a hopping inside of me, as if my baby was trying to come out. After that I wouldn’t let him touch me. And in June, when my baby came, my uncle had the marriage annulled.”

  Mrs. Jeller shivered suddenly and clasped her hands with a sudden movement that shook her limp breasts under the cotton shift. “I can’t seem to get warm, even on hot days,” she said. “I can’t even sleep with regular sheets now,” she continued, indicating the bed, which was made up with a pair of thin, stained cotton blankets. Through the window came the hazy September sunlight, and from the street below, faintly, drifted the shouts of children and the noise of passing cars.

  My mother and I both had our eyes fixed on the old woman as if we were hypnotized. “What happened to your baby?” I asked, almost involuntarily.

  Mrs. Jeller looked off toward Mrs. Bryant, the social worker, who was still watching the silent television. “For a year and a half, my baby lived,” she said. “It was a baby girl. I left school and went out to work for white folks, and my lady, Miz Guthrie, was crazy about my baby. ‘Little Daisy,’ she named her, and kept her in a big basket in the dining room. She called me every hour to nurse the baby. That child saw more white society than I ever did. But she sickened and died; a lot of children died in those days. Two years later I was fourteen and free of husband and daughter. Free of both of them, and still a child myself.”

  The old woman suddenly turned her head back toward Mama and me, and gave us a toothless smile so wide and so swift that it seemed demonic. We both rose abruptly from our chairs as if we’d been struck from behind. Once on my feet, I really felt as if I might faint from the stifling heat of the room and the smell of liniment.

  “It’s been very nice to see you,” said my mother, after making a bit of small talk.

  “Nicer for me than for you,” said Mrs. Jeller, with a wink.

  When we stood waiting for the elevator in the red linoleum hallway of the nursing home, I felt unwilling to look my mother in the face, and she seemed disinclined to look at me. We stood awkwardly, half facing away from each other, and I felt very aware of my body under my clothes. For the first time, I was sensing the complicated possibilities of my own flesh—possibilities of corruption, confused pleasure, even death. The tale we’d heard—that had burst so unexpectedly upon a dullish Saturday afternoon—had a disturbing archaic flavor; it seemed, even, in a vague way, obscene. In its light it was hard for us to face each other as mother and child. We had not yet arrived at an acquaintance with each other as two women, and so we had to remain silent.

  “I never heard that story before,” said Mama finally, taking a handkerchief from her purse and patting the sides of her neck. “Poor old thing, she’s gotten very senile.”

  “It was awfully hot in there,” I said, gathering up my hair in my hands and flapping it to make a breeze.

  “Old people like hot rooms. Their limbs don’t seem to hold any warmth.”

  We got in the car and began the long drive back to the suburbs, and after a minute or two it was possible to talk naturally. We never, however, resumed our formulaic argument over the French jeans: one visible effect of our visit to old Mrs. Jeller was that ever afterward I was allowed to pick out my own clothes. My mother explained it by saying that she guessed I was old enough to make any mistake I chose.

  Negatives

  I hadn’t exactly grown up with Curry Daniels, but almost—he was even kind of related. Our mothers were distant cousins and had been best friends at Philadelphia Girls’ High School; side by side, wearing floppy, Depression-style hats, they had trilled sedately through endless Sunday afternoons in the Young Women’s Choir of the New African Baptist Church. Throughout my childhood my mother received a couple of Daniels family snapshots every few months, sent in letters from Atlanta, where Curry’s family had moved after the Second World War, and where his father had become a county supervisor. From the photographs, and from two visits to Atlanta, I knew that Curry (whose real name was John Curbin) lived in the same kind of surroundings I did in Philadelphia: a comfortable, insular, middle-class black neighborhood swathed in billiard-green lawns.

  Once, when I was very small, Curry and his two younger brothers visited Philadelphia, and the band of little boys—they had gathered in Matthew—harried me cruelly, unbraiding my plaits and threatening me with homemade blowpipes and twigs they said were baby rattlers. Much later, when I was in ninth grade, a snapshot of a rangy adolescent Curry (he w
as two years older than I was) with his legs negligently sprawled in the back seat of a Mustang convertible kept me awake and restless through a few starry May nights. After a while, though, I thought about him only when I had to send Christmas thank-you notes to his family.

  When I left home in the early nineteen-seventies to go to Harvard, Mama gave me Curry’s number at Winthrop House and instructed me to call him, but of course I didn’t. I’d almost forgotten he was at the same school until I saw him one cold December morning in a lecture on King Lear. After class I ran down the steep steps of the lecture hall and caught Curry as he was stepping out onto Cambridge Street. It was snowing, and he was wearing a big down jacket; when I gave him a sudden timid squeeze, the puffs of down collapsed softly, as if he were melting away in my embrace. “Sarah! You’ve certainly turned into a fascinating stranger!” he said, staring at me and grinning, and I felt a happy little flutter in my throat.

  I thought he looked pretty much the same as always—a bit like me, in fact, with his lean face that showed an almost evenly balanced mixture of black, white, and Indian blood. Below a mass of dark curls that he had tried, vainly, to shape into an Afro, his forehead was very high and bulgy, giving him a whiz-kid look of precocious intelligence, and his eyes, which were small, greenish, and very bright, peered through a pair of old-fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles that made him resemble, at times, an earnest young yeshiva scholar. His mouth was prettily shaped and rather pursed, the mouth of a spoiled boy. Under his jacket he was wearing jeans, a blue flannel shirt, and, draped rather dramatically around his neck, a Moroccan scarf; over one shoulder he carried a Pentax camera.

  After this first meeting Curry and I became friends. We often discussed whether or not this was proper: it was a friendship that would give great pleasure to both of our families, and that was something that neither of us particularly wanted to do. During the fall and winter of my sophomore year we wasted dozens of afternoons together over cooling cups of coffee in the Winthrop House dining room. Sometimes we played repetitive games, like trying to flip a cigarette butt into a glass across the table; other times we talked about a scholarly circle we’d invented that revolved around an imaginary publication called Condiment Review. “Have you seen Spazzola’s monograph ‘Restructuring Relish’? Absurd. The price of dillweed alone …”