Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Downstairs, directly below, in our small slice of the old house, were the two rooms that were my mother’s workshop and showroom. On our front door—up two wooden steps from the uneven brick sidewalk—was a small neat sign: MODISTE. My mother had lettered that herself; she had always been very clever with her hands. It was her first real shop, this one. It was her first real success. The first of many.

  I spent my days either at my window or in my mother’s workrooms. The rest of the house, the other two rooms, I scarcely remember. I was either a princess in my tower or a mannequin in my mother’s clothes.

  Not until years later did I realize that all the faces I saw were black. (To me they had no color, no color at all.) The people walking on the street, the old on their therapeutic rounds, the Sisters of the Holy Family, the drivers impatiently threading their way through the heavy street traffic, my mother and her customers—they all wore black skin.

  As did the children in school.

  Eventually I had to go to school. My mother did not send me when I was six, as the law said she must. For one extra year I dreamed and flaunted my beautiful dresses. I doubt that the authorities would have noticed had I not gone to school at all. I think it was my mother’s new friend who finally persuaded her. For my mother at last had a friend, a good friend, whose visits were regular and predictable. For him my mother bathed and did her hair and cooked specially and smiled when the doorbell rang.

  My mother’s friend was a tall, heavy man who came to church with us every Sunday and afterwards held my hand as I walked along the top of the low wall that bordered the churchyard. He owned a small cab company—he drove one himself—whose insignia was a lightning bolt across a bright blue circle. His name was David Clark, and he took me to school and picked me up every day of my first year.

  I went to parochial school. Navy skirts and white blouses and black-and-white saddle oxfords, all of us. All of us rows of little black raisins, waiting to be taught to read and to count and to love Lord Jesus.

  Ah, yes, but I was the only one picked up by taxi every day at three o’clock. The children stared at me as I rode away, the Indian princess in her palanquin, the treasure of the mahal above Leconte’s Drugstore.

  On the first day of school my mother went with me. I remember very little about that day—I was nauseated with excitement, griped by fear—but I remember the clothes she wore: brown and beige linen, a long-sleeved blouse, and an eight-gore skirt. I saw the nuns’ eyes flick over us in brief appraisal: we passed with honors. (I took it as my due. I wonder now how my mother felt.)

  The school smelled of peanuts and garlic bologna. The floor of my classroom was spotted with puddles of slimy liquid. Oddly enough, the other children’s panic quieted me. In the reek of their nervousness, my own stomach settled, and when the harried janitor arrived with a bucket of sawdust to sprinkle on the vomit, I helped him by pushing aside the desks.

  That first day was the longest I have ever known. And the hottest. It was early September, and the afternoon sun burned through the window shades to polish our faces with sweat—all except the teaching sister. Her face remained dry and dull as if coated with a film of dust.

  I never grew used to the noise and rush of children leaving class. When the bell sounded, I always waited while the room emptied. Then, in a pause disturbed only by the soft sounds of the teacher gathering her papers, I walked slowly through the door, last and alone.

  For first grade, I had two skirts, made by my mother according to the uniform dress code of the parochial school system, and two blouses. Every second day, when I came home, I was expected to wash my blouse carefully, using the kitchen sink and a small scrubbing board that my mother kept underneath, propped against the pipes. I then hung it on the back porch inside the screen, where no bird could soil it. Every so often my mother was dissatisfied with its whiteness, and she would wash it again in bleach. The next time I wore that blouse I was certain to have a rash across my neck and shoulders where the fabric rubbed my skin.

  Later on, when my growing required new blouses (the skirts had deep hems to let down), my mother made them slightly different. She added small tucks down the front, two tiny rows on each side of the buttons. I noticed the nuns looking at me—they were very strict about uniforms in those days—and they must have talked to my mother. My next blouses were perfectly plain. What the nuns couldn’t know about were my slips. My mother made my slips too, and they had all the elaborate decorations that my blouses lacked. They were tucked, with drawn lace and wide banks of crochet at the shoulders, and a deep flounce of lace at the hem. Only one nun ever saw them, and she wasn’t really a nun. She was a novice: very young, shorter even than I was. She was cleaning the bathrooms, and I, not noticing her, was fanning myself with my skirt against the heat. She stopped and fingered my slip. “What lovely work, what exquisite work.” Then she looked shocked and ashamed—perhaps she had made a vow of silence—and she went hastily back to her pail and mop.

  After my first year at school, I took the city bus home. The stop was at our corner. All I had to do was cross the street and open the door. Once inside, I rushed to bathe, to brush my hair, to put on the dresses that my mother would sell. Wearing her clothes and her dreams, I would move carefully among her customers, gracefully, as only a princess can.

  The lotus blossom. The treasure of the mahal. In the women’s faces I saw greed and covetousness. My mother’s order books rustled busily. I myself drew spirit and sustenance from the flickering eyes and the fingers stretched out to touch. The small crowded room became my castle and my kingdom.

  This then is the story of my mother. And of me.

  The Middle Kingdom

  HOW SHALL I TELL you about our years together, my mother and I. Teacher and pupil. Wizard and apprentice. Without ever once saying so, she taught me the mysteries of the world and the people who walked its surface. She taught me disguises to let me move safely through the ranks of my enemies. She taught me the greatest enchantment of all: how to walk like a princess in kingdoms of our own making.

  We built two kingdoms, she and I. One of walled gardens where roses bloomed all year and gold carp swam in marble lily pools, where she was queen and I was princess, where our castle gates were guarded by the flaming swords of cherubim. Through all our ordinary days my mother and I carried this gleaming private world with us, hermit crabs, walking ponderously, castles on our backs, secure.

  Our second kingdom, a kind of distant shadow of the first, was strong and firm and enduring in the human world, rooted in reality, based on money and property and the logic of commerce. Its treasures were measured by bank accounts and corporate statements.

  In this world I was a dutiful daughter, a serious industrious student, member of an emerging underclass. In this world my mother was a businesswoman, an embryo capitalist. A woman of flickering eyes, setting traps for dollars. A sorceress of spells and illusions of beauty whose customers followed her devotedly.

  Even as I did.

  In my fifteenth year, as I prepared to enter the eighth grade, the horizons of my world expanded abruptly, explosively. My good grades, my impeccable behavior, my mixed racial background, and my mother’s tireless importunities—they had all combined to get me a scholarship to St. Catherine’s, a boarding school run by the Ursuline nuns.

  In those days we were still living in the apartment over Leconte’s Drugstore, the one with the tower window seat. I stared at the familiar four corners below and wondered if I would miss these crowded streets. I had seen pictures of St. Catherine’s: a cluster of Gothic buildings in the midst of green pastures that sloped away to misty blue hills. I had even charted the exact distance on a road map (eight hundred thirty-two miles) and the direction (almost straight north).

  The school sent a list of required clothes—and an offer of financial assistance in providing them. We refused. I knitted my own sweaters—one navy, one white—a scarf, mittens, and a cap in the school colors of blue and gold. My mother made my clothes, all o
f them: the uniform skirts and blouses and blazers, the nightgowns and slips and panties, one casual dress for Saturdays, a dressy one for Sundays, and a heavy coat, heavily lined.

  David Clark, my mother’s friend, bought two pale blue Samsonite suitcases for me. “A young lady needs to look good,” he said, “when she starts a new life out in the world.”

  I opened the suitcases carefully, slowly. They were the first I had ever owned. When my mother and I moved, we used cardboard boxes from the grocery.

  “Well, now”—David Clark settled in his big chair, sighing with tiredness—“look at all those winter clothes. You’ll need them, that’s for sure.” My mother brought him coffee and began massaging his shoulders and neck. Driving a cab all day stiffened and cramped his muscles. “I saw enough winter when I was in the army, enough snow and ice and cold to last a lifetime.”

  With a remembering chuckle he began the story of his wartime service, one we’d heard a hundred times before. Still, my mother and I listened attentively because the telling gave him such pleasure.

  He’d been a waiter in an officers’ club, first in England, then France, then Germany.

  “The English women, now,” he said, “they were real fond of us GIs with the black faces. They couldn’t wait to find out if we was black all over or just spotted like a dog. Pure curiosity, that’s what it was.” He shook his head slowly. “Only fight I ever had was on account of a woman. I didn’t want to, never did enjoy it none, but the guy looked like he’d kill me for sure. The funny thing was, he didn’t rightly know how to fight, so I just tapped him upside the head. And that was all. I used to wonder, did he go back later and knock that woman around.”

  He’d done a bit of black-marketing too, he said, smiling at the memory, and when he came home he had enough money to buy two cabs and start his company. He always ended his story the same way. “That war was the making of me,” he said.

  My mother went on packing my suitcases, neatly, competently preparing me for my new life.

  The two of them drove me to the airport. David handed me ten one-dollar bills, folded in half. I put them carefully in my new wallet in my new purse.

  My mother kissed my cheek, and I walked on the plane.

  That was all. Never once had my mother said: You are very lucky to have a scholarship to such a fine school. Or: You must work very hard to repay the trust the nuns have placed in you. Or: Take care to be grateful.

  You see, my mother was never grateful. She accepted this scholarship for me the way she accepted everything, as if it were her due. All her life she’d depended on the kindness and generosity of strangers, and she had come to expect it.

  I had never been on a plane before; indeed I had not been anywhere farther than a Sunday afternoon drive. But I could pretend to be an experienced traveller. There was a thin old woman sitting across the aisle from me—the plane was quite empty—and I copied her every move. The stewardess smiled when she came to check my seat belt, and I smiled back politely.

  I changed planes in Atlanta. Because we were late, the airline sent a car for me, a car with a flashing light on top. I was escorted down special stairs, through a locked door, across the hot tarmac. I sat in the backseat by myself. The driver whistled a quiet tune as we drove between lines of parked planes, passing caterers’ vans and baggage carts and men in overalls and earmuffs dragging hoses from fuel trucks. The closed van windows shut off the sound almost completely, reduced it to a kind of mutter or moan, a hollow echo.

  This, I thought, is what it’s like to be a real princess, protected and isolated and secure.

  Another locked door, another stair, another plane. I took down a pillow from the overhead bin. I smoothed my skirt carefully—I was wearing a dark plaid suit—put my purse in my lap, and folded my hands.

  A short flight this time. The stewardess leaned over me. “Someone’s meeting you?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said formally.

  She looked at me curiously. “You’re not American, are you, my dear?”

  “No,” I said calmly. “I’m not American.”

  And at that moment, it was true. At that moment I was from a faraway place, a strange and different country. Another identity to wrap around my bones, like clothes.

  In the morning I woke in a small room, alone. I’d slept through the morning bells. I was getting my school uniform out of my suitcase—rummaging through my mother’s careful packing—when one of the nuns came to find me.

  “I am Sister Mary Elizabeth. I’m in charge of this dormitory wing.”

  I didn’t look at her; I was trying to dress; the buttons were unfamiliar and I fumbled with them.

  “I was here last night when you arrived, but I expect you don’t remember me. It was so late and you were tired.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “I knew you would oversleep. Remember now, the first bell you hear is the rising bell; the second is the breakfast bell. I’ll show you where the bathroom is.”

  Soon we were rushing down unfamiliar halls to breakfast. I could hear the clattering of dishes long before I saw the double glass doors that opened into the dining hall. Just inside the door, Sister Mary Elizabeth stopped. “Here we all are.

  And I had a chance to view my new schoolmates, my companions of the term.

  Before me was a wall of white.

  I felt I was falling; my stomach lurched and came to rest in my throat.

  A whited sepulchre, that was the phrase that flashed in my mind. We had read that in religion class just before school closed in June. Last June. Black June. Far away now.

  White blouses, cotton, short sleeved, round collared. Like mine. White faces. Not like mine.

  They filled the room. Millions of them, as far as the eye could see. Endless, gleaming. Their hair was of various colors, brown, yellow, red, but under their school uniforms were bodies of matching white.

  Sister Mary Elizabeth put her hand on my shoulder, urging me forward. A few of the nearest faces stopped eating, turned to stare at me. Pale eyes, like daylight seen through the bottom of a Coca-Cola bottle.

  The nun led me to a table near a window. A table for eight. One vacant place. On a tray my breakfast: orange juice, milk, and oatmeal. “You must be hungry”—she made a quick nervous gesture toward the food—“but hurry, child, it’s almost class time. Don’t worry about where to go. All new girls have an old girl to show them around. Here’s Jennifer. She’ll help you.”

  I drank the milk quickly, tasted the oatmeal. The bell rang. I took a few more spoons of oatmeal. Jennifer shook my chair impatiently. As soon as I looked up, she turned away, moving quickly through the emptying dining room.

  She did not glance over her shoulder. She did not speak to me. She walked through a maze of corridors and doors and courtyards. I followed. She stopped at a classroom and pointed me inside.

  Most of the girls were there already, talking, giggling, rustling through new textbooks. The smell of chalk and new erasers hung in the air like fog. I took a seat just as the teacher entered, a nun with a flushed face and red pimples across her chin. “This,” she announced, “is our homeroom. You girls who are returning already know what I am about to say, but I must explain to the new students. This is where we start every school morning. I will read you the day’s announcements; we will discuss special projects and excursions and social events. We will work together and we will all become friends.”

  I looked at her blistered chin and thought: That is Indian Fire. A girl at school last year had it, and they sent her home. I wonder if this nun is contagious. I wonder if we will all catch it.

  Another bell, a short peremptory squawk—and homeroom time was over. The girls scrambled from the room. As their fluttering skirts passed me, I sniffed the disturbed air. An unfamiliar smell. Not perfume, that was not allowed. Ivory soap—yes. And something else. Quite strong, a little vinegary. The arriving class poured through the door as I collected my books. The smell grew stronger: vinegar and orange peel.


  It was the smell of white skin. I stood still, sniffing carefully. Yes, of course, that was it. Soap and skin, both white.

  My guide, Jennifer, was not waiting for me. No matter. I had my class card; I knew what came next. In the corridor the crowd thinned; classes were about to start. I should be in American history. Where was it? Was it even on this floor? We had, I remembered, come up a flight of steps. “Excuse me,” I said to a passing student, “do you know where the American-history class is?” She hurried past, as if I had not spoken, as if I were not standing in the middle of the hall, as if I were invisible.

  I must find it myself then. Each door, I noticed, bore the name of its current class. The first said ALGEBRA I; the second, FRENCH IV . On the right another corridor, two doors on each side and large double doors at the end. I hesitated, undecided: should I turn or go straight ahead?

  “Can I help?” Her rubber-soled oxfords squeaked on the polished floors as she hurried toward me; her uniform skirt flapped like a sail. “You’re new, aren’t you?” She was thin and tall; her skin was freckled to the color of a red Indian; her hair was the color of a carrot, long and straight and pulled into a ponytail. Her eyes were the yellow-green of a cat’s. “Where do you need to be?” She pulled the schedule card from my hand without asking, glanced at it quickly. “Okay, you’re almost there. Wasn’t Jennifer supposed to stay with you today?”