No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  As the South was drawn deeper into the conflict with the North and the economy faltered, Marie Solange, who had several white gentlemen friends helping her, saw both her dressmaking business and the help of her gentlemen friends dwindle. She wrote to Balthazar Mendez, seeking his help, and was relieved to learn that the old man had found a woman to quench his desires, a widow in her forties who owned a property adjacent to his. He wrote back saying that an acquaintance needed someone to manage his home. His name was General Howard Dolcater from Georgia who had come west ten years prior and owned a sizable plantation near Hattiesburg and whose wife suffered from a nervous stomach.

  Marie Solange wrote a fine letter to General Dolcater. Some weeks later two wagons arrived to bring her, Lulu, and their possessions to his plantation. Marie Solange was also to serve as private tutor and teach General Dolcater’s two daughters, Margaret and Velma, to play the piano, to dance, and to comport themselves like young ladies since, not only had they inherited their mother’s nervous disposition, but they were high-strung and ill-mannered. To make matters more difficult, the Misses Dolcater had also been cursed by providence with coarse features and bad complexions. Marie Solange hoped Lulu would befriend the two girls and influence them with her charm.

  Two unfortunate things began to reveal themselves no more than a month after Marie Solange and Lulu arrived. One was that she, Lulu, was so stunningly beautiful, and had been so well schooled by her mother, that Margaret and Velma became jealous and so difficult that Marie Solange was forced to send Lulu to live at her grandfather Balthazar Mendez’s home in northern Mississippi. The other was that Marie Solange and Howard Dolcater fell in love, and, as was the custom in those days, the master of the house began to cohabit with his mistress, not openly, but with the knowledge of everyone in the household.

  Lulu Mendez was fifteen years old, raven-haired and blue-eyed, her skin the color of alabaster—to all appearances, a beautiful young white woman. She became the talk of the area. Her grandfather was proud of her beauty and intelligence and appreciative of her talents as a hostess. He spared no amount of luxury to create an atmosphere of well-being for her. With her consent, he explained that she was his grandniece from Florida whose father was a rich merchant from the Spanish colony of Cuba in the Caribbean Sea, come to help him out in his old age. This wasn’t at all so far-fetched a story, as Balthazar Mendez’s grandfather had been a sea captain from the port of Cádiz in southern Spain who had settled on the island of Puerto Rico in the eighteenth century and whose oldest son, Felipe, had come north to Florida to help a Spanish settlement fight the Seminoles, eventually traveling west and settling in Mississippi.

  Young gentlemen came to call on Lulu Mendez. Many proposed marriage. She would always inform them that she was only fifteen years old and much too young to marry. As the war grew in intensity, the economic situation worsened and the stories of casualties became more horrifying. In time the wealth of the South was depleted and both plantations, the Mendez one, up north near Sardis Lake, not too far from the Tennessee border, and the Dolcater plantation further south fell into disrepair. Daily, there were stories of the atrocities of the Yankees and the treachery of the Negro slaves taking advantage of the deteriorating situation to escape so they could rob and pillage, rape the women, and sell the white children to Yankees as slaves.

  “What happened to your mother? Did Negroes rape her thinking she was a white woman?”

  “There was no Negroes raping anybody,” Miss Lulu said. “That was irresponsible white trash telling stories. Negroes wanted to get away from plantations and white people as fast as they could. You think they was gonna linger there because of some white doxy?”

  “So what happened to your mother?”

  “She lived happily with General Dolcater for a couple of years. He built a house for her on the plantation, had a new piano brought from New Orleans, and came to see her whenever he had time, which wasn’t often, pleased that his daughters, while they hadn’t grown beautiful, at least began to act like young women of breeding. In February of ’63 he left, and my mother never saw him again.”

  “Did he run away with another woman?”

  “You sure are a mistrustful soul,” Miss Lulu said, cackling deep in her chest and throat so that his mother thought that maybe she was a real Negro woman all powdered with talc. “Nah, he got himself killed up in Pennsylvania,” Miss Lulu said, pausing as if to refresh her memory.

  “Word came that General Dolcater had died in battle. His wife, Marjorie, was a frail woman who had just about enough strength to bear two high-strung daughters, but no more, overcome by the combination of grief in losing her husband and being unable to manage her affairs. She hanged herself. My mother, Marie Solange Breaux, was left to take care of the house and finish raising Margaret and Velma until they could find husbands since they were not stupid young women. My mother took advantage of the benevolence of the North. She shipped the two daughters off to a college for young women in the City of New York.”

  “New York?”

  “Yes, ma’am. New York City. Margaret married a Jewish gentleman who owned some theaters. She converted to the religion and wrote a book on travel in Europe. Velma married an Episcopalian minister and they lived in Connecticut. They wrote cards and letters to my mother for every occasion and always invited her to come and visit them, but she wouldn’t go north, feeling cheated of life and love by the Yankees. She returned to her people in New Orleans and died there.”

  “And you?”

  “Me? When the war was over I took care of my grandfather and then one day a young, very attractive man, a well-mannered Yankee soldier, came to the house and wanted to know if there were still slaves on our land. I said that I didn’t believe so, that whoever had stayed on had done so out of their own accord to work the land and live off of it. He said he was working with the Adjutant General’s Office of the United States Army and his name was Andrew McAlpin, a lawyer, graduated from the School of Law at Harvard University.”

  “And you fell in love with him,” Cornelia Butterworth said.

  “Yes, I did,” Miss Lulu replied. “He was the kindest person I’ve ever met and that’s what a woman needs in a man. He wanted to marry me right away,” Miss Lulu went on. “I said that I had to speak to my grandfather. He said he could wait and he certainly had no problem asking for my hand. So I told Grandfather Balthazar Mendez that I wanted to marry this young man because I was crazy in love with him, and should I tell him about my African antecedents. He took my hand and said that as far as he was concerned I was his light and joy, Negro blood or not; that there was no need to confuse the young man and that I had his blessing. His attitude was totally different than most white folks. I believe that it was his Spanish upbringing.

  “Andrew McAlpin wanted me to go north, but I was firm, child. Very firm. I told him I was duty bound to take care of my grandfather as my mother had charged me and that I could never break that promise. He was moved by my sincerity and said he had only a few more months of service left and then he could set up a law practice there in northern Mississippi. And he did. We had a modest wedding, and lived in the house with my grandfather. That was in ’66, when I was twenty-two years of age. We had no honeymoon except to walk in the woods in the spring sunlight just looking at the new flowers and at each other. We had three children. Andrew Jr., who became a lawyer like his father and went west to Colorado. Bernard, who farmed the old Mendez plantation which my grandfather left for us when he died in 1870.”

  “And the other?”

  “Marie Breaux McAlpin.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “Ran off with a hunter from up there. Dirt-poor and sneakier than a polecat. People by the name of Meekins from up near the Sunflower River. They ran off north to Tennessee. Years later she came back to see me and her father and said she was sorry. She looked happy enough and brought a whole houseful of children. But then I moved back down to where I’m living and never heard from her again.”
>
  “You said you also lived like a Negro woman. You think that had something to do with it?”

  “Yes, when my husband died I left everything behind. It was like I went through a big door into another world. A year later I got word from friends that Bernard had been fishing in the river and a flash storm came up, swamped the boat, and he drowned. He lived alone, didn’t like the company of women much and took to staying out in the woods for long periods of time. Andrew lived too far away, and, like I said, I never heard from Marie again. I raised them to be independent and they were.

  “That’s very sad,” his mother had said she told Lulu McAlpin, in recounting the story to Butterworth when he returned home in 1963 for his stepfather the Reverend Lockwood’s funeral. He guessed it was his mother’s way of telling him that she’d forgiven him for leaving after what he’d done to the reverend, but more important as a way of explaining that perhaps she had been wrong in letting her husband mistreat him. “Very sad.”

  “It may seem sad to some folks but ya’ll got to remember that Andrew McAlpin and I lived happily for forty-two years,” Lulu had said, shooing away her concerns. “The years I spent with him were a lifetime of joy. I was the luckiest woman in the world. One morning I got up out of bed, went to the kitchen to put on water for coffee, came back to wake him, and he was already stiff, his face peaceful. That was 1908. I was sixty-four years old, feeling strong, had all my teeth still, could play the piano and see well enough to thread a needle without using spectacles. I sold some of the land, left the rest in trust for Andrew and Marie’s children if they wanted to claim it. I came back down near Biloxi and built this cabin here in the woods.”

  “To be with Negro folks again?”

  “Yes, ma’am. To be with Negro folks again.”

  “Why did you wanna do that after living as a white woman?”

  “I’d done a lot of reading about cures, phrenology, and different things. I’ve always wanted to help folks and now I had no family. The few times Andrew and I had gone north to his relatives, they seemed distant and cold and you got the feeling that they didn’t approve much of him having married a southern woman, which is the way they saw me. Sometimes I think that maybe if they knew I was a Negro they might’ve taken to me more readily. Yankee folks are that way.”

  “I wouldn’t know, ma’am,” his mother had said, chuckling as she told him the story.

  “But it went beyond that,” Lulu McAlpin said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, wanting not to lie to myself about who I was.”

  “That you was a Negro woman.”

  “No, that wasn’t as important as knowing that I had a connection to African people but didn’t look like them. Color don’t mean a damn thing to most country Negro folks. It’s what you got under the skin that counts. What you got in your heart.”

  “How did folks take to you living here?”

  “Oh, they knew who I was so that wasn’t a problem. They knew I was Roland Mendez’s daughter. One thing African folks have is a memory. Remember, they didn’t register the birth of Negro folks so they had to know who was related. They kinda enjoyed me passing all those years and coming back. They wanted to know how it was, so I was constantly in demand to tell stories about living with white folks and they’d just laugh and laugh.”

  “How was it living as a Negro woman?”

  “If you want to know the truth, both got their advantages and both got their disadvantages. Being white helps you live grandly. Big house, servants, a man to provide for your comfort, but your life is too damned ordered and you gotta put up with all sorts of nonsense from folks. You gotta keep up too many appearances. Living as a Negro woman you got more freedom and people don’t expect a whole lot from you. On the other hand, the disdain is hard to take and you gotta work like a mule. Menfolks behave a whole lot different.”

  “But why would whites be prejudiced against you? You look white,” Cornelia said.

  “It don’t matter to them. Crackers is crackers. They’re mean as snakes. Once they find out you got one ounce of Negro blood in you, that’s it. You’re a Negro. You could be white as flour and look like a Hebrew prophet sent special from God and if they found out your great-great-great, back to the time of Noah’s ark, was African, then that’s it. Right there you’re a Negro, no two ways about it.

  “I don’t want any part of that white world anymore. I’m happy right here. Nobody bothers me and I don’t bother nobody. I built me this cabin all by myself, live in it in peace, grow me some vegetables, eat some and can the rest. I have a few chickens for eggs and that’s it. Don’t eat any meat. Never had a liking for it. Some peanuts once in a while. And lemonade. I love lemonade. No sugar. Never liked it, either. I will eat a melon, however. The other thing I cannot stand about being a Negro is all this concern with going to Heaven and being in church singing and carrying on. Can’t stand it at all.”

  “They say French people is Catholic,” his mother said.

  “Marie Solange was raised a Catholic, but she didn’t like all their carrying on with incense and plaster saints and folks kneeling and kissing the Pope’s ring.” Lulu looked at Cornelia. “You feeling better?”

  “Yes, ma’am, much better, except I got this chile at home that is awfully sick. My Melinda.”

  “Just tell Lulu what ails her.”

  “Miss Lulu, my nine-year-old girl, Melinda, fell outta a tree and cracked her head open. She ain’t right and it’s like she’s a baby again. And last year my husband was killed down in Mobile working on the water. I prayed and prayed, but the chile just babbles on and now that I’m alone with another baby just two years old, I got to run our small farm all by myself cause my girl, Melinda, can’t help any. I can’t even leave her with the baby. I got a pig, a cow, some chickens, and a field of corn, and a vegetable garden. No money and no nothing. I does a little sewing, but that’s it and that don’t help any cause things is real bad in Alabama, ma’am.”

  “Things is bad all over, chile, but you sure got troubles. I can see that,” Miss Lulu said. “Come on over here and let me feel your head.”

  And then Rachel got a squat three-legged stool and placed it in front of Miss Lulu, but his mother wouldn’t move and Miss Lulu laughed and Rachel had to sit his mother down.

  “No, no,” Miss Lulu said, “turn her around. I don’t need to see her future, that’s bleak as hell. Any fool can see that. I need to see what’s in the child’s head, feel the bumps on her head. I need to see if there’s somethin’ in there that can help her get on with her life. Just turn aroun’ and let me feel your nappy head, girl.”

  His mother sat down, her heart beating rapidly and the sweat pouring from her armpits, and then the old woman was touching her head with long, strong fingers, poking and squeezing her shoulders, until she felt real sleepy, and far away she could hear Miss Lulu asking her questions and she heard her voice answering. When it was all over she felt light and as if a great big weight had been lifted off her shoulders and then Miss Lulu was talking to her real slow, her voice sounding like it didn’t belong to anybody she’d ever heard, so that later, after it was all over, she knew that Miss Lulu had done some kind of bewitchment on her.

  “Now, let me look at you,” Miss Lulu said, peering at her face. “You feeling any better?”

  “Yes, ma’am. A whole lot better. Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it. But I got advice for you. Stay away from gambling men and preachers. They’ll bring you nothin’ but grief.”

  “Preachers, ma’am?”

  “You heard me, girl. You ain’t gone deaf on me, have you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then remember what I told you. No gambling men and no preachers. I examined your head and you ain’t got enough room in there for one or the other. Can you remember that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Cause if you don’t, you’re gonna end up in a whole lot of trouble and I don’t guarantee that you’ll come out of i
t alive. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said. She got up quickly from the stool and grinned at the old Negro white woman and then felt foolish.

  Rachel paid the woman one silver dollar and went off feeling satisfied that she’d been able to help her cousin from Alabama.

  His mother returned home and for a while she thought that Melinda was getting better, but it was just her wishing for it to be so. As she got older, Melinda’s body began to change into that of a woman and her female urges became stronger so that she would sit and play with herself without any awareness that there was anything wrong with what she was doing. This distressed his mother, so she took to tying Melinda’s hands to a post near the chicken coop like she was one of the animals. Melinda whimpered the first few days but in time got used to it and sat quietly playing in the dirt with her feet. But that was after the Reverend Lockwood had shown up.

  Butterworth thought again about his life and decided that he definitely should’ve stayed with Florence Baines and married her. She had eventually grown tired of him and his absences and infidelities and had gone off with a West Indian man who married her and bought her a house in St. Albans, Queens. One day coming back from Louis Armstrong’s house, he’d seen her with her two daughters as they were getting out of a car in a shopping center. She hadn’t seen him but it was Florence all right, grown broader and thicker, but still looking trusting and good. He felt a twinge of jealousy, which turned into regret, thinking that the two teenage girls, unusually pretty, could have easily been his daughters had he had more courage instead of wearing his heart on his sleeve over Billie Holiday and her troubled life.