Blanche Passes Go

by Barbara Neely

  Blanche wondered if Nancy Morris would ever have occasion to understand the luxury of having nothing worse to worry about than hosting your first dance.

  A white woman with heavy legs and a pale, waxy face entered the ballroom and came toward them. She walked like she didn’t think she belonged in the room: her eyes lowered, her hands folded at her waist, and almost a curtsy when she got Nancy’s attention. In an accent heavy in high-note endings, she told Nancy she was wanted on the phone. Trophy help, Blanche thought. Probably Nancy’s imported personal maid. Ardell had told her it was all the rage among the area’s rich to have a white servant with a foreign accent.

  “Ladies’ maids, nannies, social secretaries,” Ardell had told her. “But not cooks. These white folks know who cooks what they like, the way they like it.”

  When Nancy’s back was turned, the woman gave Blanche a you-are-lower-than-mud kind of look, then sniffed and tossed her head. Blanche wondered if this was a case of aping the attitude toward blacks that the woman saw in her employers. She knew from experience in other households that people who came to America later in life often bought into the racist hype about blacks as a way of proving they were real Americans. Blanche impulsively thumbed her nose. The woman fluffed herself up, spun on her heels, and marched out of the room behind her mistress.

  The sound of breaking glass sent Blanche hurrying from surveying the layout of the elaborate refreshments setup off the ballroom back to the kitchen. She pushed open the kitchen door. “Everything okay?” She could see that it wasn’t.

  A tall, muscular white man had Clarice pinned in the corner. She tried to duck under his arm but he lowered it and pressed closer, laughing all the time.

  “Get the hell away from her.” Rage deepened Blanche’s voice. Her breath felt hot in her mouth. The man turned his head toward her. There was something familiar about him. His eyes glistened; dark brown hair fell over his forehead. Blanche could see him sweating. He looked at her as though he knew her voice wasn’t one he had to obey. He didn’t release Clarice. Blanche looked around for a weapon.

  “What’s going on here?”

  All three people in the room turned toward the man and woman who’d just entered the kitchen. It was the man who’d spoken. The woman was Nancy Morris. Blanche assumed the man was Nancy’s husband, Jason.

  The other man quickly stepped away from Clarice. “No problem, Big Bro,” he said. “We were just havin’ a little fun, weren’t we, gals?” He looked from Clarice to Blanche, both of whom stared at him as though he were a talking dog-turd.

  “You the only one having fun, mister,” Blanche said.

  Jason was across the large room in four steps. He grabbed his brother by the arm. “Get out of my way, Seth.” Jason pushed his brother aside and turned to Clarice. “Are you all right, miss?” he asked. “Here”—he gently guided Clarice to a chair, then knelt in front of her—“did he hurt you? Are you…”

  Clarice nodded her head without looking at him.

  Jason Morris glared at his brother, who smirked in a way that made Blanche want to spit on him.

  “Apologize. Now!” Jason said.

  Blanche noticed that Nancy Morris was staring at her husband with what seemed like amusement in her eyes. Blanche wondered what it was about this scene that the woman could possibly find funny. Nancy opened her mouth as if to speak but didn’t. Jason stood and faced his brother. They were like light and dark photographs of the same person, Jason pale-eyed and curly blond, Seth with dark eyes and limp, almost black hair. Yet their noses, the size and set of their ears, the shape of their chins and bodies were all the same.

  “I said apologize.” Jason sounded even less like a man willing to take no for an answer than he had the first time. Seth looked from Jason to Nancy. She turned away, no doubt embarrassed to have her brother-in-law forced to apologize to a servant, and in front of others. It just wasn’t done—which sent Jason right up in Blanche’s estimation.

  Seth finally gave Clarice the same smirk he’d offered his brother. “Sorry about that.” He turned and sauntered toward the kitchen door with his hands in his pockets. Blanche half expected him to start whistling. He looked back over his shoulder as he left. Something about the tilt of his head or the light triggered Blanche’s memory. She knew why he’d seemed familiar: she’d seen him before, and she remembered where, too.

  Jason stared after Seth until the kitchen door swung closed, then turned to Blanche and Clarice. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that such a thing should happen in my home. I hope you will accept my apology and that of my wife and family. There is no excuse for my brother’s behavior and I will not attempt to make one. Now if you’ll excuse us.”

  Nancy Morris listened to her husband’s speech with folded arms. Her look reminded Blanche of someone watching a magic trick and trying to figure out how it was done. It was not the kind of look Blanche would have expected from the mousy little worrier to whom she’d served sherry earlier.

  When the door swung closed behind them, Blanche went to Clarice and put her arm around the woman’s shoulders.

  Tears rolled down Clarice’s cheeks. “Nasty-assed thing!” Her nostrils quivered. “Waited till I was in here by myself, puttin’ his hands all…” Blanche could smell Clarice’s rage, like hair burning.

  “When Mr. Henry hear ’bout this, he gon grab that white man and…” Clarice made motions with her hands as though she had them wrapped around Seth’s throat. She stopped suddenly and gave Blanche a teary look full of panic. “I ain’t gon tell him, though. Mr. Henry don’t need that kinda trouble, he…” Clarice’s lips trembled so fiercely she couldn’t continue.

  Blanche was thrown back to the days just after she was raped, when she had longed for the solace of telling her then boyfriend, Leo, what Palmer had done to her. She hadn’t told him for the same reason Clarice wouldn’t tell Mr. Henry about Seth. Blanche pulled Clarice to her and hugged her hard, as if that could protect them from the pain of this piece of black women’s old race knowledge: their rapes and mistreatments at the hands of powerful white men could also cost them the black men who loved them. There were more local stories than either woman wanted to remember of what had happened to black men who’d attempted to defend their daughters and wives, mothers and sisters. But that didn’t mean nothing could be done about Seth.

  “Maybe we’ll get a chance to fix him something special,” Blanche said. “Just a little something special on his plate or in his drink in payment for what he did to you.” Blanche remembered times when she’d used just this method after some insult from an employer that she couldn’t address directly without losing a job she needed to keep. She shut her mind against the memory of the time she hadn’t fought back.

  Clarice heaved a clearing sigh and nodded. “Yeah, a real special somethin’.” She forced a grin through the last of her tears.

  “Shoulda stabbed that fucker in the nuts!” Ardell said when she heard about the Seth incident.

  “Not till we get paid. He’s our client’s brother, remember?” Blanche told her how Jason had forced Seth to apologize, then added: “I seen that Seth before, and he was acting like a booty-hound then! He’s the man I saw with his tongue down some woman’s throat at the train station. Remember, Ardell?”

  “Oh yeah. That was him? Wonder who the woman was.”

  “I didn’t get a good look at her. Just hair and big eyes.”

  “I bet it wasn’t that very pregnant wife I saw him come in with.”

  “Well, at least his brother made that dog apologize,” Clarice said.

  “And me and Clarice got our own special way of dealing with Seth,” Blanche told Ardell.

  Ardell looked from one to the other. “Less I know about it the better, I think.”

  The guests were about to arrive when Jason came back to the kitchen. His wife was with him. Blanche assumed he’d come back to say whatever he’d
planned to say when he’d caught his brother acting like a dog in rut. This time Nancy’s expression matched her husband’s in relaxed affability.

  “My wife and I just wanted to tell you how pleased we are that your company is participating in the Farleigh bicentennial celebrations. You know, it’s not enough to simply end segregation. It’s not enough to rest on the great progress we’ve made in the South. A share of the pie is what full citizenship and equality…”

  Blanche and Ardell gave each other a “Can you believe this shit?” look. Blanche understood what Jason thought he was saying about economic development for black folks, but what she was hearing was a relatively young white man, with inherited wealth and power and all the privileges that go with that profile, telling them that he and Ardell were equals because a little black catering outfit had a contract to serve white people while they partied, as black people have always done. And the contract was just a one-time thing. There’d been two years of fund-raising events for the bicentennial—all of them catered by white caterers.

  “…and thank you in advance for what I am sure will be a wonderful repast.”

  Repast? Give me a break! People were ever amazing. In the little time she’d known this man, she’d seen two different people in him: one who was concerned and kind to Clarice; another who’d been so furious with his brother that she’d half expected them to come to blows; now here he was sounding like a bad politician with an icicle up his butt. She wondered who he really was. She watched with amusement as he looked from face to face. Did he expect them to applaud, or break out in a heartfelt rendition of “Old Black Joe”? Ardell let him feel the weight of their silence before she stepped forward.

  “We certainly do appreciate this opportunity to be a part of the bicentennial by bidding our services right alongside more established caterers.”

  Blanche took Ardell’s last comment as a reminder to Jason that all he’d done was clear the doorway. Ardell had gotten through it by being good and willing to cut her profits to the nub.

  When Jason left, Nancy stayed behind.

  “My husband…We just hope that this…the earlier incident won’t…” She pulled her head in so far her chin seemed to rest on her neck; she looked up at them without raising it. “My brother-in-law is sometimes too…gets overly…I hope we can keep this confidential?” She looked quickly from face to face and took their silence as the answer she wanted to hear. “Well, that’s fine, then.” She hurried out of the room.

  “White folks!” Blanche, Ardell, and Clarice all said at once and burst out laughing, even though it wasn’t the Morrises’ whiteness but their lameness that was laughable.

  When Blanche went back out into the refreshment alcove off the ballroom, there were about ten or twelve people milling around with drinks in their hands and another thirty or forty dancing to a small band in the ballroom—heads bobbing like corks in a sea of black tie, sequins, and satin. She was fascinated by the lack of color in the women’s clothes. There were some lovely gowns but they were all pearl or white or a middling shade of blue. If there was a red gown in the room, or one whose tulle, satin, seed pearls, or modest décolletage was not interchangeable, she couldn’t find it. She noticed that two of the three black women guests were wearing dressy leather shoes. She began to check out the white women’s feet. There was a pair of leather shoes. There another. She gave these leather-shoes-wearing women—black and white—a closer looking over. Their gowns seemed expensive enough, although there were more skintight fits than among the other women present. A couple of the men with the leather-shoe women were wearing business suits instead of tuxedos. They also had larger hand gestures and worse haircuts than the other white men standing and dancing around. Blanche figured these folks were the race/class-diversity guests: people invited as symbols of the New South’s integration of both blacks and up-from-working-class whites. But shoes are one of the ways you know who’s who in the class club, she thought. It was possible for some everyday people to get a good education, so having gone to Yale or Harvard wasn’t always enough to identify you as one of the serious haves. But Yale didn’t teach you to have your cloth shoes dyed to match your ball gown, or the difference between formal and semiformal wear. She always cracked up when she heard some (usually overrich) white politician going on about classless America—a country where only one class counted.

  Blanche spotted Seth Morris standing at the bar, relaxed and laughing with another man as though he hadn’t just been caught assaulting Clarice. The man with Seth had his back to Blanche. He raised his hand to get the bartender’s attention. “Dewar’s, no ice,” the man said.

  A stomach cramp nearly doubled her over. The light grew dingy; a smell, bitter and fruity, like milk about to turn, stung her nose; the music went flat; and she was suddenly cold. The pleasant buzz and hum of people talking and laughing rumbled ugly, like a mob forming. She covered her mouth and hurried toward the kitchen, vomit burning her throat. Someone spoke to her; she hardly heard and didn’t heed. She yanked the back door open and ran down an unlit driveway, her heart and her footfall beating like call and response. Ardell caught her by the arm and jerked her to a stop. They both stood panting for a moment.

  “It’s him,” Blanche said. “He’s in there.”

  Ardell didn’t need an explanation. “Oh shit! I knew we shoulda talked about this. But you never seemed to want…” She put her arms around Blanche and hugged her close. Then she took her car keys from her pocket and gave them to Blanche. “You go on home.” The keys nearly slipped through Blanche’s sweat-slick fingers.

  She sat in the car for a minute or two, chastising herself for being so weak. She’d thought she was prepared to see him, had come to Farleigh to face him somehow. Yet the sound of his voice, the knowledge of his presence, was a boil erupting in her brain, oozing poison as though it were only yesterday that David Palmer had raped her at knifepoint. Her head slammed against the headrest, propelled by memory so sharp she could smell the lavender bubble bath in the tub she’d been soaking in at Palmer’s sister’s house, where she was supposed to be working. What had she been thinking about in the moment before he’d pushed back the bathroom door? She raised her hands to her aching skull, clawing at his hands as she’d done back then, trying to loosen her hair from his grip. Slipping, banging her knees and legs against the tub, trying to get on her feet, too shocked and scared to scream. Then the knife. The knife: long, slim, pointed; carvings on its fancy bone handle—the kind of knife a boy got for his twelfth birthday. The kind of knife that stopped all struggling, that made her repeat, “Please, don’t cut me, please,” over and over and over again, as though the words could protect her from a slit throat, a pierced heart. Once again, she watched herself pleading for her life while parts of her were being stolen and murdered. When it was over—when he had grunted and poked and shivered his sperm into her, then finally fled—for just a flash, for just a fast beat of her heart, she’d been grateful that he had only raped her. For this alone she would hate him until the moment after she died. Suddenly she felt as though she’d been frozen for the last eight years, as though her life were a game of Monopoly in which she was stuck at Go. Certainly she had gone on with her life and she’d done all right with what she had to work with. But she could see now that a part of her was still back there, curled up like a broken child on that bathroom floor.

  Her throat clogged with the same questions that had plagued her the day it had happened: Why hadn’t she locked the bathroom door before she got in the tub? Would she have had the courage to fight him if he’d caught her with her clothes on, in the kitchen, with its large variety of possible weapons? Was she wrong about how she would have been treated by the police and courts if she’d reported him and pressed charges? Was she wrong in her belief that to do so would have meant the end of her working in white people’s homes in Farleigh? Blanche leaned her head against the steering wheel, amazed that this old wound could be so easily reache
d and ripped wide open simply by the sound of his voice.

  What would have happened if she hadn’t run away just now, if she’d turned and faced him? Her knees knocked together and her hands trembled. Her weakness made her cry hot, stinging tears that left her feeling no better. She started the car and drove home.

  She couldn’t rest. She checked the windows and door locks three times and was glad the place was too small to have an entrance that was not within her view.

  She heard voices outside. She turned out the lights and stood listening, a butcher knife gripped in her hand, her ears and eyes concentrated on the partially open window: a man and a woman arguing, like lightning and thunder. “No!” the woman shouted. Another victim? “Goddamnit!” from the man. A thin wail, sad and scared, made Blanche flinch. That makes three of us tonight, she thought. A door slammed. A car started, then sped past her house and around the corner. Quiet. Blanche turned on the lights, the radio. No. She could hear better with the radio off, hear someone sliding up to her door, trying the knob, scrambling around the bungalow trying to peek in through the space between the curtains and the windowsill. She wedged a chair beneath the front-door knob, and thought about iron bars for the windows. Maybe a dog. Pacing the floor, sweat cooling on her forehead, she gave a little shriek when the phone rang. She picked up the receiver, but didn’t speak.

  “Hello? Hello?” A man’s voice. “Hello, Blanche? Is that you?”

  Blanche let out the breath she’d been holding. “Thelvin, hey.” She worked at sounding as if she’d just been mindlessly flipping through a magazine. “How you doin?”

  “Everything all right?” he asked as though his fingers were on her wrist, charting her racing pulse.

  “Why you think something’s wrong?”

  “Well, you’re home, for one thing. The message you left on my machine said you were working tonight. And you sound kinda…”

  “If you didn’t think I was home, why’d you call me?” She could hear suspicion thick as fresh cream in her voice. She reminded herself that Thelvin wasn’t David Palmer. He was a different man. A different kind, even a different color of man. But right now it was only the man part that mattered.