Suce had never heard Spin utter a single word, nor had she heard him laugh—not even a chuckle—but she knew he had a tongue and so she thought that his language was buried down deep inside of him. She supposed there was some happiness down there too and so, she thought, that’s where the laughter came from.
Suce tore her eyes away from the window, her mind away from the memories, and looked down to see water rolling down her bodice. She didn’t even think of her eyes and instead looked up at the ceiling to see if it was leaking again, even though the sun sat high and bright in the sky and not a cloud lingered.
The space above her head was bone dry, so she touched her face and her fingers came back wet.
It puzzled her and she set the small knife down on the table and checked herself for grief and there was none.
Suce wore as a bracelet the blue granite eagle necklace that had belonged to Lou and now she reached for the stone and fumbled with it.
Could be just thinking back over the years, she told herself. Sometimes the memories did that to her—made her sad.
Her mind rolled over them again, but nothing resembling grief stung her heart.
She set the paring knife down.
Could be one of the children.
She whispered each of their names: “Moss, Frederick, Ezekiel, Sara, Lou-Ann, Fleming, Vera-Bell, Vonnie, Sonny Boy, Lillie, Beka, Helen.” A slight pause before calling the next group.
Now the dead ones: “Martini, Willie Junior, Sally.”
Still nothing.
Suce twisted in her chair and probed deeper into the dark spaces inside of herself, looking for the sadness, but nothing jumped out at her. There were no shifting shadows, but still the tears rolled.
“Mama?” she whispered, and dragged the back of her hands across her wet eyes.
Lou had come to her every now and again. A branch pulled across the window, a cup left in the center of the table, upside down. Suce had seen her as clear as day the evening she herself spread her legs and pushed out her third child. Lou walked right out of the wall and looked down at the bloody baby and whispered, “Ezekiel.”
Suce waited for the feeling, and still none came.
She balled her fist, becoming frustrated now. “Martini!” she yelled into the air.
Had to be . . . Maybe.
Willie Junior and Sawyer came out warm and dead. In the ground within an hour. Small wooden cross, names scrawled on it. Date.
Martini was almost grown. Had seen the sky, liked to laugh. Dead three years now, and angry for it. Hiding things, loosening bolts, dropping rusty nails where she knew a bare foot would tread.
Suce sighed.
Martini just gone. Helen in the bedroom trying to shake her awake, then getting scared and running to Suce and saying, “She cold, Mama. Like ice.”
The hollering came after Doctor Dentist made it official. Checking Martini’s face and feeling for a pulse on her wrist and neck and then looking directly at Suce, his mouth not moving, his eyes telling it all: gone.
Martini’s eyes open and staring, lips parted and blue. No breath, but Suce could have sworn that a tear slid down her face just before Doctor Dentist pulled her eyelids down with his index and middle fingers.
Doctor Dentist said that Martini’s heart had just stopped beating.
“A heart attack? She wasn’t no old woman!”
“Happen to young ones too sometimes,” Doctor Dentist said, then snapped his black bag shut.
Suce watched his dusty shoes walk across her clean floors. Her child was dead.
The hollering went on for days, through the preparation, the wake, the church service, the digging of the grave, and the final pat pat sound the back of the shovel made across the dark mound of dirt that reminded Suce of the shape her belly took on when she was pregnant.
Now Suce just sat there, half-peeled potato in one hand and mouth whispering, “What, what is it?”
When Vonnie walked in, he just looked at the table littered with the curled brown skin and the naked taters already turning in the coarse air.
“Mama?”
She’d fall into these dazes every now and again, talking to nothing, answering ghosts. Now he wondered if her mind was leaving her seventy-four-year-old body.
Suce’s eyes fluttered and she looked at Vonnie. “You forget your manners out in the field?”
Vonnie—tall and dark, the handsome part of him camouflaged by his ruined mouth. The midwife had almost dropped him at the sight of it. Later, Doctor Dentist would tell Suce and Willie that it was called a cleft palate. “Nothing you can do. Just one of them things.”
“Evenin’, ma’am,” Vonnie said, and removed the straw hat from his head. Suce just nodded, retrieved the small knife, and began again what the sudden sadness had interrupted.
“What that Schiffer boy want?” Suce inquired without missing a stroke.
“Said he got some work down by him if I want it.”
“Hmmm,” Suce said, and tossed the potato into the bowl. “Got some collard greens on the stove. Neck bones and beans already done, but I was feeling for some boiled potatoes.”
“Uh-huh,” Vonnie said, and lifted the lid off the pot of greens.
“Nobody here, so I sent that boy Adam down to Miss Ellie for one of her apple pies,” Suce said as she worked at skinning the potato. “Feeling for pie too.”
“Where the baby at?”
“The mama come for her early today. Good. I was tired anyway.”
“Beka?”
“Gone down to Eloise for a spell.”
“Helen?”
“In the outhouse.”
“Lillie?”
“Ain’t seen her yet.”
The sadness swelled, and Suce dropped the potato and slapped at her chest.
“Mama?” Vonnie didn’t move, but his heart raced.
“I’m all right, just some gas.”
So it was Lillie, she thought.
* * *
Couldn’t keep her from town. Men and drink and music. Lillie was loose. Had just unfurled one day and liberated the tight, neat bun she’d worn since she could, swapping it in favor of the cascading mane that made the menfolk smile so broad, they looked foolish.
Wild, and Suce didn’t know what had turned her that way. Bitten by something rabid. Some lying man who had promised her something for the something down between her legs. Love, probably, Suce thought. Women were always ready to give themselves over for love, when all the men really had to offer them was the word and not the meaning behind it.
“Shoot,” Suce said, and plucked up another potato. “She go o’er to Mr. James today?” Suce tried hard to hold her words steady.
“Seen her heading that way; can’t say that’s where she ended up, though,” Vonnie said as he stared down into the simmering pot of beans.
“You wash your hands?” Suce asked, her eyebrows lifting.
Vonnie set the top back down on the pot.
“Seen Mr. James, though, and he ain’t ask for her, so I suppose—”
“Hmmmmm,” Suce’s murmur cut away the rest of Vonnie’s statement. She rubbed at her chest again.
“Mama, you—”
“I want you to find out for sure if she went there today,” Suce said, and gently put the knife back down on the table before folding her hands and sharing a worried look with the tablecloth.
Vonnie stood for a moment, watching her, before placing his hat back on his head and heading out the door.
It was Lillie, she was sure of it.
* * *
Night came and Vonnie followed, coming through the door, dragging a red handkerchief across his brow.
Suce was in her rocking chair, a small child across her lap whimpering and squirming.
“That the Poole boy?” Vonnie asked.
“Uh-huh. Robert.”
“Where his mama at?”
“Headache. She come to me, I give her the headache powder, she hand him to me.” Suce gently rubbed the baby’s back. “He
colicky, I think.”
“That baby with you more than he with his mama.” Vonnie removed his hat and hung it on the nail beside the door.
“Where Lillie?”
Vonnie glanced toward the kitchen. “Mr. James said she come and leave early.”
“Left and went where?”
“He said she had to go and see Doctor Dentist.”
Suce cocked her head, and the rocking chair came to a halt.
“For what?”
“I didn’t ask, but I don’t suspect she would’ve shared her reason with Mr. James,” Vonnie said, and bent to untie his boots.
Standing clouds bearded the moon. Crickets sang for water and now Lillie had gone off and done something to herself.
Suce lifted the baby to her shoulder and began to rock again.
___________________
Three days later an older man stood before Suce. Tall, thin, one leg two inches shorter than the other. Suce couldn’t stop staring at the shoe and how the sole was built up to hide his defect. Everything else on him looked okay, she guessed. Not a man she would have wasted a second look on—long face, creased in the cheeks and across the forehead. Eyes too close, nose spread too wide. Suit dusty around the cuffs and tattered around the collar.
Helen and Beka sat quietly and waited. Vonnie was in the kitchen pacing the floor between the window and the door.
Lillie, waterfall hair hiding her small shoulders, slipped her arm around the man’s waist, pulling his hip in to her side. He wobbled a bit and then steadied himself and blushed.
“What they call you again?”
“Corinthians, ma’am.”
Suce eyed him closely and rubbed one bare foot over the other.
“Where your people hail from?” she asked, and reached over and touched the bare wood of a small table that sat beside her rocker.
“Oklahoma,” he said as he watched her fingers stroke the wood.
“How you all end up here?”
“White folks run us out, burn down the town, kill off good right many Negroes too.”
“Sad.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Most men comes and asks the family for the woman’s hand in marriage,” Suce said, and folded her arms across her chest. “They don’t just show up and proclaim it’s done already.”
“Yessum, I was—” Corinthians started.
“I told him all that wasn’t necessary. I told him I was grown and didn’t need nobody’s permission for nothing.”
Suce looked at Lillie, a little bitty thing with too much mouth.
“Still,” Suce continued, “t’aint right.”
Silence.
“So where y’all been?”
Corinthian’s mouth opened, but Lillie’s words flew past him: “We been on our honeymoon.”
Suce smirked. “Honeymoon?”
Vonnie grunted from the kitchen, the girls pulled at the hems of their skirts.
“That’s right.”
“You ain’t got no job no more, you know that?”
“Don’t care, moving anyway.”
“What?”
“Where?” Vonnie said from the kitchen, a glass of ice water clutched in his hand.
“Phila-del-phia,” Lillie sang.
Suce looked confused.
“That’s in Pennsylvania, ma’am.” Corinthians spoke slow and loud.
“I know where it’s at.” And then, “My daughter tell you I was stupid and deaf?”
Eyes blinked and his skin turned scarlet. “N-no ma’am.”
“Why Phila-del-phia?”
“Got a house there.”
“Really?”
“And a congregation.”
“You don’t say? You a minister?”
“Yessum.”
“Hmmmm, and didn’t have the good sense to ask for her hand proper?”
Corinthians dropped his eyes in shame. “It all happened so quick,” he mumbled.
“Uh-huh, things always go quick with Lillie.” Suce snuffed.
Vonnie spat up his drink of water, caught most of it in the palm of his hand. The girls hid their smiles.
“Fool,” Lillie muttered at Vonnie, and then threw a sharp look at her sisters.
“Y’all going to Phila-del-phia by train?” Suce asked.
“No ma’am. By car.”
“You all got an auto-mo-bile?”
“Brand new.”
“Is that right?” Suce breathed and looked down at her hands. She was lost for a moment, trapped in an earlier time when her eldest son, Moss, came back from town in a coughing, hacking piece of junk on four wheels. It’d taken him a good two hours to get it home, him not knowing how to drive an automobile, and the road not willing to have it on its back driven by someone with no experience.
Suce laughed at the memory.
“Ma’am?” Corinthians said, leaning in.
“It’s nothing,” Suce replied, and dabbed at the corners of her eyes.
Lillie searched her mother’s face for some glimmer that would tell her that Suce was impressed, but Suce’s expression remained bland.
“How long you know’d our Lillie?”
“He know me long enough to know that he love me and want to take me the hell away from here!” Lillie screeched.
Suce’s cheek twitched, and she threw a look at Corinthians’s strange shoe again.
“You know what you doing?”
The question was so heavy that Corinthians pulled at the collar of his shirt and looked toward the open window and wondered where the air went off to.
“Yes ma’am,” he said with as much force as his unsure voice would allow.
“Uh-huh.” Suce moaned and then turned her attention to Lillie. “Y’all gonna come back and visit?”
Lillie, as if she had been waiting for that very question, flicked her waterfall hair over her shoulders, threw her head back, and laughed. “The only way I’ll ever come back here will be in a pine box!”
The girls held their breath and reached for each other’s hands.
“What so bad ’bout here?”
“Ask them,” Lillie flung at her sisters, and then turned on Vonnie. “Ask him. He know.”
Suce turned an inquisitive eye on Vonnie, but her mouth didn’t utter a word.
___________________
In Philadelphia the neighbors welcomed Lillie with open arms.
They pretended to mind their own business even though they eavesdropped from behind lace curtains, watched out in the open, right on the porch while seated in wooden rockers and pretending to read the paper or enjoy the day.
By the time Corinthians was dead, they tsk-tsked loud enough for Lillie to hear and made sure she saw the arch in their backs and the upward tilt of their noses whenever she was near.
Back then, Germantown, Philadelphia, was divided into pockets of Southerners. Alabamians to the west; South Carolinians to the south; North Carolinians with a sprinkle of Virginia people to the east; Georgians, Floridians, and Kentuckians on the north side, the rest settling in the middle. So there were some who knew the Sandersville Lessings personally, and the first words that got back to Suce said:
Lillie come to Phila-del-phia, to Germantown. Married woman. Minister husband. She sitting up in the front pew of the Church of the Black Virgin, white gloved, proper dress, singing the Lord’s prayers, smiling at her minister husband, bringing cookies to bake sales, buying furniture on credit, belly swelling, first baby come, a girl, she the sweetest thing you ever did want to see. Light skin-ded, head full of black hair, pretty l’il thing—they name her Love.
Second set of words say:
She bought two life insurance policies, a new car, more kids come, a boy named Bernard Moses and a girl named Clementine Marie.
Her hands full, one walking, one teething, one crawling. House nice, new porch, hanging flower baskets. They doing all right for themselves.
A credit to the community. A credit to her race.
Third set of words come:
>
She a good wife. Visiting her husband in the hospital twice a day, finding another minister to stand in for him at the church. The children clean, look sad for their ailing papa, though.
Fourth set say:
He went hard. Lillie bawl like thunder, fell out at the coffin. Cash in the policies, sold off the church and the building beside it. Men coming and going, she wearing red gloves, red lipstick, red beads around her neck, drinking, the devil’s music playing in the parlor, another baby come (even though her husband dead), a girl, Lillie name her Wella. What foolish kind of name is that?
Fifth set say:
Well, any one of us could have told Corinthians as soon as we laid eyes on Lillie Lessing that she would be the spade to dig his grave. But he couldn’t see it. Blinded by her fair skin and long hair and whatever it was she did to him in bed at night that kept him grinning like a idiot.
She was too young for him anyway and not even a virgin!
Now Lillie barely minding her own children, leaving them for days at a time while she whore around Phila-del-phia, around Germantown, like she done lost her goddamn mind!
The eldest girl too grown for her own good. Grown and passionate about red. Red scarf tied around her neck and we’ve even seen her clomping up and down the streets in her mama’s red high-heel shoes, sitting on the porch, legs crossed like a harlot, face painted up to match.
Now is that any way for an eleven-year-old girl to act?
Somebody better get up here and see about these chirren!
___________________
Suce had never been on a train in her life and wasn’t about to get on one now, but Vonnie had to tend the land and the others were off making a way in Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City. Raising families, crammed into two-by-four places called tenements. Working hard at putting some distance between slave and sir, mammy and miss.
Nowhere Is a Place Page 19
