Whistling Past the Graveyard

by kindle@netgalley. com

  I felt my red rage coming on, not strong as usual ’cause I was sick. Why did everybody have to be so daggone mean to Eula? After I got better, I was gonna find that truck and break out its headlights.

  “How did you lose them and manage to hide?” Miss Cyrena asked.

  “Now that’s somethin’ I learned as a young’un; gettin’ away and hidin’. Learned it real good.”

  Miss Cyrena’s voice dropped so quiet I had to listen hard to hear when she said, “You’ve had a difficult life . . . more than most of us, I imagine.”

  My ears perked up then. I’d been more and more curious ’bout Eula and her pap and her no-account brother. I already knew more than I wanted to about Wallace.

  But Eula didn’t say anything to ease my curiousness. She just said, “Think I’ll only take backyard or indoor work from now on.”

  “Yes, I would. Once those ruffians set their sights on you, it’s usually best to stay out of their way. And they’ll have a grudge to carry now, too. Never known them not to get their revenge.” Miss Cyrena was quiet for a second. “I think I have a better idea. Why don’t you use my kitchen to make baked goods? That green-tomato pie you made was the most delicious I’ve ever tasted, and the hot-milk cake . . . my, oh, my. Mrs. Washington went on and on about that peach cobbler I took over to thank her for the collards from her garden. You could probably sell things to the coffee shop and restaurants and not have to work outside of this house at all. I could do the sales and delivery—even the shopping. You won’t be exposed at all.”

  “Can’t until I earn enough to buy bakin’ supplies.”

  “I’ll front you the money.”

  “No, ma’am. I couldn’t take any more from you than I already have.”

  I couldn’t be still any longer. “Do it, Eula,” I said, walking into the kitchen. It would keep Eula safe while we got our money built up so we could fix the truck and get on to Nashville. “It’s a good idea. And I can go out and collect bottles along the roads, turn ’em in for the refunds. You shouldn’t be out where those men can get at you.”

  “Starla! I thought you were sleeping,”Miss Cyrena said. She put her arm in front of her glass, like she didn’t want me to see it.

  Eula reached out an arm and motioned me close. I stepped right up next to her and looked at her face. She didn’t have any more cuts than the ones Wallace had given her, which was healing up nice. A little of the antsy-pantsy left me.

  She wrapped an arm around me and touched my forehead with her other hand. “No more burnin’.” She smiled. “You better, child. You better.” The gladness in her voice made me feel special—like she’d felt poorly ’cause I felt poorly. I got a sudden attack of being ashamed; she was in so much trouble ’cause of me.

  I laid my head on her shoulder. Her arms wrapped me tight and I was all the sudden taken by a cryin’ fit.

  “Please, Eula,” I said against her shoulder. “Please do like Miss Cyrena says.”

  Eula petted my hair and rocked me. “Shhhh. Shhhh, child.”

  I jerked away. “I mean it! It ain’t safe for you out there with those men and the N-double-A-CP.”

  Her eyes got wide. “You been listenin’ awhile.”

  I nodded and wiped my eyes. “What is the N-double-A-CP?”

  Miss Cyrena said, “An organization to help Negros get their full rights as citizens of this country.”

  “Like what?”

  “Voting without harassment. Equality under the law—not separate rules for Negros and whites; no separate schools or toilets or bus seats.”

  “Oh.” I couldn’t imagine a school with white kids and colored kids all mixed up. “Mamie said everybody likes it the way it is—not just whites, coloreds, too.”

  “That’s what most white people say,” Miss Cyrena said. “They don’t want it to change.”

  “Colored do?”

  “Not all, but that’s because they’ve been taught to be afraid.”

  Eula pulled me back against her. “All right, that’s enough worry for one night. Time you get back to sleep.”

  “Please say you’ll bake and not go out to work,” I said. “Please.”

  Miss Cyrena said, “You’ll make money faster baking than doing domestic work.”

  “And I can help,” I said.

  “It’s a good plan, Eula.”

  For a long while Eula was quiet. Then I heard her sniffle. “It’s a good plan.” She patted my back. “Now get you back to bed, child. We bakin’ tomorrow.”

  As she tucked me in my couch-bed, I said, “I’m sorry.”

  She tilted her head; the moonlight glittered in her eyes. “What you mean?”

  “I’m sorry I’m causin’ you so much trouble.”

  “Now you listen to me. I spent my whole life wantin’ to take care of children. You a blessing, not a burden.” She looked at me hard. “Don’t you go forgettin’ that.”

  She patted my shoulder and left me alone. As I fell asleep, it come to me that that was the first time anybody had ever told me I was a blessing.

  17

  i

  got up the next morning and it looked like Eula had been up all night baking. I bet she’d used up everything in Miss Cyrena’s kitchen that could be made into a pie or cake. And she didn’t even have a single order yet.

  I stood there looking at them all lined up on the table. “How come you baked all these?”

  Eula was at the counter, her hands deep in a mixing bowl, sweezing and patting, squeezing and patting. “Sometimes I just gotta bake.”

  “What’s this one?” I pointed to a pie that kinda looked like apple, but not.

  “Green tomato, for Miss Cyrena. She near ate the last one all herself.” Eula leaned close. “So I reckon it might be her favorite.”

  “That one pumpkin?”

  “Sweet potato.”

  “And that?” I pointed to a round cake with a hole in the middle.

  “Surely you know apple-dapple cake?”

  I shook my head. “Never seen a cake with a hole.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Angel food?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, we got our work cut out for us. You gotta know what they taste like if ’n you gonna make ’em.”

  I eyed the table. There was lots of things that didn’t look familiar.

  “We gotta eat ’em all?” I was all for sweets, but even I couldn’t eat all these, even if I had a week.

  “Miss Cyrena said she’d take some in town, maybe give out a sample to some of the restaurants and a couple of her friends. Try to scare up some business.”

  Then it hit me. Eula said I had to know if I was gonna make ’em. “Am I helpin’?”

  “You want to?”

  I nodded. This’d be almost as good as when I got to Nashville and got to make Christmas cookies with Lulu.

  “Good. A lot of soothin’ come from bakin’. Get your hands washed and down in this here dough.” She wiped her hands on her apron and stepped back. “We makin’ a chess pie.”

  “Shouldn’t I use a spoon?” I asked before I plunged my hands in the bowl. “Mamie always said to keep your fingers out of what you’re makin’.”

  “Oh, no, child. Gotta get your hands deep in a pie crust. That how you know when it right. Just gotta barely hold together. Too wet and it won’t be nice and flaky.”

  We spent the rest of the morning making that chess pie. Eula explained to me how you had to use ice water when mixin’ the crust. She showed me how to put it in the pie tin and brush it with egg white and prick it with a fork and bake it for a few minutes before adding the filling—which was mostly eggs and sugar, but had cornmeal in it!—to be baked. That made for a nice crisp crust, she said. But it was only for a chess pie. Every pie, it had its own special trick. I wanted to learn them all.

  Eula was right, baking was soothin’. Too bad baby James was too little to do baking, maybe he wouldn’t cry as much.

  The baking business in Miss Cyrena’s town turned out to
be real good. So good that I didn’t even have time to go out and collect bottles for deposit money. I was a little sorry ’cause I missed being outside.

  Me and Eula . . . I mean, Eula and I (Miss Cyrena was real picky about the way we talked in her house) started rolling pie crust and mixing cake and muffin batters first thing in the morning, even before we ate breakfast. When I bellyached about being hungry, Eula told me I was lucky that Miss Cyrena had a nice new electric mixer or breakfast would be even later.

  Even though I had to wait for breakfast, I was glad Eula had decided to do baking instead of going to work at people’s houses and whatnot. I could keep my eye on her and know she was safe. Besides, if she hadn’t, I might never have found out something about myself. Turned out, taking care of babies wasn’t my only gift. Eula said I got me a special gift for rolling pie crust, too. She only had to show me how to do it once. And then she helped me with my first one by putting her hands over mine and letting me get the feel for how hard to press the rolling pin and how to go this way and that to make the dough a circle. In the four days we’d been baking, I’d only rolled one too thin and had to start over. Eula said that messing with the pie dough—she called it “working” the dough, but I was the one working, so it didn’t make any sense to me—too much made it tough and not nice and flaky, so I was real careful from then on.

  I wondered, what other gifts I got bottled up inside me? That question had started to gnaw on me some.

  That Thursday morning, my wondering was bigger than ever. And so was the orders. Folks in Miss Cyrena’s town must eat an extra lot of cake and pie on Friday and Saturday, so Eula said we had to work extrafast—which made our conversationing time shorter. We wouldn’t get to sit at the table and have a banana and a glass of milk while we waited for a batch to come out of the oven. That was my favorite time of day, me and Eula at the table talking with the timer ticking behind our words. I’d already found out she’d been a maid to three different houses with kids before she switched to baking. When I asked why she changed families (Bess and Ernestine sure had stayed put with their families), she’d got real quiet before she said it was ’cause she loved them babies too much. She said that was the reason she changed to baking, too; too much baby love. That didn’t make a lick of sense to me, but she got some tears stuck in her eyes, so I didn’t ask any more about it.

  Even though our conversationing time wasn’t gonna be, I was determined to get my questions asked about my gifts. Just as soon as we had the pie dough getting cold in the Frigidaire and the first cakes in the oven, me and—Eula and I finally got to sit down and eat our grits and eggs and fried bacon. Miss Cyrena said Frosted Flakes was nothing but sugar, and a growing child needed protein. I’d been growing just fine on Frosted Flakes so far, but didn’t argue ’cause we was guests in her house.

  Even though I was starvin’, as soon as Eula finished saying grace, I got right to it. “Eula, you got any more special gif ’s . . . other’n pies and babies?”

  She stopped with her coffee cup halfway to her mouth. She shook her head. “Reckon not . . . none that I know ’bout anyhow.” She blew on the coffee, then took a sip.

  “When did you know ’bout the ones you got?”

  “Well now, the babies come early, when I helpin’ my cousin take care of the littler cousins while their momma worked.”

  “How old were you?” I was wondering if I was late in finding my own gifts, or right on time.

  “Changed the first diaper when I was four.” She wrinkled her nose and waved her hand under it. “Stinky one, too.” She laughed a little. “You find out someday. Them new baby ones like baby James has ain’t so bad yet. I was takin’care of ’em all on my own by the time I was nine.” She picked up her knife and nodded for me to start eating, too. “Time short, eat up.”

  I felt a little disappointed. I thought having the gift before I was ten was real special.

  I swung my bare feet, liking the feel of the linoleum swish, swish, swish with the tick-tick of the timer as I thought. I put a big bite of eggs into my mouth.

  As Eula buttered her toast, she said, “Soothed the colic in the baby when I was eight. The rest just come a little at a time.”

  “How’d you know ’bout the pies?” I asked. My mouth was full, but Miss Cyrena wasn’t in the room to scold me.

  “Here’s the thing ’bout gif ’s.” Eula stopped buttering her toast and looked straight at me. “A body don’t know how many the good Lord tucked inside them until the time is right. I reckon a person could go a whole life and not know. That why you gotta try lots of things, many as you can . . . experiment.”

  I took a bite of bacon, forgetting that I always saved it for last because it was my favorite.

  Mamie always made me do the things she wanted me to do, which was never the interesting stuff. Whenever I asked to do something, she said I’d make too much mess, or too much noise, or it was dangerous, or I’d break something, or people would think I was unladylike, or think I was trashy. Why, if I hadn’t met Eula, I might never have found out about the babies or the pie crust.

  “How do you know what to try?” I asked. There didn’t seem to be enough time to try everything. What if I was trying race-car driving (dangerous, unladylike, and trashy) when my gift was really doctoring animals?

  She looked at me like I wasn’t getting the point. “Why, when your mind gets curious ’bout somethin’, you know you should experiment. You a white child, you can do anything you want!”

  I snorted. “You don’t know my mamie.” I realized too late that I wasn’t stickin’ to my story. I held my breath for Eula to say something, but she didn’t even look my way, so I reckon she was so caught up in talkin’ gifts that she missed it.

  “I ain’t sayin’ doin’ it right the second it pops into your mind. Rules keep a child safe. But as you growin’, the chances gonna be there for you. Why you can be anythin’ when you grow up.”

  The way she said it got me thinking. Mamie said girls grow up to be secretaries or nurses or teachers and then turn into mommas, and that’s their job for the rest of their life. But my momma was famous for being a singer. She must have tried things that weren’t secretarying or nursing to find out she had a gift.

  Right then I got a little sick feeling in my belly. She had been a momma . . . but had to leave to get famous. Do you have to choose one or the other?

  Eula said, “You got all sorts of gif ’s hidin’ inside you. I can tell.” “You can?”

  “Clear as the sun in the sky!”

  “What are they?”

  “Ohhh,” she said real serious. “They don’t got names yet. That’s the part you have to find out with your experimentin’.”

  The timer went ding! Eula got up to check the cakes with a toothpick; that’s how you could tell if they was done. As she did, she patted my shoulder. “Jus’ remember, they’s all there inside you, waitin’ to be found.”

  I sat there finishing my breakfast, feeling around inside to see if my mind got curious about something.

  Curiosities started snapping like popcorn.

  That afternoon, when Miss Cyrena was loading up her car to make deliveries, I decided I’d had all the being indoors I could tolerate. She’d pulled her car right up to the back door so she didn’t have to carry the cakes and all to the driveway on the side of the house. I followed Miss Cyrena out, even though the going-out rule was: only with permission, which was most always given after dark and only for the backyard. Truth be told, I was turning even whiter on account of I never got to be in the sun. If only I had my bicycle! I’d be able to ride away from this neighborhood where I stood out like a polar bear mixed in with regular bears. I would ride and ride and ride, until my legs fell off.

  “Can I come?” I asked. I’d brought a cake with me so I’d be helpful. I handed it to Miss Cyrena.

  She took the cake. Her eyes flickered toward the house and back to me. “Oh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “Please? I’ll sta
y in the car. I won’t be a bother at all.”

  She took the cake and put it real careful in one of the boxes Mrs. Washington’s son, Cletus, had made to carry the cakes and whatnot. “It’s not that you’d be a bother! You’re always such good help. It’s just that . . .”

  I knew what she was thinking. ’Sides me sticking out like a polar bear, there was the Jenkins boys in town. We hadn’t had no more problems from them, probably ’cause Eula was staying hid inside Miss Cyrena’s and they couldn’t find her. Course Miss Cyrena had said they like to pick on kids, too, so I couldn’t argue that I was white and they’d leave me alone.

  “If I see that truck with the Confederate flag on the hood, I’ll hide down on the floorboard.”

  Her eyes got squinty behind her glasses. “You heard it all, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. “So I know to stay away from them. See? It’s good.”

  “It’s not like hide-and-seek, Starla. Those men are cruel and dangerous.”

  “Miss Cyrena, I’m gonna go crazy if I don’t get outta here.”

  After a second, she smiled just a little. “Well, we can’t have you going crazy, can we?”

  I held my breath.

  She nodded. “Go tell Eula you’re coming with me.”

  I jumped and turned around at the same time and ran into the house before she could change her mind.

  She called after me, “And change your clothes. Put on that nice dress we got you from the church.”

  I run upstairs to change—since I slept on the couch and didn’t have a room myself, I kept my clothes up in Eula’s room. I stopped when I heard Eula laughing. Since we’d been at Miss Cyrena’s, Eula had changed some. Her smiles come more easy and she acted less like she was afraid of her own shadow. But laughing had still been a rare thing.

  I walked slow and quiet and peeked in the door. Baby James was laying in the middle of the bed and Eula was telling him a story. Course James wasn’t big enough to pay any attention, but Eula was having fun anyway. She made her hands act like butterflies and bumblebees and Brer Rabbit. Those critters did the silliest things . . . which is why Eula’d been laughing. All the sudden she looked up and saw me. Her smile come quick and bright and changed everything about her.