A Kind of Freedom

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  “I most definitely will.” He took a step toward the porch. “I have church on Sunday but maybe after that.”

  Evelyn nodded. “Me too,” she said. “Where do you attend?”

  “Holy Ghost. What about you?”

  “St. Augustine,” she said. “My daddy won’t step foot in there, says he won’t go to a church that seats Negroes in the back, but Mother says that’s just his excuse, he wouldn’t go to any church, even one that let them sit on the altar next to the priest himself.”

  They both laughed.

  “I wonder how my sister and your friend are doing,” Evelyn smirked, still trying to stretch their time. “They’re out some late.”

  “Going to be much later with my friend,” Renard laughed.

  Evelyn didn’t join in. Ruby wasn’t as conservative as she was, not by a long shot, but Evelyn wouldn’t stand for her being ridiculed.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it, miss.” His face scrunched up with regret. “I’m sure he’s treating her real respectable. He’s a respectable sort of guy, but he’s a night owl, that’s all, and he loves to talk. They’re probably just seeing a movie, and you know how that goes, it takes so long to exit from the Negro balcony, that’s all I meant.”

  Evelyn nodded.

  “I meant it, miss. I won’t suffer anybody talking ill about a lady. He wouldn’t try it, but even if he did, I’d make sure it was the last word he said about your sister.”

  Evelyn smiled. “And what about you? How do you speak about ladies?”

  He smiled. “I haven’t had much reason to speak about them before,” he said, his stutter gone. “But if I saw Andrew today, I might tell him I made a new friend.”

  “Just a friend, huh?” Evelyn didn’t know where her boldness had been lurking.

  “A special friend,” Renard finished. “Real special,” he repeated, walking backward now, down the porch steps and then the sidewalk until he was out of sight.

  Evelyn revived the night in her mind once he was gone; so thoroughly was she coiled inside the retelling she didn’t hear her sister until Ruby reached their bedroom.

  Usually when Ruby went out and Evelyn stayed home, she had the decency to be quiet, as quiet as she could, but this time she slammed her nightgown drawer shut, she kicked off her shoes. She stomped to the bathroom, made a to-do of splashing water over her face. Once she was back in the room, Evelyn had no choice but to sit up and ask what had gone wrong.

  “Everything.” Ruby was close to tears.

  Evelyn had seen her like this only one other time when word had gotten back about Langston, and Ruby had considered transferring to secretarial school in Baton Rouge.

  “It started off all right I suppose. He held my hand, he took me to Dufon’s, he told me to order anything I liked. But we hadn’t been seated for more than five minutes when another girl walked up to the table. I think she’s one of the Chapitals; I’ve seen her around your campus. Surprised I remembered her, not much to look at, really, Evelyn, I could outmatch her on my worst day, but he sat there and held a conversation with her for five minutes before he turned back to me. He didn’t even introduce me. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.”

  “Oh, Ruby.” Evelyn didn’t know what to say. Normally her sister’s moods infiltrated her own, and Evelyn was certain something tangible would befall her as a direct result of them, but this time she felt insulated in a world of her own creation. “Oh, Ruby,” she repeated, not sure how long she had stalled since the first time she said it. “I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sure he was just being polite.” She almost slipped and said Renard had mentioned that his friend was an outgoing fellow, but she couldn’t reference Renard, not at a time like this.

  Ruby shook her head, huffing. “The blind leading the blind,” she said. “I should have known not to ask you your opinion.”

  Evelyn smarted at that and was tempted to correct her, but she held back. If she introduced Renard now, he would forever be a wedge between them; it was early, but Evelyn already knew that she would see him again.

  “Anyway, I’ve already decided,” Ruby went on, “I’m never seeing him again. There’s no way. He’s the type to think too high of himself, and let me tell you his hair is not as straight as it looked the other day, he puts some sort of oil in there, and he’s not as light as we thought either. I still can’t get a read on his family, what they did before his daddy lucked up on that teaching gig, and anyway if Brother’s grades are any indication of the kind of educating they’re doing at Valena C. Jones, that whole family is in a world of trouble.”

  Evelyn could tell her part in the performance was over, and she turned to the wall and made like she was sleeping. Ruby kept going for another hour though: The man hadn’t ordered his food the way Daddy would; she could tell he wasn’t used to eating at such fine establishments by the way he asked rather than told the waiter what he was going to have; he talked about the war like he wanted to be a part of it, when everyone knew you didn’t discuss such gruesome matters in front of a lady. Not only that, when they walked home, a white man passed, and Andrew lowered his head and nearly pushed her to the side of the street.

  “Daddy never would have done it that way,” Ruby whispered. “He wouldn’t have gotten himself killed, this is Louisiana, but he would have found a way to protect us and maintain his dignity. That’s the kind of man I’m looking for, and that Andrew, he was nowhere close. Let me tell you, Evelyn, you ought to count your blessings that his friend didn’t ask you out. You know what they say about birds of a feather. If Andrew was no count, then that old uneven-hem man must be the bottom of the barrel.”

  The next morning, Evelyn slept in, though she heard the eggs cackling, smelled the bacon smoking on the fire. She was so tired she even tarried in bed past the doorbell ringing, then Miss Georgia’s shrill voice and high laughter. Finally she heard her own name.

  She shot up, stuck her ear to the door, but couldn’t make out the conversation, just a few smatterings of words here and there, “nice looking,” and “about an hour,” and “I kept an eye out to make sure.” Evelyn couldn’t hear any of her mother’s responses, but it didn’t matter. As she dressed, her late-night excitement faded into the dull certainty that whatever magic had been sparked on that swing had been snuffed out in her mother’s sitting room this morning. Her father hadn’t been home, but he would be in a matter of minutes, and there was no question her mother would repeat what she’d heard, her father would storm in her room and forbid her from even thinking about Renard again, and she’d go on attending classes at Dillard, coming home at night, and barely fending off her loneliness, which was rising above her head.

  Still, she didn’t feel sad, just settled in her new understanding that this was life, and she had been foolish to expect much else. As she was about to head to the kitchen for any scraps Ruby had left behind, her sister walked in their room with a sneaky smirk on her face and two biscuits in her hand.

  “So”—she plopped on her made-up bed and threw a pillow at Evelyn’s chest—“you didn’t tell me you had a visitor last night,” and as she said the word night, the pillow bounced off Evelyn and hit the floor. “You’re keeping secrets now, huh? Or trying to? You know Ruby always finds out in the end.” She sang the last part of the sentence. “This time it only took twelve hours.”

  Evelyn smiled back, but she was afraid. She lowered her voice. “You had a bad time last night. I didn’t want to pour salt on the wound.”

  Ruby didn’t answer for a little while. She just played with a thread hanging from the end of her apple-red skirt. Sometimes when she was in a bad mood, Evelyn would volunteer to sew any of her clothes that needed mending. Evelyn wondered if in an hour she’d be weaving a needle through that bright cloth.

  Ruby looked up. “Evelyn, don’t be stupid, I’m your sister, your

  joy is my joy.” She stared at her
, her eyes wide and intense. “Anyway, I’m the one who introduced you to this man. What’s his name? Raymond? I should at least reap the rewards of my efforts through you.” She had inched her voice up a notch from its regular octave in an attempt to sound happy, but there was something in her face’s plain affect that made Evelyn certain her sister’s anger was near.

  Evelyn sat down next to her to get it all over with. “How’d you find out?” she asked.

  “How do you think? Miss Georgia’s loud mouth. Lord Jesus, I can’t change my girdle without her getting word. Let that be a note to you, girl. Don’t do anything in front of this house that you don’t want Daddy to know about because lucky for you Mama happened to be home this morning. If it had been Daddy who answered the door, we already know Ray would be a page in your memory book.” She paused. “And you’d be off at the Sisters of the Holy Family convent by now.” She cackled.

  Evelyn shrugged. “Mother’s going to tell him anyway; that’s over now.”

  Ruby gripped Evelyn’s wrist and locked eyes with her in a rare show of emotion. “She won’t,” she said. “She would never. That time I got caught holding hands with Langston at the St. Bernard Market, she yelled about my reputation and threatened to lock me in my room, but she never breathed a word.”

  Evelyn sighed. “That’s because it was you; it’s different.” She caught Ruby grinning then, the first genuine smile the girl had had all morning.

  Evelyn didn’t leave the house the rest of the day; she just waited for Daddy to get word, act on it, but it never happened. Even before dinner when it was just the two of them in the kitchen, and she gathered the silverware to set the table, and he prepared a whiskey straight, he just went on about the patient he’d seen. “Miss Sylvia still hasn’t dropped that baby. I told her husband to walk her up and down Napoleon. That little thing would be out by the morning, but these women don’t listen. You’d think they were the ones who spent the eight years in school. I should take off my stethoscope when I walk in their houses, pass it over, let them listen to my heart beat. I told her, if she goes any longer, she’s going to be delivering at Charity, and she’d have better luck giving birth in a manger than in the Negro ward of a hospital.”

  Evelyn nodded and smiled, waiting for him to approach the real transgression. Halfway through dinner, when he and Mother had gone on and on about Mardi Gras preparations, the debutante receptions, soprano recitals, and whist parties; when Ruby pontificated over who would be riding with Zulu this year, how early she’d need to reach North Claiborne to catch the Indians, why the Skeleton Men frightened her; when Mother added that the Million-Dollar Baby dolls were scandalous and Daddy smirked and noted they were just costumes after all, Evelyn realized he didn’t know. And she stared at her mother as if just noticing a subtle feature in the older woman’s face that had transformed her into a different person altogether.

  Without her daddy’s interference, Evelyn and Renard spent their free days together. They’d meet at the Sweet Tooth for ice cream and giggle at the owner of the store, who would scoop the ice cream up, toss it in the air, then catch it with a cone. After paying, they’d drift outside to walk, past the women haggling with the butchers over turkey necks and kids gaping at the posters outside the Circle Theater. They didn’t speak at first—the bustling environment seemed to grant permission to their silence—but finally after a few days of the same, Renard’s voice inched out in a cracked whisper.

  “How was your treat?”

  “Delicious,” Evelyn said, so eager to engage with him the word shot out. She actually hadn’t gone inside the Sweet Tooth before, though she’d stood on that street for years because it tempted Ruby to see someone eating something she wanted but couldn’t have. He nodded at her answer and put his head back down.

  “How was yours?” Evelyn asked as sweet as her double chocolate malt ball shake.

  “The best I ever had. Andrew’s mama makes shakes all the time. Don’t tell Andrew, but I think this one was better.”

  The rest of their conversation seemed to pour out—first about their studies, then about what time they would head to the parades, and finally about the disparate versions of the stories Andrew and Ruby had relayed about their first date.

  “I heard they didn’t have the best time. Don’t tell him I told you, but I guess they ran into another woman, and my sister felt like he talked to her too long.”

  Renard chuckled. “Yeah, that’s my friend for you. He knows just about everybody in the city. Man or woman. And he doesn’t just leave it at a simple hello, he wants to know how their mama is, how their mama’s mama is, their brothers and sisters. He gets a full report on each one. That girl was probably from a big family, that’s all.”

  “That’s what I told her, that he didn’t mean any disrespect.”

  “No, he’s the kindest man I know. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. All his people are like that. When my mama passed, they didn’t have to take me in. They certainly didn’t have to pay my way. Andrew’s mama lost two of her sons; she has her own grief to tend to.”

  “To the war?”

  “No, tuberculosis; there aren’t too many Negroes fighting in the war.”

  “But Miss Georgia’s son is there.”

  “He may be there, but odds are he’s not holding a gun.”

  Evelyn lowered her eyes. “Oh.” She wanted to change the subject; the war was tragic in the way slavery was; it hadn’t affected her, and she thought talking about it might invite it in. “Well, at least Andrew’s mama still has him,” she said.

  He nodded, then went on. “My mama was just as sweet as Andrew’s, you know. I never met her, but they tell me that. They tell me she was beautiful. She was a twin.” He looked up in the sky, talking out of the side of his mouth. “Jet-black hair down her back, they say. Beautiful woman.” Then he jerked back into the conversation as if he were coming to. “What about yours?”

  “My—?” Evelyn asked, confused.

  “Your mama?”

  She shrugged. “She’s stunning,” she said. “She’s the classiest woman I ever met.”

  “What’s it like, having her? That probably sounds crazy, but I always wondered . . .”

  Evelyn didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to sound ungrateful. She knew her mother loved her—there had been the time Ruby convinced Evelyn to swallow a dollar piece to make it multiply, and Evelyn had been rushed to Flint-Goodrich for the night. Her mother couldn’t be comforted, sobbing beside her bedside. Evelyn had heard her as she came to, and in those seconds she thought maybe there was a blessing inside that dollar, some voodoo magic that might open her mother’s heart, bind her to her, but after Evelyn was discharged, it was more of the same. Nothing Evelyn said came out right; nothing she did could warrant the woman’s approval.

  “We’re not so close,” she said. “I guess I’m more of a daddy’s girl.”

  “That’s too bad,” Renard said.

  “It’s not so bad,” Evelyn said. “I shouldn’t complain about it. You lost your mama, and I’m complaining about one who corrects me too much,” she tried to laugh.

  “Naw.” Renard shook his head. “Don’t say that. There’s all different types of ways to leave somebody. Maybe it’s sadder that she’s there, and she just feels far away.”

  From then on, Evelyn woke up each day with a renewed tolerance for the world; the feeling she’d been searching for her whole life had been missing because she hadn’t met Renard, and now that he was here, she could grasp the higher octave of joy her solitude precluded.

  Still, she made him say good-bye to her two blocks from their house and bribed Brother, who had caught them snuggling, with all the hog head cheese he could stomach.

  One morning Daddy walked into the kitchen while she whistled.

  “You’ve been in a mighty good mood lately, Evie.”

  She turned to him, startled into silence. “I
have?” she asked finally. “I didn’t mean to be.”

  “No? What’s causing you to be so happy beyond your control?” He sat down, perched one leg atop the other, and smiled.

  Brother walked in just then, and she hurried to dish his snack before he could answer Daddy for her.

  “Extra mayonnaise,” Brother grinned.

  Her daddy glanced from Brother to her, his eyes narrowing. “I’ll take a sandwich too,” Daddy said.

  “Yes, sir.” Evelyn spread twice as much meat on the Wonder Bread as normal and added an extra teaspoon of mayonnaise too. She served her daddy first and shot Brother a pleading look to compensate for it. Mother had made lemonade, and she poured each of them a tall cool glass.

  “You don’t want one?” Daddy asked, a dollop of the soft meat on his lip.

  She shook her head, standing at the edge of the counter, waiting.

  When Daddy finished, he let out a huge belch he would have never delivered if Mother were there and finished off his lemonade. He pulled a toothpick from a jar in the center of the table and plucked the fat from between his teeth.

  “Why don’t you bring the boy by then, since you don’t want to talk about him?” he asked finally.

  Evelyn gasped, jerked her head toward Brother.

  “I didn’t say nothing. I swear I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t need a little bird to tell me. You think I don’t know when a gal is in love?” Her daddy let out a bellow of a laugh.

  Evelyn could feel her face heating on the inside. Renard had told her on one of their dates that he had never seen a Negro woman blush before. Then she had blushed again and smiled.

  Now, Daddy got up from where he was seated, shuffled to the parlor and out the door, and Brother followed him. Before Brother left the room, he turned back, “Do that mean no more sandwiches?”

  Now that Daddy knew about Renard, Evelyn let him walk her all the way to her porch before he kissed her hand each evening. Renard had settled matters between Ruby and Andrew, and since then, Andrew would walk Ruby to the porch too, only later, and Ruby would allow him more than a kiss on the hand. Ruby had tried to discuss the details with Evelyn, but Evelyn had yawned one night just a few moments in, and Ruby took the hint and began whispering with Mother instead. Evelyn heard them sometimes.