Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  In Berdis Peets Ivoe recognized the flare of heroines she had met in her literary solitude. Conversations with her never seemed to go in the expected way. Berdis didn’t care two straws for the latest fashion but would go without eating to buy music. She was indifferent to clothes and the attention of boys. Neither did money hold her interest; never having had any she never spoke of it. Punctuating her musings with a gesture—a soft stroke down the arm or, if sitting, a pat on the thigh—Berdis spoke excitedly about traveling the world and playing music, descriptions so vivid that Ivoe could hear and see the concerts happening in Vienna, Budapest, Paris! Passion for music gave Berdis an original life. In this way, she reminded Ivoe of all the women she loved—her mother, Aunt May-Belle, Miss Stokes—each had certain talents that seemed to dictate her womanhood. Conversations with Berdis were full of the girl’s saucy tales peppered with outrageous antics. She liked to give the white man hell and refused to give them the satisfaction of knowing they had wounded her. Like the time a white woman would not sell her a Rachmaninoff piano concerto: “You think you’ve done something? You’re not the only music store in Austin. One is bound to take my colored money, you old ugly thing you.” She reminded Ivoe not to kowtow to white folks in her unconscious ways. “You’ve got to act as high above them as cake is over shit.”

  .

  Berdis Peets came from a family of coal miners in Bastrop, Central-By-God Texas. Five brothers followed Daddy into the mines while she was meant to fill her mother’s washerwoman shoes. Berdis could rinse clothes in plain water just fine, but adding Mrs. Stewart’s Bluing to the laundry brought on a fit of sneezing. “Can’t hire her out—won’t be able to whiten nothing.” She attended school, but nobody gave a damn about ciphering and reading. Only the work her brothers did counted for something since it brought in money. What counted for Berdis was school, where the teacher played piano and took her as far as she could in music lessons. All efforts to persuade Daddy that he should put her under a proper music teacher failed.

  “No kind of rearing, you see? No tenderness,” Berdis said in the midst of reading one November afternoon in Ivoe’s room. They were at the stage of their friendship where stories were prompted by everything. Dickens held Berdis enthralled; more than once that day Ivoe had seen her eyes well with tears while reading him and she had loved her for it.

  Berdis laid her book aside and Ivoe’s too. Her daddy had raised them like crops, she said, only the crops got more tending. Sometimes it was all Daddy could do to pace the floor cussing, knock one of the boys upside the head, pinch her titty too hard, anything to keep from filling their beds with coal and lighting a match. Things like that happened in Bastrop every so often when a parent’s mind filled with visions of a life that could never be, or when a child’s laughter sounded too sparkly and sweet.

  Daddy got old quick, Berdis said. Kept letting them overwork him even when Mother took sick, lay down and stayed that way. One day Berdis came home from school and found Daddy pacing out in the yard. “Your momma wanna see you.” One brother was on the floor outside the closed bedroom door, holding his head and crying. The door creaked open and two more brothers came out, raggedy voice trailing behind. “Where Berdis at?” The woman in the bed was too small, too frightful looking to be her mother. Rough gray scales gone past the chance of softening had replaced the satin mahogany skin. And she smelled very bad. Her mother gasped for breath and her chest rattled. She gave an openmouthed cough. Some of the phlegm caught in the corner of her mouth, most of it stuck to the front of Berdis’s dress. For a long time Berdis would think of that cough, what it meant: Death was looking to move in, about to sign the lease. Death was slamming doors, creaking on bone floors, displeased that it had to live, if only for a little while, in such a hellhole. “One day . . . you’ll wisen up . . . find yourself a man . . . Never been bad looking . . . don’t know how long . . . that’s gonna last . . . Better pick up . . . a needle and thread . . . an iron . . . find work with . . . somebody in town . . . find yourself a man . . . a husband . . .” Then she opened her eyes, gray and pink where the whites used to be. “Find you a husband, girl. Nothing’s gonna come . . . from that music mess. Nothing.”

  After they put her mother in the ground, Berdis’s mind filled with all kinds of strange thoughts. Finding a husband, though, was no more near to her than the moon. (If Mother couldn’t love you, who would? And even if they surprised you with all the trying, still wouldn’t be a love big enough to fill the spot where Mother should have been.) Bastrop’s Ebenezer Baptist Church took pity on the girl who played so beautifully during service. They donated money for continued piano studies and would pay her tuition in exchange for her promise to return to Bastrop to teach after graduation. “Thank God for sickness and death,” Berdis said in a wry tone. “Losing a mother and gaining music is a better deal than most.” They both knew she was right. “A hen will dip snuff before I set foot in Bastrop again.”

  .

  In the last five months, Ivoe had given long hours to the printing shed while Berdis labored at the Steinway. Berdis’s practice hour often turned into three, and Ivoe lingered at her special place at the library—the round oak table beneath a plaque bearing President Abraham Lincoln’s quote: “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.” She liked to read at the table closest to the glass bookcase from which she withdrew the untaught books—Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, My Bondage and My Freedom, and, a favorite, George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Time away from the press, the library, and the practice room, Berdis and Ivoe became for each other what both had missed growing up: a best girl.

  Around this time Ivoe began to think whites and Negroes inhabited the same country but lived in different worlds. Whites enjoyed a world of opportunity, freedom. Colored people trudged along in a world of retribution rooted in something as ridiculous as pigmentation. She tried to explain her feelings to her friend one afternoon.

  “What you huffing about?” Berdis said.

  “I’ve been thinking . . . white people must be remembering something bad about Negroes. The memory’s all wrong but it’s nothing we can do about it. If you look on down through history . . . take the Romans. They killed everybody. I mean everybody. We got some Italians in Starkville. They marry the Moravians, the Germans, all kinds of folks. Folks want to hire them—they building everything. Never mind all the killing—down through history—of everybody that wasn’t them. Take the African. What Africans do you know—down through history—that killed a bunch of Europeans? What did the American Negro ever do to anybody? They’re remembering something on us that isn’t right, holding it against us. And seems like they can’t ever forget it.”

  “You the one all in their faces, talking to this one and that one. There are a thousand better things you’ll catch me doing before you ever see me up in a white person’s face or letting them in mine,” Berdis said.

  “Merely putting my education on display,” Ivoe said in a tone she heard in her head whenever she read about English royalty.

  “What’s the advantage of that?”

  “They should see we possess great intellect and are worthy of their respect.”

  Berdis frowned. “All those colored people in the fields and you think white people thinking about you like that? You said so yourself—can’t change what they remember. And why would you want to? Why would you even want to be involved? They’re hateful. Maybe not the exact one you talking to but his daddy is, his momma is, and that means the hate’s right there in the blood. They eat their own, Ivoe! I was reading a book where all the cannibals were white . . . and they’re the civilized ones!”

  Ivoe laughed. She felt a peculiar comfort and trust in Berdis’s contempt, which leaked out like a bad smell whenever she felt slighted or was in a good mood. “You don’t have the sense God gave a bird!”r />
  “I got more than you got.”

  The joy of having a close friend gave Ivoe confidence. From the chatter of other girls, she knew Berdis also needed her. Playing piano didn’t give her the right to be so dicty, they said. Who did she think she was refusing to haul wood and coal in the winter months? Glad to see Strange Bird go, they said, after Berdis left the post assigned to all scholarship recipients in exchange for room and board. She now lived with a wealthy colored family, looking after a toddler, which she said was a heap better than doing anything for Willetson girls. Dicty and stupid, Berdis called them. Ivoe wondered what qualities she had that made her Bird’s inevitable confidante.

  .

  That was the Williams girl outside Beard Hall, thought Ona Durden. Ivoe’s features weren’t perfect and Ona could see how, in a sullen mood, she might even be unattractive, but inspired by passion, Ivoe commanded your full attention. During instruction of the Mergenthaler linotype, her cheeks flushed, her large brown eyes sparkled. While other pupils stepped back, cautious of getting burned, Ivoe went to work moving letter forms into place, watching excitedly as the machine spaced the line, then poured molten metal that cooled into a single line of type. Now, here she was on a Saturday afternoon, more eager than a basket of puppies when most girls were ironing their skirts for the week ahead.

  “Miss Durden, you said the new press was arriving today and we could come see it.”

  “That was one invitation I thought no one would take me up on.”

  A great clattering rig of iron caught Ivoe’s eye. Except for the water motor in the place where the old press had a crank, turned manually by two students, she quickly identified each part of the Cottrell cylinder press, memorized from the catalog Miss Durden had shared with her.

  Miss Durden flipped the switch and the contraption slowly started to move. “A motorized drive passes the ink rollers up to the platen,” she shouted over the rumble. “You can’t see from over there. Watch the platen where the rollers collect the ink. Then it goes down over the type. When the platen closes, the pressure forms the impression of the wood block on the paper. Now, come over on this side. That’s where the printed sheet will come out.”

  “The Cottrell is faster than the old press by nearly thirty minutes,” Ivoe said, taking the bulky practice papers from the steel frame and carrying them to the guillotine, where she released the lever at just the right angle.

  Miss Durden wiped grimy hands on her gingham smock.

  “You ever think about writing something for the Herald?” she began casually. As with many of her pupils, she had sensed in Ivoe a need for special encouragement. “You do a fine job of printing programs and things. I’d be interested to see if you can write.”

  In the printing shed Ivoe felt calm and happy, feelings she laid to a childhood made infinitely brighter by the press. And there was a sense of excitement she could not describe but knew had something to do with her future. “I-I never thought about journalism . . . mostly I enjoy putting the paper together,” she stammered.

  “Father up in heaven, she can set type for a paper but can’t imagine writing for one.” Miss Durden cut a wicked grin and rolled her eyes at the ceiling.

  As usual with the teacher, there was instant courage, motivation to want to do more and better. “I’ve loved newspapers all my life. It just never occurred to me that I could write for one. I don’t know that I can.”

  “Well, maybe you can’t but I don’t see the great upset in trying.” Miss Durden removed her smock. “All right, Miss Williams, you’ve got other studies and I have a thirty-minute trip home.”

  “I know tomorrow’s Sunday but I’m free to practice on the press,” Ivoe said.

  Miss Durden removed her glasses and laughed a quick, knowing laugh. “Fine, then. Let’s make it noon.”

  .

  How vast the gulf between consuming words and making them! Reading had always enlivened Ivoe but writing was death. Where she had cherished books for their company, writing was a lonely endeavor she was not suited for. Her first contributions to the Herald were written in her habitual passive voice. “On the way to progress, we make self-discoveries,” Miss Durden encouraged. For Ivoe, the blank page was a looking glass. In writing she came face-to-face with her truest self. She could speak her mind without worrying about who it offended. She was a gardener like her mother, planting seed for thought in a reader’s mind. Like Papa she forged the right word on the anvil of her mind.

  .

  Watching Berdis go up the hill, Ivoe stepped wrong into a ditch overgrown with tiny yellow flowers. She stumbled and pitched forward into a sprawling vine of nettle. Oh—the sting! She could hear faint laughter as she scrambled to her feet. “I’m gonna get you, Berdis.” Climbing the hill in such heat was not for the weak: she drew on the energy left over from the early-morning excitement. From seven until noon she had set type, stopping only at Miss Durden’s insistence that she enjoy some of her Saturday when Berdis poked her head inside the printing shed. “Go on. Give the others a chance to get as good as you have become.” It was Miss Durden’s first time remarking on her work. Now she could barely stand to be away from the clink-clank of metal, the rhythm of the steam-powered press, Miss Durden’s laughter.

  Ivoe was still deciding whether she should spend the evening studying for Monday’s French exam or begin the essay for literature when she reached the overlook. Her gaze followed the winding rusty ridges of bluffs banded in splendid reds down along the narrow gorge where Barton Creek joined the Colorado. She squinted against the sun trying to make out the figure; Berdis was climbing down.

  A bee flew off a thistle, fluttered, and disappeared inside a claret. Hidden in a cove full of tall crimson cones, Berdis snapped off a clover and pressed it to her nose before tossing it to the ground. “Took you long enough,” she said, sliding her skirt down. Ivoe followed the curve of her back, looking away from her buttocks snug against her slip. “Well, we didn’t come here to keep company with the flowers. You waiting on some fancy invitation? Sorry, ma’am. No post out in these parts.” She raised Ivoe’s arm, let it drop like a rag doll’s, and ran off. “Take your clothes off and come on!”

  Jumping, twisting, laughing, splashing—and the frigid cold of the creek—delighted Ivoe. Shuddering in a clinging petticoat, she was catching her breath when Berdis kissed her long (greedy as Gargantua, patient as Pantagruel). Ivoe froze. She could run a list as long as the Colorado on what might happen if they were caught. She thought of losing her place at Willetson and pulled away.

  Berdis grabbed her. “I’ve been coming here since before I knew you and I’ve never seen another soul down here. No place else for us to go. Life sure was wasted on you if you’re going to be so scared about everything.” She gave the water a great smack.

  They crawled onto the bank giggling. Bird gathered their skirts and flung them over a floor of cream-and-purple petals. She pulled Ivoe down on the bed of wild plum, where they shivered in the sunlight, hands entwined, palms soft and warm against each other.

  “Ever notice how we never study on menfolk?”

  “I talk about Papa and Timbo all the time.”

  “They’re your daddy and brother. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “I’ve never done any courting. Unless you want to count the little bit of kissing I did with the Indian boy.”

  “Hush up with them tall tales.”

  Ivoe folded her legs under her behind so that her knees bore uncomfortably into the ground, a welcome distraction.

  “I don’t study on boys because when you study on them then you start encouraging them. And I don’t want to encourage them.”

  Berdis inched closer. “They need encouraging too. Don’t they? Claim to be so brave. Shoot, I’ve never come across one who could best me out of bravery. Not a one. And I got five brothers.”

  “That does not surprise me, Miss Peets.
You’d stare down a bear moving in your direction.”

  “And it does not surprise me, Miss Williams, that you didn’t get no further than kissing with your shy self. But it might surprise you to know,” Berdis intoned magnanimously, “that I study on you. Yes indeedy, Miss Peets studies on Miss Williams every day. All day.”

  The sun slanted over Bird’s shoulder, drawing Ivoe’s gaze momentarily to her nipples, like gossamer figs, and quickening a sense of dread. She could no more study on boys than give up every leisure hour retracing her steps with Bird, whose cool hand now lay on Ivoe’s thigh.

  “Now what, Miss Williams, do you say to that?”

  “I don’t have to study on you ’cause you’re always there. It’s like you send yourself to me. I won’t be paying you a bit of mind. I’ll be at the library, or thinking on typefaces, or reading by my redbud, and here you come. Seems like you found yourself a good hiding place in my mind. When I least expect it you’re tiptoeing around in there making me smile and think all kinds of foolish thoughts.”