Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  “It’s a start,” Ivoe explained to her mother that evening. She was already meditating on the letter she wanted to write to Ona, scratching her left hand so hard welts appeared like ripples on a pond.

  Lemon looked at the pile of okra and grabbed her daughter’s hand. “Where is your mind? You fixing to scratch yourself to ribbons. Get some of that camphor before you touch your face and start itching all over.” The look in Ivoe’s eyes she had seen earlier that summer. After the graduation ceremony Ivoe had none of the calm satisfaction that came with achievement. She was oddly quiet and fidgety until the teacher joined them on the lawn. Talking to Miss Durden seemed to perk her up.

  Children ought to know the wishes their parents hold for them. Lemon held a special one for Ivoe. She hoped that a person would come along to go the distance with her, help Ivoe run the race in her and Ennis’s stead—and with the same devotion. Timothy had found his One, now who would love Ivoe on the road to her life’s purpose? On graduation day she had thought she would meet a nice young man from the school down the road, but in the shade of the redbud tree, hope faded. Watching Ivoe and Miss Durden she saw something curious—perfect tenderness of the teacher’s hand as she swept a curl from Ivoe’s forehead. A funny feeling came to her watching Ivoe’s eyes when she accepted the teacher’s gift, a clothbound book with a fern-green slipcase with gold embossed writing: A Dream-Alphabet, and Other Poems. She’d never seen Ivoe embrace anyone like that or look at a thing the way she read Miss Durden’s card (“May your road wind to where the heart leads . . . Love, Ona”).

  “You get a letter from your friend lately? Imagine you can’t wait to write and tell her about this,” Lemon said.

  Ivoe wiped her hands and reached for plates to set the table, wondering what her mother could possibly know about it.

  “I imagine finding words to say what’s going on with yourself, putting it all down, and sending it off for another soul feels good. The only letters I ever wrote were those I sent to you. No need in me lying. If I ever sat down to write to somebody all what’s on my mind . . . well, I probably would still be writing.”

  The cabin was still that night when Ivoe thought again of the letter she received that afternoon, as if Momma had talked it up. Reading Ona’s letter for the third time, she paused between sentences, taking her eyes off the page to imagine everything Ona described, savoring each stroke of pen like a glad eater who lays the fork to rest during an exquisite meal. She clutched the letter to her chest, sighed for all its subtle niceties, and returned it to the special box under the bed. Peanut hulls on the little table brought to mind the only time she ever missed a class at Willetson. For a week, she had braved the interminable cold with the boycotters. After two days of missed classes, someone rapped on her door. The only proof that she had not hallucinated a benevolent phantom came when Miss Durden touched her head.

  In and out of fevered sleep, she was fully jolted awake by a smell so divine she wondered if this was part of her delirium. Miss Durden peeled off a snow-dusted coat and ordered her to sit up. She watched the teacher pull a small iron pot from a box. Moments later she held a magical bowl of velvety amethyst. Sweet and creamy, the purple yam soup was unlike anything Ivoe had ever tasted. Even the thought of it now in still midnight heat roused her. She imagined Miss Durden at home, before she entered her tiny room that winter’s day—the beautiful slender hands assembling ingredients, eyes that held tenderness gazing over a recipe. An unexpected breeze rustled the fig tree limbs outside her bedroom window as she pictured Ona in a lace slip, arms opening to embrace her. She breathed in the musky scent of fruit, heavy and succulent, turned on her stomach, followed the curve and line and pressed the arc with patience until her nightgown, damp with sweat, clung to her back. Such sweet rhythm, her song for Ona crescendoed in silence. She held the notes deep in her throat where they melted and trickled like fresh honey from a comb to the hollow of her belly.

  At the last oak tree before the Stark house Ivoe followed the slate path to the fountain. Inside a fluted cement bowl on a terra-cotta pedestal stood a cherub cast from ebony with a pitcher of flowing water. As a child, Ivoe had found the fountain a great source of intrigue, not for the sweet black figure poised on tiptoe but for the monstrous bird etched on the angel baby’s chest. One traversed an identical black eagle, painted on the porch, with outstretched wings, a scepter and orb in each talon, to reach the front door. This coat of arms was stamped inside each of the Starks’ books, embroidered on their linens, etched in the center of the rockwood bench where Miss Susan sat dressed in denim trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, a shapeless sun hat balanced on one knee.

  “That’s a face that’s holding something in. Go on and laugh. I know I look like a funny ole scarecrow. Don’t I know it?”

  A few stairs delivered the giggling women into the garden.

  “You ever see trumpets that golden? You can almost hear them they’re so loud. I know Gabriel’s up in heaven fit to be tied! When Mr. Stark built this garden for me, he chose narcissus because they’re sturdy and are supposed to bring domestic happiness. Any wits left at all tumbling around in this skull, I lay to these flowers—a little peace on loan from God.”

  Susan knelt on the ground and drew a finger to her lips. She looked over her shoulder, leaned forward, and unscrewed the lid of the DaysO Work tin. The plug of tobacco daintily packed between her bottom lip and gums, she winked. Ivoe wanted to laugh. If Miss Susan prided herself on this secret, she needed to find another one; everybody in Little Tunis knew she dipped snuff.

  “Now, I told Minnie good to snap the bulbs apart before she planted them. This morning she told me she forgot. Figured I’d work on this overcrowding here—so they don’t grow tangled—while you tell me what it is you came to say.” She slid a small shovel under the clump, careful not to knock the bulb.

  Ivoe didn’t know where to begin. She was twenty-two and life was going on without her. She felt tired and disgusted, just marking time on Little Tunis’s roads that winded nowhere.

  “Do you know anyone who needs a secretary, assistant of any kind—maybe something to do with books? I need work. Meaningful work.”

  “Aren’t you still at the paper, or has Edna Standish made it impossible for you to work there?” Susan took a rag, spit, and folded. “That woman could irritate Michael the archangel.”

  “For four years I’ve done nothing but menial tasks at the Enterprise. I’ve pleaded with Mrs. Standish to give me real work. Proofreading, fact-checking, anything. Each time I mention it she waves it off, like’s she’s swatting a fly.”

  Susan sat up straight and still. Nearby, two bees landed inside a flower’s corona. She lowered her voice. “Hand me that rag. Sweat makes bees aggressive. They don’t usually bother with narcissus—it’s early yet and there’s little in the way of pollen. They’ll take what they can get. Go on—”

  “I’ve asked Mrs. Standish more times than I care to think to let me write. I bring her good ideas for stories to report on. A couple of days’ll pass and the story I proposed is printed—sometimes on the front page and not written half as well as I might have done.”

  “Go right on blaming Edna or the Enterprise if you want to but you’d be wrong as two left shoes ’cause neither of them is confining your life, Ivoe. You are. Finishing at Willetson— that’s tall cotton. You ought not to give up.”

  “Give up?” Ivoe’s voice escalated. She thought of Willetson’s annual alumni bulletins in which each year the number of her former classmates, now married to sharecroppers and working in the fields, grew. White southerners held it against colored people for not accomplishing more when they went out of their way to devise their greatest impediments. “It may be possible for a young white woman to carry off her career plans without incident, but for a member of my race and sex—even with credentials—it proves difficult, if not impossible.”

  “Help me up from here. I’ve had my sun for
the day.”

  Susan grabbed hold of Ivoe’s hands and struggled to her feet. “Who told you to stay in Texas?” Her eyes brightened with devilment as she leaned closer. “Why don’t you get out of here?”

  Shaded by the pecan trees, on the path to the house Ivoe traced the reasons she had stayed in Little Tunis: “Paltry earnings—and no savings.” And the mailings she received from Ona every month—clippings from the Negro press that included warnings to overzealous migrants to the city. Without a job or friend waiting in the new destination, she couldn’t even dream of leaving. “Not that Momma would ever let me.”

  “Let you?!” Susan’s eyes were full of wild wonder. “Well, I sure did waste a whole lot of envy on you.”

  Ivoe could taste the blood from a tongue bitten too hard. Why on God’s green earth would a white woman, who owned more land than a thousand men could plant in a day, be jealous of anybody, least of all a colored girl?

  “How do you figure I have anything worth envy?” Ivoe said, climbing the porch stairs.

  Susan bored in on her but there was warmth and kindness in her bearing as she sat down and motioned for Ivoe to do the same.

  “Being white don’t mean I’ve been done right by life. Now, the Negro is the last person I expect sympathy from—and that includes you—but you need some facts to balance out those assumptions.” Miss Susan’s face balled up; her searing blue eyes looked like the ocean about to spill over, a face that grieved the world, at least the South.

  “I wasn’t born to cotton. Daddy was no planter. We didn’t own slaves. Daddy was a hardscrabble upcountry yeoman farmer and a piss-poor one at that. He only had about twenty-five acres and a whole heap of debt. Failed at raising tobacco. Eventually, he got a little corn crop going. That was around the time Mother died and he took to the bottle. He used to fuss to high heaven about having three daughters and no sons to help with all the work. We did our share but it wasn’t enough. In town one day—I must’ve been around ten—Daddy met a young man who was signing up families to take west.” Susan paused to look about the porch—every surface was bare. No cool beverage awaited her. She rolled her eyes and rang the bell for Minnie.

  For as long as Ivoe could remember, she had wondered about the coat of arms. Now, sitting a few feet away from the black eagle, she settled in. By the time Alfred Stark fled the Prussian province of Westfalen for South Carolina with thirty-two Prussian and Moravian families in 1859, cotton profiteers had depleted the backcountry soil. His plan for a Piedmont cotton empire had failed before he dropped anchor. Fortune grew westward. Stark brokered a deal with the governor of Texas to lead a gang of yeoman families and Muslim bondspeople from Alabama to the cotton frontier.

  “Stark put it to Daddy straight: Central East Texas was wild country but the soil was good. Well, that was more than Daddy could boast. He collected his daughters and packed up the household. The journey was hell. Daddy had damn near pickled his liver but couldn’t stop with the drink—only the German Evangelicals didn’t allow it. He sweat and cussed and fought the whole way. In Georgia, one of my sisters turned back. Said she’d rather die alone in South Carolina than head into the unknown with a drunkard.”

  Susan looked at Ivoe and wondered how much of her own history the girl knew.

  “We picked up thirty-one Africans from a ship in Alabama and there were at least that many waiting when we arrived in Texas. The Alabama Africans were different and they weren’t long for Texas. Whenever chastised—beat—they cried out to Allah. Refused to convert. They spoke Arabic and some other languages the whites had no knowledge of. Alfred couldn’t trust that the Alabama Africans prayed to a God he didn’t know anything about, and so many times a day, like your mother. ’Cause your grandfather Booker brought in money with his smithing, he was the only man Alfred spared, along with his two wives Iraj and May-Belle. That business with the Muslim slaves haunted him all of his days, though he never would admit it. He’d be figuring on something, push his paper over to me, and ask the obvious: ‘That right there say twenty-eight, don’t it?’ Every time he dealt in money, seem like the sum was 280 . . . 2,800 . . . 28,000—couldn’t get away from 28. That’s how many Africans they drowned in the creek.”

  Ivoe recalled wartime and the burning down of her schoolhouse. On one of those long winter days with Momma she’d asked her why she hadn’t married a Muslim man. Momma told her there wasn’t none to marry but she had not said anything about the twenty-eight. There was no telling, no counting the loss her parents had known that she would never know about.

  “In Louisiana, I lost another sister. Ran off with a fella. I was fourteen years old when we landed at the Brazos. Daddy died a few weeks later. At his funeral, Alfred Stark, then a twenty-five-year-old widower, told me to come work scullery in the big house. That’s how I came to know your grandmother. I heard awful stories about cotton ­pickers—how it destroyed the hands and back—different from the Negro rice planters of Carolina with legs and feet blistered and swollen where they worked the marshy rice fields fifteen hours a day. At fifteen, I took sick with Stark’s child—bedridden with fever. After I finally came to myself, Iraj told me Stark had married me for fear that I would die. If I died a fornicator, well, that made him one too, and he didn’t want it on his conscience. My baby girl died in infancy.”

  Ivoe flashed on the mysterious tombstone she had discovered in the garden while playing as a little girl: THEDA SUSAN STARK, FEBRUARY 10, 1860–FEBRUARY 23, 1860.

  “That December I gave him Earl. Your mother was born the same year. If you really want to know the truth, Ivoe, ain’t nobody free. The whole business of living is mismanaged by a few who are long on money and short on common sense. In the matter of all that living I just told you about I didn’t have a say in a lot of things,” Miss Susan said, her voice catching a little. “That’s what it means to be just a woman—no say. But an educated woman has a say and choice! Ivoe, you’ve got more education than every white woman I know. And a sense of duty, a life’s purpose . . . I never did find mine.”

  “Every month I write to the editors of the Bryan Daily Eagle and the Lone Star Ranger. I have even offered to write for no money with the hope that more clippings will prove to Mrs. Standish—”

  “You’ll fair better in a city—someplace north. Now if you don’t want to leave that’s another story, but don’t put that on Lemon. She’ll understand and if she doesn’t—well, you just keep talking until she does.”

  “I don’t know anybody anywhere else.”

  “Well, I do.” Susan straightened up and regarded Ivoe with earnestness. “If I let you borrow my name—to see if it’ll open doors—will you make the most of it?”

  Before she could answer Susan had hurried into the house and returned with eyeglasses and a leather book.

  “There was a woman in Chicago who had a temperance organization. Maybe she could help. Alfred’s people are known all over the state of Missouri. You write to this man in Kansas City. I believe he owns a couple of papers, or knows somebody who does—tell him that you know me. See if he can do anything for you.”

  At that moment, Ivoe nodded to Minnie, carrying two glasses of iced tea.

  “I put a ham up for tonight’s supper, Miss Susan. Ham be all right?”

  “Minnie, that’s the third time you’ve asked me that today,” Susan snapped. “You ought not to fixate on one thing. What about the silver? Is it polished? You know I have the ladies for tea tomorrow. And my hats—did you go into town to pick them up?”

  While Minnie’s scolding continued a bee landed on Susan. Ivoe wondered if the fine hairs covering the woman’s arm like fuzz on a peach made her oblivious to the bee, or if she was like May-Belle, who sat rock-still to encourage flight. Only a queen bee would cakewalk like that, syncopating each step with her stinger—once, twice, and again. Sturdy as a jonquil.

  “Shiiit!” Miss Susan’s hand came down on her arm like a cleaver
on a chicken’s neck. “It’s my own damn fault. I know better than to sit out here—Minnie, run, bring me some lemon to clean this with.” Susan studied her arm, scowled after the help. “Today! Not tomorrow.” She whispered to Ivoe, “I have half a mind to fire her. She never was any good and now that she’s gotten old, she’s worse.”

  “Miss Susan, I better get on home,” Ivoe said.

  “You remember what I told you. Write to Kansas City.”

  From the road Ivoe heard her shouting to Minnie to call the doctor.

  .

  Earl Stark never knew his mother was allergic to bee venom.

  The Williamses paused before the walnut coffin to take in the nest of brown-and-gray curls piled high on Susan’s head, the pearl earrings dangling from her fleshy earlobes, the dress. “She always did favor that one,” Lemon said of the bodice of beige lace over a skirt of brown silk. She looked at the smooth hands, remembering the final chore of each day when she delivered a toddy on a pewter tray, retrieved the liniment of rose petals and wild cherry bark, and disrobed her mistress, carefully kneading her limbs as a mother rubs her ailing child.

  After Earl’s eulogy, a small boy was deployed to hold the music while Irabelle played “Du Bist Mir Nah und Doch So Fern,” a song cherished by Miss Susan, who had often recalled how beautifully her husband played it when he returned from the war.

  For many from Little Tunis, the funeral of Mrs. Stark meant they would finally see inside the Starks’ manse, whose stories of grandeur had lived for generations in the Bottoms. A long line wended from the porch down into the famous jonquil garden, with two butlers ushering visitors into the parlor. Though they were barred from other rooms, some paused in the foyer to glance up the staircase, craned their necks for a view of the dining room and the kitchen where Minnie claimed to get her fill of sweet cream and pie or cake every night after supper. But there were also those who would pluck out an eye before lingering on lavish furnishings; they couldn’t leave quick enough: “Ain’t a house in all of these United States worth what we been through picking cotton to an early grave.”