Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  Yours,

  Ivoe

  Austin, January 24, 1917

  Dear Ivoe,

  At today’s newspaper meeting I half expected you to show up. This term’s crop of minds is keen as ever. As for crumb snatching, I say make your own table. If you feel that what you do does not matter, do what I hope Willetson has had a hand in teaching you: find a way to do what matters not just to yourself but also to others. In the meantime, what joy are your pursuing? I recently acquired a book of verse by Paul Laurence Dunbar—Oak and Ivy. The poems are delightful. Between teaching and the poems there remains plenty of time for me to feel discouraged with myself. Tomorrow I will turn forty-two, and along with added age comes the feeling that the chance for untried things has slipped away.

  We two are a pitiful pair!

  Write when you have the chance. You cannot imagine what pleasure I take in your letters.

  Love, your old friend,

  Ona

  Kansas City, February 7, 1917

  Dear Ona,

  I have been too discouraged by my family’s need and my own to write. I am lonely but it is not a friend I crave. You are nearer to me than you know—than I know what to do with since I cannot reach out and touch you.

  I am lonely yet there is never a moment alone at home. Momma and Irabelle bicker constantly, as you might expect when wisdom and youth collide. Timbo, Roena, and their boys are suffocating. Each one speaks of his or her want hourly. You’d expect this from the children; it’s the parents who must learn to do better. Still, it seems everyone but me has someone to talk to.

  I have been remembering Papa several times a day. The remaining hours I spend wanting this, wanting that—good food to eat, a newspaper to write for, proper lady’s shoes of the latest fashion, a good book to read and someone to discuss it with, someone to talk to and touch. If you passed me on the street you wouldn’t know me. The load has sagged for all this want.

  Yours (in dire need),

  Ivoe

  Austin, February 18, 1917

  Dear Ivoe,

  Sometimes in life you have to bend low to follow through on your dream. As soon as you are able, straighten up. In the meantime, the city you couldn’t wait to get to awaits your discovery. Get out of doors, walk around, discover . . . I enclose a book, Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood—quite a bit of my soul reflected in its pages.

  We remain near to each other,

  Your Ona

  Ivoe has been a dipper at Alton Clover twelve weeks when her name issues from the loudspeaker in the room that smells of cocoa and bergamot hair grease, where she dips nine hours a day across from a sullen girl Ivoe is sure lost her smile to the bruises peeking out from the collar of her dress. It is the worst kind of job, monotonous and requiring total attention. As in all piecework, skill and speed count, and she has neither. What she has is a cold metal stool at the end of the row, where all lefties are seated, and a small instrument with a bowed wire at the end just large enough so that the bonbons do not slip through; with this she dips each ball of cream into smooth chocolate and sets it on the parchment-lined tray. Getting the balls to stay where she places them is hard enough but the final step is next to impossible. She can no more make the little fold of chocolate over the top, the trademark for the pricier bonbons, than Timbo can give up gambling. Her bonbons are a mess, as though her trays are intended for the Smudge Company. “I know the girls by their trays,” Mrs. Humphrey had said on her first day. At the second call of her name, Ivoe thinks that she is not long for this job.

  Drawn shades and Mrs. Humphrey unbuttoning her shirtwaist surprise Ivoe—but just a little. It has been five weeks of warm hands against her back, ample bosom pressed against her head while her tray is inspected, and greedy glances whenever the forewoman enters the commons where the hefty girls from packaging and receiving take their lunch. (They are not friendlier than the dippers but they are louder, which gives the same effect.) There are things about being a colored woman in the city that she can learn from Lois. Ivoe likes the way she says “Williams” in that funny accent, the hooded hazel eyes, and all the small ways she is generous—invitations for overtime, packs of cocoa powder slipped into her coat pocket (later used by Momma in cakes). She appreciates the advice: which banks cheat Negroes; where to get the colored livery when she misses the trolley; which beauticians can’t press hair worth a damn; the church all striving Negroes attend.

  There is nothing furtive about the forewoman’s touch. She pulls Ivoe close for a kiss, slow and gentle. She unzips the uniform, bites the back and sides of her neck, cups her breasts from behind. Down and under the slip, she probes between her legs in a staccato rhythm that ends in a surprising deluge.

  Ivoe thinks of Ona, backs Lois against the desk, pushes up the sides of her skirt. She takes a seat in front of her, leans forward. She thinks of stew meat for supper instead of beans. Soft hands cradle her head, lead her to a heady scent. “Sweet, sweet,” says a voice like velvet. She keeps at her business—pleasant enough—until Lois arches against the noise of steam whistles. Afterward, Lois erects herself, hand-brushes loose strands of hair in the direction of her upsweep. She knots Ivoe’s apron and pats her on the back. Ivoe takes the two-dollar bill from under the can of pecan brittle on the desk, pops a piece of candy into her mouth, and returns to work.

  .

  Six months after their arrival in Kansas City, Ivoe sat the heavy valise on the ground, rubbing where the handle had left a red depression across her palm. Everything she owned had fit into the suitcase and three hat boxes, carried by Momma, Irabelle, and Roena, who were farther ahead, each striving with all eagerness. “Y’all wait for me. I’m the one with the key,” Ivoe called out. She shook her head at their excitement to see the little house the Stranger’s Rest minister had given her permission to live and work in. Last week, after ironing out the arrangements, she had visited the house alone—little more than four walls and a roof on empty Cherry Street. Only the kitchen came furnished, if you could call the rickety table and chair shy of one leg furniture, but there was no one to hurry out of the bathroom, no one to share food with, and no one to consider late at night when she needed to type. Best of all, no one to talk to, no voices to crowd out the one in her head.

  “Clean it up and it’ll do,” Momma said, while Irabelle’s eyes lit up. “Shoot, girl. You got as much room as we got—and it’s just you.” Roena stood in the doorway, looking out into the small yard. “You know anything about the street?”

  Momma and Irabelle talked over each other with suggestions for how she might fix up the little house. “Saw some decent things at the Salvation Army.” “I’ll tell your brother to keep a lookout for furniture on the street. It’ll be good as new once you wipe it down.” All she needed now was a little hot water, salt, and vinegar to clean the windows, the typewriter set up in a comfortable spot, and a little peace. As Ivoe pushed the Williams women out her front door, a shadow of worry crossed Momma’s face: “Don’t forget us over on Mulberry, you hear?”

  Ivoe dipped the sharp pointed nib into the inkstand and begin to write in her favorite hand, delicate copperplate.

  Kansas City, April 10, 1917

  My dearest Ona,

  Reading a letter from you is like settling into a large comfortable chair. Braced by your encouragement, I seized an opportunity worth celebrating. It so happens that the minister of our church has his eye on a public office next year. Learning of his plans, I shared an idea hatched from your advice to find a way to “do what matters to me and others.” I told him that a newsletter would galvanize his congregation and the West Bottoms and be a giant step toward his political goal. I offered to write on the community’s social concerns and to attend to the church’s printing needs. I’ll keep making bonbons for Mr. Clover because the church job carries no pay. However, as editor of the newsletter, which I will call Meditation, I can live and work in the little
church-owned house where there is a printing press—used now only to print the Sunday bulletins. I invited Momma and Irabelle to stay with me, thinking Timbo, Roena, and theirs might spread out in the Mulberry apartment. Momma reminded me that she is saving for her own home and encouraged me to take the house for myself. At twenty-eight, I am finally living alone in a home I do not have to share. You can’t imagine how this encourages me.

  Through with feeling lowly and helpless. I will be a journalist and live an original life—see if I won’t! As always, nothing seems as if it has truly happened to me until I share it with you. Please take note of my new address and the tiny aromatic box.

  I remain your loving friend,

  Ivoe L. Williams

  1810 Cherry Street

  Kansas City, MO

  Austin, April 21, 1917

  My Loving Journalist,

  What words are you bringing to the congregation to help wartime K.C.? When I am in bed, I think of the men scattering like chickens at the sound of sniper shots. I worry about your brother finding himself face-to-face with a German.

  No time to write a long letter. After receiving yours, I aim to be your first mail in the new home. Let me know if the old homestead requires anything. And PLEASE do send your Meditations my way. I am more eager for them than I can write, more proud of you than I can say.

  Love,

  Ona

  PS: I received the chocolates. How anything this divine arrived intact is no small wonder. Many thanks, many kisses.

  The door to the past flung open, Ivoe was joined by two unwelcome guests—regret and doubt. Errands and answering the telephone for the Enterprise did not take her far, but they had placed her in the midst of her dream. What good was the newsletter she had no time to write? Every morning she awoke determined to write a paragraph for the week’s Meditation. She left the house by seven in the morning; her shift lasted from eight until six. By ten in the morning, she had taken three, four lavatory breaks to scribble down ideas, phrases. Around noon her eyes began to blur from the hundreds of balls she had dipped. Late afternoon her stool felt like granite, causing her spine to curve like the letter C. (She had been taught the right way to sit in order to make left-handed penmanship ­legible—shoulders rolled back, forearm straight, not bent in a ninety-degree angle, which always caused the hand to smudge the slate as she wrote across it. She now sat wrong all day.) Despite weary eyes, a tired ass, and a sore back, on the trolley home she perked up again. She was unaccustomed to work that exhausted the body while the brain remained charged. At the kitchen table she studied the jumble of folded paper and scraps of notes emptied from her pockets, but in a tired haze none of it made sense. She mulled over ideas before pulling out the little portable Underwood—usually around ten. She pecked out three or four sentences. Sometimes she imagined May-Belle at the table quilting, or for inspiration that simple command spoken so often by Ona Durden: “Carry on.”

  .

  From the corner, Lois Humphrey watched Ivoe with hungry intensity. Her candy girls ate lunch in their respective workrooms. Williams belonged across the hall with the rest of the dippers, but there she sat alone on a bench in the commons, known turf for the girls from packing and receiving. Conversations were in full swing: Who’d seen what picture show at the Gem Theater? Or cut a rug at the Ozarks Club on Saturday night? Ideas and invitations for the weekend flew back and forth, not a single one caught by Ivoe, whose food went untouched as she greedily eyed a letter. Sal, a loud girl with shiny black pin curls, laughed in a loose sort of way, stood up, and walked over to Ivoe. Hand or machine packing—it didn’t matter—two-faced Sal could do it all to a fare-thee-well and still stir up enough she-said to keep the factory rocking. A week ago she couldn’t stand “dicty hussies from Texas.” Said it loud enough for everyone to hear. Now she interrupted Ivoe, paying her a phony smile for half of a sandwich. Whether Ivoe knew it, feeding the backbiting chippie had probably done her some good. Someday Sal might remember the edge taken off her hunger and tell someone not to steal Ivoe’s coat or pour chocolate in her shoes—a good thing since Ivoe wasn’t hard enough to make it without a friend, nor was she about to pretend that sitting in a theater balcony melting over some dandy in too much cologne was entertainment.

  Away from work, Lois tried not to think of the wide-eyed girlishness and warm southern manner, the long legs and full lips, but these things kept Ivoe on her mind. “Williams!” she shouted above the lively chatter.

  Ivoe looked up, a degree of annoyance crossing her face.

  Lois watched as Ivoe’s face opened wide with pleasure. She grazed and tugged the blackberry nipple with her teeth then gave it a pinch. They moved from the floor to the chairs, where Lois lit a cigarette. As usual when they sat across from each other bare-chested in half-slips, discussing this and that, there was no mention of the ring on Lois’s left hand.

  Thirty-four hours after boarding her train in Boston, fifteen years ago, Lois Brady left Kansas City’s Union Station on the heels of a well-dressed crowd. At the club she picked the darkest berry on the vine, an elevator operator at the Jefferson Hotel. He wore his need tough. If not the little ones, he answered the big desires; he made her a wife and a home, and she felt protected within a community where Mother and brother would be welcomed. After a little while he understood the bargain. Not to worry, she assured him, one man was plenty. Apart from her job and their too-quiet home life, she had neither the time nor the money for dalliances. He learned to ignore strange perfumes, lipstick, the scent of another woman whenever he brought her hands to his mouth to kiss.

  Lois drew from her cigarette. “What’s going on down there on my floor?”

  “Work. That’s all.”

  “Shit, work ain’t never all. Somebody’s mad at somebody. Somebody’s sick. Somebody owe somebody money. Somebody sleeping with somebody she ain’t got no business sleeping with. And all that mess affects my floor.”

  When Lois’s eyes went flat like that, a sharp wave of desire tore through Ivoe. She watched Lois roll the stocking up her leg, snap the garter. She had a figure to beat the band.

  “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about it. I keep to myself.”

  “Um-hum. Busy reading letters.” She fit one breast and the other into the cups of a lilac brassiere. “Hand me my blouse. I read your Meditation.”

  “Was it any good?”

  “Preachy. Didn’t tell me nothing I don’t already know. Or knew and forgot ’cause it wasn’t important the first time. You got me scratching my head on this one, Williams. If you can’t tell me what’s going on here, how are you writing a newsletter?”

  Not very well, Ivoe thought. Copies placed in the vestibule before church ended in the ladies’ room, blotted with lipstick or scribbled over with more pressing news. Some littered the hallway floors or blew over the outside steps. Her opinions and the little insight gleaned from the occasional chat with the church secretary and minister (who knew very little about the lives of his congregants) wasn’t enough for members of Stranger’s Rest to carry the Meditation home.

  Lois stubbed her cigarette out and stepped into her skirt. She would’ve put money—hell, the whole factory—on this bet: Ivoe had never sat to any woman’s kitchen table having her hair done or playing cards, nor had she seen the inside of a pool hall. No wonder the people couldn’t see themselves in her writing, all dressed up in Willetsonese. “If you listen out there like you listen in here, you’ll never find out what’s going on.”

  Ivoe tossed the wrapping from a pecan brittle into the wastebasket, then leaned over to remove the Boston Guardian from the trash.

  “My brother sends it from back home. Go on. Take it with you. Better make your trolley. I wouldn’t want to be caught out late in the West Bottoms by myself on a Friday night.”

  Ivoe gripped the rope suspended from the trolley ceiling transfixed by the newspaper’s cover photo. The caption read
: “Sold to the Boston Guardian by a member of the attending party.” Nothing about the onlookers hinted at the atrocity. Their wardrobes—Sunday best. Their faces—blank. What looked like two blackened thumbprints hanging from a tree had once been colored men. She nearly missed her stop—neighborhood problems, muckraking, police raids, and violence. So much violence. As in a Hearst scandal sheet, too much space was given to crime news. Not one word devoted to racial self-help.

  .

  In the summer of 1917, Ivoe kept her ear to the Vine. An acquaintance at the YWCA apprised her of a new city chapter of the Prudence Crandall Club. As a guest of the Ivy Needle club, she learned about the special concerns of young colored women in the city who were protected neither by law, father, nor husband. To fill in the other half of black life in Kansas City, she used her brother’s name as a calling card when venturing boldly into billiard halls, gambling dens, any place men congregated, including the basement of the YMCA, a temporary home for the Negro Leagues’ baseball players. She inquired about people’s lives in the city: What did they want? What weren’t they getting? What did they struggle with and hope to change?

  After a day on the street, she turned out the light in the wee hours satisfied, only to awaken and read over the steady, uneven product of the night. On the disgusted ride to work she tried to shine a light inside her mind, blast away the dark thoughts. The less time she gave to moping about the Meditation—remarkably unhelpful—the sooner better ideas showed up. If she concentrated on words rather than chocolate and if Lois left her alone, by midmorning she could draw inspiration from everything from girl gossip to a radio tune.