Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  Five minutes before the bell rang and she belonged at her station, Ivoe poked her head in Lois’s office.

  “I thought you had lost your way, it’s been so long. Close the door.” Lois enclosed Ivoe in a tight embrace that Ivoe did not return. “Tell the girls you had to see the doctor this morning.”

  “I do have to leave this afternoon.”

  Lois stepped back and adjusted her skirt. “Well, I can’t lay eyes daily on something that don’t belong to me. With Christmas around the corner, I’ll have to hire your replacement in the morning.”

  “I suspected you would.”

  “You know what you doing?”

  Ivoe nodded. After today Ona would have leads on who to solicit for printing needs—programs, invitations, cards and such. Without the factory work, Ivoe would have more time to devote to the Meditation. Money would always be little, but life was already rich and full since her ambition was safe with Ona, even if her job wasn’t.

  “I’ve been good to you.”

  Love is a curious thing. In her search to explain, Ivoe realized it no longer mattered.

  “You’ve been more than good, you’ve been fair in a city that showed me no fairness.”

  She kissed Lois at the corner of her mouth and left.

  .

  A groggy Ona shuffled behind Ivoe with a cup of tea, the white sheet clinging to her round shoulders, caught where her back ended and her ample behind began. They sat down on the sofa side by side. An orange scarf held Ona’s pin curls in place and a crease lay deep in her left cheek as she stifled a yawn. Ivoe snapped open the Dallas Express, one of several colored newspapers they subscribed to. Ona got up to put a roll on the Welte-Mignon pianola, her only possession moved from Texas they had struggled to make room for. The small Perfection printing press, a teacher’s wardrobe, and the box of memories looked as if they had grown there. Ivoe read swiftly, encouraged in part by the jaunty rhythm of Blind Boone.

  Any discussion of Ivoe’s life now would sound like the worst bragging. For the first time she could concentrate all her efforts on writing. Mornings played out at a meeting or lecture. From early afternoon through the evening she worked on the Meditation. Between seeking out printing jobs at neighborhood businesses, Ona kept house with small flourishes. Where Ivoe had washed and ironed the curtains, Ona sprinkled a dash of vanilla on the hem and tied the curtains with a floral scarf, bringing sweet cheerfulness to a once dreary room. Decorative fir branches in the vase on the kitchen table from last winter were now replaced by orange peonies, and the undergarment drawer was never without grapefruit peel.

  No Williams dared to say it, but Ona’s sweet potato pie rivaled Momma’s chess pie. She had even impressed Momma with recipes like her aromatic amethyst soup. She could hold the twins rapt with story; inspire Irabelle with chapter and verse of exactly how her music made her feel; and draw a laugh from Roena’s little pot belly (her figure had gone from string bean to pea pod, the fate of all women who weren’t danced enough). “Take your woman out sometimes,” Ivoe once heard Ona say to Timbo. “It’s not so much that your wife wants to be seen, it’s that she wants to be seen by you—in a different light.” Roena talked about their night out for months.

  Ona remained true to her calling of civic duty. She joined the Kansas City, Kansas, chapter of the NAACP and the Colored Women’s League, who worked to raise funds for the Paseo House, a refuge for wayward colored girls. On weekends she turned their home into a meeting place for spirited women who held the same moral and ethical concerns for the race. Every Saturday at four, Mr. Nixon drove up in the Ford Runabout—VINE CONFISERIE etched on the passenger door—and handed over the box of usual goodness: rose-scented tea and violet honey; pralines; the gooseberry-jam-filled butter cookies that Ona loved. Plated treats and pots of tea traveled around the parlor as the women buzzed with ideas and concerns: suffrage; the challenges of motherhood; domestic budgeting; better employment opportunities. No matter the subjects, every conversation included the queer observation and worthy question: The Kansas City Police Department was vigilant on the Vine, but for whose benefit? And where could they turn for information on law and order?

  Ona enjoyed her new life’s rhythm. Having taught classes that convened at eight for fifteen years, she now awakened at half past six and tended the house, picking up balls of paper around Ivoe’s desk where she had settled down to write after supper until late in the night. She appreciated tidying up for the clues it gave her on what Ivoe was thinking. Ona spent late morning working on the neighborhood printing—cards, invitations, posters—always ferreting out some bit of helpful information for Ivoe. Late in the afternoon, she turned her attention to supper. If they required an ingredient, she made note of it on her way to the mailbox. Presently, she was thinking of potato salad to eat with the chicken when she opened the tin door and pulled out a letter. She eyed it curiously. Who did Ivoe know in Baltimore?

  .

  Berdis Peets Brown Wilson Diaz greeted them in a voice carrying but unmusical. She handed Ivoe a small white box crumpled from the twelve-hour train ride and kissed her with tobacco-tinged lips. Her face held fine lines; her wavy hair, cropped close, showed gray about the temples. She studied Ivoe for clues on the life she led. Where was the dull skin that no amount of rouge could perk up? The shoulders rounded and bent from carrying too heavy a load? No traces of hardship, not a single ounce of grown woman pain did Ivoe seem to carry. There seemed to be all about her a high degree of satisfaction—not even—joy! Berdis knit her brows at some vague recognition of the woman beside Ivoe. The name did not readily come, but a sudden painful and vivid rush of feelings filled her at once. Miss Durden looked exactly as she had a decade ago. Before her face could register shock Berdis excused herself, explaining the small box, “Chrusciki. The Polish call them chrusciki.”

  In the bathroom, she passed the gas knotting her stomach while the pus-filled ulcers lining her jaws induced her to spit. Raising her head from the sink, she was appalled by her reflection. Ivoe and Miss Durden had barely aged but she had grown old. No rouge or lipstick can cover the truth—your whole life shows in your face. She tried anyway, caking light Egyptian powder on the butterfly rash over her nose and above her sunken cheeks. She made her mouth a blooming rose, transformed her eyes into two smudges of dusky dark brown. Several draws from her cigarette helped to mask the rank mouth odor caused by pyorrhea. Oblivious to fallen ashes on the sink and floor, she tossed the cigarette into the toilet. A second once-over in the mirror showed no great improvement.

  The cozy house was redolent of cake or pie. Berdis sat in the dimmest corner of the room until Ona pulled back the curtain and the sun shone in on her. Everything was bright and gay as the two moved about setting up afternoon tea. The white box was emptied, the cookies laid out on a green glass plate. Ivoe was different. The high-minded walk gave it away: stiff-backed but shoulders swinging, hips following in the same side-to-side motion.

  “Never happier,” Ivoe said, sucking powdered sugar off her fingers. She was glad to be out of Little Tunis, glad to be through with the factory, and more in love with life in the city and with Ona than she could say. Berdis offered a phony smile. Printing had always been a tonic shared between the two; nothing had changed. Ona chatted with ease about printing cards and advertisements for colored businesses, while Ivoe wrote and published a church newsletter.

  “You say they call them chrus-ci-ki?” Ivoe said, aware that she and Ona had filled the room with too much of their joy.

  “Angel wings too,” Berdis said, boring a baleful glare into Ona’s back while she filled their cups and asked in a tone that belied judgment, “What are you doing in Baltimore?”

  “She gives music lessons,” Ivoe said, recalling the letter received a month ago.

  “I give private lessons to the children of doctors, dentists, professors from the university. Occasionally, a charity case, like the son of the Polish b
aker whose shop is next door to my house.” She said nothing of the first husband, a lousy manager; or the few years wrapped in the embrace of husband number two, who neither awakened her senses nor knew enough to let them lie sleeping; or Beetleboy; or husband three, taken by Uncle Sam.

  “When you wrote and said you were coming to town, Ona picked up something special,” Ivoe said, placing the piano roll beneath the tracker bar.

  “From the recorded performance of Mr. Joplin himself . . . ‘Pleasant Moments.’”

  “‘Pleasant Moments,’ indeed!” Berdis said merely to say something.

  Ona’s eyes slid from Ivoe to Berdis, who smoked the way a squirrel chews nuts. She rose when the pianola started to play. “Shake a leg, Berdis. Sitting is the last thing you ought to want to do after that long train ride.”

  “Y’all go on. It’s not every day I get to watch two colored women cut a rug,” Berdis said, minding the piano keys that moved without her touch. Through narrowed eyelids, she watched the hostesses dance. In their hobble dresses the foxtrot was a challenge. Still, their quick-quick-slow-quick steps, the gentle sway of Ivoe’s hip when the step was deliberately slow, made Berdis twist in her chair, away from the couple, toward the pianola as if she could engage it in conversation. She was thinking of something Ivoe had said earlier about their time at Willetson, a season of dreaming. None of her dreams saw fit to come true. Her one true love had been dangled above her reach. Anything you served the way she had served music ought to serve you back, but life had unfairly chastened her plans. Since leaving Willetson, she had not set foot in a concert hall to hear music, let alone to play, even though her first husband had promised she’d be heard by crowds in Mexico City, where high-minded folks could hear past the color of her skin. He brought a piano home to the little apartment of ocher-stuccoed walls on Avenida del Pacifico. A week after he left, they came for the piano rented in her name. Overdue payments and unpaid rent sent her back to Texas, where she took a room with the Wilsons of Galveston. Young Wilson proposed on his fourth or fifth visit to his parents, her landlords. Soon, there was a child. Finally someone she might share her music with. Except that the baby didn’t respond to her voice, or his daddy’s voice, or even a thunderous roll on the keys of the piano at church. That was only the beginning. Stayed on the breast too long, her brown baby boy did, so his belly grew and his face changed a little even when the rest of him refused to. Wouldn’t coo, crawl, or chew. Sometimes when she passed the crib she looked twice: “Baby or beetle?” By his fourth birthday, still he wouldn’t speak. Maybe he figured since she made him, she ought to know exactly what his thoughts were. He stared up at her from the crib. At least he could see. Who knew all the work that came with being seen and not heard?

  When she thought about it, she had never craved anyone’s ­company—not before Ivoe or since her. Marriage had only brought more feelings of estrangement—from husband and baby. Nobody knew her in Lake Charles, where a new school had just opened. One of the builders—C.J., they called him, for “Crazy Juan”—bothered her for a while. Before she knew anything she was Berdis Peets Brown Wilson Diaz, packing moss in the toe of a boot just like she’d done for Daddy the days he worked the mines; only Juan was headed to war. The telegram arrived before their sheets cooled. The money most used to set themselves up like proper widows she spent on a one-way ticket east.

  On May 14, 1915, dressed in a white suit and carrying a saffron-colored leather valise of memories—a rattle, a harmonica, scores of music—Berdis boarded a mixed-passenger freight train bound for New Orleans. Nearly thirty, though the joint pain made her feel older, and still possessed of visions of a harmonious life, she changed trains and eventually arrived in Baltimore, all smiles and gratitude for an elderly colored woman who mopped floors at the conservatory in Mount Vernon. How beautifully her seatmate had spoken about the music she had missed during her travels. From Union Station, Berdis followed the woman’s directions to a boardinghouse. A second word of advice brought her to the opulent Belvedere hotel. As she changed beds on the eighth floor several months later, a conversation in the hallway ignited a dream.

  No instrument was better suited for its player than the ebony grand Bechstein she played on audition day. Rachmaninoff’s Morceaux de Fantaisie called for a moderate tempo played with exquisite touch and feeling, which she had practiced on the hotel’s piano. The elegy conjured Willetson and all those things the heart had worked to evict. Ivoe Williams had not crossed her mind in years, yet there in the first three chords of Prelude in C-sharp Minor were the days at the creek with her best girl. Now here she was, guiding her touch on the keys in rich bass, a propulsive climax. Gasps of pleasure among the dead-quiet jury gave her confidence. She played the remaining movements precisely, as one should—control from the forearm, wrists hard as snakewood. Heavy applause. “Miss Peets, you are someone worthy of an audience,” said a pale face flushed deep rose. There was some question of her age, where she received training. In the end none of this would matter. An honest review of her program, rendered in praise, ended in kind rejection: “Regrettably, the Peabody Institute does not enroll Negro students.”

  Regrettably, indeed.

  A return down south was all she could think to do. She wrote to Willetson, requesting Ivoe’s address. Ticket inquiry turned into employment aboard the Alouette. She landed in Fell’s Point, which suited fine once she learned poor Europeans were friendlier than colored people because they had less to prove. The little room above the Polish bakery on Essex Street was home when she wasn’t giving manicures and dressing hair, eighteen hours a day back and forth to Cleveland. Occasionally, it slipped to the right woman that she played piano and she was invited to entertain lady passengers on the Observation Room’s Steinway. A view of the Allegheny Mountains with Joplin at her fingertips! It could go another way too. No tip from the women, who called her haughty and accused her of such outlandish tales: Who had ever heard of a Pullman maid classically trained on the piano?

  Berdis returned her thoughts to the present moment. Ona wore a playful grimace as she raised one knee sharply between Ivoe’s legs. Her lips parted like she might say something, then a sigh gave way to a smile and a funny, exasperated roll of the eyes. There was for Ivoe real pleasure in the way Ona moved. She thrust the upper part of her body forward with open hands, grabbed Ona around the waist, and swung her till they both laughed. Their movement slowed, yet they were gaining sensation in their hips as they dragged their feet to mark the same beats in the gentle bump, bump, and shove of their dance. They were impossibly close on an up-tempo rag, dancing on a dime.

  .

  Berdis opened the shiny emerald tin, lit a Lucky Strike, and took a long drag. For the last few days she had tried to put her finger on what she felt since entering the little blue house on Cherry Street. Nothing was off about Ivoe—everything was too on, lit up, polished, smooth. Gone were all the little ways Ivoe seemed unsure of herself, even scared of life, the parts of her Berdis found vulnerable, charming. The woman she’d spent the last four days with didn’t fear the world; she mastered it, as much as a colored woman could.

  At that moment, Ona rose, passed behind the sofa, trailing her hand across Ivoe’s back. “Want anything?” Without lifting her eyes from the magazine she read, Ivoe reached behind, touched Ona’s hand to say, No thank you. Berdis uncrossed her legs, leaned forward, as if improving her vantage. There it was, as she now supposed it had been since Willetson, a kind of haughty air surrounding Ivoe; Ona’s love—if that’s what you could call it, and she supposed it was love—made her arrogant.

  Loneliness boiled up inside her at the terrible picture before her. Across the room Ona sat in her slip and stockings with Ivoe on the floor between her legs. Ivoe’s head hung low while she held up the Walker’s pomade. Ona dipped into the jar, drawing a finger along Ivoe’s scalp, calling up in Berdis the urge to walk over and rub her cigarette out on Ona’s hand. Berdis tried not to let it show, ta
pping her foot, bopping her head along to the pianola. She blew a thick ring of smoke, riled by what private things she could tell about the couple as thick and close as flies in a jar of honey. Berdis was reminded of being between her own mother’s legs. Having her hair combed was the only way to get back to that place (Mother had always said she loved her children each for one day and one day only, the day they were born). Heavy hands and rough fingers were delicate only when they probed her scalp, plaiting patterns none of the other girls wore. Her favorite, meticulous zigzagged lines forming the letter Z all over her head, proved her mother could care. “Bad enough He gave me a girl . . . I will say this for you. You got some good hair. Easy to fix.” Between Mother’s legs, dark as molasses and sturdy as oak trunks, Berdis had felt safe from the world. You could fall asleep down there even though the scent was dizzying—bergamot oil, Mother’s musk, So-and-So’s laundry (you could always tell the washerwomen in Bastrop: they sweat ammonia)—and dream a wonderful dream of the sweet bread and candied apples that only ever came on Christmas and Sister Sarah singing “Steal Away to Jesus” with her head reared and slipping your feet into Daddy’s mining boots first thing in the chilly morning. To be yanked from such slumber was the worst feeling in the world. Without thinking Berdis would always draw a hand up to the spot touched so tenderly before, groping for the braid pulled too hard. Swwwwaaat. The wooden comb landed hard against her knuckles. “What you feeling it for? Be still.” Where did the love go? She waited for the word that held all of her mother’s impatience, disappointment, unending fatigue. “Gone.” As in: Go on away from here. Go.