A Matter of Souls (16 page)

“I do not see,” Sister Formidable continued, “why you felt you had any right to interrupt Sister Contumelia during a lesson.”

“She said the ‘
niggras'
in this country should stop causing trouble.” Pamela Ann repeated the pronunciation she'd heard as accurately as she could.

Sister Formidable picked up a ruler and rapped it on her desk impatiently. “What nonsense are you speaking?”

“Well, my mama says every one of us should protest for equality. And I told Sister Contumelia she said it wrong. It's pronounced
Nee-gro
. I know, because my mama taught me that, too.” One of the things Pamela Ann had inherited from her mother was speaking things plain.

“Your mother, who is in the insane asylum! How dare you take this attitude! You are arrogant and disrespectful!” Sister Formidable spoke harshly but was apparently a bit flustered.

Pamela Ann had a delayed reaction to Sister's threatening tone. On any other day, that red-faced frown would have her squirming as she anticipated a fiery lecture accompanied by the burning blows of the paddle on her behind. But unfortunately for Sister Formidable, she had started Pamela to thinking about her mother.

There had been good times, fun times, before her mother went away. Everybody in Lowtown, where Pamela had lived all her life, said that Joyce Farmer was brilliant. There was nothing she couldn't do. She had learned to read when she was three and taken to the piano, playing by ear,
shortly after that. They said seven-year-old Joyce quizzed the preacher about why God had put Jonah in that whale, and whether God had trapped Colored people on Earth for the same reason. She started following the Catholics after that. She was pretty, too—brown and slim, with flashing dark eyes and a heart-shaped smile. She fell hard in love with Beamon Toussaint, and he followed her off north to the university.

Something happened to her there.

The way Pamela Ann always heard her grandmother Ma T tell it, something happened, and when they came back south a couple of years later, Joyce wasn't the same. So she had borne Pamela Ann and lavished all her attention on her “little brown baby with sparklin' eyes,” reading her Paul Laurence Dunbar and Dorothy West, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. She was thrilled by Pamela Ann's perfect pitch and sat the baby on her lap to reach the piano keys. In her mind, Pamela Ann could summon her mother's throaty voice any time of day.

Joyce went to Mass every Sunday and fell to her knees on Saturday afternoons in the confessional, staying for what seemed like hours as Pamela Ann sat waiting in the drafty, dim church, inhaling the sweet incense. What, the little girl had wondered, could her mother have done that much sinning about?

When Pamela was eight, she got tired of listening to the old ladies whisper with Ma T every time Joyce quoted Shakespeare or broke into a made-up opera about Negro
rights. She got tired of watching her father's shoulders beat down during family dinners about “all his promise gone.” He would only look at Joyce while she cocked her head back at him, smiling sweetly.

“Well, what happened up there?” Pamela had mustered up the courage to ask between bites of smothered pork chop one Sunday afternoon.

With a cool voice, Joyce had answered, “the white people killed your mother.”

Ma T dropped the gravy boat. Grandpapa and all the aunts and the preacher fell silent as Beamon reached out and took Joyce's hand.

“She doesn't mean it, Pam,” he said. But Joyce batted her eyes and nodded her head.

“Oh, yes. Yes I do. Pamela Ann, the White folks killed Joyce Toussaint. Your mama is not the woman she once was.” She slipped her hand away from Beamon's. “Isn't that right, honey?” she asked softly.

Pamela Ann's father looked into his wife's eyes, then into his daughter's.

“You always was too smart for your own good,” Ma T muttered, mopping gravy off her lace tablecloth. “Went up there and them White folks drove you crazy. She don't need to be left with Pamela, Beamon!”

Pamela's mouth had dropped open, her father abruptly stood up, and her mother screamed.

“You can't separate me from my child! She's the only way I'm alive! Beamon, tell her!” Joyce's voice rose hysterically,
and she turned to Pamela. “Every time I look at you, Baby, I see who I used to be. Don't let them kill you too!”

“That's enough,” Beamon said gently. But Joyce was shaking as she looked around the table for some agreement, some support. Pamela could see that it was only her father and herself who backed her mother up. She stood up and took her mother's hand.

Pamela remembered her insides quaking and barely holding the strong urge to let all her water out.

Suddenly, Joyce's knees bent, and as she sank to the floor, her face was wet with tears.

“Oh, I forgot,” she whispered, almost to herself. “I'm dead.”

Pamela had let her eyes gaze down at the shiny wood floor as she recalled these things, but now she slowly raised her head. She looked under her eyelids at Sister Formidable, and instead of a smoking behind, she felt hot anger inside.

Arrogant and disrespectful
. She knew what arrogant meant—how dare this person talk about her mother as if she was crazy? Wasn't that disrespectful? And what did she know about real life anyway? That's what Ma T always mumbled about the nuns.

In first grade, Pamela Ann had thought they were holy women, the real wives of God. They were smart, they prayed, they spoke Latin and sang—almost like her own
mother. But as she got older, she listened and she watched and she thought.

They were not always kind. They were not always generous. And sometimes—sometimes, they treated their little Negro students with the same roughness that they did the secondhand textbooks that St. Benedict inherited from the White Catholic school across town. They often treated their Negro students not with joy, but as if they were a penance.

Penance was what Joyce was always seeking in that confessional; penance was what the priest always gave Pamela Ann on Fridays when he chanted behind the red velvet curtain: Five Our Fathers. Five Hail Mary's. Pamela Ann's sin was always the same: she was mad at Ma T for sending her mother Joyce away.

Pamela Ann narrowed her eyes as she tried to look deep into Sister Formidable's mind. Past her horn-rimmed glasses, underneath the white wimple and black veil. She leaned to the edge of her chair, craning her neck.

Sister Formidable dropped the ruler and arched back, as if she thought Pamela might fly at her. Her blue eyes widened, and she went very pale.

Pamela Ann could hear her mother's voice inside her head. She smiled.

“I think—I think you owe my mother an apology … Sister.” She slid back.

Sister Formidable's fingers crept to the black telephone at the corner of her desk. She attempted, but found that she
was not able to dial a number while keeping her eyes on Pamela Ann.

A funny thought crossed Pamela Ann's mind.
Maybe she's afraid that I'm crazy!
The girl giggled. Sister Formidable fumbled through a small file of cards near the phone and then dialed with trembling fingers.

“I need Beamon Toussaint,” she almost whispered. But she seemed to be recovering herself. “Yes, I mean
Mr.
Toussaint!” she barked, and waited—not looking across at Pamela Ann. “Beamon, you must come and get this girl. No, I cannot explain. She
must
go.”

Pamela couldn't make out her father's muffled words, but the nun's fingers tightened on the receiver.

“I … I don't know about that. Yes. I see, but you'll have to take that up with Father—Oh. Yes, I understand—good-bye.” She hung up in a rush.

“Should I go get my things?” Pamela Ann asked, swinging her legs under the chair. But Sister Formidable shook her veil vigorously and stood up.

“You will not return to Sister Contumelia's classroom; it would be too disruptive. I will gather your belongings and speak to your father. You will meet him outside …” She walked briskly toward the door, then paused with her hand on the knob.

“Pamela?” Sister Formidable looked over her shoulder. Pamela had never before seen such a curious expression on any nun's face. Was it wonder? Astonishment? A puzzlement that prayer might not work out?

“Yes, Sister?” Pamela Ann answered sweetly. Her mother was inside her, for sure.

The nun shook herself and blinked, as if she expected to see something or someone different when she opened her eyes again.

“Nothing.” She clicked the door shut between them.

Pamela Ann smoothed the pleats on her skirt and wondered what her father had made the nun understand on the telephone.

“What possessed you, Daughter?” Beamon was leaning against the passenger-side door of his shiny gray Buick with his arms folded.

He didn't seem, to Pamela Ann, to be particularly angry or surprised. In fact, she thought as she slowly walked down the wide brick steps of St. Benedict the Moor School, he looked like he was proud.

Pamela shaded her eyes from the noonday sun and peered at him to make sure.

She had never lied to her father.

“Mama did,” she said, stopping just a few steps away.

“I see.” Beamon glanced away from her for a minute, then paid close attention to the filtered cigarette that he pulled out and lit.

“You know,” he said, tossing down the burnt match, “your grandmother is worried about you.”

“Because I got sent away from school?” Pamela Ann asked.

“Because you seem more and more like your mama every day,” he answered, blowing off a series of round puffs of smoke. Each one was smaller than the one before it. Pamela Ann lifted her head to watch them float up into the sky together, joining the clouds.

“You're a lot like Joyce,” Pamela Ann's father said in a funny voice, almost like he was talking to himself.

She looked in his direction, but he had turned to open the door for her.

“All that promise gone,” he muttered, closing Pamela Ann's door with a soft click. She stretched up to see him through the rearview mirror as he came around the car. When he got in, he paused before he put his key in the ignition.

“What is it, Daddy?” Pamela asked. Her heart started beating fast, faster than fast, the way it did on the big Ferris wheel at the state fair. The way it had when she watched her Daddy drive off in this same Buick with her mama in this seat.

“Y'all both deserve better,” he said firmly. He turned the key and shifted gears. And then he smiled at his daughter. “This place can't hold you, Pamela Ann.”

Pamela sucked in her breath, not knowing exactly what was coming. She gripped the soft leather seat and stared over the dashboard. Her father didn't turn at the corner, heading toward the white-columned funeral home where
Ma T and Grandpapa ruled the same way Sister Formidable did at St. Benedict the Moor School.

No, Beamon cruised through the town, going somewhere else. He left the city limits, sailing on the blacktop toward the highway turnoff. At the flashing red traffic signal he slowed to a stop. Pamela Ann's heart was in her throat.