Absalom's Daughters (2 page)

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, when Miz Helen came for the laundry, Cassie couldn't take her eyes off Judith. There was a week when Judith came in every day, and the two of them would study each other. It was all Cassie could do to keep from saying something. She was never sure what that something would be, but words were about to spring out of her mouth. One Friday when Judith came in, Lil Ma took Cassie's chin between her fingers and, as Judith watched, pulled Cassie's face around so Cassie could see the expression on Lil Ma's face. It was different than any she'd ever seen before, or maybe it was the same look she had been too little to understand when William Forrest had walked by on the street two years ago or when she'd asked Grandmother about Beanie Simms's magical destination where colored folks could turn white. Lil Ma let go, and Cassie concentrated on her folding until Miz Helen and her children left.

*   *   *

William Forrest left his family the year Cassie turned ten.

One morning in August, Judith came to pick up the laundry without her mother. Mrs. Duckett, who cleaned for the Clements, was there with her big son, James. Mrs. Duckett, who was in a gossipy mood and didn't seem to mind calling Lil Ma
Adelaine
, said, “Watch if Miz Helen show up.” Miz Helen didn't.

Judith was eleven and thin. She stood outside in the heat with her hands at her sides while James Duckett, whose mind, at seventeen, had grown no older than five or six years old, took the heavy bags of laundry down from the counter and out to the two faded red wagons. Cassie and Lil Ma and Grandmother and Mrs. Duckett watched through the plate-glass window

“How she gone haul all that up the hill?” said Mrs. Duckett.

“Maybe she thinks your James'll do it,” said Grandmother.

“I ain't sending my boy no place with that girl,” said Mrs. Duckett. “Let the whole town talk about her daddy 'fore she gets to makin' up stories about my James.”

James patted the bags into place and smiled his big little-boy smile and walked back into the laundry. The screen door slapped behind him, and the hot breath of the day followed him in.

Outside, Judith picked up the handle of one of the wagons and then the handle of the other. She turned and pulled like a plow mule. The wagons barely budged. She pulled again, arms stretched out behind her, eyes on the hot white concrete sidewalk. She certainly knew the faces behind the plate-glass window were watching.

Cassie stood at the screen door, feeling the heat behind it. Judith moved away, slowly, down Negro Street.

“Don't you think about going out there,” said Lil Ma. “She's doing just fine.”

Cassie pushed the door open and stepped into the hot, humid morning. The words she felt finally formed and came out of her mouth. “She didn't know who her daddy was gone be!”

She ran and caught up to Judith at the corner, where she was waiting for a break in the scant traffic.

“Git away,” said Judith. “I don't need no help.”

“I ain't here to help you.”

Judith kept both hands locked around the wagon handles. Sweat ran down her neck. There were purplish circles under her eyes. Her lank brown hair looked uncombed. Her dress was a grimy pink, falling just above her knees, like she'd grown out of it too fast for the next hand-me-down to catch up. Cassie wore hand-me-downs too, but hers were freshly laundered, and Lil Ma hemmed them properly.

Judith jerked the wagons over the wooden planks of the railroad crossing and across the next road. Cassie followed her into the shade of the trees lining the old neighborhood streets. The houses had been nice once; they were shabby now and broken up into apartments. The white men who worked in the oil fields lived here. Their wives and daughters did what they could for money, and those who couldn't find work watched what went on outside from their windows. The colored maids who kept the big houses on the hill walked through this neighborhood every day. Judith and her family lived around here somewhere.

Judith stopped and wiped her face on her sleeve and held one of the wagon handles out to Cassie. “Well, it don't look right, do it?” she said and angled her head at a clapboard house with peeling paint. In one of the upstairs windows, a flowered curtain fell back into place.

“I ain't here to help you.”

“Why the hail
are
you here?”

All Cassie's life there had been a laundry counter between the two of them. This close, the family resemblance seemed less clear. Cassie knew she'd be punished when she got back to the laundry, which made her less in a rush to get back. She took a wagon handle and pulled.

Each wagon was heavy enough where the street was flat. Judith could not have managed both once the road angled upward. The two of them walked along, the wagons rumbling behind. It was so hot, even the birds were quiet, and the leaves of the old plane trees hung limp.

“You wanna know where my daddy went?” said Judith.

“I guess.”

“He run off with 'nother woman.” Judith changed hands on the wagon handle. “Rich woman, my momma said.”

“What rich woman?” said Cassie.

“No one ever said her name.”

“Why a rich woman wanna run off with a oil-field man?”

“My momma said she was a hoor.”

“A rich hoor?” said Cassie. The rusty wagon handle felt gritty in her fist. “I never heard of a rich hoor.”

“I seen 'em dressed real nice.”

“I seen 'em wearin' the same clothes all the time.”

Judith wiped a damp hand on her grubby dress. “You know any? I mean personally.”

“One. But I only see her in church. My mama don't mix with her.”

“We got three come to our church.” She aimed a thumb over her shoulder, back toward town. “I hear the Catholics got half a dozen.”

Cassie laughed and then stopped herself. “Jesus prob'ly didn't laugh at the hoors.”

“Prob'ly not. Here's the hill, now. Pull!”

*   *   *

Cassie had never been up the hill or anywhere near the mansions. The first house sat well back from the curb at the end of a driveway lined with rosebushes and azaleas. The front yard was like a forest, filled with spreading maples. The front door, which Cassie could just see through the canopy of leaves, was framed by tall columns. Pots of flowers lined the front porch. Wisteria in full bloom hung from the eaves like bolts of purple bunting.

Judith flipped through the tags on the laundry sacks until she found the one she was looking for. “Leave that wagon,” she said. “Come on.”

Cassie followed Judith down the cobbled driveway. The wagon rattled between the trees, and Judith slowed, concentrating on noiselessly approaching the house. The driveway split as they came out from under the trees, one part leading to a side entrance where there was a low roof. Cassie came to a stop in the split while Judith labored on, dragging the wagon along the drive to where it disappeared around the back of the house. Cassie had seen pictures like this side entrance to the house on the walls at home. The side entrance was a place made for carriages and horses. Carriages and horses and white women in silks filled Cassie's mind until she noticed that the sound of wagon wheels had stopped. She saw the white face in the window of the side door, looking right at her. Was it a man or a woman or a tall child? The face vanished, and the door jerked open. Cassie turned and ran down the drive, to the other wagon, pushed up against the curb.

Judith clattered back while Cassie waited, pulling up her wilting socks. Judith hauled her wagon into the street. She had something clenched in her fist. Nickels.

“Why you run off?”

“There was someone at the window.”

Judith put whatever she'd been paid into the pocket of her dress. There wasn't even the clink of two coins. “You supposed to be helpin' me.”

“Then you should pay me.”

“I ain't payin' you nuthin'.”

Cassie eyed the road ahead. It was long and steep. “Guess I'll go home.”

“Your momma sent you to help me.”

“My mama said you doin' just fine. She gone whup me when I get back.”

“I give you three—no, two cent.”

“How much you get?”

“A nickle each house.”

“You had nine bags.”

“MacReedys' get two.”

“Three cent.”

Judith pushed her hands into her hair. “Cain't,” she said, and Cassie thought Judith might start to cry. “Mah daddy ain't left us nuthin'.”

*   *   *

The next house was well out of sight of the first one, though only partway up the hill. Judith took the wagon Cassie had been pulling. Cassie waited, sweating at the curb. Even the driveway went
up
, vanishing into a forest of lilacs, oak, and hydrangea. Cassie could barely see the house. Judith returned with money in her fist. She held her palm out to Cassie, and Cassie took the hot nickel.

The transaction felt strange. “Thanks,” said Cassie.

“Don't tell nobody I'm payin' a nigger girl.”

“You say that again, an' I'm tellin' everybody you my sister.”

Judith worked her fist around the handle of the wagon. Her mouth tightened and made a little twist at the edge, not like a smile, not like a reflection of her father. The meaning in the look wasn't something Cassie could identify.

“All right,” said Judith.

This felt strange, like Judith had been waiting for Cassie to say what they were.

“You swear,” said Cassie.

“I swear.” Judith looked at her. “You think people can tell?”

“Only if they want to.”

Judith turned to plod up the rest of the hill.

*   *   *

Cassie came home late in the hottest part of the afternoon through the white part of town, past Tawney's Store, past Beanie Simms's three shoeshine chairs in front of the barber shop, past Saul's Grocery, where Mister Saul would wait on white folks in the front and coloreds in the back. She crossed the tracks and made her way to the end of Negro Street, where the front door of the laundry was propped open for whatever breeze there was. Inside, Cassie pushed through the swinging gate in the laundry counter and through a second door, which opened into the tiny kitchen in the back room. An old coal stove took up half the space in the kitchen and got hot enough to warm both rooms upstairs in the winter. There was room for a table with three chairs. Two shelves for dishes and cups fit into the space under the staircase that led up to the second floor.

The kitchen was blistering: The stove burned high, lined with half a dozen irons, which Cassie would be using after supper to press shirts and trousers. Cassie wiped sweat from under her lip. She opened the back screen door into the small dirt yard. Even the heat of the evening seemed cooler than being inside.

Grandmother was pinning up the day's wash—mostly sheets. Bleached and starched, the sheets hung in tight rows. Before Grandmother clipped each sheet to the clothesline, Cassie was supposed to dampen the small dirt yard with a watering can to keep the dust from rising up to grime the clean white seams. Dampening the ground had been Cassie's job even when she was too little to do much else. Today she had forgotten to do it, so Grandmother probably had. No doubt Cassie would hear about it. Once, when she was six or seven, Beanie Simms had told her that his father had owned the shoeshine chairs before him and had told Beanie Simms when he was a boy that the business would be his one day. The thought that something might be hers when she was grown had struck Cassie—the watering can, the newspaper pictures on the walls upstairs, even the laundry itself—all of it hers. She had asked Grandmother about it, and Grandmother had taken the clothespins out of her mouth and said, “When you have your own child, we'll go away and raise it in some other place.” When Cassie thought about that conversation later, she was never sure she hadn't dreamed it, but the force of Grandmother's reaction had seemed real enough.

Grandmother shaded her eyes at Cassie and pointed to a pan of yams and a bowl of green beans sitting on the back steps. There was a knife to peel the yams. Cassie sat and took the pan of yams in her lap and slid the knife under the clay-colored skin.

Grandmother sat next to her. She took up the bowl of beans.

“You shouldn't have gone off with that white girl,” said Grandmother. She began snapping the beans, pulling out the tough threads. “You made your mother and me very unhappy.”

A window rattled open in its sash upstairs. Lil Ma, in the heat of the second floor.

“You went with her because you think she's your sister. Did she act like your sister?”

Cassie wasn't sure what the correct answer was, but she knew what to say. “Nome.”

“She never will.” Grandmother broke a bean neatly in half. “You want to know where you come from. I'll tell you where you come from. From Lil Ma's blood, and Lil Ma came from my blood, and my blood came down through your great-great-grandmother, who was a slave woman named Cassandra, just like we named you.” Grandmother took up another handful of beans and snapped their ends off. “Cassandra's father was a white man. He seeded the land with cotton, and he seeded his slave women, and he got him a white woman for a wife, and he seeded her too. He had two children by her, a girl and a boy. The girl died of sickness, and the boy grew up into a murdering criminal. The boy had to run from the law, but while he was running, he took after his father and seeded his way all around the state. His descendants are all around here. I'm one of them. You're one of them. That white girl is too, I'd bet, which would make her your half sister and your cousin. But no matter how twice-related you are, she's no kin to you. Kin has a feeling for how far back the blood goes.” She rifled the beans, looking with her fingertips for any that had escaped with their ends on. “She'll never have that feeling for you.”

*   *   *