Absalom's Daughters (21 page)

“Judith?” she said.

Judith's eyes flickered under thin lids.

Cassie touched Judith's left hand with the tar, drawing it across the knuckles. There was no change. She did it again. Judith smiled in her sleep, which made her look like she was ten years old. Cassie wiped the tar across Judith pale skin a third time. No change at all. She put the tar in her pocket and got off the bed. She went out of the bedroom and downstairs to tell Mrs. Glade and the Reverend that they had both found dresses that they liked and that she would be leaving with Judith for Virginia on the next train.

When they asked if she would go on to Boston when she was finished with her business in Virginia, Cassie said yes.

 

CHAPTER
TWELVE

The Reverend and Mrs. Glade dropped them off in front of the train station in the town of Parmetter, about twenty miles east of Porterville. It took two hours to drive there on unpaved roads, and Mrs. Glade kept making Cassie repeat their phone number so she could call if she had any problems on the way to Boston because there was no way to memorize the route back to Porterville and no one in Parmetter would know the way.

They reached the train station late in the afternoon. Reverend Glade gave Cassie the money for the train tickets. There was enough for her to buy a one-way ticket to Boston and about two-thirds as much for Judith, to get to Virginia, where Bill Forrest was, and then be on her way to New York. The station in New York where Judith would get off was called Grand Central, and it sounded so very grand to Cassie that it was hard to not want to go. How bad could it be, really, to be a maid in a place with a Grand Central Station? Would Boston have anything like that? None of the newspapers or magazine pages lining the walls at home in Heron-Neck had mentioned anything about Boston. She only knew that Mrs. Glade had told her that it was cold there in the winter and she would have to dress warm.

The Glades drove away, and Judith and Cassie stood on the wooden platform and waved. Each of them wore a secondhand dress and shoes with white ankle socks. Each had a purse and a small suitcase of secondhand clothes, including brassieres and underwear. Judith kept sticking her thumbs underneath the band of her brassiere through the bodice of her dress.

“This is the most uncomfortable thing I ever put on.”

“The price o' fame,” said Cassie.

“I'm hungry,” Judith said. Mrs. Glade had given each of them a paper bag with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, apples, and brownies for dessert. “Let's eat.”

“It's only five in the afternoon,” Cassie said.

“I'm gonna git me a Coke from that drugstore crost the street. You want one?”

“You know I don't like Coke.”

“Then you git the train tickets.”

“You the one gonna buy 'em.”

“Why you think the Reverend Glade done give you the money? He think I'm liable to run right off with it.” She pointed at the ticket booth, directly under the clock. “Jus' go on over there and tell 'im where we goin'.”

It would have been so much easier for Judith to saunter up to the white man in the ticket booth. This was the real reason that Reverend Glade had given Cassie the money. It had nothing to do with trust. It had to do with the tar. She could almost taste the humiliation of being a colored girl asking for two train tickets.

Farther down the platform a group of colored women in church hats chatted with animated gestures around a heap of luggage. “You ain't gonna be the first colored t'buy a ticket today. You sure you don't want somethin' from the sodee fountain?”

“I'm sure.”

Judith went across the street and disappeared into the drugstore.

Cassie wandered over to the ticket booth and examined the schedule pinned into its frame. The columns of numbers and places made no sense to her. She went to the ticket window and said, “Hello, suh.” The stationmaster, reading the newspaper, ignored her from inside his little cage. There was no one else by the ticket window, and the platform was empty except for herself and the colored ladies down a ways. The stationmaster scowled at her from under bushy white eyebrows.

“You gettin' on a train?”

“Suh,” she said, “you got a train goes to Grand Central Station in New York City?”

“Shore we do. Cost you fifty-three dollars.”

“How long it take to git there?”

“Three days and two over-night, but see here,” he said. “If you ain't takin' no train, you wastin' my time askin' 'bout it.”

“No, suh,” said Cassie. “I ain't mean to waste nobody's time. You mind if I ask you 'bout 'nother train?”

“Where to? The North Pole?”

“Oh no, suh, that be way too cold. But my daddy's in Virginia. You got a train goes to Virginia?”

“We got trains go all over Virginia. Different places got different fares. Where's your daddy?”

“Remington, Virginia, suh.”

He consulted the papers on his desk. “That's thirteen dollars and fifty cents.”

“What time it leave, suh?”

“That train come in one-half hour from now.”

“When it git to Remington, suh?”

“Nine oh five tomorrow mornin'.”

She took the money out of her secondhand purse and laid the bills on the counter. “Kin you give me two tickets to Remington, suh?”

He eyed her, her money. He looked like he wanted to know where she'd gotten so much. “Two tickets for the colored seats.”

She had anticipated this but not in a way that kept her from saying so quickly, “Suh, the girl I's trav'lin' with is white.”

“Two tickets then,” he said and held them until she slid the cash under the bars in his window. He slid the tickets out but didn't let go as she put her fingers on them.

He said, “Where'd you get all that money, gal?”

She didn't take her eyes off the tickets. “Suh, ain't you heard of Miz Judith Forrest?”

“Cain't say I have.”

“She a singin' star from Mississippi to South Carolina. She travel from church to church spreadin' the gospel word. I's surprised you ain't heard of her yet, but you will once she git on the reddio. Her voice so beautiful, it lift your soul right up.”

“So what're you doing with her money?”

Cassie raised her eyes just a little, just enough to see the bottom of his white beard. “I's her maid, suh.”

She felt him let the tickets go, and she scooped them up before he could change his mind, behind those white eyebrows and beard. “Thank you, suh,” she said. “You lissen to the reddio, now. Miz Judith Forrest.”

Judith came across the street with a bottle of Coke and a big paper cup of cold water. “They wanted t'charge me a penny for the cup. I had to tell 'em the cup ain't worth even half a penny.” She sat on the edge of the platform and offered Cassie the water.

“You git the tickets?”

Cassie showed her.

“These to Remington.”

“You kin git that New York ticket yourself.”

“There enough money left?”

Cassie gave her the fare for the New York trip and took a long cold drink from the paper cup.

Judith opened the Coke and took a swig. She took the apple out of the dinner pail and took a bite out of it. She chewed while Cassie thought about introducing herself as
Miz Judith Forrest's maid
forever.

The train announced itself with a profound rumble that Cassie felt inside her chest before she saw it. She felt in her pocket for the tar. It would work, as long as she was willing to abandon everything.The train appeared from around a bend, enormous and black. Steam rushed out from under it in hot clouds. It rolled past them, heat billowing from its metal skin, wheels, and pistons, hotter than any part of the day. Passenger cars rattled past, each window a snapshot of the people inside.

Judith shouted over the noise, “We cain't sit together?”

“I don't imagine so.”

“How'm I gonna know when to git off?”

“Nobody gonna let you ride for free. Someone'll tell you.”

“You shore?”

“I'm sure.”

Judith flung her arms around Cassie's neck and hung on like she was scared for the first time in her life. The train slowed and stopped, and Judith let go. She grabbed her suitcase and her dinner and ran to where a white conductor was helping white people down off the train. Judith pushed past them and clambered on. She turned once at the top of the stairs to wave and vanished inside. Cassie walked down the length of the train, looking for her through the windows but not seeing her. Toward the end of the train, she found a colored man in overalls tapping the wheels with a hammer.

“Excuse me,” she said, “where's the colored car?”

“Down there. Number fourteen.” He pointed to where the women in Sunday hats were getting on the very last car before the caboose. “You got a ticket, gal?”

She showed him, and he stuck his hammer in the loop of his overall and walked with her down to number fourteen. He helped her up on the wobbly wooden step and into the train car with a rough, strong hand. She found a seat by a window, back from where the Sunday hat ladies had grouped themselves, and watched the man in the coveralls as the train pulled away. He stood on the platform, hands on his hips as though the whole enterprise belonged to him.

Cassie put her palm against the glass and turned to watch him and Parmetter and everything south of it roll away, faster and faster still.

*   *   *

In the evening, the ladies took out a basket of fried chicken and biscuits and a carefully packed pitcher of iced tea. They didn't act like they'd noticed Cassie until she started eating her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then a lady in a white satin hat said to her, “Come over here and have some decent food.”

They made room for her on the edge of one of the seats. These particular seats were arranged to face each other, as though the passengers were in a very small parlor. The ladies' knees practically touched each other, and the widest ladies squeezed the thinnest between them. They asked where she was going and where she was coming from and where her people were. She told them most of the truth and felt bad for not being entirely honest with them, as they were very generous with their food and their cold tea. She asked if any of them had ever been to Remington, and none of them had. They were all getting off in Maddox, South Carolina, for a wedding, and wasn't it ridiculous that this late train was the only one that stopped there and folks had to be bothered to pick them up at the station at ten in the evening. Cassie asked if any of them had ever been to Boston, and they laughed as though it was the funniest thing they'd heard all day.

“You got people in Boston?” said a lady in a blue hat, and Cassie said, “No, ma'am.” And the lady said, “What're you gonna do in a place where you don't know nobody? Who gonna give you work?” and the other hat ladies
umm-hmmed
in agreement. “At least in the South ever'body related to ever'body else,” she said. “People may not like it, but they cain't deny it. Up North, people from all over, don't know their own kin, wouldn't know a cousin or an uncle if they fell over 'em. You say your daddy in Remington?” Cassie nodded, and the lady in the white satin hat patted her hand. “Git him to show you round. You say you do laundry? Well ever'body got to git they draws washed, so you shouldn't have enny trouble findin' work.”

One of the ladies, a thin one, said that even folks in Boston had to git they draws washed, but no one was listening to her, and the talk turned to the wedding and the cake and how the bride was too fat to ever look good in her mama's dress an' white sure wasn't the right color on her
ennyway
. Cassie sat with them until the train pulled into the Maddox station, well after ten. They wished her good luck and got off the train under yellow street lamps. Nice cars awaited them and drove them away into the darkness.

The lights stayed on in the train car all night but were only bright enough to show you the way to the toilet. Once the ladies left for the wedding, there were only two other people, a man and a woman at opposite ends of the car, both sleeping. Cassie was tired enough to sleep, but there was too much going on in her head.

Boston. Judith. New York. The tar. Boston. Judith. New York. The tar.

The rhythm of the train on the rails started to sound like the words in Cassie's mind. To make the beat stop, she opened the bulky purse the Glades had given her and tried to organize the few items in it. There was a compact with pinkish powder in the puff but no mirror. She found a tube of used lipstick, which made her think of Judith and the albino boy, and Judith bleeding through her dress, standing in that creek in Alabama, wringing out her dress and trying not to cry. There was a postcard in the bottom of the purse. It was the one she'd written to Lil Ma before they'd reached Enterprise but forgotten to send.

Dear Lil Ma and Grandmother,

I am doing well. We have a car and people help us when it doesn't run.
Soon we will be in Enterprise in Alabama where there is a monument to the Boll Weevil. I will write more soon.

Love, Cassie

She felt as though she'd written it years ago. What would she say now?

Dear Lil Ma and Grandmother,

I have the thing that will make me white.

Love, Cassie

The tar in her pocket watched her thoughts. Writing a letter might be all right, but mailing it would make the letter a lie.

Outside, South or North Carolina rushed by in the dark. Cassie repeated the Glades' phone number under her breath. She counted the money they had put into her secondhand purse, and came up with fifty dollars. Cassie put everything back into the purse and snapped it shut. She looked out the window and noted with surprise that the trees were covered with blossoms, so thick and white they shone in the dark, lit by the passing train. To regular travelers this might not be remarkable, but only yesterday afternoon, in Porterville, the flowers had been frail and rotten, falling to the ground. Fresh white blossoms rushed past the train window, a second chance at the change of the season. Cassie leaned her cheek against the glass.