How to Make an American Quilt (29 page)

One summer, the son of the Chicago partner spent three months on the ranch, where he met and fell in love with Anna—or, perhaps, it was the idea of Anna—whom he could not marry even though this is America and we are all God’s children, because Anna was a maid and she was black. Her garnet necklace no longer overwhelmed her frame as it had when she was a child; she was now seventeen, with the garnets just skimming her delicate collarbone, their many facets refracting in the sunlight. She moved with a singular grace. The boy noticed her walking around the house and on her evening strolls, where he watched her watching the night sky.

It was the way in which she considered the evening star that made him want her.
Sikhamba-nge-nyanga
.

She-who-walks-by-moonlight.

I
T WAS NATURAL
that the invisible Anna should find herself curious about and attracted to the high visibility of the rich Chicago boy. She
had never had a lover before and found his admiration to be both thrilling and frightening. She could not trust him, yet she was not cautious. Divided her heart between her desire to respond to his proffered love and her dislike, mistrust of his skin; her shy affection for a boy close to her own age and the potency of his social power; she was both suspicious and willing in the face of love.

(There was a duality of historical forces at work: the interplay of racial color, as well as the son of the man from Chicago and the maid of the house simply carrying out a traditional arrangement between the classes.)

The boy reached for her garnet beads, laid his hand on both her necklace and her neck. Where did you get these? he asked.

My great-grandmother, she said, covering his hand with hers—either to caress his fingers or shove them away—she could not have said. I’ve had them for as long as I can remember.

They glinted like diamonds in the light.

Sometimes he treated her as if she knew nothing, but she knew that he never bothered to ask her the right questions. Like about the rotation of the planets or the significance behind a meteor shower or the meaning of a blue moon or how to lay down the base for a quilt. He came to her room when everyone was away for the day; he sat familiarly on her bed as Anna slouched against the wall. Anna noted the way he examined each square of
The Life Before
. She held her breath; she thought he might ask the right questions.

“It has a name,” she said, stepping closer.

“Is that so?”

“It’s called
The Life Before
.” She felt suspended between airy heights and great depths.

“The Life Before,”
he repeated. Then asked, “Do you ever think about me?”

Anna relaxed her breathing. She decided to tell him the quilt stories (the ones that Pauline thought she might have forgotten) had
he asked; he did not ask. And she saw herself as he might have seen her, as someone who did not matter to him, as something to do during his interim on the ranch. She reconciled herself to solitude. Again. And she wanted to laugh at his question; wanted to say,
That is all I am allowed to do in this place, is think about you and your family and their comfort and their guests and their ills
. She said, “Of course.”

“I hate it here,” he said. “You’d love Chicago. You ever been to Chicago?”

Anna shook her head. No sense in saying that she grew up in San Francisco. That she was not a stranger to city life.

“It is something to see. Particularly the buildings. They are impressive. Very beautiful. Some fairly new, the fire and all.” He lay on his back across her bed. “Now there’s something I’d like to do. Build.”

Anna sat near him on the bed.

“My father has other plans,” he finished.

“But you are rich. You can probably do whatever you want with your life.” She moved closer. She wanted to feel control; she wanted to feel wealth by association.

He laughed. “Oh, yes, as long as it is acceptable to my parents. You know how parents are.” He smoothed the hem of her skirt flat on the bed, superimposed it on
The Life Before
.

Anna shrugged her shoulders. “I was raised by my great-aunt Pauline. My mother died and I don’t exactly recall her. They say I take after my father.”

She could see the boy staring at her, examining each feature of her face and figure. She knew what he was thinking: that the skin was a rather light brown and the hair, while curly, was almost, well,
white
in construction. The mouth and nose were so beautiful; they belonged to the skin.

“Your father?” he said.

“Color seems to be problem for some people.”

“Yes,” said the boy.

“Every day,” she said, “I am aware of my color—made aware of my color or that I have a color or that I belong to a color. I am always my color first and Anna second. As if people can be divided, carved up that way.” She stopped. “Ah, but you have your parents to contend with.”

He pulled her over to him, pushed her shoulders down; Anna was willing. She had nothing to lose.

I
T WAS THROUGH
this sad liaison that Anna came to be unemployed and left with a child to raise. She was angry with the boy and angry with herself. But not with Marianna, her baby; none of the bad feeling for the father bled through to her affection for the child.

When Anna learned she was pregnant, she left, much the same way she’d left the house in San Francisco. She did not tell the boy that she was having a baby; she kept it to herself. She did not want to hear him say that he loved her but could not marry her.

She simply left one day. “I’m leaving,” she said, and by the next day was gone. Anna would not leave without telling her employers good-bye; that would be too much like running away and that she would not do. She does not run—they cannot make her—she
walks
.

S
O BEGAN
the third phase of the four quarters that neatly separate Anna’s life. As a housekeeper (
domestic
being the popular name in 1935) for the Rubens family, which included Mr. and Mrs. Rubens and their daughters, Glady Joe and Hy. Anna and Glady Joe were both seventeen.

For years, Mr. and Mrs. Rubens had had a steady stream of “wayward” girls employed in their home, living there, doing light
housework, and cooking. They were sponsored by the Episcopal church and they stayed until the baby arrived, at which point the Rubenses bade farewell to the girl, as the girl did to her baby. It was understood that these infants were earmarked for adoption into responsible, barren families.

As Mrs. Rubens often said to friends who applauded her “good deeds”: “It is the least we can do for a girl who finds herself in a bad way.”

The pastor came to see Mrs. Rubens personally regarding the matter of Anna. “You see,” he said, “this is a little more delicate than usual. Anna Neale is Negro.” He did not add that she was as much Caucasian as she was Negro, because it simply would not have mattered; because this is the United States, with its archaic “one drop” rule, a legacy passed down from the Founding Fathers:
One drop of Negro blood makes one Negro
.

Mrs. Rubens said quickly, “Send her over. She is welcome here.”

Anna almost felt worse working for a family that went out of its way to be “nice” to her, to include her, to be concerned about her pregnancy. To show interest in her condition, Anna knew, was altogether different from showing interest in
her
. She was more accustomed to the invisibility of her role at the ranch, or even the mrs.’s treatment of her. Pauline was now semiretired from her job there. It bothered Anna when the Rubenses insisted upon introducing her to their friends. She was embarrassed at Mrs. Rubens’s calling her “our Anna” as in “You must meet our Anna.” Mrs. Rubens took a special interest in Anna’s diet (“Plenty of milk” and “You could stand to gain a little weight as well”). Mrs. Rubens let out old clothes of her own (“It’s either you or Goodwill, Anna”), and told Glady Joe and Hy “not to bother Anna.”

Yet underneath it all, Anna could not quite shake off the chill,
the tiniest hint of frost from Mrs. Rubens. Mr. Rubens was always polite to her, always asking her for things a housekeeper should provide, nothing more. He was often out of town on business and, in that respect, seemed more like an employer, making him more comfortable to be around.