JEWEL (11 page)

And while she settled in next to me I thought of James in the South Pacific, and of the only things I knew of that place, black and white pictures in ancient issues of National Geographic I used to read when I was in college. Black water and black trees and gray dust, above it all a white sun that burned away any color I might have been able to imagine, though James’d sent home letters describing flowers he’d never thought could be, shades of green deeper and brighter than any summer in Mississippi, water the blue of a cold and cloudless November noon here.

He was with the Seabees, him and his fellow sailors making barracks and airstrips and offices on each new island we won down there, but in my thoughts of him all that was gone. There was nothing, only the knowledge as sharp as a knife in my heart that James was there, me here.

But even in the face of that knowledge cutting deep, even in the face of my firstborn not yet knowing the beauty of his newest sister, I was still grandly grateful for the God up in Heaven and His ignoring my prayer to let this child die. He was a merciful God, I knew, this fact bore witness by the kiss Wilman’d given, the sweet nod of the head Burton’d made. His mercy was there in Billie Jean’s eyes and how she’d looked at me, in the warmth of my Annie in bed beside me, and I wondered how I’d survived the sort of God I’d had inflicted on me when I was a girl, a single child, no brothers or sisters to usher me through this life, back when it was only me to stand before the world and watch what it could give you and just as easily take away.

When it came clear to Missy Cook I wasn’t going to change, wasn’t going to become the woman of taste and bearing and gentility everything her daughter had killed when she’d gone for that halfbreed Choctaw I was sent away to the Mississippi Industrial School for Girls, a place for wayward trash and delinquents, certainly what I must have become in her eyes. Cathe ral was reading away by that time, the two of us trading chapters in the Bible to read to one another while I worked at my figuring, her doing her chores. She’d already met Nelson by then, too, him a short, thick buck working on the county road crew, the two of them meeting at the Ebenezer AME where Molly attended.

It had been a day like every other in late winter, the overcast sky, I could see outside the dining room window, heavy and dark. Missy Cook and I were seated at the table, and Molly came from the kitchen, sat before us food in the same fine china I’d known for five years.

Missy Cook cleared her throat and, like always, took my hand in hers for the blessing.

But instead of going right to her same old words over the food, she smiled at me, her head tilted to one side.

Molly was gone from the room, and I looked down at my plate, gold-rimmed with yellow flowers circled with cobalt ribbons, china as fine, I imagined, as when her daddy had given it to her and her new Yankee husband.

She said, “Beginning Monday the next, you will be attending a new school. The Mississippi Industrial School for Girls. It will be a place for you to grow up, to learn to become a lady of manners and heart.” She paused, gave a small squeeze of my hand. “A place where you can build upon your walk with the Almighty, and where you can learn how we are placed upon this earth and to what ends that placement will serve us, if we only serve Him first and best.”

I swallowed hard, did my best to let my hand go loose, but nothing happened. The muscles in my arm were tight, on fire. I hadn’t looked up at her yet, my eyes on a single cobalt ribbon and how it glided, danced about the perfect flowers. I said, “Does this have to do with teaching Cathe ral to read? ” not certain if she would know what I was talking about, but testing all the same.

She let go my hand, and suddenly my hand was cold, her flesh having warmed me somehow. I could see steam up from the plate of food before me, and I thought of Molly sampling the lima beans, her small laugh.

Missy Cook said, “I watch for you from upstairs simply because I feel it my God-given duty to keep an eye out for you, to watch for your welfare.” She brought her hands to her lap, her signal I should do the same for our blessing.

I held my hands together in my lap, tried to warm them up, but couldn’t, and I suddenly felt I was dying here, and just as quick this Mississippi Industrial School for Girls became some garden to me, an escape, lodging in a night that’d started with the death of my momma and daddy, the School one more minute closer to a dawn I hoped I would recognize when it came. Sometime.

“Our Father, ” Missy Cook started, and I bowed my head, her voice the high-pitched, pious whisper it always was. “Bless this food, as You have been so kind to bless this household and all its inhabitants. We thank Thee for the blessings of the future, the blessings of the present, and the blessings of the past that have made so abundant this table before us.”

That was where she usually stopped, and I was already lifting my head, ready to eat this abundance before it grew cold, before I’d be booted on my way to whatever next new life was to come. But Missy Cook’s eyes were still drawn tight and closed, her hands still in her lap, and for a moment I wondered whether she might be ready to burst into tongues herself.

What I did was wrong, I knew. But there was nothing for it. I simply laughed, not loud or on purpose, but a laugh that left me, the picture in me of Missy Cook’s eyes rolling back, words from another world leaving her, and that image was what made me give way to the freedom suddenly in my heart, I was on my way from this place, from fine china, the dead gray sky outside the window, from food blamed on a God who would keep the niggers back in the kitchen from reading.

I laughed for only an instant, but loud enough for Missy Cook to hear me, for her to crack open one eye, and I snapped my head down, held my hands tighter together.

She said, “And bless my granddaughter on her imminent journey, on her passage from child into adult, from ignorance into wisdom, from the abyss of great darkness into the gates of Heaven. Bless her, dear Lord, with the knowledge of Christ’s grace and love and tender mercy.”

She paused, breathe out in a heavy whisper, “Amen.”

I had only a moment to look up before her open palm came down upon my cheek. A blast of white pain seemed to split open my face, the shock of it enough to keep back tears, even to keep me from looking away from her own face, her teeth clenched, hand up and ready to slap me again.

“You chose a path when you were baptized, and that path is not one from which you can fall, ” she said. “Laughing in Christ’s face. For the wages of sin is death, saith the Lord. To laugh in Christ’s face is sin.”

Her hand was still up high, the fingers beginning now to shiver with what I figured must have been anticipation, more sin from me.

But I turned toward her, faced her. I could feel the welt rising in my cheek, the rush of blood there, but I looked at her, let her eyes enter me, let mine, as best I could, enter hers. I held her look for a few moments, then closed my eyes.

I wasn’t certain now how many Christs there were at work in this world, how many Gods, from Cathe ral’s and Molly’s to whatever god had driven my father and my mother toward and then away from each other, to the one that operated somehow in the woman before me, but I did the only thing I knew the Christ in me would have done, I gave her my other cheek, offered up the side of my face that was still smooth and white, untouched by the hand of her Christ in rebuke of me laughing.

I was frightened, but not of her hand, the coming blow. What filled me with fear was the sudden certainty of what I saw that gesture meant, it was a dare, a line drawn in the dirt. Christ knew that, knew the shape of that moment when the accused would stand innocent. And I wasn’t certain which was worse, me aligning myself with Christ, doing what He’d instructed, or the hate that seemed to guide me into daring her to strike me again. There were two sides to the gesture. Two sides to everything, I saw.

I held my eyes closed, waiting, waiting, but she only yelled, “Insolence, ” the thick and silent and cold air of the room shattered.

On Saturday morning a wagon came for me, driven by a white man in overalls and wearing a cap tipped to the left, almost covering one eye.

Next to him sat a white woman in a gray dress, around her shoulders a heavy black wool coat, a gray wool bonnet tied tight around her face.

She seemed not to have any lips at all, her mouth a hard slit, and I knew that this was the end of one life, the start of the next, Molly’s eyes as she stood on the old porch shiny, her hands in front of her, fingers laced. Cathe ral stood next to her, her face holding nothing, no smile, no frown, as she lifted one hand to me and waved.

I waved to her, me in the back of the wagon, in my lap the Bible Pastor had given me after my baptism, next to me a tired and beaten leather valise, inside it everything I needed, two dresses with petticoats, two pairs of shoes, three tablets of paper, three red pencils, and, wedged between sheets of the newest tablet, the photograph of my grandfather, Jacob Chandler. And somewhere above me, looking out a window down on us all, was Missy Cook.

The driver gave the reins a shake, and we started off.

“Ezekiel thirty-seven, ” Cathe ral called out, and brought her hand down. She stood with her arms at her sides, calling out the chapter I would have read to her this afternoon had I not been sent away from here by my grandmother.

“Ezekiel thirty-eight, ” I called back, the wagon now at the foot of the drive and pulling out into the street, where one last cold snap the night before had near-frozen the mud ruts. “Just you make sure you keep on with your reading, ” I nearly shouted, and I smiled, waved even harder, my words meant not only as encouragement to Cathe ral, but as a signal to Missy Cook, the same sort of signal a burning high-back rocker had meant a night so many years ago.

Cathe ral nodded. Molly hadn’t moved. Then the two were gone, the porch now hidden behind trees on the street, and I was alone again in the world.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, turned, looked up at the woman. She was smiling at me, said, “Now let’s just be quiet back there.”

I did my best to smile back at her, but the ruts in the road took over, and I bounced hard, the only cushion beneath me a wool blanket. The woman turned forward again, her gloved hands gripping the edge of the seat.

“Hold on, ” the driver said.

But I’d already let go, had my Bible open, was turning in it to Ezekiel 37, and I started reading, “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about, and, behold, there were very many in the open valley, and lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.”

I shut the book right then, closed my eyes. I knew this story by heart, knew about the dry bones coming up from the ground and forming an army for the whole house of Israel. I was out of that valley now, those dry bones, the savable ones, already up and walking, Cathe ral and her boyfriend, Nelson, and in a way Molly, too, her knowing all along I’d been teaching her daughter.

“You all right, child? ” the woman asked, and I opened my eyes. She wasn’t smiling, on her face concern, her eyebrows together.

I said, “No ma’am.” I paused, watched my old street and the trees and the other homes all falling away behind the wagon, places and things and people I counted on never seeing again. I said, “Just scared.”

She nodded. “You’ve every right to be, ” she said, and I knew she meant it, the way she’d nodded, kept her eyes right on mine. What was ahead was anybody’s guess, so I did the only thing I could do, I sat in the back of the wagon, started the long ride to the Mississippi Industrial School for Girls in Picayune, hours away. Things after that would come clear, I knew, and I settled in, held myself against the cold, against the banging wheels on frozen ground, against the lives I was leaving behind.

Late that day, me sleeping on and off, the roads never seeming any less bumpy than my old street, I climbed down from the wagon, finally, there in Picayune. The driver helped me, his hands cold in the evening air, clouds low and near-black above us all, the woman smiling down at me no different than before, as if there were plenty she knew about what would happen to me here. I followed her into the building, huge and ugly, yellow brick with windows no larger than shoeboxes. She led me up to the third floor to my room, inside it six beds all with iron headboards like bars from a jail cell door, walls the same ugly yellow brick as outside, quilts as thin as paper. The room had its own sink, a mirror, beneath the sink a bucket and mop and can of Bon Ami.

Within a week or so I had a best friend, one Cleopatra Sinclair, a tall girl with strawberry blond hair she kept in two ponytails, one on top of the other at the back of her head. She was from a town called Bobo, Mississippi, placed here because she’d thrown a brick through a storefront window in town two days after her father’d shot himself in the head in the outhouse behind her old home. Her mother’d died four years before, and the town fathers figured on her best being served by sending her down to Picayune. “Where I could find a useful and redemptive life, ” were the words she used when she told me the story of how she was sent here.

Cleopatra had brought with her the same brick she threw through that window, slept with it under her pillow every night. Another girl, Mavis Petrie, a short girl with black hair to her waist, legs like tree trunks, kept with her a mother-of-pearl inlaid brush and comb, gifts to her from her aunt, who’d sent her here for no other reason than that she’d caught her smoking rabbit tobacco out behind their wagon one evening. “It was the only thing wrong I ever done, ” Mavis said each night as she brought the brush through her hair a hundred times, “the only thing I ever done wrong, the only thing, ” though Cleopatra had it on good measure that the real reason she’d been sent here was because the aunt had found Mavis in bed with the uncle one Sunday morning, and that the brush and comb were in fact gifts from the uncle, him thankful for the good time she’d shown him. Of course I never questioned Cleopatra, never asked her where she’d gotten her information, but only stared at Mavis each night as she brushed her hair and muttered about what she’d done wrong, Cleopatra and I exchanging glances now and again, amazed at what she might know about men, what neither of us had any idea about.