Juneteenth (29 page)

“So
that’s
what started it,” Sister Wilhite said.

“That’s the story anyway,” Daddy Hickman said. “For a while the poor woman couldn’t leave her room, just lay in the bed eating ambrosia and chocolate eclairs day and night.”

A new tone had come into Daddy Hickman’s voice now. He looked at the eye set in the cloth, searching for a joke. “Eating what?” he said, removing his cigar.

“That’s right, Revern’ Bliss. Ambrosia and chocolate eclairs.”

“Day and night?”

“That’s what they say.”

“But didn’t it make her sick?”

“Oh, she was already sick,” Daddy Hickman said. “Anyway, when she finally could leave her room she came up with some strange notions….”

“What kind of notions?”

“Well, she thought she was some kind of queen.”

“Did she have a crown?”

“Come to think about it, she did, Revern’ Bliss, and she had a great big Hamilton watch set right in the middle of it and she used to walk around the streets wearing a long white robe and stopping everybody and asking them if they knew what time it was. It wasn’t a bad idea either, Bliss—except for the fact that her watch was always slow. Folks who didn’t want to set their watches according to her time was in for some trouble. She’d start to screaming right there in the street and charging them with all sorts of crimes. You have no idea how relieved folks were when she misplaced that watch and crown and went off to Europe with her auntie on her father’s side.”

Daddy Hickman’s voice stopped and Bliss could see the eye looking from deep within the cloth.

“Then what happened?” he said.

“Oh she stayed over there about a year, taking the baths and drinking that sulfur water and mineral water and consorting with the crowned heads of Europe. And I heard she was at a place called Wiesbaden where she enjoyed herself losing a lot of money. Then I went up north to Detroit and worked in the Ford plant for a while and I didn’t hear any more about her. Then I came back and I heard she had come home again and how she had a new mind and a new notion….”

“What kind of new mind and notion?”

“Well, now she not only insisted she was a queen but she had the notion that all the young children belonged to her. She had the notion she was the Mary Madonna. Bliss, pretty soon she was making off with other folks’ children like a pack rat preparing for hard times. The story is that she grabbed a little
Chinee
baby and took him off to New Orleans and named him Uncle Yen Sen, or something like that….”

“She really stole him?”

“Yes she did, Bliss. And she rented a room and opened up what
she
called a Chinese laundry in one of those old houses with the iron lace around the front. It was on a street where a bunch of first-class washerwomen lived too and she had that poor little baby lying up there on the counter in a big clothes basket wearing a diaper made out of the United States flag….”

“Oh, oh!” someone behind him said.

“Now how patriotic can you get,” Sister Wilhite said.

“Didn’t anyone come looking for the baby, Daddy Hickman?”

“Oh sure they did, Bliss. But she had covered her tracks like an Indian. She was supposed to be up in Saratoga, that’s in New York, you see, but instead she went up to Washington, D.C., with the baby dressed up in a Turkish turban and little gold shoes that turned up at the toe and they spent two days up there riding up and down the Washington Monument, and after that they doubled back. That’s how that was. You see?”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “They probably had them a good time.”

“I don’t know, Bliss. They just might have got awfully dizzy.”

“So what happened then, Revern’?” one of the women said.

“Well, things went along for a while. She wasn’t doing much business but things were quiet and nobody bothered them and they ate a lot of buttered carrots and shoofly pie, but mostly carrots … and—”

“Why they eat all those carrots?”

“Because she thought they would improve the baby’s vision, Bliss.”

“He means she was trying to straighten out his eyes, Revern’ Bliss,” Deacon Wilhite said and suppressed a laugh.

“I hear that carrots make you beautiful,” Sister Lucy said.

“And did they ever find the baby?”

“That’s right, after a while they did, Bliss. And it happened like
this. They was down there waiting for the Mardi Gras to come. One day an old Yankee veteran from the Civil War walked in there to get some shirts washed and ironed and when he looked in that basket and saw Old Glory pinned around that Chinese baby he like to bust a gut. Excuse me, ladies. He saw that, Bliss, and wanted to start the war all over again. He called the police and the fire department and wired the President up in Washington and raised so much Cain that they ran him out of town for a carpetbagger—while she was treated like she’d done the most normal thing in the world. The poor Chinese lady had a world of trouble getting her little boy back again, because folks tend to take what rich women like that say as the truth—
and
, on top of that, the child had come to like her, didn’t think he was a Chinese at all….”

“What’d he think he was?”

“A Confederate named Wong E. Lee.”

“So what happened to them then?”

“Well, Bliss, the news got around and her folks heard about it and came and took her home and they gave the Chinese lady some money for all her trouble and grief and they turned over the laundry to them and they stayed there and made a fortune and now the little boy is glad he’s a Chinese.”

“Wong E. Lee,” Bliss said.

“They should’ve put that woman under lock and key right then and there,” Sister Wilhite said. “If they had we would’ve been saved all this trouble.”

“That’s right, Bliss,” Daddy Hickman said. “That’s one of the points. Down here a woman like that can get away with anything because not only is her family rich, it’s old and has standing position. They’re quality—of some kind. But no sooner did she get out of that mess than she ups and grabs a little Mexican boy. This was down in Houston, wasn’t it, Deacon?”

“Dallas,” Deacon Wilhite said, his head back, his eyes gazing at the ceiling. “Dallas is where it happened.”

“That’s right, Bliss; Dallas, Texas. She kidnaps this little boy and names him Pancho Villa Van Buren Starr and rushes him up to the Kentucky Derby—which was being held at the time. That was Louisville. Sports and hustlers from all over were there making bets and drinking mint juleps, having a little sport—innocent and uninnocent. Well, up there after she had lost five thousand dollars, a piebald gelding and all the jewelry she had taken along, she tried to use the baby to place a bet with, like he was cash on the line.”

“Now Revern’,” Sister Lucy said, “she didn’t do a thing like that!”

“Oh yes, she did. And it was logical from her point of view. To her way of thinking property like that is negotiable and she swore that little Mexican boy was a family heirloom that had been in the family for years.… So knowing who she was and how solid her background was and all they took Pancho for the bet and called the president of the Jockey Club about it but the horse she picked came in last.”

“And did they get the baby?”

“They did, Bliss, but it was a long time afterwards. The boy took off and got lost. He had a hard time, Bliss, because she hadn’t let him eat anything but chop suey and although he found a Chinese restaurant he couldn’t eat because he only spoke Mexican and the restaurant folks couldn’t understand him. So I guess you were lucky because she only
tried
to steal you. The sisters took care of that. So I want you to forget that woman, you hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You forget all about her, Bliss; I’m talking to you seriously now. Forget her and the foolishness she was saying because she’d never seen you before and I hope she never sees you again. All right now, I better rest so I can help you preach next week. Meantime, I want
you to do like I say and forget the woman and if you do I’ll take you … Here, come close so I can whisper….”

He bent close, smelling the medicine and then Daddy Hickman was whispering, “I’ll take you to see one of those moving pictures you’ve been hearing about. Now that’s a secret. You’ll keep it, won’t you?”

“Yes, sir. The secret.”

He looked but suddenly the eye was gone—as though someone had turned down the wick on a lamp.

“Daddy Hickman—” he began, but now Sister Lucy had him by the arm.

“Shhh,” she said, “he’s sleeping now,” and he was being led quietly away.

It’s like trying to reconstruct your own birth as
cherchez la femme
and find the man. Sin, Hickman’d call it but all men are of larceny to the fourth power of the newborn heart then it’s run not walk to avoid escape, ignore the recognition. Hairs bursting isolated and red out of the white temple and her strange voice screaming
Cudworth, Cudworth
and I followed I went I fled up and out of the darkness and she lived behind a wall so strong it had no need for altitude. No foot transgressed no alien bird’s song aggrieved her privacy—Was this my home, my rightful place? Cudworth, she called—I heard dragonflies I saw the great house resting in the gentle shade of her cottonwood mimosa wisteria, the tulip trees.
No Mister Movie-Man
, she said, locking her legs before the rise of magnolias, smiling, no peach blossoms no not that.… She’s my mother
she
said and I answered She is my mother she Get out the vote Senator, vote. Senator, promise them anything but wheel and deal. She said, Baby, baby, always insisting upon appellation the fruit
Eve conned Adam with I’ll call you by your true name, Baby she said—after the snake. Cudworth from the cow’s belly a round ball of hair regurgitated. Call me Hank, no Bone. Important not to get lost—I followed Cudworth, Cudworth he’s my—Yes sir by following the line of Body’s mother and Mrs. Proctor discussing my aborted emancipation from the dark down labyrinthine ways of gossip being hung on lines in the sun, the hot air. Body’s mother was there before me, broad-backed and turning great curved hips with intent face and mouth spiked with wooden clothespins we used for soldiers in our games, her hair hidden beneath a purple cloth. I yearned for her love of Body as my own. Mrs. Proctor, short and fat rocking from side to side, gently as she slow-dragged from left to right, her man’s shoes shuffling over the earth leaving ridges in the soil—her hips tossing languidly, a gentle, mysterious tide of gingham beneath the line hanging the underskirts, slips, bloomers as they talked up under her wet clothes. Red-white-blue democracy for you bleached and clean making transparent shadows upon the red clay ground, the sun filtering pastel through the cloth and the air clean to the smell with me crouching underneath, the first well-hung line, my finger tracing upon the hard earth, wondering how did I get out and get lost, did I come down from under these thin petticoats out of these in order to ascend—clank-clank-clank your mother.

She’s got to be a fool, from Body’s mother. Coming into our meeting like that. Either that or she was drunk or something, her voice rising in invitation to a re-creation of my soul’s agony. And Mrs. Proctor accepting,

Ain’t it the truth? And there we was just wanting to be left alone in peace to serve God for a few days and to praise Him—but can we do it? Oh no. She so high and mighty she gon’ take that chile without the hardship and pain, without even gitting struck good and
hard on the maidenhead—And not only take from us but from the Lord as well.… Looking around

Then, seeing me, Sssssh …

What is it, girl—Oh, Revern’ Bliss, Body’s mother said. She looked down at me, her hands on ample hips.

Mam? I, Bliss, said, my face feeling tight, wan.

Honey, will you go send Body to me, please?

I looked for judgment in her broad face. She held the clothespins fanned out between her fingers like a marksman holding shotgun shells during a trap shoot.

Yes, mam.

Thank you, Revern’ Bliss.

And I arose and moved down the line of clothes and then under a line of stockings and pink and blue underthings and back three lines till I was behind drying sheets, hearing her softly saying. These children, I swear they all alike, even Revern’ Bliss. They never stop trying to listen to grown folks talking, and they always rambling in trunks and drawers. Lord knows what they ’spect to find. Him and Revern’ Bliss was playing with some toy autos one day and I looked out and Body has done found one of my old breast pumps somewhere and is making out it’s a auto horn!

I went past bloomers billowing gently in the breeze
Clank-clank-clank, that’s your ma’s with a fleet of them big Mack trucks and nineteen elephants. A whole team of mules could walk through there
. I went toward the back door where the washtubs glinted dully on the low bench, trailing my finger and thumb as I went past and around to the front of the house, calling, Body! Hey Body! Your mother wants you, Body. Knowing all the while that he had gone to dig crawdads. He was my right hand but I had been told not to go there. Calling: Body? Hey! Body! Lying in word and deed while my mind hung back upon their voices like a feather upon a gentle breeze. Behind
me, over the top of the house I could hear their voices rising clear with soft hoarseness, like alto horns in mellow duet across the morning air. I looked down the street. Except for a cat rubbing itself against a hedge down near the corner nothing was moving. I was alone and lonely, the porch was high and I crawled beneath and lay still in the cool shadows thinking about the crawdad hole over where the cotton press had burned down across from the railroad tracks, the tall weeds and muddy water. Body could swim, I wasn’t allowed. Along the slippery bank the crawdads raised up their pale brown castles of mudballs. We fried their tails in cornmeal and bacon grease, ate them with half-fried Irish potatoes. In the gloom I lay, beside the discarded wheel of a baby buggy. Body’s mother saved his baby shoes. They hung by a blue ribbon from the mirror of the washstand. Where were mine? Near my arm a line of frantic ants crawled down the piling, carrying specks of white sugar or crumbs. Piss ants, sugar ants, all in a row, coming and a-going like my breath, their feelers touch and go. Patty-cake. Then I could hear their sighful voices approaching full of heat and sounds of rest, and through the cracks between the steps I could see their broad bottoms coming down upon the giving boards and saw their washday dresses collapsing then stretching taut between their knees as they rested back, their elbows upon the floor of the porch as slowly they fanned themselves with blue bandannas.