Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County (16 page)

“Well, what do they do with them?” Jackie asked.

“They bury 'em
above
ground. They call them ‘mausoleums.' ”

“Oh, yes,” Jackie said. “I've seen photographs of that. I think it's because the water table there is so high.”

A knock at the door made us jump nearly out of our skins. In a way I was grateful because the conversation was giving me the creepy-crawlies.

“I'll get it,” I said, but by the time I reached the door I wished I'd let someone else answer it. Through the scalloped lace curtain on the windowpane beside the front door, I could see a silhouette of the distinctive hat worn by a police officer in uniform. I cracked open the door, and he thrust a letter into my hand without saying a word.

“Wait,” he said, as I started to close the door. “Someone has to sign for it.” This made me even more uneasy, but I did as I was told.

“Dora?” Mrs. Bailey White called out. “Who is it, dear?”

I returned to the parlor. “Oh, it's nothing, probably. Just a letter from the town.”

“Mrs. Bailey White, did you pay your taxes?” Plain Jane said, alarmed.

“Course I did! Don't know what this nonsense could be. Dora, dear, you open it and read it aloud, okay?”

I was beginning to think that Jackie's gin and tonic suggestion might be a good one. “All right,” I said, my voice squeaky. “Well, let's see. It's addressed to you and date-stamped today—October 10, 1964. It says”:

Dear Matilda Louise Bailey White:

It has come to our attention that you have exceeded the number of unrelated persons living in this house, and that one of the residents is a child unrelated to any of the residents. You are, therefore, running a rooming house and/or child care institution without proper permit.

“What else does it say?” Jackie asked, after she recovered enough to speak. “Is there a court date? Do we pay a fine?”

“It's a warning,” Plain Jane said.

“Can we ignore it?” Jackie asked. “In Boston if you get a letter like that, you just ignore it. Nine times out of ten, that's the end of it.”

“I don't think we can do that,” Plain Jane said. “I think we'll have to address it in some way.” She thought for a moment and added, “Well, I suppose it's not surprising. They always find a way to get to you.”

“Who?” Jackie asked. “You mean Darryl?”

“Yes, Darryl. And maybe his backers, too. Those people from that place in New Jersey.”

Mrs. Bailey White nodded. “He's fighting dirty,” she said.

“We don't know that for sure,” I said, but the second the words left my lips I realized it was probably true. Plain Jane, Jackie, and Mrs. Bailey White had been looking after Dream for more than a year. There had been complaints but nothing had really come of it. This felt like retribution.

We discussed what we should do. As Mama would have said, we talked that ol' topic to death and right into the next world. Finally, we agreed to face it head-on by going to the municipal offices. The plan was that we'd go together. By now it was late in the day so we decided to meet at 8:30 sharp the next morning outside the town-owned trailer, adjacent to the police station.

The first accusation in the letter to Mrs. Bailey White turned out to be easy to disprove. Jackie, Plain Jane, and I were able to demonstrate that we were only “visitors” at the house owned by Mrs. Bailey White. For Jackie, it was as easy as handing them her driver's license with her home address on it. Plain Jane and I, who didn't drive, brought our property tax bills with us.

“But what about the girl?” The clerk, a plump gal with a beehive hairdo, posed the question as if she was sure we were hiding something.

“What girl?” Plain Jane asked.

“The colored girl,” the clerk said, snapping gum in her mouth. “The one who comes to stay there. And her colored baby.”

Clearly, the clerk had been apprised of every detail. “What, are you guys spying on us?” Jackie said, in her usual “anything but subtle” way.

“No one's spying on anyone,” the clerk snapped. “But we have become aware that a colored girl about age twenty stays in that house from time to time. And her baby is there
all
the time. Is it their legal residence?”

The question caught us off-guard. “The girl's legal address is at her grandmother's,” Mrs. Bailey White said. “And the baby's, too.” Whether or not this was true, I didn't know, but it was a good answer.

The clerk sighed. “All right,” she said. “Looks like you've satisfied the first part of the complaint. But not the second. If that baby isn't related to any of you, and you have no legal status in her life, then she shouldn't be living there. Unless you have a license for some kind of school or maybe a home for unwed mothers and their babies, something like that.”

A smile that I recognized as mischievous suddenly appeared on Jackie's face. “Well, thank you
so very much
!” Jackie gushed to the clerk. “You've been
so very helpful
!”

Jackie practically skipped out the door.

“What are you so happy about?” Plain Jane asked warily.

“That gal in there just handed us the solution!” she said. “All we have to do is open a house for unwed mothers and babies. It's that simple! We can keep Dream and maybe help some other young women, too.”

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Plain Jane said.

“What do you think, Mrs. Bailey White?” Jackie asked, adding, “Of course, this is entirely up to you.”

Mrs. Bailey White looked overwhelmed but smiled. “I don't know how much good I'll be to y'all,” she said slowly, “but you're welcome to use my house.”

“I admit that it's a fascinating idea,” Plain Jane said cautiously, “but Jackie, aren't you getting ahead of yourself? You always have us rushing into things!”

“Dora, what do you think?” Jackie asked, ignoring Plain Jane.

“Well, I won't be here. I still plan to go back to Mississippi,” I said. “But if y'all think you can do it, I don't see why not. Of
course, there's something you're forgetting. We need to talk to Priscilla first. She should be told what's going on. She would need to be on board with this.”

It was agreed. Jackie would try to reach Priscilla by telephone and report back to us the next day.

As I nodded off to sleep that night, I marveled at Jackie's enthusiasm and her ability to find answers while I was still busy mulling over the question. She was persuasive, and made things sound easier than they were—like talking me into going to Mississippi to find out about Mama and her people. Once you've known someone like Jackie, however, you can't easily go back to a life in which you're sitting on the sidelines, waiting for something to happen. Before I knew her, I thought the best way to travel through life was to take the most comforting and familiar routes. While I still longed to do this at times—it was part of my nature—I could see now that playing it too safe might mean never really living at all. From Jackie, I had learned to take the plunge into the deep end of the pond, not just stick my toe in, or wade around in the shallows.

A
s the Trailways bus rambled toward Naples, Priscilla yawned politely and stretched, taking care not to bump into the older woman sitting next to her. She reminded Priscilla a little of her grandma—tiny and hunched over, with hands swollen and disfigured from a lifetime of working in the fields.

Priscilla had been trying to read on the long bus ride from Daytona, with some success on the Sanford to Tampa stretch, but then began dozing off, tired from working late in the college laundry. One employee went home sick, so she'd been doing the job of two people but complaining was unthinkable. Working until midnight—even in a hot and humid laundry—was easy compared to what her grandma did, day after day.

The older woman suddenly elbowed her and cried out, pointing to something outside the bus window. Even wedged as they were in the far-back seat of the colored section, it was hard to miss: a brand-new, oversized billboard with lime-green lettering.

Welcome to Dreamsville! the sign hollered.

What in the world?
Priscilla thought.

And then they passed another, identical to the first. This time, Priscilla got more than a glimpse. Accompanying the astonishing words was a stylized illustration of an idealized American couple. A white gal was tastefully reclined in a lounge chair with a long cigarette in one hand and a cute little mixed drink—the kind with an umbrella in it—beside her on a small table. A white fellow, presumably her husband, loomed in the foreground with an expensive-looking fishing pole in one hand and a golf club in the other, grinning so broadly it was scary.
Lord,
Priscilla thought,
you'd think God himself had just handed him the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Imagine going through life with that amount of self-assurance.
The couple, to Priscilla's eyes, looked vaguely Northern. For one thing, they were tan. With the exception of men who worked outdoors—a farmer with his red neck from driving a tractor, or a fisherman with deep crows'-feet wrinkles acquired from squinting at the water—local white folks protected their skin from the sun. In fact, it was said among black folks that the Caucasians of Collier County were so white that looking at them hurt your eyes. Priscilla tried not to join in when others joked like that. White folks couldn't help being white any more than she could help the fact that she was not. Besides, she'd been treated exceptionally well by white folks. Most of them, anyway.

The other indication that the folks depicted in the sign were supposed to be Yankees was, in a word, jewelry. The gal on the lounge chair had a ring on one hand that would have made Elizabeth Taylor pass out, plus ropes of gold, pearls, and who-knows-what hanging heavily around her neck. All this, and wearing a bathing suit, too. The man, who wore a polo shirt with some kind of insignia like a family crest or college logo, sported an oversized watch on one wrist.

In sociology class, Priscilla had learned that these folks were called “the Northern Leisure Class.” But why would they come to Naples? Who was putting out the welcome mat?

And why were there so many? Unlike the South, where there were a handful of rich folks in every small town—with everyone else poor as dirt—there seemed to be a surplus of people with money to burn in Yankeeland. She couldn't imagine being able to afford one house, let alone one up north and a second one in Florida just for vacations. Vacations! That was a concept she couldn't grasp, either. Life was not a cakewalk for anyone, her granny used to counsel, but sometimes it sure seemed that way from the outside looking in.

When the bus passed a third, identical billboard, this time Priscilla noticed the words “Coming Soon!” on a banner that stretched across the lower right corner. Well, whatever was going on, it probably wasn't good, and Priscilla felt a cool chill move down her spine like someone had just walked over an unsettled grave.

Jackie had not said a word on the telephone about any of this. Did she not know? Or did she not care? No, Jackie would care. She would be angry, unless she was involved in it in some way. But why would she be involved? Jackie wouldn't like the idea of someone using “Dreamsville” without her permission, and Priscilla couldn't imagine Jackie accepting payment for it, or endorsing a development of some sort, either. That didn't seem like Jackie's style.

Of course, maybe Jackie hadn't mentioned it because long-distance calls cost a pretty penny. More than that, though, was a lack of privacy on Priscilla's end. With more than fifteen girls sharing one phone at the rooming house that was Priscilla's home-away-from-home at Bethune-Cookman College,
someone always seemed to be lurking in the hallway awaiting her turn. Opportunities were ripe for eavesdropping. The other complication was that Priscilla, working in the laundry and attending classes, often missed Jackie's calls. It was remarkable how much information a nosy floor-mate could glean from a simple phone message, so Jackie quickly learned to avoid chit-chat and to leave a message saying only that Priscilla needed to call home.

Whenever Priscilla found one of these messages stuck in the doorjamb of her little room, she felt a little faint. Without fail, she was at first convinced that something had happened to her baby. Maybe Dream was sick and desperately needed her mama. A negligent, selfish, fool-hearted mama who was clear across the state, and almost as far north as the Georgia border, studying English and sociology at a black college where no one knew her secret.

The hallway was silent, thanks to the late hour, so Priscilla dropped her book bag and purse and dashed to the phone to call Jackie back. As always she asked the long-distance operator to reverse charges, which made her feel wretched until she forced herself to remember her baby daughter. She was doing this for her child. She would do anything for her child. That was why she was away, to build a better life for herself and, in turn, for Dream.

She felt the same way the next morning when she sat in the back of the Trailways bus. She was doing that for Dream, too. Nine years after Mrs. Parks refused to move from the white section of a bus in Birmingham, the colored section was business as usual in Florida. Here it was 1964, the Civil Rights Act had just been signed by President Johnson, and the yellow line that designated the “back of the bus” was as bright and menacing
as ever. There were times when Priscilla could sit wherever she wanted, especially if the bus was nearly empty. But if a bus driver was a bigot, he'd tell you to go to the back of the bus. Or, if there were mean-looking white passengers—and you could never tell, really, just from a glance—it was better to go sit in the back of the bus and live to talk about it. This stuck in Priscilla's craw and she felt that familiar flash of soul-crushing shame, but again, just like those collect calls, they could be tolerated if she was doing it for her child.