New Mercies (24 page)

Pickett went to the car and reached into the backseat, taking out three bottles of soda pop that were stored in a champagne bucket of ice. She removed the tops and handed one to me.
When the black man, cap in hand, reached us, Pickett gave him a bottle and said, “It’s plenty hot to work this morning, Jake.”

“I ain’t going to lie. It’s as hot as a cotton field. I’m just stumbling round ’mongst the toes of God out here, trying to keep from the heatstroke. I sure would like to get shed of this sun.” He gulped down the Nu-Grape and handed the bottle back to Pickett.

“You rest now,” she told him.

Jake shook his head. “I weren’t born to be lazy. My mama learned me to work, and I ain’t sorry.” He went back across the cemetery, and when he reached the open grave, he spit into his hands and rubbed them together before picking up a shovel.

“Where are they buried, the Negroes?” I asked.

“Not here. There’s a colored cemetery.”

“Separate in life and separate in death.” I stared at Amalia’s grave and noticed for the first time the bouquet of flowers set in a jar of water. They were fresh, perhaps put there this very morning, probably by Ezra.

“Not necessarily,” Pickett said, sipping from her bottle.

“What’s that?”

“I said black and white may be separate in death, but not always in life, if you know what I mean.”

I didn’t and had to think for a minute. “Are you talking about miscegenation?”

“Does that surprise you?” A breeze came up, catching Pickett’s full skirt, which went billowing up. She caught it and clutched it around her.

“Of course not. There are plenty of light-skinned Negroes in Natchez.”

“It didn’t happen just back in slavery times.”

“You’re saying there are white men today who keep black mistresses hidden away.”

“Not all of them are hidden. I could name you a dozen mixed couples in Natchez. One of them was a prominent Natchezian who lived openly with a black woman and their children, just as if they were man and wife. When he died, he left her better fixed than most white widows.”

“But he didn’t marry her.” My voice was edged with scorn.

“He couldn’t. It’s illegal.” Pickett waited until I looked up at her. “Is it legal where you come from?”

“You’ve put me in my place,” I said, admitting to her that I did not know. I sipped the Nu-Grape, found it too sweet, and wondered if I could pour it out when Pickett wasn’t looking.

“Rightly or wrongly, it happened then and happens now and evermore will be. In the old days, dallying with a servant girl was a rite of passage for a planter’s son. It kept the white girls safe. The slave owner himself had his pick of the women in the slave quarters. I expect half the slave women in the South gave birth to a light-skinned baby or two.”

“What happened to the children?”

“They were sold down the river by the father or sometimes his wife. Or if the father cared about them, they went to work in the big house instead of in the fields. Look at your own Ezra. I do not believe he is a pure-blooded African.” She raised an eyebrow.

Not wanting to give Pickett time to wonder if Ezra and I shared the same white blood, I said quickly, “How could southerners do that? How could they let their own children be slaves?”

“We pretended it didn’t happen.” Pickett stared across the cemetery at Jake. “Pretending is one of the things we in the Old South do best.” She put the bottle to her lips, sipped, and poured the contents onto the ground. “Just as I’m pretending to like this dreadful Nu-Grape, dearie. And so are you.”

P
ARTHENA HAD LEFT A MESSAGE
at the hotel, telling me that Mr. Stroud, the editor of the
Natchez Democrat
, would be delighted to have me to call anytime that day. She apologized for not being able to introduce us personally, but she was being called away to attend to a relative who was ill.

“That is the lot of southern women. Nothing comes before sick relatives, and Parthena’s relatives are sicker than most,” Pickett said, reading the message over my shoulder. “It’s what keeps Dr. Aldrich in business. He’s made sacks and sacks of money off sympathy and sugar pills.”

“He’s an odd little person.”

“Yes. He was considered quite the gay creature until Miss Magdalene turned him down when she was young. It’s pretty generally known she broke his heart.”

After all the nasty things the doctor had said about Magdalene, I said, I was surprised he had proposed to her.

“She was the only woman in Natchez who was shorter than he, and she went and married a man who was a foot taller. Poor Dr. Aldrich is still pouting.”

“He had not a single good word to say about her at breakfast.”

“He hasn’t since the end of Reconstruction. A man scorned . . .” Pickett put out her hands, palms up.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Oh course you have, my dear—Bayard Lott. He’d been seething since Miss Amalia broke off the engagement.”

“Men are more troublesome than women.”

“Tell me something I don’t know. Come along. I’ll drop you.”

Pickett left me at the newspaper office, where I asked for Mr. Stroud, telling the receptionist that Nora Bondurant was calling.

“A lady, who I already lost her name said you’d be stopping any next minute,” the woman replied. She turned to a man who wore a hat made of folded newspaper, which perched on his head like a saucepan, and said, “You take your foot in your hand and go out to the press and get him.”

A few minutes later, Wash, the man from the breakfast table, walked in and bowed. “Good day again, Miss Nora.”

“You run the newspaper?”

“In Natchez, we set store by who we are, not what we do. Besides, I warrant you people like me better when they don’t know I own the paper.” He ushered me into an office that was cluttered with photographs, a typewriter, and carbon copies of stories, all spread across a desk. He removed a stack of newspapers
from a chair and offered me a seat. “You are a newspaperwoman yourself, I understand.”

“If you have that impression, then I sail under false colors. I’m just a scribbler who writes stories for ladies who like to fancy up their flower beds. But I accepted Parthena’s offer of an introduction in hopes you’d let me into your newspaper morgue.”

He did not look surprised. “Thought so. That’s why I had Gladys, out front, to put together a file of our stories about the goat-lady murders.”

“There is something more. I’d be awfully glad if you’d let me go through your old newspapers.”

He looked at me curiously. “How old?”

“Eighteen seventy-seven.”

He mulled that over. “I’m guessing your father was born in eighteen and seventy-eight.”

I looked away.

“Oh, don’t be embarrassed about that. You know yourself that it’s a reporter’s job to figure out all those things.” He cleared his throat. “Besides, once you’re murdered, you can’t hide out your secrets anymore. Miss Amalia is ever our favorite topic of conversation at the Eola’s eating table these days. Mr. Sam told us about Miss Odalie’s speculation. That woman wears herself out with minding other people’s business. She’s the meanest kind of woman. Still, a big number of folks would not be surprised if what she said is true. You won’t find it in the newspaper, however.”

“Perhaps there’s something else from back then—an engagement announcement or a notice of the engagement being called off.”

“Oh, we didn’t believe in such in those days. We respected our womenfolk. If Miss Amalia’s name had been in our columns in such connection, the old captain would have come boiling in here with a horse whip.”

“I’d like to see the papers just the same.”

“No harm to it. We’ve got a library, although it’s mostly put to use as a lunchroom. I’ll have Gladys to clear off the bologna and bread crumbs.”

He called to the receptionist, who took me into a room lined with bound volumes of newspapers. She warned me about the ink coming off on my clothes and handed me an apron. As she searched the shelves, looking for 1877, she pointed to a thin volume. “That’s 1865. We had plenty of news then, but we couldn’t hardly get the paper to print it on. Some publishers used wallpaper.” She set a thick folio on the table. “Here’s you your 1877.” She opened it to the first January issue and left me alone.

Wash was right, of course. There was no society page, although the paper printed mentions of balls, parties, and outings. In a July newspaper, there was a brief article on Captain Bondurant, “who will be traveling to New York City and abroad. He is to be accompanied by his daughter, Miss Amalia Bondurant.” There were no details about Amalia, no adjectives such as
lovely
or
popular
, nothing to indicate what she hoped to see or do.

No further mention was made of the Bondurants until the end of the year. Under the headline
NATCHEZIANS AT HOME
was an article about Amalia and her father returning to Natchez after an extensive trip to New York and London.

After finishing the 1877 newspapers, I took down the 1878 volume and found in June a mention of the Bondurants. Inside
a black box was the headline
NATCHEZ LADY IN ARMS OF MORPHEUS
and an article telling of the passing of Emilie Bondurant in New Orleans. The piece did not reveal the cause of death but hinted that it might have been yellow fever, which had been bad that year. Captain Bondurant, the article said, had undertaken the “grievous journey to New Orleans to claim the body of his beloved wife, one of the kindest ladies who ever drew breath.” Neither Amalia nor Frederick was included in the article. In further editions of the paper, there was no record of the captain returning home or of Miss Emilie’s funeral. And no mention anywhere of my father.

But there was something about Bayard Lott in a September issue. The piece was only a few sentences: “Bayard Lott is returning to New York on business. Mr. Lott hopes to enjoy the social season there, just as he did last year. Then he will proceed to London, where he was in great demand a year ago.”

After returning the newspapers to the shelves, I took off the apron and found a washroom where I could scrub the ink off my hands. Once presentable, I went in search of Wash.

“Find anything?” he asked.

“Miss Amalia went to New York in 1877, along with Bayard Lott. They both were in London, too.”

“So he followed her first to one place and then to another.”

“It looks that way. Of course, we’ll never know if they actually saw each other.”

“She certainly saw somebody.” He looked uncomfortable. “I ought not to have said such a thing.”

“Perhaps they ought not to have done such a thing.” We both chuckled. “It appears that Miss Amalia and her mother went to
New Orleans for the summer of 1878. Miss Emilie died there.”

“Who ever heard of anybody going to New Orleans for the summer? And that year, the yellow fever was bad.”

“So the paper said. The article suggested that Miss Emilie might have died of the fever, not childbirth.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t have put anything in the paper about a lady dying that way. We never mentioned childbirth. Ours was a world handicapped by ignorance, and it was sure a wonder where little babies came from. My dear mother told me every chick and child was found in the cabbage patch.” He thought a minute. “We didn’t hide out the women when they were in the family way. We just ignored the condition. We still do.”

“So do we.” Then I asked the question I’d asked everyone else. “Why did Bayard Lott kill Miss Amalia?”

Wash ran his hand through his hair. The room was hot and close, and his shirt was damp with sweat under his arms. There was perspiration on his face—and on mine, too. “I couldn’t hardly say, and I have tried to figure it out since that first doggone day she was found. Why did Bayard go over there that day? From what Mr. Sam says, Bayard and Miss Amalia didn’t have truck with each other. Make a heck of a story, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, you won’t print any of what I told you, will you?”

Wash grinned at me. “No, Miss Nora. The
Democrat
is not a yellow sheet, bless God, and Miss Amalia was as sweet as honey in the comb. We still respect our women in Natchez.” He paused and added, “Course, if it’d been Miss Maggie . . .”

I asked if she were really as bad as Dr. Aldrich claimed.

Wash took out a handkerchief and wiped the back of his head
with it. “Miss Maggie turned down our good doctor’s advances because he was too old. It is a terrible thing to wound a southern man’s pride, and the doctor is a good hater. When she went to housekeeping with Bayard Lott, Miss Maggie left the doctor in a misery so deep that he has had vexation about it ever since. That did not prevent him from trafficking with a plenty of women—he was a scalawag and an alley cat in his time, if you don’t mind my saying so—but he never did find a woman to his liking. He likes ’em pert, and Miss Maggie is that.”

“Perhaps with Bayard Lott dead, he can press his suit again. Don’t you think Miss Magdalene would enjoy being courted?”

I intended the remark to be funny. After all, there was something outlandish about the aged old man pursuing such an odd little creature, but Wash looked up in surprise and said, “By golly, I hadn’t thought of that, and I bet Dr. Aldrich hasn’t, either. His old mind runs slower these days. I will make it my business to suggest it to him. Miss Nora, I warrant you have a true understanding of Natchez women.”

Mr. Sam followed us in his auto as Pickett drove me to Avoca that afternoon. After she turned off the motor, she reached into the back of the car, taking out the three empty Nu-Grape bottles. “They’re for Miss Magdalene’s bottle tree. Ezra will hang them for her.”

Ezra was not waiting for me, as he had been on my last visit. Instead, Aunt Polly stepped onto the porch from Amalia’s room. When she saw us, she took a few steps forward and dropped a
rock clutched in her hand. She wrapped her hands in her apron and stood motionless, leaning against a pillar for support, waiting for us to reach her.

Alarmed, I called, “Where’s Ezra?” Ignoring the ladder, I climbed directly onto the porch.

“Ezra to the quarters. There five, maybe six mens here last night. They make out to crook you.” She stopped and waited until Mr. Sam helped Pickett up the ladder. Mr. Sam removed his hat and said, “How do, Aunty.”