Nine Women (2 page)

And my mother said nothing at all. When I could wait no longer, when the silence between us seemed more dangerous and frightening than any nightmare, I asked, “Why are we running away?”

“To be safe,” she said.

“Is it far?”

“It is far enough to be safe,” she said.

When we finally reached the place where we would live, she hired two more neighborhood men to take our things up the stairs. She had moved without leaving a trace behind.

I guessed it had something to do with her visitor, but I did not worry. In all the stories my mother had told me, there were always threats and pursuits and enemies to be avoided. It was the way a princess lived. And my mother was always there, to bring me to safety at last.

When we sat in our new home, in the clutter of boxes and furniture, when we were safely inside, the door locked behind us, my mother smiled at me, a great slow smile that showed square strong teeth in the smooth darkness of her face. “My hidden princess,” she said, “my lotus flower…”

The accustomed endearments tumbled from her lips, the expected exotic song of love and praise. I, young as I was, noted the change. For the past few days, and on the drive across town, she had spoken rarely, and then only in the crisp blunt language of everyday.

Now, by the smooth soft flow of her words, I knew that we were indeed safe. We had passed through a series of lodgings—I think I remember them all, even the one where I was born, the one with a chinaberry tree outside the window—but we had finally gained our castle, the one we had been searching for. There was even a turret, to command the approaches and to defend against enemies.

The house stood on a corner. Its old clapboard walls rose directly from the sidewalk through two stories of flaking gray paint to a roof decorated with fancy wooden scallops; in the dark spaces under the eaves generations of pigeons nested and fluttered. At the second-floor corner, jutting over the sidewalk, was a small turret or tower, capped with a high pointed roof like a clown’s hat.

Inside the tower was a hinged seat of varnished wood entirely covered by scratch drawings: flowers and initials and hearts, dancing stick figures and even a face or two. Here we stored odd bits of things: old shoes, an umbrella with a broken rib, a doll in a pink and blue gingham dress, an Easter bunny of purple and yellow plush, a black patent purse. Roaches lived there too; they ate the stuffing from the doll and the feather from her hat, and they ate spots of fur from the Easter bunny so that it looked burned. I thought they had also nibbled the edge of the patent leather purse, but my mother said no, it was just use-worn.

Day after day, I sat on top that jumble of things, above the secret workings of insects, and I watched through the windows, three panes of glass on the three sides of my tower, which my mother washed every month, so that I might see clearly.

Most of the floor below us was occupied by a drugstore, a small dark place that smelled of disinfectant and sugar candy, of brown paper and cough medicine. On two of the other corners were small houses, one room wide, perched off the ground on low brick foundations and edged by foot-wide runners of grass. On the third corner, directly across from my window was Providence Manor, a home for the old. A tall iron fence enclosed an entire block of grass and trees and even occasional blooming flowers, a wilderness that stretched out of my sight. Just inside the fence was a gravel path where, on good days, the old people walked, some slowly on canes, some with arms flexing rapidly in a military march, some in chairs wheeled by nuns in black habits and white headdresses. They rotated past the spear points of the fence, every good day taking their quota of sun and exhaust-laden air. After dark, on rainy nights, the flashing sign in the drugstore window beat against those railings, broke and ran off down the shiny black street.

Downstairs too, directly below, in our small slice of the old house, were the two rooms that were my mother’s workshop and showroom. On our front door—up two wooden steps from the uneven brick sidewalk—was a small neat sign:
MODISTE.
My mother had lettered that herself; she had always been very clever with her hands. It was the first real shop she had.

I spent my days either at my window or in my mother’s workrooms. The rest of the house, the other two rooms, I don’t remember at all. I was either a princess in my tower or a mannequin in my mother’s clothes.

Not until years later did I realize that all the faces I saw were black. (To me they had no color, no color at all.) The people walking on the street, the old on their therapeutic rounds, the Sisters of the Holy Family, the drivers impatiently threading their way through the heavy street traffic, my mother and her customers—they all wore black skin.

As did the children in school. Eventually I had to go to school. My mother did not send me when I was six, as the law said she must. For one extra year I dreamed and flaunted my beautiful dresses. I doubt that the authorities would have noticed had I not gone to school at all. I think it was my mother’s new friend who finally persuaded her. For my mother at last had a friend, a good friend whose visits were regular and predictable. For him my mother bathed and did her hair and cooked specially and smiled when the doorbell rang.

My mother’s friend was a tall, heavy man who came to church with us every Sunday and afterwards held my hand as I walked along the top of the low wall that bordered the churchyard. He owned a small cab company—he drove one himself—whose insignia was a lightning bolt across a bright blue circle. His name was David Clark, and he took me to school and picked me up every day of my first year.

I went to parochial school. Navy skirts and white blouses and black and white saddle oxfords, all of us. All of us, rows of little black raisins, waiting to be taught to read and to count and to love Lord Jesus. But I was the only one picked up by taxi every day at three o’clock. The children stared at me as I rode away, the Indian princess in her palanquin, the treasure of the mahal above Leconte’s Drugstore.

On the first day of school my mother went with me. I remember very little about that day—I was nauseated with excitement, gripped with fear—but I remember the dress she wore. She had made it herself of course, just as she had made my school uniform; it was brown linen, a long-sleeved blouse and an eight-gore skirt. I saw the nuns’ eyes flick over us in brief appraisal: we passed with honors. (I took it as my due. I wonder now how my mother felt.)

The school smelled of peanuts and garlic bologna. The floor of my classroom was spotted with puddles of slimy liquid. Oddly enough, the other children’s panic quieted me. In the reek of their nervousness, my own stomach settled, and when the harried janitor arrived with a bucket of sawdust to sprinkle on the vomit, I helped him by pushing aside the desks.

That first day was the longest I have ever known. And the hottest. It was early September and the afternoon sun burned through the window shades to polish our faces with sweat—all except the teaching sister. Her face remained dry and dull as if coated with a film of dust.

I never grew used to the noise and rush of children leaving class. When the bell sounded, I always waited while the room emptied. Then, in a pause disturbed only by the soft sounds of the teacher gathering her papers, I walked slowly through the door, last and alone. Always alone, except for once, years later when I was at boarding school at St. Mary’s, mine the only dark face in a sea of Irish skin. (The other girls simply ignored me, saw through me as if I were invisible or transparent.) By the time I had gathered my books and reached the door, their departing backs were far down the hall. But at St. Mary’s I was not alone. My companion was a moonfaced child of my own age who had rheumatoid arthritis, took massive doses of cortisone, and moved with the slow painful dignity of an ancient woman. She died in our second year of high school. I, along with every other girl in the school, wrote a letter of condolence to her parents. Mine was never acknowledged.

But that was in the future, in the time when I was no longer a child, a good many years away.

For first grade, I had two skirts, made by my mother according to the uniform dress code of the parochial school system, and two blouses. Every second day, when I came home, I was expected to wash my blouse carefully, using the kitchen sink and a small scrubbing board that my mother kept underneath, propped against the pipes. I then hung it on the back porch inside the screen, where no bird could soil it. Every so often my mother was dissatisfied with its whiteness and she would wash it again in bleach. The next time I wore that blouse I was certain to have a rash across my neck and shoulders where the fabric rubbed my skin.

Later on, when my growing required new blouses (the skirts had deep hems to let down), my mother made them slightly different. She added small tucks down the front, two tiny rows on each side of the buttons. I noticed the nuns looking at me—they were very strict about uniforms in those days—and they must have written to my mother. My next blouses were perfectly plain. What the nuns couldn’t know about were my slips. My mother made my slips too, and they had all the elaborate decorations that my blouses lacked. They were tucked, with drawn lace and wide bands of crochet at the shoulders, and a deep flounce of lace at the hem. Only one nun ever saw them and she wasn’t really a nun. She was a novice: very young, shorter even than I was. She was cleaning the bathrooms and I, not noticing her, was fanning myself with my skirt against the heat. She stopped and fingered my slip. “What lovely work, what exquisite work.” Then she looked shocked and ashamed—perhaps she had made a vow of silence—and she went hastily back to her pail and mop.

After the first year at school, I took the city bus home. The stop was at our corner. All I had to do was cross the street and open the door. Once inside, I rushed to bathe, to brush my hair, to put on the dresses that my mother would sell. Wearing her clothes and her dreams, I would move carefully among her customers, gracefully, as only a princess can.

The lotus blossom. The treasure of the mahal. In the women’s faces I saw greed and covetousness. My mother’s order books rustled busily. I myself drew spirit and sustenance from the flickering eyes and the fingers stretched out to touch. In the small crowded room, I had come into my castle and my kingdom.

And so I passed my childhood disguised to myself as a princess. I thrived, grew strong and resilient. When the kingdom at last fell and the castle was conquered, and I lost my crown and my birthright, when I stood naked and revealed as a young black female of illegitimate birth, it hardly mattered. By then the castle and the kingdom were within me and I carried them away.

A
S THE PLANE BEGAN
its descent into Clarksdale, Nancy Martinson stretched and sighed, closed her magazine and tucked it away neatly. Her husband and younger daughter slept soundly in the seats next to her; across the aisle her other daughter worked a crossword puzzle.

Outside the brilliant morning sunshine thinned to a yellow hazy glow. On the ground below, patches of fog shrouded the neatly plowed cornfields and clung to the brushy sides of the hills. The plane banked, circled; she saw a black strip of highway and a single car on it.

The engines slowed, changed tone, settling the plane for its final approach. With a soft hiss, the wheels went down. Thick gray fog wiped the window empty.

She sat back, rubbing her neck, dutifully checking her seat belt, waiting for the landing, watching the fog-obscured window. And saw a tree race past, leaves spattering like rain against the window.

Somebody has thrown a tree at us, she thought foolishly. How can that be.

The floor rose, lurching hard against her feet. She was shaken like a rag doll, so violently she could scarcely breathe. She wrapped her arms around her body, holding on, while her head pounded against the seat back. Her knees jerked up, beating against her crossed arms. She heard loud squeals like tires on pavement and a steady high-pitched metallic whine. And voices, massed voices like a church choir far away. But no, she thought with sluggish wonder, those were screams.

She held tightly to herself as she careened through flashes of light and dark, through roaring oceans of sound. Shaking violently like a flag snapping in the wind.

A yellow column of flame appeared in the aisle. Glittering, shining. The color of sun, burning like sun.

She saw her daughter—recognized the blue and white stripes of her dress—saw her daughter, arms outstretched, rise to meet it. Pass through the gleaming gateway and vanish.

Next to her, her husband was rising, stretching. She saw clearly the initial on his shirt sleeve. He reached for her, missed, called to her. Before he vanished in the brilliant light.

She too would follow.… But the arms wrapped around her body refused to loosen their grip. Her feet stamped down against the lurching floor and found nothing there. She struggled, bent double, thrashing from side to side.

Then she was free. In silence, in complete and perfect silence, she floated slowly through air that was sprinkled and speckled with glitter. Fell forever along rainbows like giant playground slides. Ended at last with trees bending over her, surrounding her. To hold them back, she lifted her hands straight out in front of her, fingers spread.

All around her small lives went on, undisturbed. Grass broke through its softened seed, uncoiling to the surface, lifting tents of mud on the points of its sharp blades. Leaves unrolled from their tight curls on the twigs overhead, relaxing to the air with soft whisperings of content.

She heard ants running across the surface of the earth, feet clattering like iron boots. She heard grains of sand shift and rattle within the tunnels worms dug patiently below the surface. And she saw that the ground around her spurted blood like many fountains and the worms’ tunnels flooded red.

Sam Flanders, in his second year with KLR-News, left his apartment half an hour early for work. He checked his watch, then checked again with the car radio. He shrugged: thirty minutes’ lost sleep. Well, since he had extra time, he wouldn’t fight interstate traffic. He’d go the long way, by back roads, through the country.