Song of Solomon (36 page)

“That’s her. Ought to be shamed, the two of them.
Cousins.
”

“Must not be working out if she’s trying to kill him.”

“I thought he left town.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Well, I know I don’t want to truck with her. Not me.”

“She don’t bother nobody but him.”

“Well, Pilate, then. Pilate know I turned her down, she wouldn’t like it. They spoil that child something awful.”

“Didn’t you order fish from next door?”

“All that hair. I hope she don’t expect nothing fancy.”

“Call him up again. I’m getting hungry.”

“Be just like her. No appointment. No nothing. Come in here all late and wrong and want something fancy.”

She probably meant to wait somewhere. Or go home and return to Lilly’s at eight-thirty. Yet the momentum of the thing held her—it was all of a piece. From the moment she looked into the mirror in the little pink compact she could not stop. It was as though she held her breath and could not let it go until the energy and busyness culminated in a beauty that would dazzle him. That was why, when she left Lilly’s, she looked neither right nor left but walked on and on, oblivious of other people, street lights, automobiles, and a thunderous sky. She was thoroughly soaked before she realized it was raining and then only because one of the shopping bags split. When she looked down, her Evan-Picone white-with-a-band-of-color skirt was lying in a neat half fold on the shoulder of the road, and she was far far from home. She put down both bags, picked the skirt up and brushed away the crumbs of gravel that stuck to it. Quickly she refolded it, but when she tried to tuck it back into the shopping bag, the bag collapsed altogether. Rain soaked her hair and poured down her neck as she stooped to repair the damage. She pulled out the box of Con Brios, a smaller package of Van Raalte gloves, and another containing her fawn-trimmed-in-sea-foam shortie nightgown. These she stuffed into the other bag. Retracing her steps, she found herself unable to carry the heavier bag in one hand, so she hoisted it up to her stomach and hugged it with both arms. She had gone hardly ten yards when the bottom fell out of it. Hagar tripped on Jungle Red (Sculptura) and Youth Blend, and to her great dismay, saw her box of Sunny Glow toppling into a puddle. She collected Jungle Red and Youth Blend safely, but Sunny Glow, which had tipped completely over and lost its protective disk, exploded in light peach puffs under the weight of the raindrops. Hagar scraped up as much of it as she could and pressed the wilted cellophane disk back into the box.

Twice before she got to Darling Street she had to stop to retrieve her purchases from the ground. Finally she stood in Pilate’s doorway, limp, wet, and confused, clutching her bundles in whatever way she could. Reba was so relieved to see her that she grabbed her, knocking Chantilly and Bandit to the floor. Hagar stiffened and pulled away from her mother.

“I have to hurry,” she whispered. “I have to hurry.”

Loafers sluicing, hair dripping, holding her purchases in her arms, she made it into the bedroom and shut the door. Pilate and Reba made no move to follow her.

Hagar stripped herself naked there, and without taking time to dry her face or hair or feet, she dressed herself up in the white-with-a-band-of-color skirt and matching bolero, the Maiden-form brassiere, the Fruit of the Loom panties, the no color hose, the Playtex garter belt and the Joyce con brios. Then she sat down to attend to her face. She drew charcoal gray for the young round eye through her brows, after which she rubbed mango tango on her cheeks. Then she patted sunny glow all over her face. Mango tango disappeared under it and she had to put it on again. She pushed out her lips and spread jungle red over them. She put baby clear sky light to outwit the day light on her eyelids and touched bandit to her throat, earlobes, and wrists. Finally she poured a little youth blend into her palm and smoothed it over her face.

At last she opened the door and presented herself to Pilate and Reba. And it was in their eyes that she saw what she had not seen before in the mirror: the wet ripped hose, the soiled white dress, the sticky, lumpy face powder, the streaked rouge, and the wild wet shoals of hair. All this she saw in their eyes, and the sight filled her own with water warmer and much older than the rain. Water that lasted for hours, until the fever came, and then it stopped. The fever dried her eyes up as well as her mouth.

She lay in her little Goldilocks’-choice bed, her eyes sand dry and as quiet as glass. Pilate and Reba, seated beside the bed, bent over her like two divi-divi trees beaten forward by a wind always blowing from the same direction. Like the trees, they offered her all they had: love murmurs and a protective shade.

“Mama.” Hagar floated up into an even higher fever.

“Hmmm?”

“Why don’t he like my hair?”

“Who, baby? Who don’t like your hair?”

“Milkman.”

“Milkman does too like your hair,” said Reba.

“No. He don’t. But I can’t figure out why. Why he never liked my hair.”

“Of course he likes it. How can he not like it?” asked Pilate.

“He likes silky hair.” Hagar was murmuring so low they had to bend down to hear her.

“Silky hair? Milkman?”

“He don’t like hair like mine.”

“Hush, Hagar.”

“Silky hair the color of a penny.”

“Don’t talk, baby.”

“Curly, wavy, silky hair. He don’t like mine.”

Pilate put her hand on Hagar’s head and trailed her fingers through her granddaughter’s soft damp wool. “How can he not love your hair? It’s the same hair that grows out of his own armpits. The same hair that crawls up out his crotch on up his stomach. All over his chest. The very same. It grows out of his nose, over his lips, and if he ever lost his razor it would grow all over his face. It’s all over his head, Hagar. It’s his hair too. He got to love it.”

“He don’t love it at all. He hates it.”

“No he don’t. He don’t know what he loves, but he’ll come around, honey, one of these days. How can he love himself and hate your hair?”

“He loves silky hair.”

“Hush, Hagar.”

“Penny-colored hair.”

“Please, honey.”

“And lemon-colored skin.”

“Shhh.”

“And gray-blue eyes.”

“Hush now, hush.”

“And thin nose.”

“Hush, girl, hush.”

“He’s never going to like my hair.”

“Hush. Hush. Hush, girl, hush.”

The neighbors took up a collection because Pilate and Reba had spent everything getting Hagar the things needed to fix herself up. It didn’t amount to much, though, and it was touch and go whether she’d have a decent funeral until Ruth walked down to Sonny’s Shop and stared at Macon without blinking. He reached into his cash drawer and pulled out two twenty-dollar bills and put them down on the desk. Ruth didn’t stretch out her hand to pick them up, or even shift her feet. Macon hesitated, then wheeled around in his chair and began fiddling with the combination to his safe. Ruth waited. Macon dipped into the safe three separate times before Ruth unclasped her hands and reached for the money. “Thank you,” she said, and marched off to Linden Chapel Funeral Home to make the fastest arrangements possible.

Two days later, halfway through the service, it seemed as though Ruth was going to be the lone member of the bereaved family there. A female quartet from Linden Baptist Church had already sung “Abide with Me”; the wife of the mortician had read the condolence cards and the minister had launched into his “Naked came ye into this life and naked shall ye depart” sermon, which he had always believed suitable for the death of a young woman; and the winos in the vestibule who came to pay their respects to “Pilate’s girl,” but who dared not enter, had begun to sob, when the door swung open and Pilate burst in, shouting, “Mercy!” as though it were a command. A young man stood up and moved toward her. She flung out her right arm and almost knocked him down. “I want mercy!” she shouted, and began walking toward the coffin, shaking her head from side to side as though somebody had asked her a question and her answer was no.

Halfway up the aisle she stopped, lifted a finger, and pointed. Then slowly, although her breathing was fast and shallow, she lowered her hand to her side. It was strange, the languorous, limp hand coming to rest at her side while her breathing was coming so quick and fast. “Mercy,” she said again, but she whispered it now. The mortician scurried toward her and touched her elbow. She moved away from him and went right up to the bier. She tilted her head and looked down. Her earring grazed her shoulder. Out of the total blackness of her clothes it blazed like a star. The mortician tried to approach her again, and moved closer, but when he saw her inky, berry-black lips, her cloudy, rainy eyes, the wonderful brass box hanging from her ear, he stepped back and looked at the floor.

“Mercy?” Now she was asking a question. “Mercy?”

It was not enough. The word needed a bottom, a frame. She straightened up, held her head high, and transformed the plea into a note. In a clear bluebell voice she sang it out—the one word held so long it became a sentence—and before the last syllable had died in the corners of the room, she was answered in a sweet soprano: “I hear you.”

The people turned around. Reba had entered and was singing too. Pilate neither acknowledged her entrance nor missed a beat. She simply repeated the word “Mercy,” and Reba replied. The daughter standing at the back of the chapel, the mother up front, they sang.

In the nighttime.

Mercy.

In the darkness.

Mercy.

In the morning.

Mercy.

At my bedside.

Mercy.

On my knees now.

Mercy. Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.

They stopped at the same time in a high silence. Pilate reached out her hand and placed three fingers on the edge of the coffin. Now she addressed her words to the woman bordered in gray satin who lay before her. Softly, privately, she sang to Hagar the very same reassurance she had promised her when she was a little girl.

Who’s been botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin?

Who’s been botherin my baby?

Who’s been botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin?

Who’s been botherin my baby girl?

Somebody’s been botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin.

Somebody’s been botherin my baby.

Somebody’s been botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin.

Some
body’s been botherin my baby girl.

I’ll find who’s botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin.

I’ll find who’s botherin my baby.

I’ll find who’s botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin.

I’ll find who’s botherin my baby girl.

“My baby girl.” The three words were still pumping in her throat as she turned away from the coffin. Looking about at the faces of the people seated in the pews, she fastened on the first pair of eyes that were directed toward her. She nodded at the face and said, “My baby girl.” She looked for another pair of eyes and told him also, “My baby girl.” Moving back down the aisle, she told each face turned toward her the same piece of news. “My baby girl. That’s my baby girl. My baby girl. My baby girl. My baby girl.”

Conversationally she spoke, identifying Hagar, selecting her away from everybody else in the world who had died. First she spoke to the ones who had the courage to look at her, shake their heads, and say, “Amen.” Then she spoke to those whose nerve failed them, whose glance would climb no higher than the long black fingers at her side. Toward them especially she leaned a little, telling in three words the full story of the stumped life in the coffin behind her. “My baby girl.” Words tossed like stones into a silent canyon.

Suddenly, like an elephant who has just found his anger and lifts his trunk over the heads of the little men who want his teeth or his hide or his flesh or his amazing strength, Pilate trumpeted for the sky itself to hear, “And she was
loved!”

It startled one of the sympathetic winos in the vestibule and he dropped his bottle, spurting emerald glass and jungle-red wine everywhere.

Chapter 14

Perhaps it was because the sun had hit the rim of the horizon, but Susan Byrd’s house looked different. The cedar tree was a silvery gray and its bark crinkled all the way up. It looked to Milkman like the leg of an ancient elephant. And now he noticed that the ropes that held the swing were frayed and the picket fence that had looked so bright and perky before was really flaked, peeling, even leaning to the left. The blue steps leading to the porch were faded into a watery gray. In fact the whole house looked seedy.

He lifted his hand to knock on the door and noticed the doorbell. He rang it and Susan Byrd opened the door.

“Hello again,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “you’re as good as your word.”

“I’d like to talk to you some more, if you don’t mind. About Sing. May I come in?”

“Of course.” She stood back from the door and the odor of another batch of gingerbread wafted out. Again they sat in the living room—he in the gray wing-back chair, she on the sofa this time. Miss Long was nowhere in sight.

“I know you don’t know who Sing married or if she married, but I was wondering—”

“Of course I know who she married. That is if they did marry. She married Jake, that black boy her mother took care of.”

Milkman felt dizzy. Everybody kept changing right in front of him. “But yesterday you said nobody heard from her after she left.”

“Nobody did. But they knew who she left with!”

“Jake?”

“Jake. Black Jake. Black as coal.”

“Where—where did they live? Boston?”

“I don’t know where they ended up. North, I guess. We never heard.”

“I thought you said she went to a private school in Boston.”

She dismissed the whole notion with a wave of her hand. “I just said that in front of
her,
Grace. She talks so much, you know. Carries tales all over the county. It’s true she was supposed to go to some school, but she didn’t. She left on that double-team wagon with that black boy, Jake. A whole lot of slaves got together. Jake was driving. Can you imagine it? Riding off with a wagonload of slaves?”

“What was Jake’s last name? Can you tell me?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think he had one. He was one of those flying African children. They must all be dead a long time now.”

“Flying African children?”

“Urn hm, one of Solomon’s children. Or Shalimar. Papa said Heddy always called him Shalimar.”

“And Heddy was…”

“My grandmother. Sing’s mother and Papa’s too. An Indian woman. She was the one who took care of Jake when his father left them all. She found him and took him home and raised him. She didn’t have any boy children then. My father, Crowell, came later.” She leaned forward and whispered, “She didn’t have a husband, Heddy. I didn’t want to go into all of that with Grace. You can imagine what she’d do with that information.

You’re a stranger, so it doesn’t matter. But Grace…” Susan Byrd looked pleadingly at the ceiling. “This Jake was a baby she found, and he and Sing grew up together, and I guess rather than be packed off to some Quaker school, she ran away with him. You know colored people and Indians mixed a lot, but sometimes, well, some Indians didn’t like it—the marrying, I mean. But neither one of them knew their own father, Jake nor Sing. And my own father didn’t know his. Heddy never said. I don’t know to this day if he was white, red, or—well—
what.
Sing’s name was Singing Bird. And my father’s name was Crow at first. Later he changed it to Crowell Byrd. After he took off his buckskin.” She smiled.

“Why did you call Solomon a flying African?”

“Oh, that’s just some old folks’ lie they tell around here. Some of those Africans they brought over here as slaves could fly. A lot of them flew back to Africa. The one around here who did was this same Solomon, or Shalimar—I never knew which was right. He had a slew of children, all over the place. You may have noticed that everybody around here claims kin to him. Must be over forty families spread in these hills calling themselves Solomon something or other. I guess he must have been hot stuff.” She laughed. “But anyway, hot stuff or not, he disappeared and left everybody. Wife, everybody, including some twenty-one children. And they say they all saw him go. The wife saw him and the children saw him. They were all working in the fields. They used to try to grow cotton here. Can you imagine? In these hills? But cotton was king then. Everybody grew it until the land went bad. It was cotton even when I was a girl. Well, back to this Jake boy. He was supposed to be one of Solomon’s original twenty-one—all boys and all of them with the same mother. Jake was the baby. The baby and the wife were right next to him when he flew off.”

“When you say ‘flew off’ you mean he ran away, don’t you? Escaped?”

“No, I mean flew. Oh, it’s just foolishness, you know, but according to the story he wasn’t running away. He was flying.

He flew. You know, like a bird. Just stood up in the fields one day, ran up some hill, spun around a couple of times, and was lifted up in the air. Went right on back to wherever it was he came from. There’s a big double-headed rock over the valley named for him. It like to killed the woman, the wife. I guess you could say ‘wife.’ Anyway she’s supposed to have screamed out loud for days. And there’s a ravine near here they call Ryna’s Gulch, and sometimes you can hear this funny sound by it that the wind makes. People say it’s the wife, Solomon’s wife, crying. Her name was Ryna. They say she screamed and screamed, lost her mind completely. You don’t hear about women like that anymore, but there used to be more—the kind of woman who couldn’t live without a particular man. And when the man left, they lost their minds, or died or something. Love, I guess. But I always thought it was trying to take care of children by themselves, you know what I mean?”

She talked on and on while Milkman sat back and listened to gossip, stories, legends, speculations. His mind was ahead of hers, behind hers, with hers, and bit by bit, with what she said, what he knew, and what he guessed, he put it all together.

Sing had said she was going to a Quaker school, but she joined Jake on his wagonful of ex-slaves heading for Boston or somewhere. They must have dropped their passengers all along the way. And then Jake, at the reins, took a wrong turn, because he couldn’t read, and they ended up in Pennsylvania.

“But there’s a children’s game they play around here. And in the game they sing, ‘Jake the
only
son of Solomon.’
Only.
” He looked at her, hoping she wouldn’t mind the interruption.

“Well, they’re wrong. He wasn’t the only son. There were twenty others. But he was the only one Solomon tried to take with him. Maybe that’s what it means. He lifted him up, but dropped him near the porch of the big house. That’s where Heddy found him. She used to come over there and help with the soapmaking and the candlemaking. She wasn’t a slave, but she worked over at the big house certain times of year. She was melting tallow when she looked up and saw this man holding a baby and flying toward the ridge. He brushed too close to a tree and the baby slipped out of his arms and fell through the branches to the ground. He was unconscious, but the trees saved him from dying. Heddy ran over and picked him up. She didn’t have any male children, like I said, just a little bitty girl, and this one just dropped out of the sky almost in her lap. She never named him anything different; she was afraid to do that. She found out the baby was Ryna’s, but Ryna was out of her mind. Heddy lived a good ways off from the place Solomon and them others worked on. She tried to keep the girl away from that place too. And you can imagine how she felt when both of them ran off. Just my father was left.”

“Did Jake have to register at the Freedmen’s Bureau before he left the state?”

“Everybody did. Everybody who had been slaves, that is. Whether they left the state or not. But we were never slaves, so—”

“You told me that. Weren’t any of Jake’s brothers registering too?”

“I couldn’t say. Those must have been some times, back then. Some bad times. It’s a wonder anybody knows who anybody is.”

“You’ve helped me a lot, Miss Byrd. I’m grateful.” He thought then about asking her if she had a photo album. He wanted to see Sing, Crowell, even Heddy. But he decided against it. She might start asking him questions, and he didn’t want to trouble her with a new-found relative who was as black as Jake.

“Now, that’s not the woman you’re looking, is it? Pilate?”

“No,” he said. “Couldn’t be.” He made motions of departure and then remembered his watch.

“By did I leave my watch here? I’d like it back.”

“Watch?”

“Yes. Your friend wanted to see it. Miss Long. I handed it to her but I forgot—” Milkman stopped. Susan Byrd was laughing out loud.

“Well, you can say goodbye to it, Mr. Macon. Grace will go to dinner all over the county telling people about the watch you gave her.”

“What?”

“Well, you know. She doesn’t mean any real harm, but it’s a quiet place. We don’t have many visitors, especially young men who wear gold watches and have northern accents. I’ll get it back for you.”

“Never mind. Never mind.”

“You’ll just have to forgive her otherwise. This is a dull place, Mr. Macon. There’s absolutely nothing in the world going on here. Not a thing.”