The Sweetest Thing (19 page)

He touched my shoulder, and I shuddered, shoved his hand away, bent my head down, and quickened my pace to almost a run. They laughed behind me and were by my side again. Most evenings at this time, the streets around Five Points were still crowded, but that evening, I saw no one.

“We know missy works nearby. We seen you riding the streetcar alone and figured sometime we'd get our chance, when no one was around.” The man who had touched me now grabbed me by the arm. The other, a smaller man with a black cap pulled low on his face, yanked my purse from my grasp.

“Now, where is the money missy makes at her job?”

I felt light-headed with fear. I always kept the cash in my skirt pocket—what if they were determined to find it? He began pulling items out of my purse—my wallet, my brush—while the taller man shoved me toward a side street.

In a panic, I screamed so loud and so long that, taken aback, their reaction time was compromised. The taller man shoved me to the ground and was at my throat in half a second. “Missy shouldn't have done that.” He slapped his hand over my mouth.

I tried to bite him. Then I saw his knife. Dread washed through me.

“Where's the money, missy?”

From far away I thought I heard someone calling my name. Mr. Saxton! A tall figure wearing a hat approached us, and my heart sank. I didn't know the man. Was he a cohort of these men?

No. He had called my name.

Or was I hallucinating?

My assailants cursed and took off running, with my purse. I sat on the ground, heart hammering in my chest, afraid to move. When the man in the hat came near and bent down, I screamed again. He backed away, saying, “It's okay, miss. I won't hurt you. Let me help you up.”

I found I could barely stand. My legs were trembling so violently that I thought for sure they would buckle under me.

“Are you hurt?” the man asked.

I shook my head.

“Can I help you get somewhere?”

I looked up at him. He was well-groomed, middle-aged, dressed in a business suit and wearing a fedora.

“Daddy!” I cried out.

He stared at me warily.

No, not my father. Just a businessman, headed home from work.

“The streetcar,” I choked out, unable to pronounce another word. He walked beside me in silence.

We reached the stop. Still trembling, I whispered, “Thank you. I . . . I want to give you something for helping me.” I reached in my skirt pocket and pulled out the cash. But when I looked up, he was gone. Vanished.

On the streetcar, I sat almost glued beside a young woman with a small child. It seemed to take an eternity to get home. My mouth was parched as I stumbled inside our house, bolted the lock behind me, collapsed on the floor, and sobbed.

Mamma and Mrs. Chandler and Dobbs went with me to report the mugging at the police station, and then I begged Dobbs to spend the night at our house. For the sake of Mamma and Barbara and Irvin, I tried to act as if I were fine, but I wrestled with nightmares through the night, seeing blurred faces of evil men and then Daddy's, so clear, beside me.

I awoke to find Dobbs there, kneeling beside the bed and holding a cool rag on my forehead, hers a mass of wrinkles. “It's okay, Perri. Just a bad dream.” I nodded, patted her hand, and closed my eyes. But I kept seeing the men's faces and then hearing someone calling my name and feeling that Daddy was somehow right there beside me.

Dobbs

My friendship with Perri had begun through tragedy, and it seemed to solidify, once again, after the mugging incident. Upon her request, I stayed at her house for a few nights, but I immediately felt the eyes of Mrs. Singleton on me, disapproving, suspicious. And it hurt. I wanted to take her away, alone, and tell her exactly what I had found in the toolbox, but she was not interested. That was clear.

Twice, I almost told Perri about her father's toolbox, but in the end, I could not bring myself to say the words. I needed to. I did not want her to find out from another source, and yet, in my mind, it seemed too complicated, and she seemed too fragile to hear it.

It was a few days later when Perri asked me, “Dobbs, do you believe in angels?”

“Angels?”

“Yes, like a guardian angel?”

“I think so. I mean, I know Jesus talks about children having an angel watching over them.”

“I think the man who saved me was an angel.”

I was so shocked, I had no response.

“I know he called my name. I just know it. I heard it. And when he came close, I thought it was my father. I could have sworn it was him. But it turned out to be just a well-dressed businessman, and when I tried to offer him something, he vanished. Really. He just wasn't there anymore.” She looked hopeful and fearful at the same time. “So could it have been an angel?”

I took her hand and held it and said, “Sounds like an angel to me. One way or another, God protected you.”

And I think Perri agreed with me on this one incident. I really think she did.

CHAPTER

17

Dobbs

Hank wrote me at least twice a week, and every time I saw his handwriting on the envelope, my heart would twitter and I'd get a deep longing to be in his arms, safe. To my great relief, he was hired to work at the World's Fair, and in each letter, he told me about his job selling Coca-Colas to tourists who came from all over the world. He also assured me of his prayers and encouraged me to “give the enigma of the toolbox up to God each day and night.”

So I tried. Honestly I did. But before long, I'd be calculating in my mind, and then I'd scribble my ideas down on scraps of paper. I had accumulated quite a few scraps by the time I jotted down what I considered the two most plausible explanations:

~Holden Singleton had been stealing things and hiding them for a while; he needed money; he was certainly desperate. If he stole them and hid them, when I found them and told Aunt Josie and she told Mrs. Singleton, then perhaps Mrs. Singleton took them out, to clear her husband's name and either told or didn't tell Aunt Josie.

~Somebody else stole them—an unknown person—and hid them in the Singletons' house to implicate Holden or Anna or both, and that person is still happily going about his or her business. Who could it be? Maybe mean, ornery Becca! But why?

Every day as I looked at those scraps of paper, I admitted that I had no clue as to what had really happened. A verse floated into my mind.
“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy paths.”

Trust. I took my Bible, and, as usual, it fell open to where I had inserted the photograph. Once again I saw Jackie's face staring out at me, bringing with it that tiny whisper of doubt. I closed the Bible without reading a single verse, wondering why life's situations were so complicated and painful.

Surely God would show me something. He'd show up, as He always did. Until then, I would wait.

Perri

To get my mind off the mugging, I organized the darkroom with the new equipment from Mr. Saxton. He had given me another light box, to replace my old system, and good advice about avoiding extreme temperatures for the chemicals. He'd also told me how to help with ventilation, to keep the chemical odor down. Finally, he'd given me quite a bit of film that needed to be used soon and a stack of postcards onto which I could print photographs.

It took a lot longer to drive from our house on Club Drive to the Chandler residence on West Paces Ferry. Instead of asking Jimmy for a ride, I began driving the Buick myself, so gradually I was less nervous behind the wheel. Once at the Chandlers', Hosea and Cornelius helped me install the light box and made a deep tank that would accommodate many rolls of film. Occasionally Mrs. Chandler came out to see the darkroom's progress and didn't seem to mind allowing her servants to help me.

Cornelius came up with the idea of making a wood reel, for washing film, which turned by the force of water passing through it, like a paddle wheel.

“You're a genius!” I told him.

But when Parthenia heard me say that, she made a face and said, “He's no genius. Jus' as stubborn a boy as anyone could imagine.”

Cornelius yanked on his little sister's braids, but he gave her the sweetest smile, and I could tell he was proud of his invention and proud of his kid sister.

So little by little, in the sweltering heat of July, my darkroom began to look more like a professional space, and I couldn't help wishing that Philip—and Luke—would come down to see it.

Philip sent me postcards each week, and on one he'd printed a photo of Luke and himself standing outside their kiosk at the World's Fair. Luke was holding a small hand-written sign:

25 cents!

Have your picture taken outside your favorite exhibit

and pick it up the next day

On the back of the postcard, Philip had written,
This was Luke's idea, and I tell you what, everyone wants to have their photo made!

When I showed the postcard to Mr. Saxton, he said, “You could do the same thing, Perri. You've got the postcards. Why don't you offer to take photos of your classmates doing their favorite activity? Ten cents a photo.” He chuckled. “If there's one thing I've learned in twenty years of photography, it's that Atlanta girls love to have their photographs made.”

“What a swell idea, Mr. Saxton!”

He beamed at me, twirling his moustache around a finger.

———

That weekend, Dobbs helped me pass out little handmade flyers to the girls at the club, which read:

Summer Shots:

The perfect keepsake to remember

these wonderful lazy days of summer

when your head is hidden in a school book next fall.

Three poses—30 cents.

10 cents for a postcard.

Soon the word spread around, and many girls from Washington Seminary were begging their mothers for Summer Shots. Within a week, the girls from our rival school were keen on the idea too, and then the boys found out.

So I worked for Mr. Saxton during the week, and on the weekends, Dobbs and I had oodles of work too. We even got the kids in on it. Frances and Barbara trimmed the postcards while they whispered about boys. They also added little colored hearts or stars or other symbols around the edges of the cards. Frances was quite good at drawing, and Barbara was marvelous with choosing colors.

Coobie tagged along with us, brushing a girl's hair back or arranging her hands and then standing behind me as I prepared to take a photo. She'd jump up and down, curls jiggling all around her face, yelling, “Smile! Come on, now. Smile!”

After a particularly long day of taking photos and then developing them in the darkroom, I told everyone good-night and drove the Buick home alone. I crept along at first, afraid of the dark, squinting to see with the headlights, my mind reliving the mugging incident. I gripped the steering wheel, leaned forward, and peered out the windshield as if I expected a drunken tramp to jump out in front of the car. Or perhaps an angel would show up.

Cautiously, I made my way home and parked out in front of the house. It was only when I got out of the Buick and started up the flagstone sidewalk toward the front door that I realized my mistake. I had driven to my
real
home, the one I knew and loved. My instincts had simply directed me along that familiar route. In the pitch-dark, I stared at the white columns, looking pale gray in the night. The sprawling mansion was absolutely dark, lonely.

“Someday,” I said out loud, addressing my old home, “someday we'll be back. I promise.”

———

In early August, I drove the Buick out to the Alms Houses so that I could take the boxes of clothes and household items we had cleaned out of our old home to Mrs. Clark, the director. Mae Pearl and Dobbs came with me, as well as Coobie and Parthenia. Dobbs and the little girls immediately went to find Anna out in the fields, and Mae Pearl walked over to the Black Alms House and went up on the porch, where the same old man she'd met the last time—Mr. Ross was his name—was still seated. It struck me that perhaps he had never even moved, and that made me smile.

Mamma and Daddy had always been involved in charity work through the Rotary Club, the Garden Club, the Junior League, the church, and many other organizations, and I'd helped at the Red Cross and the Northside Nursing Home. I had never seen charity work as a sacrifice. To me, it was normal, giving our excess time and money to help those less fortunate. But as I stood in Mrs. Clark's office, boxes filled with our possessions beside me, I felt sliced open and raw. I was giving away a part of my family's past, and as I did so, I could suddenly relate to these people who had fallen on hard times. I had seen what I thought of as
shared humanness
in Mae Pearl's and Mr. Ross's hands. Now I saw a shared humanness in all that we had lost.

Later I walked around the grounds taking pictures with the Zeiss Contax Mr. Saxton had lent me, and I felt a great solace. I caught sight of Coobie and Parthenia coming from the cornfields. They started chasing butterflies, and I followed behind them. I got a marvelous candid shot of Coobie holding out her hand with a Monarch butterfly perched on it. Her face was one big exclamation point. Beside her, Parthenia was pointing and hopping around, and in the background the colored prisoners labored in the fields.

I walked out farther to where they were working, the men's bare torsos shining with sweat and the women wiping their brows with damp handkerchiefs after every lift and pitch of the hoe. For one fleeting second, I thought of Vincent Van Gogh, whom we had studied in art class, out in the fields of southern France, painting the garlic pickers under a merciless sun. I lifted my camera, put it to my eye, and focused in on one woman, who was wiping her hands on her apron as she leaned heavily on her hoe. I clicked the shutter. She saw me. Our eyes met. I gave a brief smile and waved.

Dobbs

Perri suggested that Mae Pearl and I go out to the Alms Houses with her when she took her father's clothes and other possessions to the people living there. Yet I went with a heavy heart. For a while, I had imagined Anna freed, back with her family, living on the Chandler property. Instead, she was still working as a prisoner.

I found her coming in from the fields, and as we walked back to her room together, I told her all about the latest developments with the stolen silver and jewelry.

Anna kept shaking her head back and forth. “Heap of trouble now, ain't it? Not yore fault, though, Miz Mary Dobbs. I don't know what in the world happened in that house, but I know two things for shore, so you listen to me good.”

When Anna spoke, her dark eyes bore into me, making me the slightest bit uncomfortable. “First is that Miz Chandler ain't lying. If she said she didn't find those things, she's absolutely telling the truth. She won't lie to protect Miz Singleton or to protect me. I've known her since she was about yore age, and I kin tell you this: she just goes by the rules, is all. Right by the rules. She's a good woman, and that's the truth.”

Every once in a while as she spoke, Anna gave a slight wince, as if a sudden pain shot through her, which I imagined it did. I studied her deep-set eyes and the circles underneath them, her thick arms all tight and muscular from lifting heavy bales of hay and swinging a hoe and who knew what else.

“The second thing is this. Mr. Singleton ain't done no stealin' either. I knowed him—a fine man, kinda high-strung and nervous, but good and honest. Miz Singleton used ta hire me to work at their beautiful house whenever they gave one of them big fancy parties. Me and Dellareen, we'd talk, and we said it a hundred times if we said it once—our bosses is honest men, both of 'em. Ain't always that way for servants, no sir-ree, but we's lucky.

“So I don't know who took them things and hid 'em there, but it waddn't Mr. Singleton. It waddn't him.”

I shook my head. “But he was depressed! Desperate! People do strange things, opposite of their typical demeanor, when they're sad and afraid and desperate.”

“Listen ta me, Miz Mary Dobbs. Good Lawd's providin' for me in His own way, and you ain't got no business digging inta things way past yore understandin'. Ain't yore fault ya found them things, but nuthin' you can do 'bout it now. If'n the Good Lawd wants this mystery to be solved, well, I reckon He's big enough to solve it.”

I felt rebuked, and my face must have turned scarlet. Anna's words sounded a lot like things I might say about God providing. But the way she said it came from somewhere deeper in her soul.