The Undertaker's Daughter (7 page)

I couldn’t wait for her to admire our latest ride. “Hi, Paulette! Did you see the car? We’re not keeping it, though, it’s a loaner.”

“Yes, honey, it’s mighty pretty.” Paulette was just too calm about it to my way of thinking. She failed to make her usual exclamations of awe.

My father and I sat on bright, shiny chrome stools covered in fake green leather. I spun around, testing my ability to make the seat stop so that it faced the window from where I could see Jubilee’s cemetery. It was a convenient location for my father; we
could always go check on a grave after he had a cup of coffee. I relished these long summer mornings with him and did my best to stretch out the time we spent together. I caught the waft of his aftershave as my eye fell on the glint of his gold wristwatch, and from these things a sense of safety washed over me. We were comfortable with each other and he made me feel included. I was the only child at the counter; no other father brought his young girl or boy to shoot the breeze with Jubilee’s coffee drinking men of business. My mother never joined us; she wasn’t one to twirl idly on a stool. It wasn’t a place for wives, but it was a place for me. A place where I felt special.

Paulette glanced at my father when I ordered a grape Nehi and a piece of pie at ten o’clock in the morning. She was checking to make sure that it was all right and thought that I didn’t know it, but I did. I nursed a bad itch to tell her, “Children do have eyes, you know. We see
everything
.”

She pointed to the pie case, where a lemon meringue pie sat temptingly uncut. I nodded. Perfect, considering the yellow-and-white convertible.

On this particular summer’s day Paulette began to cry. She tried to hold it back, as she dabbed her eyes and nose with her apron, but the tears ran down her powdered face and left a shadow of lines and shiny spots on her orange lipstick.

She spoke in a low voice to my father and then moved away to get my piece of pie.

“What’s Paulette crying about?” I whispered.

“Desegregation.”

“What’s that?”

“Her children are going to have to go to school with the colored children.”

“But what’s she crying about?”

“She doesn’t want them to.”

“Why not?” I was bewildered.

“Hush now, here she comes, don’t say anything else about it.”

Paulette came back with a generous piece of pie. She placed it in front of me and smiled painfully with a twisted face, her eyes still brimmed with tears.

“Here, honey,” she sniffed. “You tell your daddy to bring you back here tomorrow; we’ll have chocolate cake, your favorite. And Miss Lucy Ann is making her chicken salad tomorrow, too.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I mumbled, my mouth already covered in crumbs from the flaky crust.

My father had a few quiet words with Paulette; she took a handkerchief out of her apron pocket and dabbed her eyes. I didn’t know much, but I knew that Paulette would probably cry all day.

“No one wants their children to go to school with the coloreds,” he told her, “but it’s something we’re all going to have to get used to. Not even the families who’ve been running this town since the Civil War can stop this.”

Paulette nodded furiously, eyes down, handkerchief to her nose, as if my father had said the exact thing she needed to hear. For Paulette and for others, a smudge had appeared on the horizon. Here we were, over ten years on from the day segregation was ruled unlawful in public schools, and ours was only now preparing to comply.

The New South approached.

When we returned to the funeral home, I reclaimed my seat on the swing and waited for the Shroud Lady. My father had become aware of a woman who whipped up burial shrouds at home on her Singer sewing machine. In an admirable marketing coup he made a deal with her not to sell to any other funeral
home in Jubilee, which basically meant not to Alfred Deboe, who owned the only other white funeral home in town.

She drove up Main Street in her two-tone Impala; the sun caught the green of her fenders and ricocheted off the white top. She parked, precisely, and waved to me as she opened the trunk. I opened our front door for her like a concierge, excited to usher her inside. There was work to do—shrouds to view, shrouds to choose.

She didn’t have beauty-parlor hair, and that made me observe her more closely. Her hair was as black as a raven’s and worn in a neat bun at her nape. Her vivid red lips stood out against her pale skin, and her thick, black glasses made her look like one of those movie librarians who takes her glasses off, shakes out her hair, and voilà—a bombshell. She reminded me of the young dead corpse in our home movies, but my father told me not to tell her that.

Her figure, flattered by the tailored suits she wore when she delivered her goods, made me think of working women who sauntered into skyscrapers I’d seen in the movies. Just the word
skyscraper
made my imagination soar. I pictured myself at the top of one dropping a handkerchief, counting aloud how long it floated before landing on a New York City sidewalk. A return to reality brought me face-to-face with the wife of a farmer selling shrouds to a funeral home in a small town. She walked quickly in her stilettos, anxious to show her wares, which she carried in green cardboard dress boxes stacked up in her slender arms.

I followed her inside to the central hallway but the brightness of the sun did not, and our eyes adjusted to the tunnel of dim light in the foyer. The gray carpet had seen better days, the long hallway had no windows, and today, devoid of flowers and mourners, it verged on downright somber. The Shroud Lady’s burial dresses transformed the dullness. I watched in wonder as she lined up the
boxes on a row of chairs and opened them one by one. The chiffon billowed out of the boxes and she leaned over and smoothed out the sheared bodices. Carefully, almost lovingly, she displayed the shrouds that would only ever see a few hours of daylight.

My father turned to me. “Well, what do you think? Do you think we ought to buy some of these?”

“I guess so.”

“Which ones? You choose a couple.”

Oh, dear. How to choose between all of the pastel colors? Lavender, pink, mint-green chiffon, baby blue; I’d never be able to decide. I thought about all of the caskets in the showroom that matched the colors before me now.

“Can we buy all of them?”

“Do you think we can afford them all?” He winked at the Shroud Lady.

“I don’t know, but maybe we can charge them.” I’d heard my mother say “charge it” at the pharmacy.

“I think she might accept a check, now won’t you, Mrs. Youngblood?”

I always forgot that the Shroud Lady had a name.

“Where did you learn to sew?” I asked her.

“My mother taught me,” she purred. She had the loveliest Southern drawl, soft, without a hint of a country twang.

One of the strongest, most memorable images for which a mortician strived was to make the deceased appear as if he or she were at rest. If she was going to be successful, the Shroud Lady had to contribute to that image. She sat down at her Singer and imagined what she thought a negligee-type burial dress should look like. She strove to find the right balance between a dress and a nightgown. A shroud must be feminine, yet cover as much skin as possible.

“Then why aren’t men buried in their pajamas? Why are they
always buried in a suit and the women in nightgowns?” I asked my father.

“There’s no equivalent. The shroud looks more like a dress than a nightgown. You can’t camouflage men’s pajamas. That’s just the way it is,” my father said, “and it’s not a nightgown, it’s a shroud. There’s a difference.”

Humph. Not much.

The Shroud Lady bought nylon chiffon by the bolt in sherbet colors and, eager to design something a little different from all the other shrouds she’d seen, tackled the front of the garment. She created five rows of shearing on the front of the dress, which made them nice and full. The garment was left open down the back so that it was easily adjustable.

I interrupted her right there. The image that swirled around in my mind of a dead woman’s bare back lying on that satin fabric sent shivers through me. “Do you mean that it’s just . . . just . . .
open
in the back?”

“No one’s going to see the back of it. And it makes it easier to slip on. Here, look.” She removed a pretty pink pile of chiffon from a box and gently shook it out. Two long fabric ties hung down from the back.

The “itty-bitty” buttons, as she said, were covered in her seemingly endless supply of chiffon and formed a neat row down the front. White lace trimmed the bodice and the wrists of long sleeves that hid the ravages of age and disease. The neck rose modestly high and was also trimmed in white lace. She felt these details made her shrouds special.

“How long does it take you to make one of these?” I asked.

“A
whole
day.”

She sold each shroud to my father for $13.75. I wanted one for myself. They looked like something for Victorian ladies I’d seen in
picture books, and I imagined dressing up in a blue or lavender shroud. Perhaps I’d pretend to be a ghost, or maybe I would play dead. I looked down at my frayed Keds and pedal pushers; it would be an improvement. My father ignored my whim, thinking it morbid.

I followed her out the front door and watched her walk down the street, empty-handed except for her small black clutch. I calculated her takings that day and considered what she might do with the extra money. Perhaps she’d buy a new hat, or a fat milking cow for her farm. I’d buy a bus ticket to those skyscrapers in New York.

She waved once more from the green-and-white Impala just as my father came out to tell me that Belle was ready for me.

Lunch. Nothing fancy, one of the many varieties of Campbell’s soup and cheese and crackers, but if Belle placed it in front of me, it was food fit for royalty. My mother said she just couldn’t do without Belle’s help. It was the reason I couldn’t understand why Paulette was so upset about her children going to school with black children. Belle was black and I thought she was exquisite. It wasn’t that Belle was beautiful; in fact, she was plain and had a huge goiter in the center of her neck that moved up and down when she drank, much to my fascination.

“Here, Belle, have some ice water.” I plied her with more just to watch her neck bob when she drank it.

After Belle arrived, I no longer ran around with my shirt buttoned wrong or wearing yesterday’s socks. It was all right with me if I forgot to brush my hair, but Belle wouldn’t stand for it. She all but spit on it to tame it. All of her own had fallen out due to an application of faulty straightening lotion that made her hopping mad at her sorry excuse for a beautician. So Belle wore a wig every day, with the stems of her eyeglasses tucked up underneath it.

One day, perched on the end of a chair as she shucked corn,
she raised her dress to just above her knees to form a bowl shape to hold the corn.

“This is how I stays comfortable. I don’t ever wears garters.” She revealed the tops of her stockings, which were rolled up tightly around her hairless, muscular thighs.

“But how do they stay up, Belle?”

“They’s rolled up real tight. Well, lookey here.” She lifted the top of her stocking, where she’d formed a firm roll of nylon, then let it go; it snapped back into place, tight as a rubber band.

Every morning she tied an apron around her waist, and she squeaked when she walked in her white, rubber-soled nurse shoes. If her dress had no front pockets, she kept a fresh handkerchief wound around her bra strap.

The day had begun with Paulette’s crying over something called integration. But our house had been integrated long ago. Belle knew that I was drawn to the color of her skin. Sometimes when the afternoon was quiet and she had time for me, I crawled up into her lap and ran my hand up her arm and felt her soft skin. She smelled faintly of something sweet, a combination of her natural odor and a soap that left its trace.

“Wouldn’t you rather be white, Belle?” I asked her once.

“Why, Lawdy, Lawdy, no! I likes my skin color.”

When the funeral home was particularly busy and day after day I was required to be silent and still, Belle took me for a walk downtown, all of two blocks, to the five-and-dime.

“Come here, Belle, I wanna show you something.” I detoured to the street where, on a good streak, the movie theater remained open for weeks at a time.

“
Psycho
is playing again. Have you seen it, Belle?”

“Lawd, no, I won’t watch a movie like that. And you shouldn’t be watchin’ it either.”

“Thomas took me. You wanna go sometime?”

“No, I jest watches my stories on the TV.”

I asked without thinking. Belle couldn’t go with me to the movies because we’d be separated after we entered. She would be required to sit upstairs in the balcony, and I would sit downstairs. I thought this was a strange, strange rule. I couldn’t understand why I could sit on her lap at home and not sit beside her in public. I wondered how it was that she could feed me and clothe me, yet be made to separate from me when we walked into the cinema.

Belle’s voice seemed to ramble around corners and skip and jump through the air. Sometimes it took quite a lot of concentration to understand exactly what she was talking about.

“Well . . . it was round ’bout near eleven, no, maybe round ’bout half after eleven when Joyce, my niece, my sister Bernice’s girl, comes and takes me down to my home church for they’s homecoming for all the afternoon . . . ” Her voice was low and deep.

“Do you mean Fifth Street, Belle?” I asked, trying to follow her train of thought.

She picked up steam and her voice became higher as she quickened her pace. “No, not the town church, down home to the home church. In the country, round ’bout an hour from here. I makes two pecan pies, one chess pie, one coconut cake, one chocolate cake, I fries me two chickens, makes some potato salad and three glass jars of my pickled cucumbers.”

When Belle came close to concluding a particular topic, she sometimes clapped her hands together to accent her thoughts.

“Night before”—clap, clap—“I washes my wig”—clap—“and curls it up.” Clap, clap. “I takes care of my wig.” Clap.