Tina Mcelroy Ansa (4 page)

Lena was only one among many in town who mourned the passing of the colored lunch counter as well as the food at Woolworth’s downtown.

Her father, Jonah, the consummate businessman, saw the efficacy of consolidating duplicate store sections. But he, too, mourned the changes. He was used to sending around to the five-and-tencent store late some afternoons to see what kinds of vegetables they had. The two waitresses, who also cooked there, took delight in sending Jonah his favorites—rutabagas, okra and tomatoes, corn and chicken and dumplings. Nellie didn’t care for chicken and dumplings, so she rarely cooked them.

“Wife won’t even make him chicken and dumplings,” one waitress would mutter to the other as she dished up heaping portions of the rich doughy concoction to send around the corner and down Cherry Street to The Place. She knew that because Jonah had told them so one day as he had breezed through the store taking the shortcut to the alley down the steps behind the colored lunch counter. “You know, Nellie won’t make me chicken and dumplings like ya’ll make,” he called out as he spied the dish bubbling in a pot. “She doesn’t care for them.”

The other waitress would suck her teeth, remembering how dapper and handsome he had looked in a sheer white short-sleeved shirt and roomy linen slacks, and put an extra piece of corn bread in the white paper bag intended for Jonah. “And you know he give her everything she want. Nellie always has thought she was cute.”

“A man like Jonah!” the first said indignantly.

Many folks who had worked near downtown and only had fifteen minutes for their lunch break would order their lunch one day ahead so when they sat down at the counter and picked up their forks, their plates would be set before them ready for them to dig in.

Woolworth’s was just one store closing downtown that broke Mulberry’s heart. Fragrance-scented Davison’s, where her mother had bought her Hanes stockings by the box and the Vanity Fair slips and bras and panties that Lena had worn as a teenager and took away to college, was just a shell with nothing inside but dust and trash and the occasional remains of a squatting runaway. The new store out at the Mulberry Mall didn’t even have the same name.

Burton-Smith was another one. Lena’s grandmama had insisted that the small millinery store had the widest and most grand selection of cloth and notions in the whole area. Women making their weekly pilgrimage each Saturday to the store’s sewing department would dive into the bolts of cloth and skeins of yarn and spools of cotton and silk thread.

People talked about the store as if it were a person.

“Well, I mo’ go down to Burton-Smith to see what
he
got.”

But that was all gone now, too.

Some folks in town felt that way about the whole area. Downtown gone. The expressway cutting through the heart of the city. The outskirts of town turning into office strips and manufacturing complexes. At least, the new construction brought a level of prosperity to folks Lena knew: Houses were bought, businesses were started, offspring were sent to college, second cars were purchased. But she could see no good godly reason for the changes in downtown.

She stood in the empty parking lot behind her place of business for a moment with her butt resting against the side of the car. She was surprised that she was still a little weak in the knees from her incident in the car.

Instead of going straight into the back door, Lena took her regular longer route down the alley where Mr. Brown’s service station stood, around the corner and up Broadway, blessing empty spots where much
of her Mulberry history had occurred. She blessed Miss Emily and the peanut shop. She smiled and remembered all the old and young heads she had seen sitting up in Stanley’s Barber Shop talking trash and playing checkers while Mr. Stanley slowly and painstakingly swept the linoleum floor repeatedly of short black prickly hairs.

Her high-heeled Chanel mules made a
clack-clack
sound on the smooth concrete of the wide country-town sidewalk. The sound seemed to echo up and down the empty street. It reverberated past where the old Greyhound bus station—immortalized in a local blues singer’s lyrics, “I’m washing dishes in the bus station cafe now, but I won’t be washing for long”—had stood, smelling of two-day-old traveling people with their bag lunches of fried chicken and pound cake and bananas crowded into the waiting room of the bus station. The sound of her heels echoed past the site of the historic Burghart Theatre, where Bessie Smith had performed in the late twenties; past where women, legendary “Broadway Jessies” in tight skirts, the scent of cheap perfume emanating from their pulse points, had lolled in the lobby of the barely respectable Cornet Hotel on the corner of the alley.

To many folks, Lena McPherson
was
Mulberry.

Walking up the street by herself, Lena evoked the swing and feel of decades of her people in Mulberry. It was a shame that no one was around to appreciate how good she looked striding up Broadway.

Lena’s looks laughed in the face of her forty-five years. It was not so much that she looked young for her years, which she did, for which she could thank her father’s melanin-rich chocolate-brown genes, as it was that she looked like herself, just as she always did. Barely changed from the time she walked Broadway as a girl dressed in her blue and white Blessed Martin de Porres Catholic School uniform.

Lena had grown taller than people in town had expected. Her mother had teased her daughter all the time when they were standing together, “Shoot, Lena, I could eat peas off your head.” But she couldn’t. Nellie only came up to about Lena’s earlobe. Lena had shot
up over Nellie, who wasn’t very tall at all, in her teen years to nearly five foot seven inches and stayed there the rest of her life.

She wasn’t what one would call thin or slender. She had full high breasts, a small delicate-looking waist and a slender trunk like her mother, so she appeared willowy. Yet she had inherited her father’s family’s round low butt and big shapely legs.

“Look at her, Nellie,” Grandmama would say as they both pinned half-finished tailored Sunday suits and wide-skirt party dresses on Lena’s teenaged body, “she look smaller in clothes than she do buck naked. She got one of those deceptive bodies like your people.”

And Nellie, pins in her mouth, hands on her hips, would have to nod her agreement.

Lena’s clothes, now made by all the top designers—Versace, Lagerfeld, Lauren, Robertson, Mizrahi, Karan—seemed to just barely graze her body as if she had just finished spinning around.

That made her look young, too.

Gloria, The Place’s manager, would look at Lena some mornings striding in dressed in the short white suit with colored bows all over it that Patrick Kelly had made for her when he was still a struggling designer in Atlanta, and just chuckle with admiration and envy. “Girl, you know you lucky. You got the best traits from
both
sides of your family!”

Precious, Lena’s rotund personal assistant at the Candace office, would watch her boss slip out the back door of the realty office complex—her breasts and butt bouncing
just a bit
with every step she took—and just sigh. All Precious could do was wordlessly bite into another tasteless rice cake and go back to work choking back hopelessness.

Walking up Cherry Street, Lena looked like Mulberry from a few decades before: healthy, a little country, bursting to grow, mysterious, comfortable, familiar, prosperous, old-fashioned yet current.

Unemployed, unattached men, some of them fairly young, drifting through the old center of downtown Mulberry on a bus or a freight
train would spy Lena striding into The Place and stop to yell, “Hey, baby, you got a nice ass to be almost a
redbone!”

Lena wasn’t a redbone. But she did have a lot of red in her skin. Folks down at The Place would put her “somewhere between teasing tan and pecan tan.” And that was just about right.

Her brothers had teased her at puberty that she looked like a lowercase
s
from the side when her preteen breast and hips and ass had begun to develop. Thirty years later, she was still shaped like an
s
but now she was a capital
S.

Lena had a sly look about her sometimes. Around the eyes. Not a mean, manipulating, calculating look. Rather a mischievous, chuckling, sparkling, I-know-a-secret kind of look. She had had it all her life. Her laughter, a deep, knowing, throaty chuckle, went with it. Although most people could not quite describe that look or the laugh, not exactly, almost all of them felt they liked the look of it on Lena’s face and the sound of her small-town southern voice. And they felt some connection to her because of it. Nothing they could put into words or wanted to. They just felt it.

“Well,” people in Mulberry said decades after her birth, “you know Lena was born with a caul over her face. And you know what that little piece of skin mean. But our girl ain’t just lucky and pretty ’cause she was born with a veil. She special.”

“Yeah, you ought to get her to rub that no-luck rabbit’s foot for you, Jerome.”

That sly look was partly what made old winos like Yakkity-Yak and Black as a Skillet continue to think Lena was special until the day they died. It was what attracted sinners and saints to her equally. It was what made children trail behind her in department stores just knowing good things would follow.

For decades, folk sitting out in front of shops and businesses and bars and restaurants all up and down Broadway and Cherry had shouted their intimate acknowledgment of her parentage and birth.

“Hey, there, Lena. There’s my girl! There’s that special girl! Come here, Lena, I bet you can give me a good number to play.”

Lena always thought they didn’t know the half of it. Sometimes she could even close her eyes when it did not frighten her too much and envision her own birth scene at St. Luke’s Hospital.

Dr. Williams at Nellie’s feet, old Nurse Bloom next to him, the other young nurses standing around them, looking like they had seen a ghost.

Lena had indeed come into the world looking like a spirit with a caul—a colorless piece of fetal membrane—stretched over her face. The attending physician and the midwife-nurse seemed touched by the rare birth. Everyone there did.

Even the youngest nurse’s aide in the tiny black hospital knew
something
about a child born with a caul over her face. In her head, Lena could see the young medical assistant leaning over her hospital crib and cooing, “Ooo, little baby born with the veil over your face, you
are
lucky like everybody say. I saw your daddy’s big old Cadillac outside. And you know you gon’ be happy ’cause you can see the future and have spirits to guide you. And they say you gon’ even be able to see and hear people’s thoughts.

“Um, you
are
a lucky little baby girl,” the nurse’s aide had said, shaking her head in envy.

Lena had heard the same thing all her life. These shouts greeted her each time she came downtown to her father’s whiskey store and juke joint or to view the features at the Burghart with her brothers or go shopping with her mama.

“Hey, little girl, I know who your daddy is. You Jonah’s daughter. The one born with the veil over her face. You Jonah’s child, all right. Look at ya. Look like your daddy spit you out. Makes you wonder if Nellie had anything to do with it, don’t it?”

Now, other than in folks’ stories and in photographs lining the walls of her office downtown and at home, the phantoms of all those people, sounds and smells were just about all that was left.

Save the sound of the heels of Lena’s mules on the sidewalk, the only thing stirring on the once-busy corner now was the idling green and cream city bus that sat at the intersection spewing out diesel
fumes as the driver waited for his scheduled time of departure. Coming from the now-deserted downtown area this early in the morning, the uniformed driver had a glazed look in his eyes and no passengers.

“Um, um, um,” Lena said aloud to herself as she turned the corner onto Cherry Street and took out the gold ring of twenty or more keys from her purse, “downtown Mulberry, a ghost town.”

She said it, the pronouncement on her hometown, in the same way that she reminded herself from time to time, “Um, um, um, Mama and Daddy and ’em dead.”

From the front, the liquor store and the bar and grill that comprised The Place sat side by side in the two-story brick building. But actually the small square whiskey store fit into the missing corner of the larger L-shaped juke joint. Although folks called the entire building The Place, they were usually only referring to the bar and grill. A wall of colored windows separated the liquor store from the grill side.

Thick black lettering on a white background on a sign hanging over the entrance to both establishments read:

Lena walked past the entrance to the juke joint and stopped in front of the liquor store. Through the plate-glass door, she could just make out the outline of the handsome portrait of her parents, with the brass engraving underneath, “Jonah and Eleanor McPherson, The Founders.” She had hung the portrait above the shelves on the liquor store side of The Place in an antique picture frame her mother’s friend Carrie Sawyer had given her.

Everyone in Mulberry knew Lena’s mother as “Nellie,” but for the formal portrait Lena thought the “Eleanor” was proper. She did hear Cliona from Yamacraw shout the first time she read the brass plate, “Lord, they ’un hung some picture of Jonah in this place with some ’oman name of Eleanor!!”

Cliona was outraged, outspoken and ready to go to the management
about it. The management came to her. Lena had rushed over just in time to avert a full-fledged hissy fit to explain that “Nellie” was a derivative of “Eleanor” and that the painting was indeed a picture of her mother.

It had also been Cliona from Yamacraw who had inquired, “Which one of them girls named ‘Candace’ down at that reality company? Shoulda’ named it ‘Lena.’”

In the portrait, her mother sat in a high-back embroidered chair dressed in a rather low-cut soft green dress with her russet hair pushed back from her small narrow face. Her father, Jonah, stood beside her casually decked out in an open-necked shirt and a dark jacket and light-colored loose pants. His dark handsome features, the grace in his hands, the slouch of his shoulders all mirroring Duke Ellington in his heyday. Like many black men of his era, Jonah had crafted his image after that of an icon of his time—his style, his mannerisms, his dress, his hip talk. Lena had noticed how many of her contemporaries’ fathers had the same Ellington look. How they shook their heads on their necks when they thought they were cute. How they rolled imaginary balls of lint between their thumbs and forefingers when they talked importantly.