Under the Tulip Tree

by Michelle Shocklee

  My feet grew weary in my heeled shoes, so I sat on a bench at the next streetcar stop and waited. A minute passed before an older black man, neatly dressed, walked up. When our eyes met, he nodded politely but remained standing as he too waited for the streetcar. Although we were the only people at the stop and there was plenty of room on the bench, I knew the unspoken rule as well as he did.

  A colored man could not sit next to a white woman.

  An odd thought struck me as we waited for the streetcar.

  What would this man think about the Federal Writers’ Project and its proposed interviews? Did the stories of former slaves interest him? I couldn’t imagine they would, since they would bring up an unpleasant time in the history of our country. People had moved on from the issues of slavery, leaving the ugliness in the past.

  The image of nine black teenage boys on the front page of a newspaper flashed across my mind.

  The Scottsboro boys. Convicted of raping two white women in Alabama despite overwhelming evidence of their innocence.

  When the trolley arrived, I boarded in the front of the vehicle while the man boarded in the rear. I sat beside a young white woman with a small child on her lap. The pair was too engrossed in their babbled conversation to acknowledge me.

  As the streetcar jerked forward, I peeked behind me.

  From his place at the back of the vehicle, the older man I’d boarded with looked right at me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “You’re going to do what?”

  My sister’s shrill voice rose above the loud squabbles of her two oldest children. We sat at the dining room table attempting to enjoy dinner, yet not having much success thanks to an overcooked chicken and cranky kids. Mary’s youngest, a chubby two-year-old boy, was curled on her lap, thumb poked in his mouth and eyes drooping despite the bedlam.

  “I’m applying for a job with the Federal Writers’ Project,” I hollered back.

  Mama sent me a disapproving look, whether for shouting at the table or for the job, I wasn’t sure. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” ideas to help the unemployed weren’t popular with everyone.

  “Holly, James. Enough.” Mary thumped her eldest on the arm, only because he was closest.

  “She started it,” he whined, rubbing the spot.

  “Did not.”

  Four-year-old Holly had the looks of an angel, with a head of golden curls and eyes as blue as the sky, but that’s where the angelic similarities ended. Her bottom lip perpetually stuck out, as it did now, and her glare when she was mad, which was most of the time, could freeze a camel in the desert.

  “Finish your supper and go outside to play, both of you.”

  Mary sounded exhausted. In fact, she looked awful, now that I studied her from my place across the table. Dark smudges contrasted with pale cheeks, and her hair, normally rolled and teased to perfection, lay flattened on one side. I’d been too preoccupied with my monumental decision to take notice when she first arrived, unannounced, with boisterous youngsters piling out of her old Hudson.

  A wave of compassion for my sister washed over me. The crash had changed her life, too. Roy dumped her the day after our father’s bank failed. Five months later, while we were still coping with the aftermath of the stock market crash, Mary, with tears in her eyes, confessed she was pregnant. Mama locked herself in her bedroom for two silent hours while I was left to console my sister, who, if I was honest, I thought was an idiot for getting herself into this mess. She wouldn’t say who the father was until Mama came out of her room and demanded an explanation. When Mary finally sobbed out his name, my jaw practically hit the hardwood floor.

  Homer Whitby. The very same Homer who supposedly planned to come calling on me before the crash.

  The story wasn’t pretty nor romantic. He wasn’t a knight in shining armor come to rescue Mary after Roy broke things off so abruptly. They’d met accidentally on Vanderbilt’s campus, where Homer and Roy continued to attend classes. Mary had to quit Belmont after we lost everything, and she’d gone to the school that day in hopes of finding Roy, intent on mending their fractured relationship. She found Homer instead. He offered a sympathetic shoulder to cry on, then invited her to dinner, which in hindsight seemed rather two-faced considering she’d been Roy’s girl so recently.

  What happened next was none of my business, but eight weeks after their impromptu date Mary tearfully announced she was pregnant. Dad came out of his drunken self-pity to do the right thing, which was to drive Mary to Memphis and meet with Homer’s parents. A hastily planned wedding ceremony took place a week later.

  “What kind of writing is it?” Mama asked once the children ran outside, letting the screen door bang behind them.

  I’d known this question was forthcoming, but the answer I’d planned, which was basically a lie, lodged in my throat. I didn’t like to lie to Mama, but the truth wouldn’t satisfy her. She wouldn’t approve of the subject of the interviews nor of the need for me to travel into the poorer areas of Nashville where I’d never stepped a toe.

  I settled on a half-truth and hoped for the best.

  “It’s a job Mr. Armistead told me about, interviewing different people for a government project. It pays twenty dollars a week.”

  I knew that would interest her more than the job itself.

  “Well, if Mr. Armistead thinks you should apply for it, you should. Goodness knows we need more money coming into this house.”

  “It’s not guaranteed I’ll get it,” I added, not wanting either of us to raise our hopes too high. Mr. Armistead’s warning about there being other out-of-work writers willing to do the job echoed in my mind. As reluctant as I’d been to consider the position when he first handed me the letter, now that I’d convinced myself it was worth my time, anxiety swirled through my stomach. What if I didn’t get the job?

  “Maybe you’ll interview someone famous, like Greta Garbo.” Mary’s face took on a dreamy expression. “Or Clark Gable.”

  Though difficult, I managed to keep myself from rolling my eyes at such a ridiculous statement. I offered what I trusted was a smile and not a smirk. “I doubt the government would pay for the kind of interviews you can read in Film Fun magazine.”

  Mama gasped. “You don’t read such trash, do you?”

  “No, Mama,” I said, which was true for the most part. Some reporters I’d worked with at the Banner brought in copies of the gossip magazine, boasting racy covers and tales of movie stars’ lives. I’d peeked over the shoulders of my coworkers a time or two, but I wasn’t about to confess that to Mama.

  “So who will you interview?” she asked. “Did Mr. Armistead say?”

  I wasn’t prepared to defend against the disapproval I knew she’d direct my way the moment I divulged who the interviewees were, so it seemed prudent to come up with another vague answer. Mama’d convinced herself long ago she wasn’t narrow-minded when it came to station or skin color, yet I’d witnessed her treatment of Dovie throughout the many years the old woman worked for our family. When Dovie was sick and missed a day, Mama took it as an affront and called her lazy. She’d dock Dovie’s pay if the woman accidentally broke the smallest item, and more than once I heard Mama talk down to Dovie for no reason other than she could.

  “The letter doesn’t mention the names of the people who are to be interviewed.” I scooted my chair away from the table, ready to escape her line of questioning, and picked up my plate with half my meal still intact. “I’ll do the dishes,” I said with a bright smile. “You and Mary visit and watch the kids.”

  Mary eyed me with a hint of suspicion, but neither of them protested as I cleared the table. While I ran hot water into the kitchen sink, I heard Mama ask Mary about Homer’s new job at a manufacturing company in East Nashville. I shut off the faucet to hear her answer.

  “It doesn’t pay as well as his last job,” she said, her voice lowered but still loud enough for me to hear from the next room. “His daddy knows the owner and made Homer take it. Papa Whitby told Homer he
wouldn’t help us anymore if Homer kept getting himself fired from perfectly good jobs.”

  I turned the water on again, drowning out whatever else she had to say about her good-for-nothing husband. What a disappointment Homer Whitby turned out to be. His handsome face and winning smile were a facade for a lazy charlatan and gambler who couldn’t keep a job and who’d been linked to several women despite having a wife and three children. Homer’s daddy threatened to cut him off financially after each scandal, and Homer would promise to end his wicked ways. Yet the scenario repeated itself so many times no one—not even my poor sister—believed him anymore.

  With the dishes washed and put away, I could have joined Mama and Mary on the back porch, where they watched the children play under the branches of the same magnolia tree my sister and I had played beneath. I could have, but I didn’t. Mama’s questions about the job with the FWP weren’t something I wanted to revisit, nor did I wish to pretend my sister’s life wasn’t a disaster.

  I quietly went out the front door, making sure it closed without a sound, and hurried down the street to Grandma Lorena’s, relishing the cool air on my face. September in Tennessee could be finicky, with some days as hot as midsummer and others ready to usher in autumn. This evening the weather seemed to settle somewhere in the middle, making it more than pleasant.

  Grandma’s cottage sat at the end of our street, tucked behind a hedge of laurel. She loved the neighborhood and hadn’t wanted to move too far away after selling her larger house—the one we now lived in—to Dad after Grandpa passed away. Mama and Grandma weren’t as close as I felt they should be, considering Mama was Grandma’s only child, but then I reminded myself I wasn’t close to Mama either. I’d never been able to talk to her the way I could with Grandma.

  A light shone through the lacy living room curtains. With a soft tap on the door, I called out to let her know I was coming in. Grandma sat in her favorite armchair, a book open in her lap.

  “Rena, what brings you by so late?” She glanced at the antique clock on the mantel. “I hope everything is all right at home.”

  I grinned. It was only a little after seven o’clock. “I have some good news. At least, I hope it’s good.”

  “Tell me.” Grandma put her book aside.

  Settling on the sofa, I pulled the FWP letter from my skirt pocket and handed it to her. “Mr. Armistead gave me this today.”

  Grandma took the paper and silently read through it. She looked up a minute later. “What a wonderful project. And you’re thinking about joining them?”

  “I am.” My shoulders seemed to lift on their own accord in a shrug. “I guess.”

  “What do you mean, you guess? Why wouldn’t you? It sounds like a job right up your alley. You interviewed all types of interesting people when you worked for the newspaper. This would certainly be an answer to our prayers.”

  I nodded rather halfheartedly, knowing she was right, and yet the doubts piled up.

  “Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t take this job.” She leveled a no-nonsense look at me.

  I bit the inside of my lip. Hadn’t I come to see her for this very purpose? To finally verbalize the answer to a question I’d never come face-to-face with in all my twenty-two years?

  “Because I can’t waltz into the home of a former slave and ask all kinds of personal questions. Why would they tell me about their life? Our family owned slaves. What if they figure that out? What would I say?”

  There.

  I’d put to words what had been bothering me from the very moment I read the letter in Mr. Armistead’s office. My ancestors—Grandma’s grandparents and great-grandparents—owned slaves at one time. Quite a lot, from what I understood. Surely that fact alone should exclude me from a job that involved delving into the private lives of people who had themselves once been owned.

  Grandma’s face took on a contemplative look. After a long silent moment, she nodded. “Yes, you’re right. Our family did own slaves. I was quite young when the war began, barely a year old. Papa had family in Kentucky, and when Nashville fell to the Federals, he took us there for the duration of the war. But I do remember going to visit Grandma Helen on the plantation. They grew tobacco and corn in those days. I don’t know how many slaves they had, but I imagine it was close to one hundred. Grandpa’s family came from Ohio and never approved of slavery, but he understood it was necessary to keep the plantation going. At least, that’s what Grandma’s family believed to be true in those days.”

  “You see why I don’t feel I’m suitable to interview former slaves?” I slumped against the couch.

  She scowled. “No, I certainly do not. You didn’t own slaves. It’s been seventy-one years since the war ended. No one holds your generation responsible for slavery, dear.”

  That might be true, but the feeling of guilt still hovered over me. “Did you know any of your grandmother’s slaves?”

  A soft smile increased the wrinkles on her face. “After the war, Mama hired Cornelia to come work for us in town. She’d been what they call a mammy, the older woman who takes care of the babies while their mothers work. Cornelia lived with us until she died, probably ten years. Grandma Helen always acted a bit peeved that she didn’t choose to stay on the plantation and work for wages as some of the others did, but Cornelia once told me the plantation held dark memories for her.”

  We sat in silence as the clock ticked off several moments, both of us lost in thoughts of the past. My great-great-grandmother’s plantation had long been divided and sold, so I’d never seen the big white house Grandma remembered. It had been partially burned during the war, and she said the remodeled home wasn’t nearly as grand as it had been in its early days.

  “I miss Dovie,” I said with a sigh, shifting my thoughts to the only black person I truly knew. The old woman had been part of my life for sixteen years. Her absence still hurt. “I wish we could’ve found a way to keep her on after the bank failed.”

  “I hear she’s doing well down in Franklin with the Warrens. I saw Betty not long ago, and she had nothing but good things to say about Dovie. Gus, too, since they hired them both.”

  While I knew I should be happy for Dovie and Gus, it irked me that the Warrens had come through the stock market crash unscathed and snatched up our housekeeper even before the dust settled on our upturned household. Mama felt betrayed by Dovie and made a big scene the day she came to tell us goodbye, but I always felt it was more the loss of a housekeeper and the status of keeping servants rather than losing Dovie in particular that brought her tears.

  “What would she think about this opportunity you have with the Federal Writers’ Project?” Grandma followed her question with a bit of a smirk, as though she already knew the answer.

  The image of Dovie, with hands on her hips and a tilt to her head, flashed across my mind. I grinned. “She’d say, ‘Get on down there and talk to them folks. They ain’t gonna bite you.’”

  Grandma chuckled at my imitation of our former housekeeper’s deep Southern drawl and sassy attitude. “I believe you’re exactly right. And I agree.”

  My smile slowly faded. “Do you really think I should do it?” I whispered, the very idea tying my gut into a knot. “What if . . . what if . . . ?” I couldn’t finish the sentence, mainly because I didn’t know exactly what I was afraid of. All I knew was fear mounted with every breath I took.

  “I think it will be good for you.” Her gray-blue eyes narrowed on me. “You need to see life from a different perspective in order to move forward. I believe this job may be exactly what you need to help you find your place in the world.”

  The music of crickets and tree frogs filled the night as I walked home a short time later, but it was Grandma’s words that echoed through my mind. Over the past seven years, I’d confessed to her more than once that I felt stuck. Stuck in time. Stuck in circumstance. Just plain ol’ stuck.

  How could interviewing people who’d lived in bondage decades earlier help me see my future more clearly?


  There was only one way to find out.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A car horn sounded at exactly nine o’clock Thursday morning, three weeks later.

  “My, he’s punctual.” Mama glanced out the front window to where a gray, weather-beaten Chevrolet coupe sat in our driveway. She turned to face me as I put on my sweater, her thin lips in a flat line. “A gentleman would come to the door, not sit in the car waiting for the lady.”

  “This isn’t a date, Mama.” I tucked my purse strap over my arm. “Mr. Norwood is simply giving me a ride downtown. We both work for the FWP, so we’re business professionals. If he were picking up a male coworker, he wouldn’t come to the door.”

  With more confidence than I felt, I snatched up the two steno notebooks I’d purchased per instructions from the Nashville FWP director who’d hired me last week. A bundle of freshly sharpened pencils already occupied a place in my purse, as did the paper containing the address of my first interviewee and the folded list of questions I was to ask.

  Ignoring the knot in my stomach, I turned to Mama. “Wish me luck,” I said a bit too brightly.

  Mama frowned. “I don’t recall you ever being nervous when you interviewed people for the paper.”

  That was because they weren’t former slaves living in Hell’s Half Acre, but I couldn’t tell that to Mama. “I’m just rusty, I guess. I’m sure it will all come back to me.”

  I stepped into the foyer. A word of encouragement from Mama would have gone a long way just then, but she simply watched me leave the house and walk down the porch steps. I hadn’t made it to Mr. Norwood’s car yet when I heard the door close behind me.

  With a deep breath I hoped would still my quaking insides, I reached for the handle on the passenger side of the car. A young man sat in the driver’s seat. His brown felt hat sat on his head at an angle, reminding me of Errol Flynn.