In West Mills

by De'Shawn Charles Winslow

  “I wonder what it’d be like if I move back,” Knot said to Otis Lee one day. He had come to pick up the bread pudding Pep had ordered.

  “Back where? Back to ya people?”

  “Yeah,” she replied. And she watched Otis Lee turn the question over in his head. If she knew Otis Lee as well as she believed she did, she knew he would say it might be a good idea for her to return to the place she knew best, with her family around.

  “I don’t think that’s the place for ya. Not now.”

  Well, I’ll be damned.

  Knot knew there was no way she could go back to Ahoskie to stay. Everyone knew her family, which would get in the way of how much she enjoyed drinking, playing cards, and so forth. Her pa was one of the few colored men in Ahoskie—a dentist—whom the other coloreds and Indians looked up to. He had managed to polish his reputation after he had become sober. I ain’t goin’ to let my drinking set him back.

  “Listen to me real good, Mary, Iris, Knot,” he had said to them one day. He lined them up in the parlor. He sat in his chair and twisted his long goatee. “There ain’t a whole lot of thangs I’m scared of. But one thang I’m real scared of is that one of y’all might take up drankin’. That’ll do me in. Hear?” They had all said yes and they gave him a hug, all three of them at once. Knot hadn’t been old enough to remember her pa as a drunk. But Mary had, and she had told Knot she was lucky she didn’t know that side of their pa.

  Fifteen days later, Knot received a reply to the letter she had mailed home:

  September 1942

  Dear Azalea,

  I pray God will see fit to get this letter to you quickly. Your father has been in bed for more than a week with fever like I’ve never seen in all my days. He has lost all control of his body’s doings, and as you might imagine, we expect he won’t recover unless the Lord our God performs a miracle. Your sisters and I are just beside ourselves with worry.

  Come as soon as you possibly can, child. He’s asking for you.

  Please travel safely and with haste.

  With love,

  Mrs. Doctor George Washington Centre

  Knot only had one drink that Wednesday night. She was afraid that if she had more, she might oversleep and miss the bus that passed through West Mills every Monday and Thursday, en route to the state capital. The bus would stop close enough to Ahoskie that Knot could get off and hitch a ride to her family’s house. Or, since fall temperatures were still mild and bearable, she would be able to walk from the station.

  After packing a bag—she refused to pack the black dress—she sat on her bed Indian-style. The house was quiet enough that she might hear an ant trying to lift a bread crumb.

  “Listen up,” Knot said, looking at the ceiling. “If you real, and you care anything ’bout good people, I’ll thank ya kindly to heal my pa from whatever it is he done caught.” She felt a lump forming in her throat.

  “I don’t ask for much. I don’t hardly ask you for nothin’, matter of fact. But for my pa, I’m askin’ you to fix it.”

  Knot didn’t look away from the low wooden ceiling of her bedroom. Even to wipe the tears from her cheeks, she did not look away.

  The next morning, before the sun was up, Knot tapped on Otis Lee’s door twice and walked in. Pep was in the kitchen having tea, and she was boiling two eggs for Breezy, who was still in bed. Otis Lee had already left for Pennington Farm, Pep said. He wanted an early start.

  “Where you goin’ with that?” she asked, looking at Knot’s valise. After Knot told her that she was going to Ahoskie, Pep asked if anything was wrong.

  Knot had made the decision to remain strong until she arrived in her hometown and saw her pa. In order to do that, she needed to get there without speaking to anyone about what her mother’s letter had said.

  “Nothin’ that won’t be over soon, I guess,” Knot said. “Tell Otis Lee for me?”

  Pep didn’t reply with words. An odd silence stood between them until she stepped closer to Knot and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Be safe. We’ll look after yo’ house.”

  On the bus, Knot made many attempts to read some of the novel Valley had sent to her from Washington, D.C., Bleak House. When it had arrived in the mail, Knot had read the title and said to the book, “Val couldn’t choose a different one? Shit. My house is bleak enough.”

  With many of the British novels she had read before, Knot had found herself completely taken—so much so that she’d go nearly an hour without taking a sip from a drink she’d poured. She brought the new novel along with her, hoping it would distract her from the possibility that she might be going home to see her pa’s cold body set up in the parlor. He might pull through it, Knot. You know how Dinah is. Fret over a cough.

  At a quarter past eleven o’clock, Knot stood before the double doors of the two-story homestead. The late morning breeze was cool, but the short walk from the station, the bright sun, and the one shot from her flask gave her reason to tie her sweater around her now wider waist.

  She put two mint leaves in her mouth and chewed vigorously. Why take the chance at gettin’ found out ’fore I even set foot in the damn house?

  First, Knot tried opening the door on the right. It was locked. After trying the one on the left, she knocked and then walked around the porch to one of the large windows to see if anyone was coming toward the door. She saw her mother, Dinah—Knot had been raised to call her Mother, although Knot and her sisters secretly called her Dinah Bright—look out the parlor window.

  She still looked just as Knot imagined she would—just as she had two years back, when Knot had last seen her: dressed as though she were going to noon tea with the mayor’s wife. Dinah’s hair was smoothed back and up to form a bun that sat firmly at the top of her head. Her skin, Knot noticed—even through the window, Knot’s eyes were drawn to her mother’s enviable skin. She had once heard her pa say, “Dinah Bright Centre, you look like God done rolled ya ’round in ground nutmeg. And you know I loooove me some nutmeg.” Her mother had smiled, waved him off, and said, “Don’t speak that way in front of the girls, George.” But it hadn’t been often that Knot witnessed her parents engage in playful banter.

  Through the window, Knot could see that her mother was sad, maybe even mad. Was it unusual for Dinah to look that way? No. As far back as Knot could remember, her mother had never been one to show joy, which was odd, since Dinah had been one of the most pampered colored women in Ahoskie. But the mad, sad look on Dinah’s face today was different.

  He dead already, Knot thought.

  Knot ran back to the door and waited for her mother to open it. Although the two of them had not always gotten along, Knot was prepared to embrace her mother, rub her back, and do what a person was supposed to do when her whole family needed her most. So Knot couldn’t have expected that her mother would open the door, walk up to her, and grab ahold of Knot’s left breast. She gripped it firmly and squeezed.

  At some point Knot’s knees had made contact with the porch, but she could not remember when. She hadn’t felt that much pain since the day Pep cut her to make it easier to birth the child Lady Waters had named Frances.

  Still kneeling and looking at her mother’s ankles, Knot felt as though a heat wave had traveled to Ahoskie and singled her out. She thought she would faint from the vicious throbbing in her breast. The one that had not been squeezed began to throb in sympathy with the one that had been assaulted.

  Knot stood to her feet and looked into Dinah’s deep-set brown eyes.

  “Bitch!”

  “Call me all the names you want to call me, Azalea Marie.”

  Knot tried to go around her mother and into the house to see her pa. From what the letter had said, every minute counted. And she wouldn’t waste it by standing on the porch with Dinah Bright Centre.

  Dinah shoved Knot away and blocked the entrance.

  “Move!” Knot yelled. And then, as loud as she could: “Pa! I’m here! I’m here, Pa!”

  “You show up
at my home full of milk, with no husband by your side and no child in your arms, and I’m supposed to just let you in? With all the work I put into raising you to be something?”

  Knot tried again to walk around her mother.

  “Iris! Mary!” Knot shouted toward the door. “One of y’all come get her out my way!” One of them or some other relative had to be inside sitting next to her pa’s bed, dabbing the fever sweat from his forehead, she thought.

  “No one’s in there,” Dinah said. It was her sinister laugh that explained to Knot why no one else was in the house. Knot would do anything for her pa. Everyone knew it. Dinah Bright Centre was no exception. “I had to get you here somehow, to see if it was true.”

  Knot’s heat wave was on its way back to her. That goddamn schoolmaster. “Who told you?”

  “That’s what you have to say to me?” Dinah asked. “That’s your concern?”

  “I had a baby, Mother!” Knot screamed.

  She wanted to take it back. I had a baby, Mother! She wanted it back. Not because it wasn’t true, or because she hadn’t come to terms with it. It was the way she’d said it—in her mother’s style of speaking, the way Dinah had forced Knot and her sisters to speak—that angered her now. Proper. Elegant. Things always had to be proper and elegant for Dinah, Knot remembered. Well, it had to look that way to other folk. Because if everything in the Centre household looked proper and elegant, the people in town would never believe that Dinah almost never hugged her three daughters. People would never believe that Dinah hardly ever told her girls that they were smart and beautiful. She rarely had kind words for them, or for Knot’s pa—unless they were in the midst of company.

  So Knot wanted her words back so that she could say it again her way. But since the moment had passed, she said instead, “You act like I killed some-damn-body! Shit!”

  “Maybe you have. I can’t be sure of anything where you’re concerned, Azalea Marie.”

  Having no intention of acknowledging her mother’s snide remark, Knot used the quiet moment to collect her thoughts. Someone had told her mother things that most people in West Mills didn’t know.

  “I just want to know one thing,” Knot said. “Who tol’ you?”

  “I couldn’t say even if I wanted to,” Dinah replied. She told Knot that she had gone into downtown Ahoskie to pay their household accounts. A man—his head and face had been wrapped in a red wool scarf—had approached Dinah. “I should have known right then that he was bringing bad news. It was so hot that day, Azalea.”

  Dinah leaned against the closed front door. Her calm storytelling caused Knot to forget that the two of them hadn’t been that far off from coming to blows just minutes ago.

  The man with the red wool scarf had said only three muffled words to Dinah: “’Bout your daughter.” The note he’d handed her before he had run off was short and sweet:

  Knot got a baby. She gave it away. They both alive and well. Your daughter want to come back to you. Take her back, Miss Centre. West Mills no good for her.

  “Let me see it,” Knot demanded of Dinah.

  “Oh, dear daughter,” Dinah said, peering sullenly at Knot, her head cocked to one side. “I threw that thing inside the cookstove the moment your father and I were through reading it.”

  Pa know she tricked me? I don’t believe it.

  “I always knew you’d be the one to hurt me, Azalea. On the day you were born, when I saw all that dark red hair slicked down around your head, I knew it. As pretty and precious as you were, I knew you’d give me trouble. You can’t help it.”

  “You tried like hell to get rid of my red, too,” Knot shot back. “The hours I sat, tied to a chair in that shed like a dog, with that goddamn coal mush caked in my hair.”

  She wanted to scream Bitch! again. But there was no need. The mention of the coal mush seemed to have gripped Dinah by her shoulders and shaken her.

  “You’d be wise to watch your tongue, girl.”

  “Thought I forgot, didn’t ya?” Knot said. Tears ran down her face. “Oh, what I’d give to forget it. I forgive you, though.”

  “I think you should leave,” Dinah told her. “Right now!”

  “You won’t get no argument from me on that,” Knot retorted. She wiped her face with her hands, readjusted her bobby pins, and smoothed her dress. With her valise in hand, she said, “I’d thank ya kindly if you tell me where Pa is. Somebody who got sense ’nuff in his head to know that just ’cause his daughter ain’t perfect, it don’t mean she evil.”

  “Leave your father alone,” Dinah said. “Go back to whoever wrote me that note.”

  “Never mind,” Knot said. She began her walk toward the dirt road that would take her into town.

  “If you don’t have a husband or a child with you,” Dinah shouted, “there’s no sense in going to see him! Save yourself the trouble, Azalea!”

  “I’m Knot!” she said. She kept walking.

  “You always preferred that backwoods pet name your father gave you to the sweet, decent one I gave you!”

  Knot turned her head toward the house just enough to return her mother’s sinister laugh like an unopened gift. “You don’t know shit ’bout sweet and decent!”

  Would Miss Noni tell my secret to the schoolmaster?

  “One of these days you’ll thank me for the talk we’ve just had, Azalea Marie!” Dinah declared. “Once you’ve raised children of your own, you’ll thank me!”

  Ah, go to hell.

  On the way to the church where her pa had a back room to practice dentistry—it would not be more than a twenty-minute walk, especially at her current pace—all Knot could think about was Dinah. She did not want to, but her mind seemed to be giving her no other choice.

  Why in the hell she so mean? Shit!

  Had Mary’s suggestion, years ago, that Dinah was grumpy because her marriage to their pa had been arranged been correct? Every so often, Mary’s story came to Knot—especially when Dinah showed anger toward one or all of them:

  “Before you two came along,” twenty-year-old Mary had said to Knot and Iris, “I heard Dinah Bright telling Mr. Barco that she’d been forced to marry Pa.”

  “Forced?” Iris, twelve at the time, asked.

  “She didn’t have a say in it, is what I mean.”

  “Who Mr. Barco?” nine-year-old Knot asked.

  “You mean ‘Who’s Mr. Barco?’ ” Mary corrected. “You’re both too young to remember him. He was Dinah Bright’s best friend since they were tiny children.” Mary leaned closer to Knot and Iris and whispered, “He was … a different kind of man.”

  “What that mean?” Knot asked.

  “He liked men the same way men like ladies,” Iris answered. Mary looked stunned, and asked Iris how she knew about that. And Iris said, “You told me.” Mary denied it, but Iris would not relent. “You even said the Bible says Mr. Barco will go to hell when he dies. And—”

  “Enough, Iris!” Mary broke in. She had covered her own face with her hands.

  “If we dig a deep, deep hole in the yard,” Knot said, “can we see hell?”

  “No,” Mary told her. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “I don’t understand,” Knot said.

  Mary sighed and continued, “So, anyway, Pa’s father used to have tobacco fields, and he had sharecroppers.”

  “Can I have a definition?” Knot asked.

  “It’s ‘May I have a definition?’ ” Iris replied. Knot sucked her teeth.

  Mary gave the definition. “Dinah Bright told Mr. Barco that Pa’s father treated them like they were his slaves.”

  “Ooooooo,” Knot said. She was brushing her hair. Iris offered to do it, and Knot allowed her. It was something Knot enjoyed, and Iris often said she couldn’t wait to grow up and have daughters of her own. Knot sat on the floor, between Iris’s knees, eager for the rest of Mary’s story.

  Me and Iris used to be so close, Knot now thought to herself.

  “Dinah Bright and her pa were sharecroppers,
too, and—”

  “What was Dinah’s pa’s name again?” Iris asked.

  “John Quincy Bright,” Mary said. “Or John Quinton Bright. One of those. Well—”

  “And what was Pa’s pa’s name?”

  “Shut up, Iris!” Knot said.

  “I give up!” Mary exclaimed. And they never spoke of their parents’ arranged marriage again.

  The church Knot had gone to for as long as she could remember—long before her pa and Dinah had been named head deacon and head deaconess—was half a mile from the house. If anyone had asked her whom she had seen on the road during her walk there, she would have been able to say. But when the church was in sight, she realized that she didn’t remember the walk at all. Because after thinking about Mary’s story, Knot’s thoughts had shifted back to her mother—strangely, her mother’s way of speaking. She recalled Dinah reprimanding her pa for his own way of speaking.

  “In the name of all that is holy, George,” Dinah had said one evening during dinner, “I can’t understand why you insist on speaking that way. After all the schooling you’ve been so blessed to have.”

  “This the way I spoke ’fore I went to school,” Knot’s pa said, “and it ain’t spoil my education nary a bit. You talk how you want to talk, and I’ll talk how I want to talk.” He mixed his field peas with his mashed potatoes while he said it. “I remember a time when you didn’t talk the way—”

  “Pass the salt, please, Iris,” Dinah interrupted. Knot remembered that her mother had not looked up from her plate again until the end of the meal, when she stood to clear all the dishes. But this wasn’t the first time Dinah had brought up the topic with George, and it definitely wasn’t going to be the last.

  Knot found her pa in the room he had built onto the back of the church. The door was ajar and she saw him sitting at his desk, reading a book. There was no one there to have a tooth pulled or to have patches of rotting gums cut out of their mouths.

  Knot stood in her spot quietly, watching him. Up until seven weeks ago, he had been the person she had cared about most of all. I woulda kept that child if I didn’t care ’bout her.

  Knot’s pa was now sixty-two years old, with a full head of cloud-white hair that looked as though it hadn’t been near a pair of shears in several months. His goatee matched his clean white shirt.