Saving Savannah

by Tonya Bolden

  Savannah’s mind was moving too fast for Yolande.

  “Well, I bet it’s a trap!”

  “That’s so silly.”

  “I bet Nannie Burroughs wants to trick you into thinking she likes you, only to humiliate you or something. Revenge for what was done to her?”

  “Please, Yolande.”

  “You see, after M Street she wanted to teach at one of the schools for us here. Anna Cooper and Mary Church Terrell controlled who got teaching jobs, and they blocked her.”

  “Why?”

  “They wanted the best and brightest.”

  “But Nannie Burroughs graduated with honors.”

  Yolande ran a finger across the back of her hand. “By ‘brightest’ I don’t mean in terms of brains.”

  REVENGE AFTER ALL?

  No tutoring anyone in English or in any other subject.

  Not assigned to the print shop or to the store.

  Nothing like that.

  Mona gave her an old dress, an apron, a wrap for her head, a run-down pair of shoes, then introduced her to the crew tasked with making Whitfield Hall spick-and-span.

  Savannah’s first impulse was to telephone Father, ask him to come for her quick.

  Nannie Burroughs’s revenge after all?

  But then Savannah bucked up. It’s a test. They want to see how sincere I am.

  Polishing furniture. Polishing brass. Washing windows. Bringing mirrors to a shine. Scrubbing. Sweeping. Mopping. Beating rugs.

  Savannah had never done this much manual labor in her life. By noon she was bone-tired.

  In body.

  In spirit, on a cloud. For Nannie Burroughs’s school was music without song, a field of dreams.

  There were other girls from Haiti like Mona.

  Three from Liberia.

  From Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Mississippi—there were girls from more than twenty states—with a slew from Virginia.

  Kind, friendly, cheery. No one put on airs. Everyone seemed so free within themselves.

  Over a lunch of cheese sandwiches and lemonade, Savannah sat dumbfounded, speechless, as Mona talked of opening a school like Nannie Burroughs’s in Port-au-Prince, as Martha spoke of doing the same in Monrovia.

  The reed-thin Allen twins, Ruth and Ruby, planned to start a janitorial service in Chicago.

  Long, tall Blanche Corbin aimed to own a string of beauty shops in Pittsburgh.

  “A millinery shop back home,” said doll-faced Flossie Hale from Newport News.

  “Restaurant!” declared Myrtle from Detroit.

  “Missionary!” said Gloria. “To whatever country God calls me.”

  They were all so geared up to make a life! So confident that their destinies were in their hands.

  “What about you, Savannah?” asked Mona.

  I want to move to New York City, be with Charlie.

  Hardly a plan, not compared to being a missionary or owning beauty shops.

  “I haven’t quite decided,” she said sheepishly.

  She had to do better than that!

  “An artist. I’m thinking of becoming a painter.”

  Instant regret. Why did I say that?

  Not bold enough!

  Not doing enough!

  Later, after more brass doorknobs and push plates were polished, more furniture dusted, windows cleaned, floors swept, mopped, after working up a bit of sweat, after sips of more lemonade …

  When Savannah saw the black Buick pull up, she wished God had called for a long, long pause, wished she could linger longer on the steps of Pioneer Hall gazing out from this high and lofty place.

  “Father, can you do me a favor?” she asked as the Buick pulled off.

  “Depends.”

  “Next time can you drop me off down the hill and wait for me down there when you come back to get me?”

  MISS TING

  The next time Savannah came prepared. She brought her own work clothes, but much to her surprise—

  “You can help with getting the newsletter ready for mailing,” said Mona.

  Stapling. Folding. Stacking. Stapling. Folding. That was more up Savannah’s alley. And made all the less tedious with Elza from Taft, Oklahoma, Arabella from Boston, and Rosetta from Wilmington, Delaware, filling her in on doings at the school, from a social the last Friday of every month to Dr. Woodson’s monthly lectures.

  “Do you play basketball?” asked Rosetta, planting before Savannah another stack to staple and fold.

  No, Savannah didn’t know how to play basketball. Mother thought she might get hurt.

  “No, I’ve never played. Why do you ask?”

  “We have basketball teams.”

  “Lunch!” That was Mona entering the printery with a picnic basket. Behind her, an Allen twin hugged a large jar of iced tea.

  Worktable cleared, Mona doled out sandwiches. “The cups,” she said to the Allen twin. “We forgot the cups.”

  “I’ll go fetch them,” said the girl.

  Mona turned to Savannah. “Then will you take the workman his lunch, please.”

  A sandwich wrapped in wax paper, a napkin, small thermos.

  “He’s down by the big garden plot, I think. If he’s not there, check behind the store.”

  He was sawing hard, fast. Thick branches, skinny ones littered the ground.

  “Lunch,” said Savannah to the back of him.

  Bib overalls.

  Check shirt.

  Dusty work boots.

  Chore hat.

  “You can rest it there ’pon the stump.”

  The voice gave Savannah pause, but she shrugged it off, went about placing the lunch on the stump.

  She heard the workman climbing down the ladder.

  Duty done, Savannah turned to head back—

  “Well, well, well.” From a pocket he pulled out a handkerchief, wiped his brow.

  He seemed taller than when he stood in her kitchen with his rude self.

  “Savannah, nuh?”

  She had welcomed Nella to call her by her first name. But she didn’t like the way it came out of his mouth. “Yes, that’s my name, Savannah Riddle.”

  “I’m—”

  “Boyd, is it?”

  “Lloyd.” He looked her up and down. “So how come you here?”

  Savannah straightened her back. “I help out here.”

  He looked her up and down.

  Again.

  “Help doing what? Fainting and falling down?”

  What a cad!

  “I can do quite a lot,” Savannah shot back. “The first time I was on a cleaning crew. This time I’m helping out with a mailing.”

  Lloyd leaned the saw against the tree. “Some sorta school assignment?”

  “No. It’s just something I choose to do.”

  Lloyd stepped over to the tree stump, sat down on the ground. He took out a pocketknife, wiped it on the napkin, unwrapped the sandwich. “I had a big breakfast.” He cut the sandwich in two. “Don’t like to eat much while on a job.” He put half of the sandwich into the napkin and handed it to Savannah.

  Savannah froze. “I have lunch waiting for me in the—”

  “Or is it that you scared to break bread with a workingman?”

  Savannah snatched the half a sandwich out of his hand. “Of course not.” She plopped down beside him.

  She would not be cowed by his silence. Nor by his stares. “So when exactly did you come to the capital?”

  “Few months back.”

  “From Barbados?”

  He shook his head. “Saint Thomas.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Born in Barbados, but a while back I moved to Saint Thomas.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “This and that on a plantation.”

  Savannah finished off the sandwich as fast as she could, not chewing nearly as many times as she had been raised to do. “Well, it was nice seeing you again, Lloyd.” She rose.

  “You
too, Miss Ting.”

  During Savannah’s next time at Nannie Burroughs’s little village on a hill, she was grabbing at weeds in one of the large, stone-bounded raised beds that dotted the lawn outside Pioneer Hall when she looked up, saw Lloyd striding her way.

  Good Lord!

  “Still here?” He actually smirked.

  “Well, of course I’m still here. When I make a commitment I see it through.”

  Lloyd snorted. “Miss Ting, if you gine work, put yuh back into it. You ain’t doing the earth no good a’tall with yuh weak little jabs.” He picked up the trowel beside her, made a deep dig into the dirt. “You want to dig up every root.”

  “I was going to get to that. I have my own way of doing things.”

  Lloyd snorted, walked away.

  Thank goodness!

  Savannah returned to her way of weeding.

  But then Lloyd came back.

  And with a big ole shovel. He jabbed it into the ground. “Now dig like yuh life depend ’pon it.”

  “As I said, I have my own way of—”

  “Dig, I tell you.”

  Savannah had never handled a shovel before. In springtime Father always turned the soil over. He did all the major weeding in their backyard garden, in the front yard flower plots too. The most she and Mother did was plant seeds and transplant seedlings they’d grown in the shed.

  Savannah grabbed the shovel. With both hands on the handle she stabbed into the ground, then lifted the shovel with too much force.

  Dirt went flying.

  She went flying, fell back on the ground.

  Lloyd roared with laughter.

  Savannah’s upper lip quivered.

  Begrudgingly, she accepted Lloyd’s outstretched hand.

  He practically yanked her up, snickering.

  Savannah shook her dress, brought her braid over her shoulder to pat out any dirt.

  “You know, you aren’t a very nice person, Lloyd! Hard to believe you and Nella are in the same family.”

  “You want nice, Miss Ting? You better go back to yuh world of the bourgeoisie. Back to yuh little cocoon.”

  “Will you stop calling me Miss Ting! You know my name. I’d appreciate it if you would use it!” Savannah stormed off.

  “Where you going?”

  Savannah kept walking.

  Faster when she heard his footfalls.

  In just a few strides Lloyd was by her side. “Look, I was only making sport. Come back. Let me show you how to dig.” There was no sting, no mockery in his voice.

  One foot back.

  One foot front.

  Front foot on the blade.

  “Now lean in a little.”

  Push down with back straight.

  “Give yuh weight to the back leg now. Bend yuh hip and knees.”

  Lift up the dirt.

  “Now you can weed properly,” said Lloyd.

  Once Savannah had all the earth turned over, she sat down on her haunches, commenced to pull up weeds.

  “No, no,” said Lloyd. “Take off the gloves.”

  “But—”

  “If you want to do it right you need to get yuh hands dirty.”

  Lloyd looked around and down, frowned. “You ain’t set up properly.” He jogged off. “I soon come back,” he said over his shoulder.

  Poised on the rim of that stone-bounded flower bed, Savannah spotted a pair of blue jays making a nest in a linden tree.

  Instinct. All instinct.

  Intently she watched the birds sail down to the ground, pick through winter waste—bark, twigs, leaves. Shoving aside some things. Catching up others in their beaks.

  Little heads bobbing, twitching.

  Taking flight again, returning to the linden to lay, place, make their instinct-driven lace of winter waste.

  Savannah rose, gingerly stepped closer to the tree.

  Gazing at those jays …

  If she were drained of, freed from everything she’d been taught at school, at church, from Mother, from Father …

  If I were just instinct, being—?

  Lloyd returned with a rake and a tiller atop a wheelbarrow. It was full of dead, moldy leaves and scraps of skinny branches.

  The blue jays let out a series of whirs and whines.

  “You need to feed the good earth, stroke her,” said Lloyd. “The girls here smart to save leaves from the fall. So after you weed …”

  He had just finished with his instructions when Mona appeared.

  “I’m sorry, your name again?”

  “Lloyd.”

  “Well, Lloyd, Principal Burroughs would like to see you. She wants an estimate on repairing the toolshed and some fencing.”

  Lloyd and Mona were long gone when Savannah went back to weeding. A few minutes in, she found that when she grabbed at a weed sometimes all she got was a half handful of dirt, which she then had to shake off. She looked around. With Lloyd nowhere in sight, she removed her gardening gloves. After weeding, she kept the gloves off as she fed the good earth handfuls of mucky leaves and scraps of branches, then troweling it all deep down.

  She stroked the good earth with the rake.

  Tiller in hand she readied rows for wildflower seeds.

  WANT TO PUKE!

  For the first time in her life Yolande felt like what she was.

  An only child.

  A terrified one, as she didn’t know how to be alone.

  Along with Saturdays, she was starting to hate Sundays, when after church Savannah said she couldn’t go for a bite to eat because of schoolwork to finish up. Why?

  Because she spent Saturdays at that stupid school.

  Sundays were becoming unbearable too because on their way to and from church Savannah went on and on about a place that might as well have been the moon.

  Savannah was going to learn to play basketball. “Promise, Yolande, you won’t tell Mother.”

  Mona was teaching her Creole.

  The girls from Liberia had supposedly made the most delicious dish. Some kind of stupid stew with something called froofroo or foofoo. Too close to voodoo for Yolande.

  “And next week, from Cassandra—she’s from Jamaica—I’ll learn how to make pepper pot soup.”

  The thought of that made Yolande want to puke!

  Fridays were vexing too because Savannah was so looking forward to a Saturday without her.

  Each time Savannah urged, “You really should come one Saturday!” Yolande’s stomach burned.

  RISE UP! RISE UP! RISE UP!

  Hours after sowing wildflower seeds, Savannah was all cleaned up, every bit of dirt beneath her fingernails gone. She was out of work clothes and back into her dusty-rose shirtwaist. She had a big matching bow at her nape, tied around her braid.

  And she was grateful.

  Grateful that her parents had said she could stay into the evening, attend Nannie Burroughs’s lecture.

  Of course there was a condition.

  “You must wait for me in the main house or outside Pioneer Hall, not down the hill,” said Father.

  Entering Alpha Hall’s auditorium, tan coat over one arm, Savannah spotted several girls she knew, speculated that the older women and men in the crowd were Lincoln Heights townsfolk. She was about to head for Elza and Rosetta when she spotted Nella. She beamed. She hadn’t seen her since Miss Gertie was back right as rain.

  Savannah hurried over. “How good to see you, Nella!”

  Nella seemed a little taken aback when Savannah hugged her, then sat in one of the empty seats on either side.

  “Have you heard that I’ve been helping out here on Saturdays?”

  “Yes, I have. And I’ve heard nothing but good things about you.”

  “This seat taken?” said the wearer of brown cap toe shoes.

  Savannah looked up to see Lloyd in a fairly nice brown sack suit over a blue-and-white-striped club collar percale shirt and a brown skinny knit tie. He had a felt Knox hat in his hand.

  “By all means,” said Savannah, facing fro
nt.

  The hubbub ceased when Mona stepped out onto the stage. Introduction done, applause begun, Nannie Burroughs emerged from behind the curtain in a black serge suit.

  She paced a bit, hands behind her back, before stepping up to the podium. She said nothing until the applause died down.

  “I was asked by a southern white woman,” began Nannie Burroughs, “a southern white woman who is an enthusiastic worker for votes for white women, ‘What can the Negro woman do with the ballot?’ ”

  A smattering of laughter.

  Nannie Burroughs30 cocked her head to the side. “Said I to that woman, ‘What can she do without it?’ ”

  “Tell it! Tell it!”

  “When the ballot is put into the hands of the American woman the world is going to get a correct estimate of the Negro woman.”

  The audience erupted into cheers, applause.

  Tone, rhythm, musicality. This wasn’t a lecture. This was preaching, Baptist preaching.

  “When the ballot is put into the hand of the American woman it will find the Negro woman a tower of strength of which poets have never sung—”

  “Speak on!”

  “Of which orators have never spoken—”

  “Amen! Amen! Amen!”

  “Of which scholars have never written!”

  Savannah was on the edge of her seat. If only I had a mother like Nannie Burroughs, so bold, so strong, fierce.

  Savannah sat spellbound by the passion, the power as Nannie Burroughs rolled on, singing the praises of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Maria W. Stewart, the Forten women, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Biddy Mason, Clara Brown.

  “How is it that Elizabeth Keckley rose up out of slavery to become one of the most sought-after modistes in white society—right here in the capital?”

  Applause.

  “How is it that Maggie Lena Walker born, as she is so very, very fond of saying, ‘not with a silver spoon in my mouth but a laundry basket practically on my head’—how is it that she rose up to found one of the most successful Negro banks in this land?”

  More applause.

  “How is it that Sissieretta Jones, the daughter of folks born in slavery—how is it that she rose up to become a world-class concert singer, charming the ears of royalty?”