Saving Savannah

by Tonya Bolden

Father pinched the bridge of his nose. He looked so weary. “There were other bombings last night.”

  “Other than in New York City?” Savannah’s stomach was now too sick, too nervous for coffee.

  Father nodded. “Home of Cleveland’s mayor, a judge in Boston, politician somewhere else in Massachusetts. In Philadelphia a Catholic church rectory, a jeweler’s home.”

  Savannah’s eyes wandered over to the counter laden with canned food and Sunshine Krispy crackers as Father added that in Pittsburgh the homes of a judge and some official with immigration had been targeted, and that of a silk manufacturer staunchly opposed to unions in a place in New Jersey she had never heard of, Paterson. “Does Charlie know that in New York it was a judge’s home?”

  Savannah nodded. “A watchman was killed.”

  Father took another sip of coffee. “The hunt was on before the break of day. For foreigners mostly.”

  Savannah prayed that Lloyd kept his head down, had the good sense not to hold any more meetings.

  Over dinner, meatloaf and mash, Savannah brought up something that had been gnawing at her for days. Every time she ran into the woman at school she avoided her gaze.

  A woman she had so admired during the war for the work she did with Howard University’s Red Cross unit, who had gone on a fact-finding mission after East Saint Louis, a woman to whom her parents and scores of others in the District had entrusted money raised for the victims.

  This brilliant woman fluent in not only Spanish, but also in French and German, who looked so angelic, had eyes that brought to mind a poet.

  And she wrote for the Crisis.

  “Miss Queen …?”

  “Who?” asked Mother.

  “Hallie E. Queen, one of our Spanish teachers.”

  “What about her?” asked Father, queer glance at Mother.

  Savannah swallowed. “Is she a spy?”

  “Where did you hear that?” asked Mother.

  “Yolande.”

  Father bit the inside of his lip, winced. “We have heard of this.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  Mother began wringing her hands. “Sometimes patriotism can make people do strange things.”

  “Fear will do that too,” added Father.

  “You think she willingly spied on her own people? Maybe the government made her do it—maybe they had something on her. Or maybe …”

  “Savannah,” said Mother, “let us never speak of this again.”

  “And you must promise me,” added Father, “that you will never mention it to another living soul. I advise you tell Yolande—never mind, I’ll have a word with Oscar.”

  Had it been silly, baseless gossip her parents would have said so flat-out.

  “And there’s something else that you should know, Savannah.” Father reached for her hand, squeezed it. “Marvin—Mr. Pinchback, he was found hanged in his cell a few days ago.”

  Tears rolled down Savannah’s cheeks.

  “They say there’s an investigation under way.”

  “And Mrs. Pinchback?” Savannah wiped her eyes.

  “She’s to be released in a few days. They say she will sell the house and move to Philadelphia where her sister lives.”

  The paper boy came late.

  “BOMB AT ATTORNEY GENERAL’S HOME STARTS A NATION-WIDE ROUND-UP OF ANARCHISTS”44 announced page one of the Star.

  Rattled by the photograph of the wreckage, rattled by the certainty that the beautiful Hallie E. Queen was a spy, by Mr. Pinchback’s death, and Mrs. Pinchback’s unimaginable grief, Savannah let her eyes drift up to the box to the left of the masthead with the subhead “WEATHER.”

  “Fair, continued warm tonight;45 tomorrow unsettled and …”

  Two days later, given the doubts Lloyd had seeded, Savannah was betwixt and between on how to feel about news that had Mother buzzing all afternoon—receiving telephone calls, making telephone calls, proclaiming, “Glory to God!”

  Page three of the June fifth Star chose the following headline for the news: “WOMAN SUFFRAGE WINS IN SENATE.”46

  CRAB PUFFS FOR YOLANDE

  For Savannah there was no going out to Lincoln Heights for a while. And that she understood.

  What she couldn’t fathom, what frightened, unnerved her was that Yolande never returned to Dunbar for the remaining few days of school.

  She didn’t go to church either.

  Weekday mornings there was Yolande looking out her bedroom window. Still in nightclothes, she gave Savannah a limp wave or looked right through her.

  “She’s resting,” said Mrs. Holloway on weekday afternoons, weekends too.

  Savannah thought back to when she was trapped in a maze of melancholy. She had been able to leave the house, keep up her grades, pack comfort kits.

  “It’s been days and days,” Savannah despaired as she and Mother stood in their kitchen making crab puffs for Yolande.

  What Savannah would give to hear her friend prattle on and on about a party or anything else.

  Chatter that would take Savannah’s mind off news about whether enough states would ratify the Anthony amendment, news about whitefolks in the South raising a hue and cry about Negro woman suffrage. And there was news with headlines like “THREE RADICALS TAKEN IN RAID BY DISTRICT POLICE.”47

  News too of more race riots.

  After the one in Annapolis, her parents decided against that annual vacation in Highland Beach.

  “Best we stay close to home,” said Father.

  Is anyone, anywhere safe? Savannah wondered once again.

  Not Macon, Mississippi.

  Not Bisbee, Arkansas.

  Not if you were Negro—poor, rich, high school dropout, college student, veteran, denizen of saloons and pool halls, deacon of a church.

  Not in Scranton, Pennsylvania, or Dublin, Georgia, or the City of Brotherly Love or Coatesville, Pennsylvania, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Longview, Texas, Baltimore, Maryland, Port Arthur, Texas, or …

  With each account of heaving hatred, of Negro schools, homes, churches, bodies under attack, Savannah clung to something Yolande once said.

  Yes, we have to contend with the color line, but the whitefolks here are not nearly so barbaric.

  SACHEMS, CABBAGE WHITES, AND TIGER SWALLOWTAILS

  As the black Buick pulled off, Savannah just stood there, took a deep breath, then smiled.

  At the farm stand’s bright green paint.

  At its billowing banner, WE SPECIALIZE IN THE WHOLLY IMPOSSIBLE.

  Would she ever specialize in anything? If not the wholly impossible, the slightly impossible?

  Perhaps start with the possible came a whisper from the wind that blew by bushel baskets overflowing with pole beans and corn and cucumbers and tomatoes and squash—yellow and green—and beets and peppers and heads of lettuce as big as a grown man’s head.

  “Good morning, Blanche! Good morning, Flossie!”

  “Good morning, Savannah!” said the girls in unison, then rushed from behind the stand to give Savannah a long hug.

  “Mona told us you called,” added Blanche.

  Then Flossie, “Welcome back!”

  Savannah spotted Mona making her way down.

  “Bonjou zanmi! Kijan ou ye?”

  “Mwen byen, mési,” replied Mona, a muslin sack of coins in one hand, cash box in the other.

  Savannah lost no time getting her apron out of her satchel and putting it on over her butterscotch gingham dress, then slipping out of white Nubucks and into Sister Sue white Keds. Out, too, came a straw hat on this day with a sky graced by sachems, cabbage whites, and tiger swallowtails. Savannah felt renewed by the sight of the farm stand, Blanche, Flossie, and Mona’s cheer.

  And the butterflies.

  The girls took turns weighing, bagging, making change, hauling down produce when bushel baskets ceased to overflow, walking up and down the line advertising prices.

  “Lettuce … five cents a head! … Tomatoes … seven cents a pound! And get your string beans … six c
ents a pound! And we have corn and we have peppers and we have beets! Beets just five cents a bunch!”

  High noon had come and gone when Savannah spotted Lloyd at the end of the line. She was returning to the stand with a croker sack of tomatoes over one shoulder, a sack of peppers over the other. After refilling bushel baskets she scrunched down behind the stand with her purse, pulled out her compact, checked to make sure no hair was out of place. She then went out front and walked the line.

  “Lettuce … give five cents a head …”

  During the intervening days when Miss Gertie came to clean, Savannah had ached to ask about Lloyd, then thought better. Instead she asked, “How’s the family?”

  “Fine.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, well, Miss Ting is back!” His smile so broad.

  “Yes, I’m back!” said Savannah, wishing she had the guts to say, “I’ve missed you!”

  “You’ve just now come to work?” she asked when it registered that Lloyd was in regular street clothes, not work clothes.

  “I come for my last pay and some vegetables Auntie asked me to bring, ’cause I told her Principal Burroughs gives me a discount.”

  Wait a minute. What did he say? “Your final pay?”

  Lloyd nodded.

  Savannah shifted from foot to foot. “Will you come next week for more produce?” she blurted out before realizing she wasn’t scheduled to be out at Lincoln Heights next week. But maybe if he was coming, maybe she’d ask her parents if she could do back-to-back Saturdays out at Lincoln Heights.

  Lloyd shook his head. “Next Saturday is a big day. A true Moses is coming, will deliver a lecture that evening, and I’m the main host.”

  “Who’s this, this Moses?”

  “Hubert Harrison.”

  Savannah gasped. “Really?”

  Never, ever had she seen Lloyd shocked. “You heard of him, Miss Ting?”

  “When you gave me the Messenger, it had a clipping, one of his articles.”

  “Which one?”

  Savannah frowned. “I don’t remember the title, only that it had ‘New Negro’ in it.”

  “That could be any one of his articles.” Lloyd jingled coins in a trouser pocket. “Enjoyed it?”

  “What?”

  “The Harrison piece.”

  “Oh, most definitely. It was—”

  “You want to attend the lecture?”

  “What time?”

  “Starts at seven o’clock.”

  “Where?”

  “Southwest.”

  Savannah bit her lip as she thought. Then a light bulb beamed in her head. “Yes, I can. I can be there.”

  “Meet at the edge of the Capitol lawn?”

  BECKONED BY THE PAST

  Savannah had the perfect plan.

  Once her parents left for the Lees’ dinner party, she’d change, slip out.

  Lloyd said everything would likely be over by nine o’clock at the latest. Plenty of time for her to get back home, be in bed when her parents returned at what, about ten thirty, maybe even eleven.

  And it all went off without a hitch. Her parents even left a little early.

  In a flash Savannah was out of her yellow cotton housedress and into a linen skirt, white blouse, white hose, white kidskin rubber-heeled shoes. Topping it off, a simple cream silk-and-cotton short-brimmed hat with a lavender ribbon around the crown. With off-white needle-lace gloves on her hands and a linen drawstring purse dangling from a wrist, by five thirty p.m., Savannah was out the door and into the evening’s steamy heat.

  She slowed her pace, did her best to look nonchalant as she neared the edge of the Capitol lawn where Lloyd was waiting.

  It had to be hovering around 100 degrees.

  No surprise. It was July after all. The city’s swampland history making itself known.

  And in the shadow of the Capitol, Savannah was beckoned by the past.

  For the first time, thinking of the souls who may have paved the street beneath her feet.

  Back to men, perhaps named George, Enoch, Harry, Luke, and such, hauling stone quarried with pickaxes and mauls in Virginia, while others, perhaps named Ben, Daniel, Samuel, Elijah, Peter, Paul—carpenters, joiners, masons—giving shape, form, substance to an architect’s dream of the Capitol, of the president’s house.

  Were there Hannahs and Sarahs and Annies on the scene? Drawers of water? Cooks for building crews?

  Savannah racked her brains for another name that wasn’t a perhaps.

  Musician born free in New York, lured to the capital with the promise of work, only to end up scourged and chained in the Yellow House, then made cargo to Louisiana, where he endured twelve long years a slave.

  Years back, during research for an essay, Savannah had read a white abolitionist’s account of his visit to a slave pen.48 Cruel, cramped place. Men, women, children, babies sweltered in the summer. Some froze to death in winter. The sole small window unglazed.

  Something about this steaming July evening …

  Savannah found it increasingly unnerving.

  The heavy air, the heat. Haunted by distant screams, pleas of children, families, all-alone women on auction blocks as senators and society ladies strolled by.

  Savannah glanced around as she and Lloyd walked on. Not a soul seemed fazed by the past.

  Crowds of people out. Couples strolling hand in hand. Families. Best friends. Going to, from theaters, posh restaurants, cafés with gingham curtains. People sat on stoops with wet towels around their necks, their heads.

  When they neared a crowd of kids around a hokey-pokey man’s horse-drawn cart, Lloyd stopped. “Do you want one?”

  “Why, yes, thank you. Lemon, please.”

  When Lloyd stepped away from the cart with but a single paper cup—

  “You didn’t want one?”

  Lloyd shook his head. “Not big on sweets.”

  Gloves off and tucked into her purse, Savannah took the lemon ice from Lloyd’s hand, a hand part of her ached to hold again.

  She stole glances at Lloyd as she licked her lemon ice. As at Nannie Burroughs’s lecture, he wore a brown sack suit. Same blue-and-white-striped club collar shirt. Same skinny knit tie. Same brown cap toe shoes. Same Knox felt hat. She reckoned this was Lloyd’s only nice outfit. And she wondered.

  Surely, he’d be more than a mechanic and catch-as-catch-can laborer had he been born a Sanderson, a Holloway, a Riddle? Would he soon be a graduate of Amherst or Howard or Oberlin? Poised to start an insurance company or real estate agency? Maybe envisioning his own high-class hotel?

  Or maybe he would have been like Charlie. Left Amherst or Howard or Oberlin after a year and followed his own mind.

  “Lloyd?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What made you leave Saint Thomas? Why did you come here?”

  “Wanted to live.”

  “What?”

  “Ran afoul of authorities.”

  Savannah swallowed, then plowed on. “Ran afoul how?—if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Speeches. Meetings. They said I was stirring up the masses, branded me a troublemaker. One night, five, six policemen grab me up, take me out to a cane field, told me I had two choices.”

  Heart in her mouth, Savannah stopped licking her lemon ice.

  “I could get beat to a pulp, left for dead, or—”

  “Go.”

  “And never, ever return.” Lloyd’s eyes were on the ground. And Savannah’s were on him until swiftly, but gently, he steered her to the doorway of a dry goods store.

  A pack of stumbling-drunk white sailors barreled by.

  “Disgusting,” she muttered.

  “If the congressman—name escapes me—the one who a few weeks back introduced a bill on enforcement of the Prohibition amendment—”

  “Volstead,” said Savannah.

  “Yeah, Volstead. If the bill succeed, streets will be free of such foolishness.”

  The sight of those s
ailors brought to mind the men who dragged the Pinchbacks from their home.

  Savannah told Lloyd about that awful day, down to little Sebastian’s weak whimpers. “You must be careful, Lloyd!”

  She also told him of how her family spent that frightening night when Attorney General Palmer’s home—like other homes, other places—was bombed.

  “And you, Miss Ting, you must be brave. Everybody gotta be real brave.”

  “And all these riots …”

  “Poisons hatching out, Miss Ting. Poisons hatching out.”

  AREOPAGITICA

  The lecture was held in a fairly large room of a basement apartment.

  Packed.

  Most of the men in sack suits, some fiddling with flat caps, fedoras in calloused hands, hands with swollen knuckles.

  Women—cleaners, cooks, washerwomen, likely, along with a shopgirl or two—were in what Savannah took to be their Sunday best.

  Seated on neatly placed wooden folding chairs, people chatted, read pamphlets, fanned. Others milled around a camping table covered with a white cloth and laid with small paper cups of water and a tray with squares of pound cake.

  Lloyd escorted Savannah to a front seat.

  “Oh, no, I don’t want to—”

  “Front row seat, Miss Ting.” He laid his hat on a seat beside her. “It won’t be long now,” he said, then headed for a closed door.

  Savannah literally twiddled her fingers as she waited, picking up snatches of conversations.

  “Weekend couldn’t come soon enough.”

  “Yuh boy still searching for work?”

  “Miss Haysmith back in de hospital.”

  West Indian. Almost all.

  Then came a tap on her shoulder. Savannah turned.

  “Name’s Glenna.” A young woman leaned forward, held out her hand.

  “Savannah.”

  “You not from around here?”

  “I don’t live that far away.”

  “How do you know Lloyd?”

  Now Savannah took a good look at the young woman.

  Pretty. Big-boned with deep-set eyes. She didn’t quite sound like Lloyd. More singsong in her voice.

  What’s it to her how I know Lloyd?