Saving Savannah

by Tonya Bolden

  “You are daring,” said Mother. “You are many things, but you are not a disappointment. You remind me so much of me when I was young.”

  Savannah was stunned.

  Mother and Father looked at each other.

  “It’s time,” Mother said to Father.

  Father nodded. “Savannah, go up and check on the boy—what’s his name again?”

  “Bim.”

  “Go check on Bim, then join us back down here, please.”

  MOTHER QUESTING

  Hours later Savannah sat slumped on her bed.

  Elbows on knees.

  Chin in hands.

  Numb.

  Mind a cyclone.

  Mother wasn’t raised in Charleston but in Savannah.

  Mother was the daughter of a woman born in slavery and a woman who was a—

  Mother teased, tormented into quitting school. Teaching herself with secondhand books. Petrified whenever in a house where her only place of peace was a small attic with a single small dormer window, a house of sin and lust, drinking, laudanum, cussing, white men trying to grope her.

  Mother left home at fourteen.

  Mother not born with the vaunted name of Victoria, but the humble Essie.

  And the woman with the troubled arm—not Dinah. Binah, Mother’s one and only friend.

  And Ma Clara, Mother’s first lifeline, rescue, a bandy-legged woman with twinkling eyes, gray hair like a crown, skin darker than a moonless winter midnight.

  Ma Clara who got her that job at a Miss Abby’s boardinghouse. Then came the benefactor.

  That wealthy aunt no aunt, no kin at all, but a woman who went about helping people, especially young women, rise in life.

  Savannah tried to picture Mother about the same age she was now, leaving everything, everybody she knew behind, setting sail into an unknown world with a woman she barely knew.

  Mother questing.

  Savannah closed her eyes, strained to see young Mother during those lonely, lonely days, weeks, months, in a row house with first-floor blue shutters askew, in some Baltimore back street, enduring grueling lessons—etiquette, deportment, elocution, fancy food, table settings, how to dress—on everything she needed to enter the world of the likes of the Sandersons in Washington, DC. And sketching had been such a solace and salvation for Mother just as it was for her.

  The face of another girl floated by: of that girl Savannah had seen in Beggars’ Bay, that girl in a faded red-check pinafore dress with a proud, alert bearing, that girl sweeping three crude wooden steps.

  What if she had a benefactor? Who might she become?

  “So you see, my darling girl, I know very well what a hard life is,” Mother had said at one point.

  “Savannah, if you want to turn your back on the life we offer, we ask that you think long and hard,” Father had added.

  And their words had merged, blended together.

  “Opportunity is nothing to sneeze at.”

  “You think those folks you saw in that alley wouldn’t want what you have?”

  “We can’t lock you up in your room.”

  “We can’t make you do anything really.”

  “Before you know it, Savannah, you will be a woman.”

  “We want you to be happy. But we want you to take care about the way you want to go. The kind of life you want to have.”

  “And the sacrifices you are willing to make to live that life.”

  “When you go out into the world, you must do so with eyes wide open.”

  “We ask one thing.”

  “Finish high school.”

  When Mother told Savannah that months back she had actually met her benefactor, she just stared unblinking, suddenly seeing herself in Uncle Madison’s shop and the frail but erect sprite of a woman with that fiery, ancient gaze.

  Seeing the woman clutch her pearl and diamond butterfly brooch, how her eyes went tender, misted up.

  “Her name is Dorcas Vashon. We had a discreet lunch that week,” said Mother. “She told me that she met you at Madison’s.”

  What a lovely encounter this has been … A lovely encounter indeed.

  “And you named me Savannah …”

  “A piece of home. A way of keeping with me the good I did know there, a way of remembering the people who showed me love, knew me best, helped make me strong.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Mother at the tail end of a long silence. When she returned, she had a small black velvet pouch. From it she brought out a necklace: a single strand of coral beads. “My mother gave me this when I was nine. A birthday gift, the only time I can remember her ever paying me close attention.”

  Mother pressed the necklace into Savannah’s hands.

  “According to Mamma, coral was a talisman against harm.”

  Savannah rolled the beads between her fingers.

  “Mamma snatched it from my neck the day I left home to work at Miss Abby’s. I can still hear their pitter-patter. I later found the beads after Mamma died, kept them. But then when I left Savannah with Dorcas Vashon, as I stood out on the ship’s deck, I started to toss the beads into the sea.”

  “What stopped you?” asked Savannah.

  “A feeling, something that didn’t fully come to me until much later.”

  “And it was?”

  “Maybe Mamma did the best she could. And maybe I got some of my grit from her.”

  It started to all make sense.

  The pride in things like Tiffany candlesticks.

  The overprotectiveness.

  The anger at Charlie turning his back on the security of Father’s firm.

  “Charlie knows?” Savannah had asked at one point.

  Mother nodded.

  Before heading up to her room, Savannah telephoned Charlie, told him about Harrison, her harrowing night, Lloyd, the Hell Fighters, Bim. And—

  “They just told me about Mother … Her past … How did you feel when they told you? …”

  She lowered her voice even more.

  “Wait—you actually called her a hypocrite? … Wow! … How do I feel? … I don’t know how I feel … Angry? … No. Really I’m still in shock.”

  After she hung up the telephone, Savannah thought about Charlie calling Mother a hypocrite. She didn’t agree.

  The Sandersons, your parents, everybody else there last night—these people have worked darn hard for what they have.

  Savannah had always regarded Mother as an ornament, bauble, the weaker one. Now she was reckoning with the fact that Mother was so much stronger, braver than she had ever imagined. Mother fought, forged on. She wasn’t content with pegging out an existence. Mother had indeed made a life! She was as fierce, as noble as Nannie Burroughs.

  “And, perhaps,” Savannah whispered to herself, “if I ever have a daughter, perhaps I’ll name her Essie.”

  Savannah rose from her bed, stepped over to her window to take in dusk descending.

  Lost in thought over Mother’s bitter, difficult childhood, Savannah didn’t hear the telephone ring, didn’t hear Father’s fast footsteps up the stairs, only—

  “Savannah!”

  When she reached the landing, she saw Father heading for Charlie’s old room.

  She followed, frantic. “What is it now?!”

  EENY, MEENY

  “There’s likely to be more trouble tonight.”

  By then Father had a sleeping Bim in his arms. “Grab the Bayer.”

  Father had just settled Bim on the davenport in the living room when there was a knock on the back door.

  “I’ll get it,” said Father.

  Oscar Holloway.

  “I’ve plenty of plywood to spare,” Savannah heard him say. “Come take what you need.”

  While Father boarded up windows, Savannah helped Mother shuttle blankets, pillows, candles, food, dishes, utensils, down to the basement, where she grabbed Charlie’s old baseball bat near Father’s old-timey desk.

  Later, by candlelight they supped on Campbell’s chick
en soup and Sunshine Krispy crackers.

  By candlelight too they listened to the terror of sounds in the distance.

  Eeny, meeny, miny, moe!

  Catch a—

  Sirens.

  Gunshots.

  Shouts.

  Other sounds of malice, of mayhem.

  Sky raining glass.

  Savannah was in that crevice of an alley all over again. This is not as the world ought to be! She gripped an invisible lead pipe in her hand.

  Eeny, meeny, miny, moe!

  Catch a—

  She nodded off, jerked awake, nodded off, caught glimpses of Father pacing, Mother, Father holding hands, smelled another candle lit, heard Bim mumble in his sleep on the pallet beside hers, woke with the dawn, then upstairs with Mother, with Father, saw their street had been spared.

  But evil roamed free elsewhere in the capital the next night too.

  If he hollers, cut his throat.

  During those days of savage, curdling rage Savannah steadied herself mostly by tending to Bim. Feeding him chicken or oxtail soup, checking his brow for temperature, icing his ankle, fluffing the pillow beneath that ankle, reading to him from one of her old books. Fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. Frank Baum’s The Road to Oz.

  “Thank you, Miss Fine Lady,” the boy always said.

  “Bim, my name is Savannah. You call me that, okay?” she said at one turn.

  “Okay, Miss Fine Lady.”

  During daylight calm, Father stashed canned food in the Buick, had Mother and Savannah pack overnight bags. But they didn’t have to flee their home. With Tuesday came troops, then a pouring, purging rain.

  And telephone call after telephone call.

  It was early afternoon when Mother and Father withdrew to their bedroom, closed the door.

  From the other side Savannah listened to Father relay grim news those telephone calls bore.

  Negro men, women, children dragged from streetcars yards from the Capitol, the White House, skulls fractured with rifle butts, souls crawling to safety through bloodstained streets, whites shooting from terror cars, Negroes shooting from terror cars, stabbings, old woman beaten to a pulp, old man on his knees in the doorway of a D Street shop begging for mercy.

  Savannah imagined her parents sitting on their bed, Father’s head in his hands, Mother rubbing his shoulders.

  “Dr. Woodson tucked, just in the nick of time, into the darkened doorway of a store near Pennsylvania Avenue,” said Father with such a heavy heart. “But nearby another man was not so lucky. Woodson saw a gang of white soldiers snatch him up as one would a beef for slaughter,53 shot him point-blank.”

  Father spoke of damages to businesses, to homes, who needed to get bailed out of jail, who needed help for a burial, with medical bills, with tiding over until able to return to work. Of President Woodrow Wilson on his yacht with dysentery and once back in the White House, needing his rest.

  Listening in, Savannah surprised herself. No tears. No trembling. Something within told her that if she could survive this madness—

  She went back downstairs and stepped outside her house. No damage to any houses on her block. No broken glass, rocks, pools of blood on her part of M Street NW.

  Later that day, after Calvin Chase, John Lewis, Hannibal Bash, Waylon Jones, and Mr. Holloway trooped into the living room, before Father closed the sliding doors, Savannah asked, “Will you have a lot of claims to pay out?”

  “Not sure, but I don’t expect it to be so bad. Most of the damage is in Southwest.” Father hung his head. “A lot of folks there can’t afford insurance.”

  The Walcotts?

  The Fletchers?

  Spencer?

  All her brave Hell Fighters—how had they fared?

  Savannah rushed to the telephone, told the operator that she didn’t know the number.

  “It’s a grocery store, Southwest. Name’s Fletcher.”

  LIKE A WILDFIRE LEAPS A RIVER

  Like a wildfire leaps rivers, shift-shapes, turns into tornadoes of flames, so rage leaped from city to city.

  “CHICAGO RIOTS EXTEND TO ‘LOOP’ DISTRICT,” reported the Star on July 29. “DEATHS NOW TOTAL 24.”54

  On and on and—

  Savannah reached her limit, stopped reading newspapers altogether at one point. When she went back, she kept it to light reading. Ads. Poetry. One day it was a short story about a strong-willed, beguiling, and impish beauty, Roxana, who much to everyone’s surprise married a plodder named Dick, a man she had wrapped around her little finger.

  “Red summer had merged55 into a fall resplendent in a galaxy of yellow and browns, and Dick trudged home from the depot thru the cooler atmosphere, so pleasingly refreshing after the long, hot day just over. The day’s work—”

  Savannah paused, went back. Red summer merged.

  The writer meant something wondrous by that, but for Savannah that phrase “Red Summer” brought only unbridled brutality to mind, had her on the brink of tears, churning over a way to strike back, wondering if she’d have to live in fear for the rest of her life, always braced for news of more evil unloosed.

  Red Summer.

  Tidying her room, sketching on her balcony, or going through her wardrobe for clothing—not that she was tired of, but that she simply didn’t need—Savannah constantly asked, Why? What have we ever done to them?

  Money. Power. It’s always one or the other. Or both.

  “And there’s the fear,” Savannah whispered.

  Weeks later, a mended Bim was ready to be driven to the Walcotts’.

  “So everyone’s all right?” Savannah asked on the early August day when Lloyd came through those recessed double doors with crocheted curtains to their three-quarter-length panes, as he stepped down those stairs with latticed risers in something like a fleur-de-lis pattern.

  When she’d gotten through to Mr. Fletcher after calm came to the capital, he had said Lloyd had been by and that his family was fine. But Mr. Fletcher didn’t know about the others.

  “They all come through fine,” Lloyd now assured her on that early August day.

  As Savannah stood there, Bim’s hand in hers, she saw the Walcotts’ street hadn’t come through fine. There were some boarded-up windows and busted Millet post streetlamps.

  “Mr. Walcott will see you home,” said Savannah, glancing down at Bim.

  Tears welled up in the boy’s eyes; he grabbed Savannah around the waist. “Please, Miss Fine Lady, please let me stay with you.”

  “I can’t do that, Bim. But I’ll visit. I promise.” She stroked his face, then released the boy’s hand into Lloyd’s. In the exchange their own hands touched. Savannah looked over her shoulder, saw Father with eyes facing front. She went on tiptoe, kissed Lloyd on the cheek, then pressed hers against his. “How, when will we—”

  “We’ll figure something out, Miss Ting.”

  As the black Buick pulled off, Savannah looked back, once again touched by the way Lloyd led Bim down the street.

  And when Savannah returned home, she overheard something she likened to the rising of the sun.

  MORE CAPITAL ARRESTS

  “I made a terrible mistake and I’m sorry … No, Charlie, I was overbearing and …”

  Mother apologizing?

  “You—you deserve to live your life under no cloud of condemnation … With this world on fire, we all must take happiness wherever we find it.”

  Mother forgiving?

  Mother as she ought to be?

  Turmoil. Tragedy. That’s what it took to bring this about. There was guilt bundled up with Savannah’s gratitude. Her family was becoming whole while so many lives were being torn apart in a world that was still so very much on fire.

  Red Summer had merged into a Red Fall.

  Ellenton, South Carolina … Omaha, Nebraska …

  More working people were rising up!

  Strike!

  Police in Boston.

  Steelworkers in Ohio.

  Coal miners in Illinois.


  And there was the stepped-up hunt for radicals. In Akron, Baltimore, Saint Louis—all around the nation it seemed. Then came the headline that sent a chill down Savannah’s spine: “MORE CAPITAL ARRESTS56 THIS AFTERNOON, SAY JUSTICE DEPT. AGENTS.”

  The next day Bim showed up at the Riddles’ back door with a note from Nella.

  Savannah knew, knew in her gut, that it wasn’t about Miss Gertie falling ill again, wasn’t about some Poro products. Tears were on the rise and her hands were trembling as she removed the note from its envelope.

  HIS “MISS TING”

  “Father! Father!”

  Savannah rushed to the backyard where Father was pulling up tomato stakes, readying what was left of the plants for rubbish.

  “Father! Lloyd has been arrested!”

  Father reached out to Calvin Chase for help but again and again—nothing but the runaround. Then came the telephone call that sent Savannah to her knees.

  Deported?

  Lloyd was from Saint Thomas. Savannah couldn’t make any sense of it.

  The United States had purchased the Danish West Indies a few years back, renamed them the Virgin Islands. People on Saint John, Saint Croix, Saint Thomas—they were American citizens.

  Then she heard Lloyd.

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

  Later, listless, tearless, blind to townhouse turrets and gables, treetops, Millet post streetlamps, she stood on her balcony, mourning words unsaid, missing the sound of his “Miss Ting.”

  MURMURATION

  It was the season when oaks, birches, lindens, maples shed red, orange, yellow leaves, create coverlets for ground atop their feet.

  A time when twilight bids swarms of starlings, boat-tailed grackles, red-winged blackbirds to make magic in the sky.

  Fluttering, twirling, swirling, twisting, rising, falling, reeling, swooping, whirling, flinging themselves into pirouettes, grand jetés, then, for a moment in time, flocking, in no way timorous, into a spectacular, fantastical shape—whale, seahorse, prehistoric beast.