Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction

by Russell, Vanessa

  I’m not understanding anything since I woke up this morning. I’m relieved when I finally drop him off at his print shop at the port where hundreds of workers are building the Liberty Ships for the war effort. I learn later that that was the smartest thing I did all day.

  I’m back in the warm, aromatic kitchen with Clary the next morning, loving our routine. I thought I’d hate any type of habit because of the Lighthouse’s rigid schedule, but I fit back into it like a well-worn house-slipper. With just the two of us, Clary is back to her old self and she makes me my favorite of her cooking: sweet potato biscuits.

  “Here’s some more peckings, chile’; I don’t know where you put it all. Did you find what you were looking for yesterday, Miss Katy?” she asks, setting two of these orange biscuits in front of me, the butter melting across the tops making me salivate. I’ll tell her anything she wants while smelling this, and so I tell her every “hush-hush” that happened with Ellen Whitman.

  “Eugenics?” She freezes in mid-scrubbing

  I blush at her reaction like I’ve said a bad word. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Of course I know what that is!” she says, for the first time raising her voice at me.

  “Oh. Can you tell me then? I don’t have a clue.”

  Her shoulders settle a bit and she resumes her scrubbing. I can see her from the side and she looks upset. “You’ve led a sheltered life, Miss Katy.”

  “So?” I say with a mouthful of biscuit.

  “So you may have trouble believing some of the things that goes on down here.”

  “Does this have to do with all those scars on your arm and that badly-healed broken wrist?” I sigh. “I just don’t understand why you colored people or niggers or whatever you’re called, just can’t get along. That’s the trouble I’ve seen down here.”

  She turns and gives me a glare that glazes her eyes like chocolate pudding. She pulls the biscuits away from my reach to get my attention and puts her hands on her hips. “I’ve worked for white folk a long time and I sees a lot, so don’t you go gettin’ your righteous white back up. If you don’t know of a woman in your own family,” she says pointing at me, “that’s been treated bad, then you’re not hearin’ close enough!”

  I stand up and reach over, pulling the saucer back to my place. “Come on, Clary, tell me what eugenics means.”

  “That’s a fancy word for a doctor to make a poor Negro woman sterile.” She’s still using that hateful tone but I let her.

  “I’m hearing close enough now, Clary. This happened to you?”

  “Yes’m, it did,” she says with resolve, as if it’s all settled to tell me. “When I was thirteen I’d done had a baby and then was told I was feeble-minded with low morals. A white social worker came to my mother and said if she agreed to sign the consent form, they wouldn’t cut her off welfare. After she signed, they cut me where babies couldn’t grow again. Then they gave away my baby so I wouldn’t try to go on welfare. I got married when I was sixteen and didn’t tell my husband for a long time. ‘Course eventually he got suspicious and I told him the truth and he left me. I’ve paid my dues. I’ve been working here ever since.”

  “Holy Mother of God,” I whisper. Eugenics sounds like something my great-uncle would do to his cows on his dairy farm, but to sterilize other people I can’t imagine. Why does government consider this more moral than birth control? At least with contraception, women can have a choice on how many children they want. “Where’s the money coming from for this, Clary? I heard today that money is the biggest problem.”

  “Your friend would know that best of anyone, or at least his daddy will,” Clary says drying her hands, and with that she leaves me alone to the whole pan of biscuits.

  Man, oh, man, maybe this project isn’t such a bad idea. GB - I mean Grandmama Bess - looks all flustered tonight and won’t meet my eyes. She must’ve read my papers from last night. Like Mama said, Be careful what you ask for! This just tickles me to death. It’s always been such a trip to egg GB on, I don’t know why. She looms over me with that righteous white moss of hairdo twist and gives me a hard time - maybe she’s like climbing Mount Everest and I just want to brag that I conquered her. Or at least got to her and messed with her head.

  So I reach for another rock hold and, with the news of the day agitating my mind, where a colored man was beaten to death in Alabama for marrying a white woman, I say to her, “GB, with all this liberal thinking you got, what’s wrong with whites marrying colored? And don’t give me that crap about birds of a feather flock together either. You said yourself that, ‘women are people too’ so don’t that smooth everybody out to the same thing? Whitening their skin would just be adding cream to the coffee, baby.”

  She takes a long drink of her wine and I gotta give her credit for keeping her cool. She picks up her pen and starts writing on another umpteenth lined page like she’s the only one with a year to write about, and then pauses. She looks over at me with the same color in her eyes as that bluejean ink scrawled all over her paper. There’s not space left on there to say, ‘go to hell Jesi’.

  She Speaks: “Mama came up with the line ‘women are people, too.’ Let her explain.”

  What a shitty cop-out, man. GG’s head has a small tremor when she’s put on the spot and I feel sorry for her being on this one. She lays down her pen and relaxes her hands on the table, her crooked knotty fingers giving a brush here and there to leftover crumbs from din-din. “It’s not only the birds, Jesi,” she finally says. Her trembling hand flutters toward the window, her fingers making me think of branches. It’s dark out there but I get her drift. “But nature itself teaches you. Like ivy and wisteria on our arbor out there, we can’t be of the same vine, but we can grow in the same garden. It’s the way God intended.”

  That’s no fun.

  I pick up my pen.

  So here’s the thing: I got to thinking: What My Mamas want from me is something to fight for. A cause seems to be important around these digs. But not the same cause, not like marching for Women’s Equal cause, not quite as virgin as that. But still far-out, man. Even if it is for a man, if you get my drift. Doesn’t matter if you don’t; I’m just writing like I was told.

  But first let me say: Great-Granny Ruby (aka GG), you are The Coolest! I did what you hinted to. Wow! You’re right, The Wedding Night curled my hair into a bun, so I’m not the only one - I thought that first time thing was just me. Other surprises too, like Grandmama Bess had more than one husband and did you know, GG, that her first husband loved you more? Probably not – GB sure as hell hasn’t told you, not as far as I can tell. Of course, she’s The Virgin Bess, and we won’t get any good stuff from her love life. But she had to do something; there is Mama after all. Maybe Mama was adopted. Hah-hah. And Mama is no better; she’s acting all Annette Funicello with what she’s written so far. So what, that this William TJ is groping her. What man doesn’t grope?

  I’ve been groped, I’ve been … well, before I go ruining my reputation, I’m going to excuse myself from this table like someone else I know, and write more in my private den. But I’m going to keep these next pages to myself until I read more of the others.

  I’m not feeling so low-down, now that I know some secrets.

  And ...

  The less I feel like the dumb cripple around here, the more I’ll talk.

  And …

  The more I take in, the more I’ll give out.

  It’s the Way of Life, man.

  So here’s The Truth of Isaac: Last summer I’m sitting in Civics class. You can talk about anything in Mr. Jones’ classroom. He has long shiny brown hair all the way down past his ears in this beatnik way, and he likes to have group discussions about local government, what our civic duties are, and how we should get involved. He’d almost preach this in class, but he’d do it in a slow, we’ve-got-all-day way and the way he’d saunter back and forth in front of the chalkboard with a bit of a hunched back, was mesmerizing to me (plus his family is rich
since his grandfather owns the textile mill and don’t people listen more to a rich man, thinking money buys brains?). He also had big blue eyes that showed us the red-eye when he was smoking dope. He was So Cool and I was so In Love.

  He asked us one day to picture how we see ourselves in our microcosmic world. Was our world at home a democracy, where we have a vote in decisions? Or more of a monarch, where one person rules? Or could it be a theocracy, ruled by religious beliefs?

  I snickered, which got his attention. “Miss Pickering?”

  “Where’s the Matriarch in this?” I asked. Everyone laughed because who doesn’t know about the Lighthouse?

  “Well, the matriarch is a female ruler in more of a social system,” Mr. Jones said. “What we’re talking about here is a more powerful political system, a balance of struggles on he who has the power.” He walked past me where I always sat in the front row to stay closer to him, and he squeezed my shoulder.

  “Then mine’s a monarch with a queen,” I said.

  “Yeah, well that’s the only way a chick will get power of this country,” Tyler said, and Florence, his steady, giggled. She and her striped shirtdress and matching head kerchief and long straight legs. I hear they do IT in the park. Who cares what they think?

  “Let the Mob rule,” Bobby said. He’s one of The Hoods, always looking for a fight.

  “That’s ochlocracy,” Mr. Jones said.

  “Another name is mobocracy. But if the mob rules, it’s worse than anarchy because you still have rules, but the rules change based on the mood of the leader, and what if he’s in a bad mood?”

  “Then we cream ‘em,” said Bobby. We all laughed.

  “Or you lynch them,” said a voice from the desk directly behind me. The room got quiet.

  I turned to see all eyes on Isaac Cosman. He stared back at me.

  I’d never seen a colored person up close before and I’d never heard this one speak before; he’s new to summer school and I’m making up a class I flunked when in the hospital last year. He looked older than I thought they should look for a student but what did I know? Only what I’d seen on television, with cameras more and more on Negroes-in-the-South getting water-sprayed in the streets, drinking from fountains labeled “Colored”, entering doors that said “Colored Only” and I thought the “Colored” signs were all messed up because everyone looked black and white on television.

  “Go on,” I whispered.

  “We’re supposed to be a democracy, but we can’t be at home, because we’re angry and poor and take it out on each other. We can’t be in our country, because we take away the rights of an entire race. Which is why we’re angry and poor, and it goes in a circle you see. We’re angry at home because my father was lynched in Georgia when I was a little boy and my mother raised five children by herself. ‘Jesus was lynched,’ she said. ‘He too, hung from a tree, so your dad is in good company up in heaven.’ We moved to New York to get away from having to drink from a separate water fountain. It’s not that I minded being separate, but I did mind that my water fountain was dirtier and didn’t work half the time. I don’t mind being separate; I mind being less. But to run away does no good. My mother is still a washerwoman for the white people. Like Martin Luther King said, ‘we take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes’. We can’t seem to live up to democracy. But do we fight? King says no. He says force begets force. So no mobocracy, no monarchy. No race or sex should rule the rest.”

  He said all that to me, our eyes never wavering from each other. You could’ve heard a tear drop in the room, it was so quiet. His voice, man, his voice … there was a sweet tender melody in there, slow and distinct. I’m hooked and would’ve slow-danced with him right there.

  I turned back around to see what Mr. Jones thought about this. He had meandered back up front. He was nodding, nodding, kind of staring at Isaac but not really looking, and then he tucked his hair behind his ear and resumed his teaching as if Isaac hadn’t said a word. It was the first time I was sorry I’d lost my virginity to that man.

  This was the last day of school and I didn’t play kiss-up after class and hover around Mr. Jones, hoping for some attention, a promise, a hurried rendezvous. Instead I walked out with a group so he couldn’t discreetly wave me over, but I felt his eyes burn my ass.

  I was bent over at my locker, cursing my new leg brace and the blister it had rubbed onto my leg when patched jeans came into view … a sweatshirt that read NAACP … Isaac’s face. I straightened up but with my short height – I don’t reach five feet – he still looked like the Jolly Green Giant. My height is where I related to his “I mind being less”.

  “Ho, ho, ho,” I said, deep down like the Jolly Green commercial.

  Something about his round brown eyes locked me in, deep, searching, as if trying to see what color my soul was. “Come with me to the March on Washington,” he said. “For jobs and freedom. A group of us are taking a chartered bus down. We’ll hear Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan.”

  My head was full by the time we arrived in D.C. and began the long walk toward the Washington Monument and on to the Lincoln Memorial. Six of Isaac’s school cronies, two of us white – and hey, I admit that I was relieved to see another white – sat in the back of the bus with the other colored folk. I trusted Isaac for some unknown reason and thankfully he sat next to me, but I hadn’t thought this out further than a school field trip and Dylan being there at the end. Economic slavery, racial segregation, discrimination, police brutality, they talked about it all, while I secretly worried about the lie I told Mama about spending the day and overnight with a girlfriend. (My Mamas think that I can’t do anything for myself, even refusing to let me work outside the Lighthouse. What else could I do, man, except steal money from your purses for the trip?)

  It really wasn’t a march as I’d feared would be like My Mamas had marched in, but a far-out flow among the masses of what seemed to be everyone in the U.S. – I couldn’t have turned around to go back if I wanted to. Halfway along the concrete pond between the monument and memorial, I had to take a break. I stepped out and reached for a tree as if reaching for the shore. I motioned for the rest of them to go on, each holding signs demanding integrated schools and decent housing (they didn’t give me a sign, and for once I was glad to be treated differently). Isaac lingered but I pushed him back out into the swarm. I don’t cry in front of anyone. This trip was the first thing I’d done on my own but this was like jumping into the middle of a massive river and suddenly realizing I need to learn how to swim.

  I leaned against the tree, hiked up my long skirt, and took off my leg brace and its connecting shoe. Its sole is five inches higher than my other shoe to make my left leg the same length as my right and under this August sun, it weighed a freaking thousand pounds of humid heat. I massaged around the blister that just wasn’t healing and that I just wasn’t going to tell Mama about. I hate that worried look in one eye, and that here-you-go-again look in her other eye. She doesn’t mean to, and no one knows that better than me, but it’s like, I don’t know, man, like she sees a demon in me.

  Without the peoples’ squeeze, I could breathe again. I could mellow out while they sang “We shall overcome … We shall all be free … We shall live in peace …” and I knew what they were singing about, this sense of being unburdened. I held my leg brace and believed if I dropped it, my body would become weightless and I’d float above this tree and see it all. I imagined I hovered above Bob Dylan and then I wished I was chained to the ground with Isaac as Dylan sang, And he’s taught how to walk in a pack/Shoot in the back/With his fist in a clinch/To hang and to lynch/To hide ‘neath the hood/To kill with no pain/Like a dog on a chain/He ain’t got no name/But it ain’t him to blame/He’s only a pawn in their game. I sat on the ground rocking, singing, hearing voices and music, near and distantly amplified, watching with my mind’s eye, until darkness and Isaac came.

  Back at the ranch, my Mamas are acting more queer. They’re
dragging me into heated discussions over their TV show, Wagon Train. After years, the show has moved from Wednesday night to Monday, and on a different station, and they’re bummed out. You’d think their husbands had left them. They’re crowded into the TV room that used to be the ‘back parlor’, la-de-da. They’re dividing the movie star hunks between them: GG gets Bill Hawks because she likes his Indian name and she always, always makes a big deal about rooting for the Indians; GB goes for the dashing scouts, Flint and Coop, claiming they’re the cowboy version of a reporter; and the blond dollbaby Scott Miller is supposed to be Mama’s but she complains that he says too little and shoots off his gun too much, and besides she doesn’t like blonds anymore (whatever “anymore” means). GB says, “Take Charlie, the cook, then. You both make bad coffee.” They want me to take Barnaby but he’s just a kid, GB, I argue, heavy on the “GB” part, because, like GB, Mama hates, hates me using initials for names.

  Out of boredom, I rile them up by saying, why not the Bonanza boys? The Cartwrights are fine-as-wine for us four of a kind. GG could have the papa, Ben. I’d give the eldest son, Adam, to GB, and – “Oh no you don’t!” Mama cuts in loudly, lighting a cigarette and throwing her arms around like someone gave her a bum deal, saying she’s not taking no Fat Cat like Hoss, what am I, crazy?

  “It’s just like you to want that hotheaded Little Joe,” she said, pointing her two fingers at me, the cigarette in-between scattering ashes. “Besides, these guys are dangerous for women. Every woman they’ve loved has been either murdered or died of disease.”

  Maybe now you can see what a drag it is and why it’s so cool that Isaac telephones me just then. Mama hands me the phone with one eyebrow up. “Don’t talk long; you need to go to bed. The Feminine Mystique is on your nightstand.” Of course I say nothing and turn my back to her to kiss my ass.