“So, do you like Elvis? My father doesn’t like Elvis, but I do.”
“Well, yeah, we like Elvis, don’t we, Tina?” Tab took some socks from Tina, still watching the bunk.
“Sure, we like Elvis.”
“My father is a minister, Clarence Calder. You’ve probably heard of him. He’s famous in the movement. We may go to Memphis when we finish here, so I can see where Elvis lives.”
Tab moved around the room to see if she could get a better view. “Guess you’re in junior high like me?”
“Uh, yeah, but tall for my age.” The sheets were shaking, as if she might be trying to keep from laughing. “Have you ever seen Elvis?”
“No, but that’s a good idea, going to see where he lives. Don’t you think so, Tina?”
“I said I did.” Tina was not interested in the lump under the sheets.
Tab was resisting the urge to go up and jerk the comic off. “So, did your father come down to help out with training coloreds on how to get to vote?”
The voice snickered. “Yes. Yes he did, to train coloreds, as you say. And your aunt?”
“Yeah, she’s crazy about coloreds, too. Hey, I got a idea. If you go to Memphis from here, you’re bound to go through Pulaski. It’s on the way. You could stop to see the plaque of—”
“Don’t start that again, Tab. She’s not interested. They have a lot more interesting things up north, like the Liberty Bell, things like that.” Tina pitched a pair of tennis shoes to Tab, who put them away as a bell clanged out on the front porch.
Dominique Calder tossed the comic book to the far end of the bed and sat up. Long brown legs swung around to dangle over the side of the bunk. Bushy black hair that framed her face stood out perhaps four inches on all sides of her head, and there was a sly grin. “It’s the hairdo you’re staring at, isn’t it?” They shook their heads yes. “It’s called an Afro.” One hand reached up, fingers plumping it into shape. “Most people down here don’t wear this style yet. It’s new. I realize you people down here don’t get fashions until much later. In a few years, you’ll see it all over the place.”
She slipped off the bunk, not using the ladder, which was no problem, given the length of the legs. She was tall for her age, if she was, as she had said, the same age as Tab. She looked years older, and, Tab thought, slightly weird with the bushed-out hair and a gap between her two front teeth. The face was hard and narrow, the lips thick and large—not pretty. Tab was trying to remember if she had ever seen a beautiful black person. No, but striking. That was it—she was striking.
“That’s the dinner bell.” She stood facing them, her feet planted apart, her hands jammed in her jeans pockets—daring them. “Better hurry and unpack. I can tell we’re having fried chicken. I know you people are used to fried chicken down here, but ah, c’est un bizarre plaisir pour moi.” She strode toward the door. “Et, je m’appelle Dominique.” And then she caught the door frame and turned back to them. “Oh, sorry, I was telling you that my name is Dominique. My father cautioned me about speaking French down here, with you people.”
Tina waited until Dominique was well down the hall before she burst out. “Is your father down here to help the colored people learn how to vote?” She fell over on the bunk, laughing. “How gross can you get?”
“Well, how did I know . . . this weird body, lying up there covered up like that? Have you ever heard of a colored person with a Yankee accent? Well, have you?” Tab hit her sister with a pair of socks, trying to make her stop laughing and confess. “I’m serious. Have you ever heard of such a thing?” Certainly they had not seen or heard anything like it in Bainbridge, and although they had visited Birmingham and Memphis on two occasions, nothing of that sort had made itself known to them in those cities—or on television. The set they had had for two years now showed I Love Lucy, and The Andy Griffith Show or My Three Sons, and only after homework was done.
“And you were gonna tell her about the plaque. I loved that part!”
“Well, she mighta wanted to see the plaque.”
“Oh sure, colored people just love to see anything associated with the Ku Klux Klan.” Tina pitched more socks on her bunk. “You’re too much,” she said, and pretended an exaggerated check of her own hair. “Well, I must take leave of you now, since it’s dinnertime. Adios.” She started toward the door and walked out before turning around and sticking her head back through the frame. “Oh, sorry, that’s Spanish for ‘I think our colored roommate is gonna be a jerk.’”
They met the other roommate that night at supper, sat across from her at one of the tables in a dining room that accommodated forty or so people. Eloise was from South Carolina and, Tab thought, had a regular-looking colored person’s hair—slicked down with what was probably Vaseline and tied in the back with a yellow ribbon. Her way of talking was not grating to Tab’s ear, more like her own. She was younger, eleven, and she reminded Tab in a way of Maudie May, the girl she had played with before she got polio and had to leave Bainbridge. She felt immediately comfortable with Eloise. She had come up to Highlander with her mother. When they finished here, they were going on back to South Carolina and start a citizenship school to teach people to read and get them registered to vote. “Leastways that’s what Mama say we was gonna do. It ain’t none of me. I be here ’cause Mama here.”
Dominique was sitting at a table at the far end of the room with a tall, thin colored man. Eugenia was with them, listening with rapt attention every time the man spoke.
“They talking about going on over to Troy Town tomorrow, if you’re wondering what they talking about.” Eloise had seen Tab watching Dominique’s table. “Gonna see if they can’t bring back some of them colored children scared to go to school with the whites. Let ’em be here for the weekend so they can play.” Eloise sneered. “Looka here. I ain’t scared of no whites. Sitting right here at the table with ’em, ain’t I?” Tab looked around to see whom she might be talking about. There were only Tina and herself and one of the lifeguards.
“Are you scared of him?” she whispered. No one had ever explained to Tab that she was supposed to be afraid—of anyone. For someone to mention the possibility of a predator—of any kind—to a girl would have been impolite, even common. She had heard the words, batted around at slumber parties, like balloons floating in the air, things they would say for the fun of it, to show they knew the words: whore, bitch, rape—and they knew the definitions, because they had looked them up.
“I ain’t scared of no women,” Eloise said. “You gotta be careful ’bout the men, though.” Tab eyed the lifeguard suspiciously, trying to imagine him as a villain in a movie—the closest she could come to disquieting social interchange. There was that story she had heard her grandmother tell one night on the porch, when Grandmother had had three glasses of peach wine. She didn’t like to remember the details of that story, and anyway, Grandmother had told her never to repeat it. Girls didn’t hear stories like that.
“So, Eloise, do you like Elvis? He’s white, and Dominique likes him.”
“Don’t like Elvis. My mama say the Devil in them hips. I like Fats, Fats Domino. Try to get him on the radio up here, but all I can get up here in these mountains is ‘Grand Ole Opry.’ That ain’t my type of music.”
“Me neither.”
“Tina doesn’t like it, either, do you, Tina?”
Tina nodded. She hadn’t said much to them. There were two boys sitting across from her, lifeguards for the lake, among other things, down for the summer to help out, they said—the one black and the other white. Tina had been talking to the white one and watching everything the black one did. Tab looked up from her fried chicken to give the black one a passing glance. He didn’t look colored except for his skin.
Supper was fried chicken, crowder peas, sliced tomatoes, string beans, corn bread, and all the iced tea they wanted. It didn’t taste any different from the iced tea they had at home, although the fried chicken was not the same—cornmeal in the batter.
&nbs
p; After supper, the three of them—Tina, Eloise, and Tab—helped stack chairs in the dining room. It had been decided that there should be a square dance. “I think,” Tina whispered, “we’re gonna dance—with everybody participating.”
“So? I am very good at square dancing.”
“So what if someone asks me to dance?” And sure enough, someone did, and Tina went out on the floor and wasn’t half as good as the colored man who had asked her, and she came off red-faced.
Tab was sitting on a pushed-back table, legs swinging. “You see, your problem there was, you were do-si-doing the wrong way and bumping into the people behind you that first time, and then when you were supposed to allemande right, you allemanded left and messed up the whole thing.”
“Thank you, Miss Swan Lake, but that had nothing to do with it.”
“If you don’t mind me saying so, it’s because you can’t dance worth a hoot, Tina.”
“It most certainly is not. It’s because it’s against the law; otherwise, I would have been just as good or better than everybody else.”
Tab took a drink of punch. She held the cup up in Tina’s face. “I have heard that swimming is against the law, but nowhere is it written that square dancing is against the law—or drinking punch.”
“I can’t believe you. We’re up here not more than one day and you’re acting more like Aunt Eugenia than Aunt Eugenia. Here we are, in the midst of Tennessee, breaking the law. Where is all that hate you had for Aunt Eugenia and all that stuff you’re always spouting about Cousin John Lester and our poor ancestors at the Battle of Shiloh?”
Tab sighed heavily, feeling put-upon that she must clarify the simple but irrefutable logic of it all. “If you do not remember, I will tell you. It was not colored people who killed Great-Great-Uncle Arthur. It was—do I need to explain this to you, Tina?—Yankee white people.”
Eugenia, out of breath, walked over to them at the end of the Virginia reel. Another dance was starting. “Isn’t this fun?”
They nodded their heads.
“And so many interesting people here. Do you like your roommates?”
They nodded again, forcing smiles.
“Good, good. I told you you would. Do you see that man over there?” She was pointing to the man who had been sitting next to Dominique at dinner. “I know you haven’t heard of him, but that’s Clarence Calder. He’s—”
“A famous preacher in the movement?” Tab said.
“Why, yes. How did you know?”
Tab shrugged and looked around, but she didn’t see Dominique.
The dance ended and Eugenia was back out on the floor again, acting like the social director, grabbing poor colored people who didn’t want to dance and making them join in the fun—out of the kindness of her heart, of course—because Aunt Eugenia was so anxious to do good, she was going to do it no matter who suffered.
CHAPTER 14
Divorce
THE BUS HAD COME BACK from Troy Town late the next afternoon. Eugenia, the leader, and Reverend Calder were the only ones on board. Eugenia, looking crestfallen, was sitting on the porch, waiting for dinner. “They couldn’t see, or maybe they didn’t want to see,” she said.
“Eugenia, you can’t expect it to be like you want it to be. It’s like it is. That’s the reality we work with,” the leader said.
“Did I ruin the whole thing?”
The leader looked tired. “No, it was probably bound to happen anyway. When the parents saw you arguing—discussing—with the protestors, they got scared for their children.” He could see that Eugenia was near tears, and so could Tab. She had been sitting on the edge of the porch, listening. She got up and took Aunt Eugenia’s arm. “Whatever you did, Aunt Eugenia, I know it was good.” And after she had said it, she realized she felt sorry for Aunt Eugenia and never had before.
“We need to forget it and move on,” the leader was saying. “Envelope stuffing tonight after dinner.”
“I’ll be there,” Eugenia said, brightening. “I’ll bring the girls. We’ll be there.”
That night, Tab, Dominique, Eloise, Tina, and the two lifeguards were all sitting around one of the dining room tables, stuffing envelopes, when Dominique had to say it: “You people just don’t have the temperament it takes. Your aunt botched up the whole thing over in Troy Town today.”
Tab felt duty-bound to take it as an insult, even if Dominique was right about Aunt Eugenia. She had been taught to defend family, always, no matter that you personally didn’t like what they said or who they were. She had never really thought about it before, but she wasn’t so fond of Uncle Tom. That night, in a halfhearted effort at reprisal, she short-sheeted Dominique’s bunk. The next day, she was amazed that Dominique didn’t accuse her, didn’t seem to know who had done it. She figured Dominique must not have heard about the family loyalty thing.
The younger ones—about eight children who had come to Highlander with their parents—would do other things during the day, work on crafts or take hikes or go swimming. Eloise had never learned to swim, and so one of the lifeguards was giving her lessons. Tina had volunteered to help out with the lifeguards because, she said, she had her senior lifesaving certificate. Dominique and Tab were left together by default. And when the two of them went swimming in the afternoon and Dominique said she didn’t have any aunts or uncles and that she was an only child, it was something unusual, but not unheard of. But when they reached the float in the middle of the lake and were sitting there catching their breath and Dominique said her parents were divorced, now that was news—Tab having never been acquainted with a child of divorce. It was not an occasion for sorrow as much as it presented itself as an oddity, like a two-headed cow at the fair or something out of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! This announcement brought on a dull thud of silence, Dominique gazing out at the water. Tab tried not to stare, because any minute Dominique was going to make a fool of her by laughing at her gullibility. Tab thought it must be another attempt at cleverness, much like throwing around the French phrases.
Tab had friends whose fathers drank to excess. She had one acquaintance whose mother always seemed to have bruises on her arms. She could come to Tab’s house, but Tab couldn’t go visit. It was never discussed. Discussion might require imagining the details.
With it all, divorce was not an option. It would have been shrinking from one’s duty. It would have garnered the whole community’s contempt. And her father, Dominique’s father, was a minister. Tab stared long enough at Dominique to realize she was not joking. “Are you sure?”
“Am I sure?” Dominique looked to the heavens, rolling her eyes. “You are so pathetic.”
“Why am I pathetic? You’re the one with the divorced parents, and you just come right out and say it in public. And you don’t even know me that much.”
There was silence again, except for shouts and splashes off in the swimming area. “I just don’t know anybody with divorced parents, that’s all. So shoot me.” Tab looked out at the water. “Besides, if you do get a divorce, it is not something you go around telling people.” Other people did things like that—movie stars, Elizabeth Taylor, people like that—but nobody in the real world. She sat there trying to think of anyone her parents might have mentioned. She lay back on the float and closed her eyes, completely absorbed in this new thought. There was a cousin. Did she remember her parents, maybe her grandmother, mentioning that he got a divorce and moved to Texas? People were constantly moving to Texas when they did something strange. And then she realized Dominique was still sitting there. “You know what, Dominique? You are the most unusual person I’ve ever met: a colored with a Yankee accent, whose father got a divorce, and he’s a minister on top of that.” She lay there, amazed by it all, and then heard a splash.
Dominique had jumped back in the water and was swimming ashore.
“Hey, wait up.”
“You should hear them people when they get going on a argument. Everybody saying things every which-a-way.” Eloise was talkin
g. She and Tab and Dominique had gone down the hall to the showers, hurrying because they were already late for breakfast. Tina had told them so before she left.
“Tab, you go on—go to one of them meetings they have. You can sit outside the windows and listen. They don’t mind that. You gonna hear a bunch of arguing fools.”
They were in and out of the showers in a hurry, flipping sheets, tucking in blankets—beds had to be made if you wanted breakfast—and walking fast back down the hall. Meals didn’t last long.
All three paused at the door to the dining room. “Follow me. I know where to sit,” Dominique instructed them as they entered. She seemed to feel it was her job to tell them what to do and how to do it, going to great lengths to make sure everyone knew she was leading. It had been like that since their arrival. She had, at first, been mistaken enough to try to enlist Tina. “That’s not the way you fold clothes properly,” she had said, coming down off her bunk to demonstrate. Tina stood up from stacking clothes in her orange crate and gave her a look of such contempt that Dominique had physically backed off. From the beginning, their fences were up and firmly in place. Tab, on the other hand, was fascinated by the way Dominique talked, by her hair, by the barefaced arrogance.
Tab and Eloise followed along, Dominique leading the way into the dining room, speaking to everyone she met, making sure they saw her leading. The two would stand behind and wait as she conversed with one and then another. She moved toward her father’s table; and they were halfway across the room when Eloise pulled on Tab’s shirt and motioned for her to follow. “Come on,” she whispered. “Don’t wanna get caught at that table.”
The Summer We Got Saved Page 9