Four and Twenty Blackbirds

by Cherie Priest

Page 12

 

  I went to the third floor of the ugly concrete building and chatted up the reference librarians, who pointed me towards a jungle of gray filing cabinets. Fine white spiderweb dust lifted into the air when I opened the proper drawer and shuffled for the correct file. Maybe one day they'd get around to putting all this on microfilm, or microfiche, or whatever medium a twenty-first-century library is expected to use. But sometimes I think it's true what they say about this part of the country—you may as well set your clocks back twenty years.

  And there it was: "Pine Breeze. "

  The file was thicker than I'd expected, and the old sticker label was peeling its slow way free of the folder. I pulled the whole thing out with both hands and closed the cabinet with a shove of my hip.

  The first page was a mounted newspaper clipping dated March of 1930. "Tuberculosis Hospital to Close, Reopen," the headline read. I scanned it hastily, picking out the phrases that looked important and ignoring everything else. Established 1913. Staffed by Red Cross, Salvation Army nurses. Bought by private investors—a local family. To be converted to a health spa. Interesting, but well before the time period relevant to me. I lifted the sheet out and prepared to put it aside, but not before a passage had time to leap off the page—"where some two thousand people perished during the TB epidemic . . . "

  Two thousand people? That sounded like an awful lot.

  I reached for the next item in the folder.

  1946. A neat diagram of the campus compound, laid out on yellowing paper. I counted nine buildings, including a nurse's station set away from the main grouping. I concentrated hard, trying to decipher the tiny writing on the key at the right of the page.

  Building 1: Administration headquarters. Former infirmary.

  Building 2: Auditorium / gymnasium.

  Building 3: Furnace house (for disposal of contaminated corpses).

  Contaminated corpses? Then they burned the bodies of the tuberculosis victims, and they needed an entire building to do so. Maybe that two thousand estimate wasn't so high after all.

  Building 4: Doctors' offices.

  Building 5: Outpatient services.

  Building 6: Cafeteria / food service facilities.

  Building 7: Inpatient therapy.

  Building 8: Rehabilitation dormitories.

  Building 9: Nurse's station.

  This was helpful. I made a mental note to hit the copy machine before leaving.

  Next was a series of yellowed articles bearing headlines like, "Health Facility Seeks Federal Aid," and "Pine Breeze Sanatorium Investigated for Racial Inequality. " The rest of the loose papers seemed to be articles about money problems, so I flipped past them in search of something more recent.

  1968: Ah. There it was. "Federal Grant to Fund Hospital for Adolescents in North Chattanooga. " Operated by Marion Finley. Would serve up to eighty patients, primarily substance-addicted and behaviorally problematic teenagers. Hmm. If Dave was right and the school was only serving fifteen or twenty kids back when it closed, then it really had fallen shy of projections.

  Next page: A poor-quality black-and-white photocopy of another clipping. The words were hard to make out, but the photograph had transferred well enough. Eight girls, perhaps my own age, were sitting around a long table with sewing cards strung with yarn. All their round, pale faces were turned towards the camera, cards poised over the table. Each girl wore the same stoned, automaton stare, as if she knew her picture was being taken but wasn't sure what it should mean to her. "New drugs to modify behavior . . . activities provided . . . once-troubled girls into ladylike young women . . . Finley claims high success rate, but says more funding still badly needed. "

  I put the picture away and began to flip down through another series of headlines, these too suggesting ongoing money problems. I idly wondered if the place had ever been solvent at all.

  One wealthy family had withdrawn its support, though its members had previously contributed enough to have the dormitories named after them. Despite Ms. Finley's constant begging, the government couldn't be bothered to lend a hand. Enrollment was down. Pine Breeze was operating at cost.

  1978: My mother.

  I stopped. A giant picture of my mother stared out at me from the manila folder, buttressed by the caption: "Pine Breeze Patient Dead. " I knew it was her, even though I only had the one old picture to guess by—and even before I caught her name beneath the photo. That spooky family likeness stared me in the face, and it chilled me a tiny bit.

  I picked up the article. It crackled between my fingers as I read.

  "Leslie Eve Moore, sixteen-year-old patient at the Pine Breeze adolescent facility, died sometime yesterday morning, apparently as a result of a difficult childbirth. Officials at Pine Breeze are withholding comment at this time except to say that the girl received the best medical care they could offer, and that they are deeply sorrowful. A spokesperson for the girl's family insists that they were unaware she was pregnant when she was committed to the institution. A lawyer from the NAACP has demanded an investigation, claiming that the family was never told of the pregnancy and that Leslie was not given proper medical attention, possibly because she was of mixed race. No details are available regarding the infant at this time. "

  My mother.

  And me, now the same age as she'd been then. The picture was an old studio portrait in 1970s sepia tone, one she hadn't been happy to have taken. She wasn't frowning, but her smile was forced, and her hands were clenched in her lap, smashed hard across her thighs rather than folded there. The yellow dress she wore had a butterfly collar that made her neck seem too long and thin. She looked awfully fragile for a juvenile delinquent, but there was a certain stubbornness around the set of her eyes and the full line of her mouth. I'd have been lying if I said I didn't recognize it.

  I looked quickly over each of my shoulders and, seeing no one, I folded the paper with my mother's face and stuck it in my pocket. Perhaps I should have made a photocopy, but I wasn't thinking. I'd only ever seen that one other picture of her, the one of the three sisters taken before their mother had sent my mother away. Lulu kept that picture to herself, stuck in the top corner of her dresser mirror.

  Now I had one of my own.

  I skimmed the rest of the folder's brittle fillings but I didn't expect to find anything more enlightening than what I'd already gotten. I was unsurprised by what it contained. Yet more accusatory headlines screamed out, complaining about the government funding going away and the place closing down over my scandal. I was strangely proud. It was all about me. There wasn't much extra information on my mother to be found, but at least I could say I knew a little bit more about her case. I'd never quite felt up to speed; ever since Malachi's trial in the courtroom and my own tribulations in elementary school I'd assumed the rest of the world knew something I didn't.

  After I replaced the file, I ran down the stairs and out across the street to find my uncle. He was sitting at a small square table at the end of a narrow corridor where I knew he'd be waiting. He lifted his head when I entered, disturbing the bell at the top of the coffeehouse door.

  "Did you find what you wanted?"

  I nodded and grabbed a rickety, skinny-legged seat across from him. "You've got to take me there. "

  His chin swung back and forth. "The goddess will not permit it. "

  "Then you only meant to tease me. "

  "No. I only disagreed with Lulu that you were old enough. Now you know. Now you've seen. The rest is up to you. I'll be in enough trouble when she finds out I told you this much. I'll be lucky to get laid for the rest of my life. "

  He was settled on the matter. It wouldn't do me any good to push. I'd have to find another way. I'd have to ask another question.

  "Dave, do you know who my father was?"

  "Uh-uh. Lulu thinks he was a white guy, his name might have been Allen, or Andrew, or something like that. I d
on't think anybody really knows. I'm sorry, baby. I've given you all I know. "

  With that, my uncle, Promethean traitor, finished his coffee and closed his book.

  III

  In a week or two, Lulu returned to her old self and life resumed in its rut of normalcy. I don't know if Dave ever told Lulu what he'd told me or how he helped, but we never spoke of it again, except for the odd occasion when I'd ask him to show me, and he'd shoot me down.

  I finished high school; I spent a couple of years at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga pursuing some of nothing and some of everything. I spent long enough in college that I had no excuse to leave without a degree, but that's what happened. After a while, I just got tired of going.

  For the most part, the university gave me an excuse to fall in with a snobby crowd of disaffected poets who thought I was a psychic diva because of the poetry I wrote—mostly about the three sisters and about my cousin Malachi, who rotted away in a state institution as far as I knew and cared. Oh yes, people still knew of the case. People still talked about me at least as much as they discussed the widow of the man who killed Medgar Evers. She lives near here on one of the mountains and everyone knows it. South of the Ohio River there is no such thing as old news or ancient history. Drive around downtown and look for pickup trucks with rebel flag stickers, if you don't believe me.

  Eventually I quit taking even the loosely enforced poetry workshops and sank further still down the academic totem pole by joining a small clique of slam poets. They worked out of a scuzzy bar on the south side of town, assembling their vicious rounds of bad tournament poetry to amuse or bore the meager audiences. Occasionally a local band would play before the spoken word performers took the stage, and then there would be more of a crowd for the poets to scream at.

  Once upon a time, I lived for those nights when the joint would be packed and the beers would flow freely. I never did drink beer, not even the good stuff, but I could be conned into a glass or two of wine if the mood was right. It loosened me up for the show; it made me more gloriously slick and tragic.

  Don't you know it, everyone loves a lost little girl in a black corset top and leather pants. Everyone wants to save her or fuck her, not understanding that neither is necessary. But so long as she is at least a small measure beautiful, and so long as she is young, they will come to hear her. So long as she can sell the illusion that she is innocence and pain in search of defilement and rescue, she'll have them at her feet—their eyes and teeth parted in mock blessing, their idle lust a lascivious parody of worship.