Absalom's Daughters

by Suzanne Feldman

  Judith flipped through the tags on the laundry sacks until she found the one she was looking for. “Leave that wagon,” she said. “Come on.”

  Cassie followed Judith down the cobbled driveway. The wagon rattled between the trees, and Judith slowed, concentrating on noiselessly approaching the house. The driveway split as they came out from under the trees, one part leading to a side entrance where there was a low roof. Cassie came to a stop in the split while Judith labored on, dragging the wagon along the drive to where it disappeared around the back of the house. Cassie had seen pictures like this side entrance to the house on the walls at home. The side entrance was a place made for carriages and horses. Carriages and horses and white women in silks filled Cassie’s mind until she noticed that the sound of wagon wheels had stopped. She saw the white face in the window of the side door, looking right at her. Was it a man or a woman or a tall child? The face vanished, and the door jerked open. Cassie turned and ran down the drive, to the other wagon, pushed up against the curb.

  Judith clattered back while Cassie waited, pulling up her wilting socks. Judith hauled her wagon into the street. She had something clenched in her fist. Nickels.

  “Why you run off?”

  “There was someone at the window.”

  Judith put whatever she’d been paid into the pocket of her dress. There wasn’t even the clink of two coins. “You supposed to be helpin’ me.”

  “Then you should pay me.”

  “I ain’t payin’ you nuthin’.”

  Cassie eyed the road ahead. It was long and steep. “Guess I’ll go home.”

  “Your momma sent you to help me.”

  “My mama said you doin’ just fine. She gone whup me when I get back.”

  “I give you three—no, two cent.”

  “How much you get?”

  “A nickle each house.”

  “You had nine bags.”

  “MacReedys’ get two.”

  “Three cent.”

  Judith pushed her hands into her hair. “Cain’t,” she said, and Cassie thought Judith might start to cry. “Mah daddy ain’t left us nuthin’.”

  * * *

  The next house was well out of sight of the first one, though only partway up the hill. Judith took the wagon Cassie had been pulling. Cassie waited, sweating at the curb. Even the driveway went up, vanishing into a forest of lilacs, oak, and hydrangea. Cassie could barely see the house. Judith returned with money in her fist. She held her palm out to Cassie, and Cassie took the hot nickel.

  The transaction felt strange. “Thanks,” said Cassie.

  “Don’t tell nobody I’m payin’ a nigger girl.”

  “You say that again, an’ I’m tellin’ everybody you my sister.”

  Judith worked her fist around the handle of the wagon. Her mouth tightened and made a little twist at the edge, not like a smile, not like a reflection of her father. The meaning in the look wasn’t something Cassie could identify.

  “All right,” said Judith.

  This felt strange, like Judith had been waiting for Cassie to say what they were.

  “You swear,” said Cassie.

  “I swear.” Judith looked at her. “You think people can tell?”

  “Only if they want to.”

  Judith turned to plod up the rest of the hill.

  * * *

  Cassie came home late in the hottest part of the afternoon through the white part of town, past Tawney’s Store, past Beanie Simms’s three shoeshine chairs in front of the barber shop, past Saul’s Grocery, where Mister Saul would wait on white folks in the front and coloreds in the back. She crossed the tracks and made her way to the end of Negro Street, where the front door of the laundry was propped open for whatever breeze there was. Inside, Cassie pushed through the swinging gate in the laundry counter and through a second door, which opened into the tiny kitchen in the back room. An old coal stove took up half the space in the kitchen and got hot enough to warm both rooms upstairs in the winter. There was room for a table with three chairs. Two shelves for dishes and cups fit into the space under the staircase that led up to the second floor.

  The kitchen was blistering: The stove burned high, lined with half a dozen irons, which Cassie would be using after supper to press shirts and trousers. Cassie wiped sweat from under her lip. She opened the back screen door into the small dirt yard. Even the heat of the evening seemed cooler than being inside.

  Grandmother was pinning up the day’s wash—mostly sheets. Bleached and starched, the sheets hung in tight rows. Before Grandmother clipped each sheet to the clothesline, Cassie was supposed to dampen the small dirt yard with a watering can to keep the dust from rising up to grime the clean white seams. Dampening the ground had been Cassie’s job even when she was too little to do much else. Today she had forgotten to do it, so Grandmother probably had. No doubt Cassie would hear about it. Once, when she was six or seven, Beanie Simms had told her that his father had owned the shoeshine chairs before him and had told Beanie Simms when he was a boy that the business would be his one day. The thought that something might be hers when she was grown had struck Cassie—the watering can, the newspaper pictures on the walls upstairs, even the laundry itself—all of it hers. She had asked Grandmother about it, and Grandmother had taken the clothespins out of her mouth and said, “When you have your own child, we’ll go away and raise it in some other place.” When Cassie thought about that conversation later, she was never sure she hadn’t dreamed it, but the force of Grandmother’s reaction had seemed real enough.

  Grandmother shaded her eyes at Cassie and pointed to a pan of yams and a bowl of green beans sitting on the back steps. There was a knife to peel the yams. Cassie sat and took the pan of yams in her lap and slid the knife under the clay-colored skin.

  Grandmother sat next to her. She took up the bowl of beans.

  “You shouldn’t have gone off with that white girl,” said Grandmother. She began snapping the beans, pulling out the tough threads. “You made your mother and me very unhappy.”

  A window rattled open in its sash upstairs. Lil Ma, in the heat of the second floor.

  “You went with her because you think she’s your sister. Did she act like your sister?”

  Cassie wasn’t sure what the correct answer was, but she knew what to say. “Nome.”

  “She never will.” Grandmother broke a bean neatly in half. “You want to know where you come from. I’ll tell you where you come from. From Lil Ma’s blood, and Lil Ma came from my blood, and my blood came down through your great-great-grandmother, who was a slave woman named Cassandra, just like we named you.” Grandmother took up another handful of beans and snapped their ends off. “Cassandra’s father was a white man. He seeded the land with cotton, and he seeded his slave women, and he got him a white woman for a wife, and he seeded her too. He had two children by her, a girl and a boy. The girl died of sickness, and the boy grew up into a murdering criminal. The boy had to run from the law, but while he was running, he took after his father and seeded his way all around the state. His descendants are all around here. I’m one of them. You’re one of them. That white girl is too, I’d bet, which would make her your half sister and your cousin. But no matter how twice-related you are, she’s no kin to you. Kin has a feeling for how far back the blood goes.” She rifled the beans, looking with her fingertips for any that had escaped with their ends on. “She’ll never have that feeling for you.”

  * * *

  Later that summer, Lil Ma sent Cassie up to the Wivells’ to give Mrs. Hill a package of table linens, which had been specially pressed. At the Wivells’ big fancy house, Mrs. Hill’s daughter Bethel opened the kitchen door. Bethel was eleven, a year older than Cassie, and was allowed to play the organ in church. She wore black-and-white saddle shoes, which were always spotless no matter how dusty or damp the ground.

  “Them the linens?” said Bethel.

  Cassie handed them up. Bethel examined the package, wrapped with paper and string, but didn’t op
en it. “My mama have to check ’em,” she said.

  “Check ’em for what?”

  “Wait here.” Bethel disappeared inside. The screen door slammed behind her.

  The late August air was hot and thick. Bethel’s shoes clumped away and then returned. She opened the door and came outside. “Mama’s busy,” she announced. “She be here presently.”

  They stood together on the threshold of the kitchen in the heat. Cassie’s eyes wandered downward to Bethel’s shoes again. “Where’d you git those?” she said.

  “Mama brought ’em home.”

  Which meant they were castoffs from one of the little white Wivell girls.

  “You like ’em?” said Bethel. She cocked her hip so one shoe stuck out farther than the other. “Mebbe you should ask your daddy t’git you a pair.”

  “I ain’t got no daddy,” said Cassie.

  “You know who your daddy is.”

  Cassie looked past Bethel at the gleaming kitchen to show that even if she did know, she didn’t care.

  “My daddy got a wood shop,” said Bethel. “He fix stuff for folks.”

  Cassie had once overheard Beanie Simms tell Lil Ma that Bethel’s daddy couldn’t put a broken-down, two-dollar chair back together proper.

  Bethel shifted and stuck out the other shoe. “Wanna hear who I’m a’gonna marry?”

  This shoe had a dent in the toe, but the dent was mostly hidden with white polish. “Who?” said Cassie.

  “You know Tommy Main?”

  “No.”

  “His daddy got ten acres o’ good lumber. You know what lumber is?”

  “No.”

  “Trees. Tommy’s daddy make wagons and such. He sell ’em to the white folks. Tommy gonna take over the business one day. I’ll be his wife, an’ we gonna have some money. Money and ten acres of good lumber.”

  What would happen when all the trees were cut down? Bethel would probably consider that a stupid question. Any eleven-year-old who already knew who her husband was going to be would probably have thought that far ahead.

  “I’ll be Bethel Main,” said Bethel.

  “That sound nice,” said Cassie.

  Bethel pulled her dented saddle shoe back. “Who you gonna marry?”

  She said it in such a mean-sounding way, Cassie had to look up from the fascinating shoes.

  Bethel gave Cassie a nasty little smile. “You ain’t gonna git married. Your granny gonna find you a white man an’ make you have a baby with him.” She waited for Cassie to say something, but Cassie was too surprised to say a word. “She made your mama do it. She gonna make you do it. She gonna find the whitest boy in town for you—ghost-white if she can. Ever’body in town know it.” She took a step closer. “You think it gonna be one o’ the Wivells? Or maybe Joey MacReedy—that blond-headed boy plays football?”

  Cassie reached for Bethel’s arm, meaning to grab her wrist, to squeeze it hard enough to hurt. Bethel yanked back, tried to turn, and fell in the dirt outside the kitchen door instead. She kicked at Cassie with the hard saddle shoes, missed, and jumped up to let fly with both fists. Cassie hit her first, in the shoulder. Bethel staggered. Cassie swung again and caught the girl’s mouth with the edge of her hand, and Bethel fell hard with a split lip. Bethel touched her mouth, saw the blood, and screamed. The screen door opened, and Mrs. Hill came down on the two of them like a thundercloud. She jerked Cassie up by the yoke of her dress and shook her hard. “What’s the matter with you, crazy gal? What is the matter with you?”

  Cassie opened her mouth to say what Bethel had said, but what came out in a hot rush was “What she said!”

  Bethel, on her feet and quivering, hand over her mouth, said, “I tol’ her the truth, Mama.”

  Mrs. Hill let go, and Cassie jerked away. Her head felt like it was boiling and light and ready to float off into the trees. She ran down the long drive and out into the street. A breathless wind was rising from below. She ran from it, past the big rich houses, until she was at the top of the hill.

  There was a sharp twist in the road, with a metal guard to keep cars from going off the edge. Cassie climbed over the metal guard and pushed her way through the weeds until she had a clear view of the river, where it bent, here and there, like the neck of a heron. Below, in the overcast afternoon, the railroad tracks paralleled the river to where it bent, then crossed the water and headed east alongside a macadam road. The tracks and the road narrowed to nothing and vanished into the forested hills in the distance. Gray clouds hung over everything.

  * * *

  That evening, Lil Ma was waiting for Cassie downstairs in the kitchen, heating irons on the stove. “You took your time.” Cassie came through the swinging door in the counter. “What happened to you?”

  Cassie touched her hair, which felt wild, and her dirty clothes. “Nothing.”

  “Mrs. Hill was by. She said you hit Bethel in the mouth. I didn’t believe her.”

  There was no denying it. “I hit her.”

  Lil Ma rearranged the irons. Her hair had gone frizzy in the humidity, but her dress, her shapely arms and legs were like the pictures of the ladies on the walls upstairs. Behind her, half a dozen bridesmaids’ dresses, pressed to perfection, were on hangers over the back door like a dark purple curtain, as though Lil Ma was on a stage. “I told her I didn’t raise my girl to be violent.”

  “I did hit her,” said Cassie, “because of what she said about us.”

  “People say all kinds of things,” said Lil Ma. “You can’t live your life by what comes out of ignorant mouths.” Her tone was cool in the hot room, level, like the irons on the stove. Everything Bethel had said, Cassie now understood, Lil Ma had heard before.

  Upstairs the floor creaked under Grandmother’s feet. Lil Ma moved two of the dresses, unblocking the door to the backyard. “You look tired,” she said, “and it’s awfully hot in here. Why don’t you go out and sit for a while?”

  “Yessum,” said Cassie. She slipped past Lil Ma, past the rustling purple curtain of bridesmaids’ dresses, through the door, and into the dusk.

  She sat where she could hear what was being said inside and not be seen from the door. “I thought I heard Cassie,” said Grandmother. “She’s not home yet,” said Lil Ma. “I heard another voice,” said Grandmother. “You must have been dreaming,” said Lil Ma.

  Grandmother’s footsteps creaked across the floor and back up the stairs. Cassie listened to the hissing of the irons as Lil Ma worked. She looked at the stars and the thin sliver of moon. The back door opened, and Lil Ma stepped out into the narrow frame of light that fell across the back steps. She sat next to Cassie.

  “What did Bethel say?”

  “She said that you … and Grandmother … and I was supposed to…” She couldn’t bring herself to say anything more.

  Lil Ma ran the hem of her apron back and forth through her fingers. She looked up at the second-floor window where Grandmother had been and lowered her voice to a whisper. “It’s true.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Now listen to me. Your great-great-grandmother Cassandra saw how the lightest of the mixed children could escape. She made a plan to take whiteness, bit by bit from the white man.” Lil Ma gripped her apron. “Not every daughter could keep to the plan. Your grandmother couldn’t. She fell in love with a very dark man.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I never knew him. Your grandmother left that part of Mississippi before I was born, and she told me my daddy was dead. Maybe he is. Maybe if she’d thought about what she was doing, she would have fought harder against her feelings. But here we are.”

  Lil Ma looked into the dark. A wind rattled the empty clotheslines against their metal poles. “What Bethel said to you, I’ve been hearing all my life. I would have said, ‘You’ll understand one day.’ But I don’t understand it. Things change. Just because someone keeps insisting on something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing.” She wrapped her hands in her apron, so tightly Cassie thought the fabric might tear
. “I won’t let it happen to you.”

  There was some comfort in that.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Afterward, Cassie avoided Bethel, and Bethel stayed away. What were people in town thinking about Cassie and her family? After a while that question was like a dull ache. The subject of Cassie’s prospects didn’t come up again for quite a while. In the meantime, Beanie Simms went from carving fox heads to stick in his garden to human heads, which Lil Ma called hoodoo and Grandmother called hokum, but the new heads were just as effective as the old ones at scaring off rabbits. The circus came and went four more times, and Cassie actually got to see a magician make a woman disappear inside a cabinet while doves flew out of a hat. That was the only truly magical thing that happened until Cassie was fifteen and Judith was sixteen; that was when the albino boy came to town. His magic wasn’t the good kind.

  It was only late summer, but Miss Helen claimed Henry was too sickly to work and too frail to leave the house by himself. Usually, Henry was sick in the fall when the rains began, but now Judith almost always came to pick up the laundry alone.

  “What’s Henry do all day?” Cassie asked, on the way up the hill with the wagons.

  “He lissen to the music on the reddio,” said Judith. “What you-all lissen to?”

  “We ain’t got a reddio.” It was a luxury to let her tongue be lazy, as Grandmother would have said. To speak poorly let her feel like she was someone else sometimes.

  Judith opened one arm to the morning air. “Ever’body got a reddio. Even us, and we ain’t got nuthin’.”

  “Well, we don’t.”

  “Your granny afraid you gone hear somethin’?”

  “My mother sings.”

  “I heard her singin’ out in back. She got a pretty voice. When you need music, y’all sing?”

  “Guess so.”