Absalom's Daughters

by Suzanne Feldman

  The black macadam gleamed dully under the moon as they walked. Judith came over closer to Cassie. “What you gonna do in Heron-Neck?” she said. “The laundry? You gonna do what your granny wants for the rest of your life?”

  Cassie was on the watch for headlights or any sign of motion from the dark woods behind them. She walked more quickly. Judith followed her.

  “People get rich in New York City,” said Judith.

  “We ain’t never gone get rich,” said Cassie. “All I know is how to do laundry, an’ all you know is how to deliver it. And Virginia ain’t nowhere near New York City.”

  “Virginia where we gonna get our nest egg,” said Judith. “We gonna find my daddy—our daddy—and we gonna demand our share of what he got. Whatever he’s owed is owed to us too.”

  “You outta your mind.”

  Judith drew herself up, tall in her worn-out shoes. “I understan’ if you feel that way. Ain’t no original thinking goin’ on round here near as I kin tell. You stay here and find a husband—or whatever you end up with—an’ have youself a passel of young’uns. As your life goes by, you can think of me.”

  Cassie scuffed at the road. “How long you think you’ll be gone?”

  “Years likely. When I return, I’ll be in a big car with a driver. An’ a maid. No, two maids. And a lil ol’ lap dog.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next morning, the February weather had turned cool enough for heavier coats. At the estate sale, sparse clouds passed overhead, leaving the Tawney plantation in patches of winter sun, which didn’t actually warm anyone. Most of the county turned out for the sale, not just the folks in Heron-Neck. Farmers and their bundled-up wives mixed with oily-shirted mechanics and sharecroppers alike. The gaunt and the fat showed up to see what the Tawneys would throw out.

  “Miz Tabitha’s prices were reasonable,” said Lil Ma, a woolen shawl around her shoulders, “but it’d be nice to pick up a few new plates now that she’s gone.”

  “We’re here for just one thing.” Grandmother stepped to one side to avoid a puddle. “That wringer’s going to cost enough.”

  “I wish you’d talk to Mrs. Tawney about the wringer,” said Lil Ma. “You’re better at talking to her than I am. You’ll get a better price.”

  “You’ll do what needs to be done,” said Grandmother. “You need to learn to stand up for yourself. I won’t be around forever.”

  Cassie followed Grandmother and Lil Ma, wearing the brown wool coat she’d outgrown two years ago at fourteen. But it was warmer than the one she usually wore, which was still a little damp from yesterday’s laundry delivery. She pushed her hands into the too-small pockets, not wanting to get in the middle of this argument. Lil Ma was afraid of old Mrs. Tawney, who would surely be in charge of the selling of the wringer. Every time Lil Ma took Cassie to Tawney’s Store, she kept her eyes down and acted ashamed when old Mrs. Tawney was there instead of Miz Tabitha. When Grandmother went along, she looked old Mrs. Tawney straight in the face and had no problem with the dealing that had to be done to get a new pot or a set of towels or even clothespins. Lil Ma hung back. Cassie knew Grandmother didn’t like the way Lil Ma behaved, but it was the first time she’d heard her Grandmother say, I won’t be around forever. It was like a threat, but in some ways a relief to the imagination.

  Cassie let herself trail farther and farther behind, looking for Judith in the crowd. The Tawneys’ old barn was down the hill from the crippled-looking house. The house was surrounded by bare oak trees and a variety of run-down sheds. Miz Tabitha had the store on the first floor, leaving the second and third floors to the aged relations who lived with her. Cassie knew from being brought around to the back of the place once a week for most of her life that no one young had lived there in a long time. The winter weeds, old rusted cars, and a tilting, three-wheeled tractor in the front yard told the story of years of neglect.

  The auctioneers had set out every last thing from the store behind the house on the kind of long tables used for church picnics. Lil Ma had taken Cassie to flea markets before, but none of them were as big as this. This was an estate sale, and to see the amount of stuff on the tables was to wonder how Miz Tabitha had fit it all inside the house.

  There were Pyrex dishes, cookbooks, bolts of fabric, hats, clothes, tinned tobacco, cups and saucers, cereal, bags of flour and coffee beans. Washtubs, irons, ironing boards, various hardware like hammers and saws, everything anyone might need except for maybe milk and anything else that could spoil. To Cassie it looked like the riches of the world.

  She lagged farther behind Grandmother and Lil Ma until she couldn’t really see them anymore in the crowd. She knew where they were going. The wringer was at the old house. She would be yelled at for wandering away, but she needed to find Judith. Judith was here somewhere.

  At a table covered with costume jewelry, Judith was circling for the best view of the fake pearl earrings and shiny necklaces. Three women with red-and-white striped ribbons pinned to their bosoms strode around the table, guarding it. Miz Armenia Sutter was one of them.

  “Gal,” Miz Sutter said to Cassie, “when your momma gone to have my weddin’ dress clean?”

  “We working on it, ma’am,” said Cassie

  “You tell your momma I be by this afternoon to git it, y’heah?”

  “Yessum, I tell her.”

  Miz Sutter fixed her eyes on Judith. “You too near to them necklaces, Judith Forrest! You ain’t got the money to buy ennythin’ heah. You keep your hands in your pockets and scoot.”

  Judith put her hands in the pockets of her patched red coat and sauntered off. Cassie trailed after her down the grassy incline, where the rest of the tables were arranged in uneven rows.

  “I just finished packin’ up the car,” said Judith. “Got a bit of smoke ham, a bag of cornmeal, an’ some aigs.”

  Cassie tried to picture Judith driving off in the junk car, heading for her future. It was surprisingly easy, considering she had never seen Judith do much but pull a wagon. At seventeen, though, maybe it was time for Judith to stop pulling wagons, time to move on. This made her think about the question Judith had asked her the night before—you gonna do what your granny wants for the rest of your life? The answers made her feel bad in her stomach.

  “Them boys put on the tires?” said Cassie.

  “Not yet, but they filled it up with gas. Fact is, I need to get out of town ’fore them idjits remember to come down tonight and set fire to it.” Judith pulled her red coat tighter around her skinny frame. “Now look. Here’s the reddios.”

  Some of the radios were brand-new, still in boxes. Others were clearly secondhand, with their prices written on bits of tape wrapped around the plugs. Judith examined these while women with ribbons pinned to their bosoms watched her without bothering to hide their suspicions. None of the new radios were less than three dollars, and Cassie moved away, down the table until she and Judith came to a clump of older-model radios with chewed-looking cords. The cheapest was two dollars.

  “What you gone do with a radio?” said Cassie.

  “Lissen to it when I git to my ho-tel room in Virginia,” said Judith. “Sometimes I get tarred of my own singin’.” Judith put a hand in her pocket and pulled out a dirty, folded bill so that the women guarding the table could see it. It was a single dollar. She must have saved her laundry nickels for a month. “Now if you had a dollar, we could go in on one o’ these reddios.”

  “I ain’t got a dollar,” said Cassie, which was true.

  “Well,” said Judith, “these look a bit junky. If I was gonna buy one, I’d get me a brand-new model.” She looked back at the ladies and put her chin up, as though the whole county was watching. “Come on an’ let’s look at the guns.”

  Cassie followed her through the thick of the crowd, which was white folks closer to the barn, where the auction would be later that afternoon, and colored farther away. Cassie knew Grandmother and Lil Ma were over by the house negotiating for the wringer and would be look
ing for her. She tried to see through to where the wringer might be on the porch of the crumbling old house, but there were too many people in the way. She stuck with Judith as Judith pushed past old women and little children, until she got to the table with the guns. Most of the people there were men. Judith shoved right in, turned, practically under some farmer’s armpit, and waved Cassie toward her.

  “Looky here.” A sledgehammer-sized revolver lay in a row of rusted pistols. “You know what that is?”

  The barrel was big enough to stick a finger in. Its trigger was thin and rusted. Cassie shook her head.

  “That there’s a horse pistol from the war a-tween the states. We got one at home, exceptin’ ours in better shape. Still got some shootin’ left in it.” Judith picked up the gun with both hands and held it out straight, aiming in the general direction of the barn. “He a heavy old thing. I wonder if he got a name.”

  What always impressed Cassie about Judith’s lies was that she never seemed to spend even a second coming up with them. It was like she had a store of spontaneous stories at the tip of her tongue. “Why would it have a name?” said Cassie.

  “Ours do. He’s called Big Red.”

  “It’s a red gun?” said Cassie.

  “Nope,” said Judith. “He’s named for the horse he had to shoot. My great-great-great-granddaddy came home on his horse from the war a-tween the states with that pistol, and there weren’t nothin’ to eat. And my great-great-great-granny said to him, ‘Suh, we gonna have to shoot Big Red an’ butcher him, or we gonna plumb starve.’ And my great-great-great-granddaddy said, ‘Over my dead body, woman,’ so she shot him, and then she shot the horse.”

  “She killed your granddaddy?”

  “She shot him in the leg so he couldn’t get in her way. Then she held onto his gun so if he got vengeful about the horse, she could defend herself. She taught my great-great granny how to shoot it, and she taught my great-granny, and granny taught my momma, and my momma taught me.” She hefted the pistol with both hands. “I’ll teach my daughter one day.”

  Cassie left Judith to decide where to spend her dollar. She found Grandmother at the back of Tawney’s old store. The wringer sat at an angle on the ancient, sagging veranda. Lil Ma stood near the veranda, on the ground in the weeds, her hands pulled back into the sleeves of her coat. Grandmother stood under an oak tree a little ways off. One of Miz Tabitha’s aged female relations was on the disintegrating porch, holding herself up with a cane, counting bills. Cassie recognized old Mrs. Tawney, Mister Elmer’s great-aunt. It was rumored that she was over a hundred years old and had shot at the Union troops from the top story of the Tawney house. Cassie had always believed this because her age made all the other elderly women around her seem young in comparison.

  Old Mrs. Tawney pushed the bills into her apron pocket. The bargaining was over, and Lil Ma had done her reluctant part. “It ain’t enough,” old Mrs. Tawney said to Lil Ma, “but I reckon nobody else wants the damn thing.” Old Mrs. Tawney looked down from the porch like she owned the whole place and everyone on it. “You-all better have it out of here by tomorrow, or I’ll have it sent to the junkyard. I don’t want no niggers round here after dark, y’hear?”

  “Yessum,” said Lil Ma. “We have a man come by.”

  Old Mrs. Tawney went back into the house with the money. Lil Ma looked up and saw Cassie, and for a second Cassie saw the unhappiness in Lil Ma’s eyes. Not just today’s unhappiness, or the way she felt about the insult of the moment, but the years of it, a lifetime’s worth.

  Grandmother came out from under the tree. “Good,” Grandmother said to Lil Ma, “good,” like she was talking to a dog. Lil Ma let her shoulders slump. Grandmother motioned to Cassie. “You run on back to the laundry. Get a dollar out of the moneybox and give it to Beanie Simms. Tell him to bring his truck. Right now.”

  * * *

  Through the back door of the laundry, past the neatly folded ironing and the dresses waiting to be pressed, Cassie went to the front of the store, took the cash box out from where it was hidden under the counter, and opened it. Inside were five quarters and seven one-dollar bills. She took a dollar for Beanie Simms and put it in the pocket of her old woolen coat. She looked at the rest of the money. She took out three more bills, one at a time, and held them like a fan in her hand, thinking about the New York voices that could only be heard at night. She thought about Judith living in Heron-Neck forever, just like Judith’s mother, and her mother’s mother, and all those horse-pistol-wielding women in Judith’s past, never getting away, never going to Virginia to fulfill her destiny as progeny. She thought about the look on Lil Ma’s face just now at the Tawneys’, and about the albino boy sitting in his sunlit bedroom listening to the blackest music he could find. She wanted a radio. She would listen to it in the middle of the night, and she would hear what other songs black voices sang when it was blackest outside. She put the money back in the cash box, just to see if she could still make an honest motion with her hands, took it out again, and pushed it deep into her coat pocket.

  * * *

  Beanie Simms’s truck coughed and shuddered. It seemed ready to rattle right apart. Beanie Simms let Cassie sit in the passenger seat while he drove.

  “I wisht I still had my ol’ mule some days,” said Beanie Simms, loud over the noise of the engine. “There was a reli’ble critter.” Beanie Simms held onto the steering wheel as though he thought it might come off in his hands. “I ever tell you ’bout my ol’ mule?”

  Cassie knew most of Beanie Simms’s stories by heart. She looked out the window as the town crawled by.

  “Why you so quiet, gal?” said Beanie Simms. “You sick?”

  “I ain’t sick.”

  “Better ain’t let your granny hear you talk like that.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “Then what’s the matter with you?”

  Cassie rubbed her knees. “You got a radio, Mister Simms?”

  “Sure, I gots a reddio. Over at de shoe-shine.”

  “What you lissen to?”

  Beanie Simms ground the truck’s gears. The road started to rise as they neared the Tawney place. “I lissens to de gospel music.”

  “All week long?”

  “Well now, a man kin git tarred of the same thin’ all week long.”

  “You ever lissen to colored music?”

  Beanie Simms laughed. “What you know about colored music?”

  “I heard about it.”

  “Your mama and your granny ain’t gone want you list’nin’ to that.”

  Cassie put her hand over the money in her pocket. Outside, bare trees crept past the car. Exhaust puffed up from between the floorboards. “You ever think about leavin’ here, Mister Simms?”

  “Shore,” said Beanie Simms. “Alla time.”

  “You do?”

  “Shore. Ain’t nothin’ here t’keep me.”

  “What about the shoe-shine?”

  “Well, if’n I still had my ol’ mule, I’d jus’ put the shoe-shine inna back o’ the cart and take ’em on to th’ next town.”

  “But you have a truck.”

  “This truck ain’t got no dur’bility. A mule ain’t gone do nothin’ stupid. This truck don’ care if I drive it inna ditch.” He turned down the road that would take them to Tawney’s. “Mule object to bein’ driv’ inna ditch. What about you, lil gal? You ever think o’ leavin’?”

  Cassie shifted in the seat, thinking of Judith, the car in the woods. “I couldn’t leave my mama and my grandmother.”

  “I guess I’d be thinking ’bout leavin’ if I was you,” said Beanie Simms. “’Specially with that new white boy in town.”

  Beanie Simms was a tall man with close-cropped hair. In the cramped noisiness of the truck, he loomed over her. Cassie felt herself cringe in the threadbare seat. Did the entire town of Heron-Neck know about Grandmother’s scheme? Was the entire town waiting to see what would happen next?

  “Some folks do ennythin’ to get themselves w
hiter,” said Beanie Simms. “There an easier way than what your granny got in mind.”

  “I heard you talk about it when I was a little girl,” Cassie said.

  “It ain’t jus’ talk,” said Beanie Simms. “It a town called Porterville, where white folks and black folks live in perfeck harmony. All them white folks useter be black as tar.”

  Did Beanie Simms know about the car in the woods and Judith’s plans to escape to become a reddio star? There was no telling what Beanie Simms knew.

  “Why don’t you go there yourself?” Cassie said.

  Beanie Simms drew himself up in the truck, taller than ever. “I’s the messenger. One day I’ll go, but in the meantime, I’s got to stick around to help folks out.”

  He let her off by the Tawneys’ barn and pulled the truck back to where the house was. Judith was nowhere in sight, not by the table with the miscellaneous and ancient guns, or the jewelry. Cassie made her way through the crowd and through the smells of sweat and tobacco to the table with the radios, where a white lady she didn’t recognize was standing guard.

  The two-dollar radios were gone. The only one left was a brand-new three-dollar model, still in its box. The box was white with a picture of a white man on it, obviously enjoying the music coming out of the radio inside.

  “’Scuse me, ma’am,” Cassie said to the white lady. “I’d like to buy that, please.”

  “You got three dollars?” said the white lady.

  Cassie took the money out of her pocket and felt a prickle of naked curiosity from the white woman as she wondered where a little colored girl had gotten that much cash.

  “What a girl like you need with a radio?” said the white lady.

  “We ain’t got no radio inna laundry,” said Cassie. “We ain’t got no ways to lissen to de gospel music less’n we sings it ourselves.”

  The white lady held her hand out for the money. “You’re Adelaine’s girl?”