“Yessum.”
“So this is why she charges so much for pressing.” The white lady snatched away the three dollars and pushed the boxed radio into Cassie’s hands.
When she got home, Cassie could hear Beanie Simms and another man shouting advice to each other out back about where to set the new wringer. She crept in the front door, careful first to see that no one was inside. The back door was open and gave up a narrow view of the backyard through the kitchen. The men steered the new wringer into the sheltered space where the old wringer was with Lil Ma and Grandmother darting back and forth, giving directions. Cassie slid past the stove and ran up the stairs before anyone could see her. She reached the second floor just as the screen door slammed downstairs. Someone clinked glasses together. Beanie Simms shouted something from outside, and from the bottom of the stairs, Lil Ma let out a musical laugh. Cassie knelt on the floor and opened the thin cardboard box and lifted the radio out of its silky paper wrapping.
The radio was tiny compared to its box. It was the size of a pocketbook or of a neatly folded shirt. It was white plastic, with a smooth gray knob that made a little red needle swerve across numbers in a neat row in a window.
5.8 6 7 8 10 12 16
Cassie twirled the knob back and forth, watching the needle move. What kind of music would come out of this little thing? She hadn’t thought about it, but maybe there was a special kind of radio you needed for the colored music that made your feet want to move and your hips want to swing. What if this radio only played gospel or music that white folks wanted to hear?
She unwound the cord, and the cord answered her question, but in a different way. She looked up from the radio to the walls papered in yellowing newsprint, magazine pages, and letters in blue ink from strangers. There was no electricity in these walls. Heat and light came from coal, kerosene, and candles.
Out the window, Beanie Simms gulped down a glass of cold water. Water came out of a pump. Water cooled outside in a ceramic pitcher. Instead of indoor plumbing, there was an outhouse. Everyone on Negro Street lived like this.
Cassie hid the radio under her own thin mattress, not knowing what else to do with it. She folded the cardboard box and the silky paper into the smallest wad she could manage, and when she was sure she wouldn’t be seen, she took the wad downstairs and dropped it into the furnace heat of the stove.
Judith didn’t show up that afternoon. By three, Grandmother told Cassie, “You’d better get those wagons loaded. That laundry isn’t going to deliver itself.”
While Lil Ma and Grandmother disparaged Judith’s lateness, her family’s hopeless problems, her character in general, Cassie loaded the wagons, then pulled the wagons down the street, across the tracks, and up the hill. She tried to sing to herself as she dragged the heavy, squeaking things, but in her heart she could feel that Judith was gone, gone in the car, supplied with her family’s old horse pistol and a trunk full of ham and cornmeal. Maybe the albino boy had gone with her, heading home to New York City, encouraging her to be a reddio star. Cassie pushed one of the wagons off the side of the road and into the bushes, where she could find it later for the second half of the deliveries. The first stop was the Wivells’. Cassie tried to make herself tall and straight. If the albino boy was there, it meant that Judith was still in Heron-Neck and for whatever reason hadn’t shown up for work. Cassie leaned into the weight of the wagon and hauled it up toward the Wivells’. A car came out their driveway, paused, and turned toward her. Cassie stepped aside. It was the Wivells’ car, and she peered in to see if the albino boy was inside. He was in the passenger seat and smirked at her through the glass.
“Where’s Judith?” Cassie shouted at him.
The albino boy ignored her, and Mister Wivell, who was driving, frowned as though he’d heard something go wrong with the engine.
* * *
Back home in the early evening with the empty wagons, Cassie found Lil Ma in the yard, hanging sheets. “Judith’s gone,” Cassie said.
Lil Ma looked at her in surprise. “Gone where?”
“She’s up and left to find her fortune in Virginia,” said Cassie. “She’s going to be a big singing star.” Even as the words left her mouth, she could hardly believe it. “I thought she left with that albino boy, but he’s still here.”
Lil Ma pulled the last of the sheets from the basket but didn’t pin it up. “Judith would never go anywhere without you.”
Cassie held out a handful of clothespins. “She has a car; she’s got food and a gun. She has a plan.”
“That girl never had a plan in her life,” said Lil Ma. “She can’t leave without you.” Lil Ma let the wet sheet drop back into the basket and looked up at the second-floor window. She lowered her voice. “When your grandmother heard about that albino boy. The look in her eyes. You just can’t imagine.”
Lil Ma took her back under the roof of the porch, where they couldn’t be seen from upstairs. “That boy’s the dream she’s been having all these years. She thinks your baby’s going to be like a white shell. Before it’s born, we’ll leave and go further north, where your grandmother thinks there are plenty of children like that, and we would fit right in.”
“But it isn’t true?”
“Child, how do I know if it’s true?” She grabbed Cassie’s hand. “Come inside. I have to give you something.”
Cassie followed Lil Ma inside, through the kitchen, past the irons on the stove, through the door, and into the space behind the counter. Lil Ma reached under the counter and pulled up one of the floorboards. Underneath was a cigar box tied shut with butcher string. Lil Ma opened it, revealing the neat piles of bills, counted out ten, and gave them to Cassie. “Sit,” she whispered.
Cassie sat. Lil Ma took off her own hard-soled shoes and knelt on the floor in front of Cassie. She pressed the bills into the shoes and put the shoes onto Cassie’s feet and tied the laces. Upstairs the floorboards creaked.
“Be sure no one’s looking when you take them off,” whispered Lil Ma. “Use them for a pillow when you sleep.” She was crying. “I don’t want you to leave,” Lil Ma said. “But find your sister. Go with your sister.” She pulled Cassie to her feet, kissed her, pressed her out the front door of the laundry, and closed it.
Cassie stood for a moment in the February chill. Then she ran. The brogans clunked, and the money slid back and forth under her feet. She ran into the sunset dark of Negro Street.
Was Judith in the woods? Cassie knew what the Justice boys would do to the old junk car if they found Judith with it. Everyone would be able to tell something was wrong in the woods by the column of black smoke that would rise from the burning tires. What they felt like doing to Judith would leave no column of smoke.
To her relief, she heard a car coming as she came to the end of Negro Street. She couldn’t see it yet, but it coughed and choked like the car in the woods. Its engine sounded clogged and unreliable. Cassie’s heart both leaped and sank. Judith was coming to get her, in a car that wouldn’t make it to the other side of town.
It wasn’t Judith, though; it was Beanie Simms, coming back from the shoeshine.
He leaned out the window. “Where the heck you runnin’ like that, gal?”
“Mister Simms,” she said, already breathless, “where’s Porterville?”
His face compressed into instant understanding. “I don’t know ’zactly where,” he said. “But it’s east o’ here. You ask the folks in Hilltop. Follow the railroad tracks. You be careful, gal.”
It was dark by the time Cassie got to where the road crossed Duncan Justice’s land. She saw the familiar flicker of firelight in the trees and crouched down to peer through the weave of naked branches. The car was a boxy shadow in the dim light. Empty liquor bottles glittered in the leaves on the ground. No one seemed to be around, but the fire was lively. Someone had stirred it recently.
Judith was singing in a drunken, mournful voice. Cassie stepped into the cool murk of the winter woods. Twigs snapped under Lil Ma’s hard
-soled shoes. Maybe Judith wasn’t alone with the bottles and the fire. Cassie crept to the edge of the clearing. She huddled behind a spreading briar until she could see into the shadows of the car.
“Judith?”
Judith looked up like a surprised pigeon. She swung her legs over and slid out of the driver’s seat, wobbly. Inebriated, Grandmother would have said in her most disdainful tone.
There were smears of lipstick across Judith’s chin and the side of her mouth.
Cassie stepped out of the bushes into the light of the fire. “Where them boys? Where’s the albino boy?”
Judith gestured into the night with a bottle. Her dress was torn at the sleeves. “They been here an’ gone.” She fell back into the seat behind the steering wheel.
Cassie looked at the wheels and saw the tires—not new, but not flat either. “They comin’ back?”
“They wenta git more booze.”
Cassie went around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. It was too dark to see much, but sure enough, there was a fist-sized hank of smoked ham, a sack of cornmeal, eggs, and an iron skillet. She didn’t see the horse pistol. She shut the trunk and came around to the driver’s side. She leaned in the window. “Can you make it start?”
Judith pulled halfheartedly at a handle in the dashboard. Smoke poured out from under the hood. The engine sputtered, and the car shook like Beanie Simms’s old truck, but it kept running.
Judith’s lower lip pushed out, and tears ran down her face. “You comin’ with me to Virginia?”
“I’m comin’ with you,” said Cassie. “An’ I guess we’re gonna find your daddy.”
CHAPTER FOUR
In the morning, with Heron-Neck hours behind them, Mississippi looked no different. Flat muddy roads, straight lines through stands of piney woods. They followed the railroad tracks. Now and then they rattled past a mean little shack, where ragged colored children and their equally ragged relations stopped what they were doing to watch the old junk car go by, white gal behind the wheel, colored gal in the passenger seat.
Judith always waved, singing out Hey y’all, like she was already a famous reddio star. Cassie would pretend to read the map spread over her knees. She’d found the map in the glove compartment. It had been folded and refolded so many times that most of the roads and names of counties had worn down to nothing. Vague areas of color and intermittent lines covered the map like stains. There was no sign of a place called Hilltop or of a town called Porterville.
That morning Cassie managed to convince Judith that she’d driven Beanie Simms’s old truck plenty of times, and Judith finally let her get behind the wheel. Cassie shoved the gearshift until it seemed to hook onto something. She moved her feet on the clutch and gas pedals until the car jerked forward. The ride wasn’t smooth, and Cassie didn’t look like she knew what she was doing, but Judith settled into the passenger seat with her bare feet up on the door. Cassie tried to make herself comfortable between the lumps and springs of the driver’s seat. They would have to find a cushion somewhere. Maybe two or three.
Cassie gave the car a little gas, and it rattled down a shallow hill. A breeze blew between Judith’s dirty toes, and Judith smiled at the morning. Cassie drove and Judith dozed. The car clattered and smoked. Winter fields became sparse pine forest, which gave way to scattered shacks. Shacks faded back into the trees, and the forest diminished. Now felled lumber, now rotten stumps, now a field. The landscape repeated itself. Were they going in a circle? Once in a while a stray cow or chicken stared at them from the middle of the road, too dumbfounded to run.
The scenery interrupted itself once with a church in pieces on the side of a hill. The steeple sat on cinderblocks. All four walls leaned against one sturdy tree, looking like they had been sawed from some other building. Someone had dug a foundation. The sturdy tree and the four walls were right beside the road, and going uphill, the car went so slowly, they had plenty of time to examine the church as they passed.
Judith combed out her hair with her fingers. “What church you go to back home?”
“We din’t go much, but when we did, First Baptist. Where’d you go?”
“Missionary Baptist.”
“That little white one off Main Street?”
“Wasn’t little.”
“Weren’t big neither.”
“You sing in your church?”
“Ever’body sing in church.”
“Not deaf folks.”
Deaf folks. How did Judith know anything about deaf folks and what they did in church? Were there any deaf folks in Heron-Neck? Not that she knew of, neither white nor colored. This was Judith bored. Judith making up anything just to pretend she knew what she was talking about. This was how she entertained herself. Was Cassie herself bored enough to care what Judith would say next? She concentrated on the road, though there was no traffic in sight. Was Judith busy trying to decide, like she was, if this trip was actually a good idea? They had no real plan and no idea how to get to Virginia, much less Hilltop—and Porterville. What if there was no Porterville? What if those were places Beanie Simms had made up? People paid him for the information, she was pretty sure of that, but what if following the railroad tracks was a wild goose chase? And even if they made it, then what? Would she turn white and leave Judith? And if Judith made it to Virginia, would Bill Forrest hand over whatever inheritance was left? He’d been gone for years, and the letter from Eula Bonhomme hadn’t said how much money there was. What if it was pennies? In the rearview mirror, dust rose behind the car, hiding the road to Heron-Neck. What would happen back home? With the albino boy lying in wait for colored girls or even women, was it safe for Lil Ma? Cassie should have brought Lil Ma; this was the mistake she’d made, the mistake lurking at the edges of Judith’s certainty. The three of them could have made it to Virginia, where, no matter what, there would be laundry to do. Should she turn around and head straight back? She wouldn’t escape a second time. She made a silent pledge that whatever she did, wherever she and Judith ended up, she would get Lil Ma to safety.
They reached the top of the hill. Cassie pushed the clutch in to let the old heap roll down the other side at its own speed.
“Give it gas,” said Judith. “Floor it. Like this.”
She shoved her foot over the top of Cassie’s and pushed it all the way down. The car lurched, then surged. Wind gusted in, blowing their hair and coats, pushing out the smell of exhaust and rotting upholstery. As they picked up speed, Cassie opened her mouth to let the air fill it. The vibration of the road through the seat went all through her. Trees flashed by. Her stomach lifted. Judith let out a yell, and Cassie yelled too, into the wind, without words.
* * *
By sundown of their first full day, they’d reached a low line of hills and bare winter fields. On their right, the railroad tracks disappeared into the mouth of a tunnel; on the left, their road vanished into the evening.
Cassie stopped the car. There was a railroad crossing. Patches of dirt showed that others had crossed the tracks in front of the tunnel, heading up into the hills.
“Where are we?” said Judith.
On the map, the print closer to the edges was easier to see, but no matter how Cassie studied it, she was more and more certain that they had driven off the eastern edge of the map some time ago. She showed Judith. “We’ll need a new map.”
“Where we gonna find a new map?” said Judith.
“I guess at a gas station.”
“You reckon we should stop fer the night?”
“I reckon we should.”
They got the car off the road and under some pine trees. Judith opened the trunk, found a box of matches, and struck one. The light showed what else was in the trunk: the sack of cornmeal and the hunk of ham lying unwrapped in the cast-iron skillet.
“I got aigs in here.” Judith shook out the match, lit another, and poked around in the musty space. She pulled out a chipped bowl with an apron stuffed into it. The eggs, wrapped in the apron, were m
iraculously intact. Judith shook out the second match and pushed the eggs at Cassie. “Go on an’ mix us up some corn bread. I’ll start the fire.”
Cassie sat on the running board and mixed cornmeal batter with her fingers, since there was no fork or spoon in the trunk. The bread would be flat and tough. Lil Ma would have added warm milk and yeast; the bread would have risen into something respectable instead of burning black in the pan. On her knees, Judith blew on a tiny flicker between dry pine twigs.
The fire caught and flames rose up. They showed Judith’s uneven teeth in a grin. “There y’are.” She brushed her hands on her knees. Cassie scooped the batter into the skillet and squatted by the fire with the pan.
Judith put in a few more sticks. The flames jumped and crackled. “We should slice up that ham and put it in too.”
“Did you bring a knife?”
“Din’t you?”
“Didn’t really think I’d be leavin’.”
“I thought ’bout leavin’ alla time after that albino boy, Jack, started talkin’. Started thinkin’ ’bout, you know, marriage an’ travelin’ an’ New York.” Judith put in some bigger sticks. Behind her, the dark shoulders of the hills showed as an ebony edge against a sky slowly filling with stars. The fire gained some heat, and the warmth made Cassie feel achy from hours of sitting in the car.
“Which way you want to go tomorrow?” Judith pointed left with a stick, following the road. “I don’t think this ol’ thing’ll ever get up that hill.”
“Then I guess we should take the road.” Cassie hadn’t eaten since last night and felt lightheaded enough to ask the question that had been on her mind since she’d seen Judith drinking and horsing around with the albino boy and the Justice boys.
“You gonna have a baby?”
Judith pushed a burning stick around. “I don’t know.” She took the skillet and set it into the fire. In a minute, the batter began to hiss, already burning at the edges.
“What’re you gonna do if you have a baby?” said Cassie.
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