Absalom's Daughters

by Suzanne Feldman

  At the end of the third day, the land turned hilly, and the car, unaccustomed to climbing, began to overheat. Even though it was early in March, the day had been hot. Cassie had stopped often to make sure there was water in the radiator. Judith slept in the backseat, oblivious.

  In the late afternoon while Cassie was peering into the heat and darkness of the radiator, Judith woke up. “Where are we?”

  “Alabammy hill country.” Cassie shut the car hood and picked up a galvanized bucket she’d found on the side of the road. The bucket had been shot at, but the holes were only in the upper half, so the bottom still held water. She’d been keeping it in the foot well of the passenger seat. There seemed to be a creek in every little valley.

  “I mean where on the map?”

  “I guess about a day away from Enterprise.”

  Judith sat up in the backseat. She looked better, not so bloodless. “Where we gonna stop?”

  “I ain’t seen a safe place. I seen a lot of lil shacks with white folks an’ big dogs. None o’ the coloreds been wavin’ back.”

  “Ever’body think you stole this car, an’ now you drivin’ round showin’ it off.” She got out of the backseat and made her way gingerly to the front. She sat down with her feet on either side of the bucket without acting like she’d even seen it. “You lucky you ain’t been shot at.”

  “Nobody wants this car but us. You want somethin’ to eat?”

  Judith leaned her head back on the ragged upholstery. “I’d like a steak ’n’ taters, please. An’ a ice-cold Coca-Cola to wash it all down.” Cassie laughed, and Judith smiled a pale smile. “Let’s find us a big ol’ billboard for the night.”

  A billboard for TIDE detergent was at the top of the hill and had been for such a long time that the bright orange-and-yellow bull’s-eye box had faded to gray. Cassie and Judith hid the car in thorny weeds and ate stale corn bread, all they had left. Judith marked off the past three days on the calendar and turned the page uneasily to March. Two weeks left and still in Alabama.

  “We gonna hafta drive day and night,” said Judith.

  “We don’t have the money for gas to drive day and night.”

  “Well now,” said Judith, sounding a little desperate. “We cain’t git stuck out here after comin’ all this way.”

  “We’ll find a way,” said Cassie, “isn’t that what you said?”

  “I know it’s what I said.”

  “We got to eat,” said Cassie. “We’ll think better with something in our stomachs.”

  They picked dandelion greens and tried boiling them the way they thought they remembered their grandmothers had, but the greens were bitter and tough. Not far behind the billboard, Cassie found a stand of mulberry trees with enough fruit for the two of them to feel less like they were starving. In the long grass under twisted trees they found a rotting arrangement of crates, which had once been set up as a table and chairs. Judith pushed a crate over with her foot, and that was when they found the bottles of moonshine whiskey. One was corked, nearly full, and only dirty on one side, where it’d been lying in the leaves for who knew how long. Judith scuffed around it until all the spiders ran off, and took it back with them to the car.

  It had been a clear hot afternoon, and the evening was no different. From the top of the hill, their view of the sky was uninterrupted. Stars came out. Crickets, frogs, and night birds sang all around them. There wasn’t so much as a porch light showing in the valley. Had they fallen between the crisscross of roads and landed somewhere on the old map they’d started with—on which the markings had worn away?

  Judith uncorked the bottle, took a deep whiff, and handed it over to Cassie. It smelled like paint thinner.

  “I hope you don’ think I’m gonna drink this,” said Cassie.

  “Din’t nobody in your fam’ly drink?” said Judith. “Not even when your granny wasn’t lookin’?”

  “You know my momma din’t.”

  “She shoulda.” Judith reached for the bottle. Cassie handed it back and watched Judith put the mouth of the bottle between her lips and lean back so the whiskey just rolled in. Judith swallowed twice, silently, with a terrible expression on her face, leaned forward, and coughed like she was drowning. Cassie tried to pound her on the back, but Judith held her off.

  “’At’s how it s’posed to be.” Judith gasped and pushed the bottle at her and made encouraging motions with both hands.

  “I felt so sorry for your ma,” Judith said. “She din’t wanna sleep with my daddy. She coulda done better by you. I’d see people lookin’ at your mama, jus’ lookin’ at her. I felt so sorry for her,” she said again. “Din’t you?”

  Cassie looked out at the dark and the moon, aware of a pain in the middle of her chest.

  “You wanna go home,” said Judith.

  “I don’t.”

  “You do,” said Judith, “but you cain’t.” She giggled, got up, and stumbled to the car. The radio came on. Static hissed. A white man’s voice read an agricultural report. The idea that white people were right here, talking about how the corn crop was coming along, not just among themselves around a kitchen table, but on the radio where everyone could hear, made Cassie’s chest hurt more. Judith had left the bottle on the ground, and Cassie picked it up. It was about half gone. Cain’t. Ain’t. She shut her eyes and tears came out. She took a gulp, fast, so as to bypass her tongue; it was like a mouthful of gasoline. The fumes came up behind her eyes and made them water. She choked for breath.

  “Don’t you be drinkin’ the whole bottle!” Judith said.

  The stuff ran down into Cassie’s stomach and lay there. Her mouth and throat felt like she’d swallowed lit matches. There was nothing to do but drink again. She did and had to lie down on her back in the grass. She blinked at the moon. Her chest seemed not to hurt as much.

  Judith was fiddling with the radio.

  “We out in the middle of nowhere,” Cassie kind of sang. “What you gone get ’sides hillbilly music?”

  “You lissen an’ see.” Voices flickered through static, faint, then stronger, sharp-edged, distant accents from a different world.

  I’m young, I’m loose, I’m full of juice.

  Drums and horns and a man’s voice spilled out of the radio. Judith pranced back through the darkness and stood over Cassie. She pattered her hands across her hips, shook her hands around, and rolled her eyes. From Cassie’s ground-view, Judith looked like a boneless waggle of limbs, which was funny. Judith reached down and pulled Cassie to her feet. “Come on an’ I’ll show you how to dance. Do what I do.” Judith threw her hands over her head and wiggled all over. Cassie tried it, and the silliness of it made her burst out in a laugh. Judith swung her arms and kicked her feet and sang along with her chin jutted out until static overwhelmed the song. She whirled over to the car to find another station. Cassie rubbed at where the pain had been in her chest. The ache was gone, and she felt fine now. Even the worry about getting to Virginia on time was fading. Where was the bottle? In Judith’s hand.

  “They only play this kinda music at night?” Cassie said.

  “Ain’t legal durin’ daylight hours. Jack tol’ me.”

  Judith squinched up her face in the moonlight, listening for something in particular amid the shreds of music and yelps of voices. There was a Woohoooo! Woooohoo! Not a human sound. Barely an instrument. Judith bounced out of the car, kicked off her shoes, and stood tiptoe in the long grass. “I wanna show you how Jack showed me to dance,” she said. She took a long suck on the bottle, steadied herself against the car, and wiped sweat off her forehead.

  It was the moon, Cassie thought, the moon was making everything so hot. The liquor, which had numbed her stomach and her chest, seemed cooler in the bottle than the night air, so it only made sense to take another drink, and even though it still felt like fire, her throat was seared now, so it didn’t really matter what went in there. She was surprised to see how the moon shone through the dirty glass of the bottle, and how the light from the mo
on looked on her own skin, like a wash of thin white paint, which made her think of Grandmother, and how she must look at the world—coated in shades of white. How complicated all Grandmother’s plans seemed, when just standing under the light of a nearly full moon with Judith and her reddio music and a bottle produced the same results. As long as it was night, she was white. Cassie laughed until she thought she might vomit.

  Judith laughed too. She snatched the bottle back. “Was you watchin’? Didja see?” She rocked her shoulders one way and rolled her hips in the other direction. “This how Jack taught me to dance.” She grabbed Cassie’s hand. “You be me,” she said. “I’ll be him. Here now, spin round!”

  Judith spun her. The moon circled around unexpectedly, and the ground felt wobbly. Cassie caught Judith’s other hand, the bottle still in it. Together they gripped it, Judith swayed, singing along, to the sounds coming out of the radio. Even though she didn’t know the song, Cassie felt like she did, and the words just came out of her mouth, words about love and regret and leaving and return. Judith took another gulp from the bottle, and Cassie did too. The song changed to something slow. The grass was flattened where the two of them were dancing. The moon shone straight down on everything.

  “Now,” said Judith, “you be him, and I’ll be me.”

  Cassie felt Judith become heavier, and the heaviness pulled Judith into a long, woozy spin. Cassie reached out to keep her from falling down in the flat white grass and saw her own arm, white, white, white.

  The albino’s whiteness. It had descended on her. The music was slow and sad. Their sweaty hands touched. Judith looked up with weepy eyes. She clutched Cassie’s hands and said, “Want to see how Jack showed me how to dance? This ’ere, this’s how we did it,” and she collapsed against Cassie’s chest, buried her wet face into Cassie’s neck. The two of them held each other, sweating whiskey through their clothes, whiskey tears soaking into each other’s hair, in the middle of the night, at the top of the hill in the trampled grass, where only deer and foxes had been before.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The next morning, they got up later than usual. By Cassie’s judgment the height of the sun made it almost noon. The weather was cool, which was good, but a light morning mist had settled into their clothes, chilling them both. Their mouths were dry and their heads hurt. The noise from the old junk car made their heads hurt worse. Judith said “Time’s a-wastin’,” and they got started driving. The highway opened up in front of them. Soon they saw a sign that read ENTERPRISE 10 MILES.

  Judith, who was driving, said to Cassie, “What you got left in your shoe?”

  Cassie took off her shoe and counted the change. “Ninety-six cents.”

  “We ain’t gonna get to Virginia on ninety-six cents.”

  “We can get work in Enterprise.”

  “No one gonna hire us for nuthin’,” Judith said. “We jus’ vagrants far as ennyone concerned. Besides, earnin’ money gonna take too long. I got an idea.”

  Cassie put her shoe back on. “What’s your idea?”

  “I ain’t telling you,” said Judith. “’Cause I ain’t sure it gonna work, an’ I don’t want you thinkin’ I’m’n idjit.”

  “I’ll tell you right now if it’s a stupid idea, and then you don’t have to worry ’bout me thinking you’n idjit.”

  “You don’t have to do nuthin’. An’ if it don’t work, then I guess we’ll clean ourselves up an’ find a place needs help with the laundry.”

  Up ahead signs announced ENTERPRISE’S RARITAN and LIONS CLUBS and a host of others, including the FRATERNAL ORDER OF POLICE.

  “You ain’t gonna try to do hoorin’, are you?” Cassie said.

  “Even I ain’t idjit enough for that.”

  By the time they got to Enterprise, the cool March morning had turned into a warmer March afternoon. Highway 80 led directly to the center of town, which was where the statue in the picture postcard was. Cars and pickup trucks were parked at an angle along both sides of the street in front of a hardware store, a grocery, and a diner. The monument to the boll weevil rose from a concrete island in the middle of the street. A gleaming white woman stood on a pedestal, dressed in something flimsy that was decorated with gleaming golden curlicues. She looked like she had fallen from the sky, from somewhere completely different than the dusty ordinariness of downtown Enterprise, Alabama. She towered over everything. Her bare arms were raised over her head, hands joined as though in a victorious gesture. In the postcard picture, water had come rushing out of a vase. Now the fountain was dry, and the top was blocked by something dark and oddly shaped.

  Judith parked the car by the fountain. “What she holdin’ up there?” said Judith.

  Cassie squinted into the brightness of the day. What object was that woman holding over her head in both hands, like a trophy?

  “Damned if that ain’t some kinda insect,” said Judith. “Is it a tick?”

  “It’s a weevil,” said Cassie. “See its legs stickin’ out on the side?”

  Judith stepped into the street and walked over to the edge of the fountain’s dry pool. Cassie waited for a pickup truck to chug by, then followed Judith. She could feel people staring at them from the windows of the diner. Cassie shaded her eyes to get a look at the top of the statue. Judith squinted in the sun.

  “This ain’t how it looked in the picture,” said Judith. “It looked better without the bug.”

  “Maybe no one could tell what it was a monument for.”

  “Why’d you make a monument to a pest?” said Judith. “It ain’t like it died inna war.”

  They studied it for a while longer. Cassie said, “People looking at us.”

  “I know.” Judith put her hands on her hips. “We got a hat?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “We got somethin’ like a hat?”

  “Nothin’ even like a hat,” said Cassie.

  Judith eyed the car. “Bring me that ol’ skillet.”

  “Why you want the skillet?”

  “We ain’t got no hat for folks to toss pennies into.”

  Cassie looked up at the weevil. “What you plannin’ on?”

  “I aim to start my fame and fortune right here and now,” said Judith. “This the biggest town we come to. Time to stop wishin’ an’ start doin’. Will you bring me that skillet?”

  Cassie went and got the skillet out of the trunk. At the foot of the monument, standing in its afternoon shadow, facing the half-seen people behind dusty windows, Judith cleared her throat and did some humming to warm up her voice. Cassie put the skillet on the ground to Judith’s left. Sparse traffic veered around them and the monument. Cassie didn’t know where Judith thought her admirers were going to stand and listen. She could have told Judith that she had a better chance at pennies if she stood on the sidewalk in front of the diner, but Judith had a vision in her mind, and there would be no changing it.

  “What you gone start with?” said Cassie.

  “‘Amazin’ Grace,’” said Judith. She cleared her throat and began to sing to the afternoon street.

  Cassie sat on the edge of the dry fountain and kept her eye on the diner. On the other side of the plate-glass window, paunchy white men in overalls drank coffee and cut into slices of pie. What was that girl doin’ out there, singin’ in the afternoon sun?

  Judith was building steam. Her outsized grown-up voice lent itself to gospel, and she let the sound of it ring off the dusty fronts of the brick buildings. She sounded good today. Cassie smiled at her to let her know she thought so. Judith raised her eyes to the afternoon sky and sang her song as though it was a prayer to God Almighty for success to hit her like a lightning bolt.

  She got all the way through “Amazing Grace.” People were looking at them from inside shops on both sides of the street. No one came out except for a couple who got in their car and drove off.

  “Maybe these ain’t religious folks,” said Judith, dabbing sweat from her chin. “Maybe I should sing somethin’ more country.”<
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  “Country don’t sound good without accomp’niment,” said Cassie, though the truth was, she was starting to get nervous about the lack of interest here in Enterprise. It felt like hostility was coming together behind those shop windows. Gospel might protect them from the worst things. “It’s getting late. Mebbe we should get goin’.”

  Judith started into “Surely God Is Able.” More folks got in their cars and drove off. The ones that drove past the monument glared disapprovingly until a woman shouted, “Git outta here, you raggedy tramps!” and someone else in a truck yelled, “Nigger beggars!”

  “I think it is time for us to go,” said Cassie.

  “I ain’t goin’ nowhere until I finish.” Judith raised her voice for anyone listening. “The Lawd don’t like bein’ innerupted!”

  “You better hurry up.”

  Another car pulled out, two-toned brown and white, like a fancy shoe. It came slowly down the street and stopped in front of the fountain. The windows were open. A pudgy white woman in a hat too nice for a diner sat on the passenger side. A man in a black suit was driving. Judith, still singing, didn’t miss a beat. Cassie held her breath, half expecting a shotgun barrel to poke out, but the woman waited for Judith to finish, tugging on a pair of white gloves, adjusting her hat, and examining Cassie all the while.

  Judith spread her arms wide for her finale. She ran out of air, clasped her hands, and smiled at the woman in the car.

  “Where y’all from?” said the woman.

  “Heron-Neck, Mississippi, ma’am,” said Judith.

  “What y’all doin’ here?”

  “Singin’ to get a little money, ma’am. I’s on my way to New York City to make mah fortune.”

  “Singin’?” said the woman.

  “Singin’,” said Judith.

  The woman reached behind her seat and opened the back door. “Now come on an’ git in,” she said. “We real impressed with you singin’, and we gone to introduce you to the members of our church.”

  Cassie jumped up from the edge of the fountain. “Miz Judith! Miz Judith! Cain’t you follow long in yo own car? You know I cain’t drive, and you cain’t leave me heah by mahsef!” She rolled her eyes at the impending evening and the marble monument and the boll weevil topping it all.