Absalom's Daughters

by Suzanne Feldman

  “I cain’t leave her here, ma’am,” said Judith. “This gal already half died from fright a dozen times. She ain’t got too many frights left in her.”

  The woman examined their car. “We’ll go slow. It’s just a mile or two.”

  Cassie slid into the passenger seat, and Judith got behind the wheel. The car wheezed to life.

  “What you think?” said Judith breathlessly.

  “Mebbe they witches.”

  Judith giggled. “They ain’t witches. You think they got enny connections, you know, with the singin’ bizniss?”

  “I think they gone to make you sing for they prayer meetin’ and send you off with a big basket of fried chicken.”

  “And mebbe some tater salad?”

  Cassie poked her. “Be sure you tell ’em you need money for gas. You kin tell ’em ennything you want about New York City, but please don’t say anythin’ ’bout our daddy.”

  They followed the car into one of the nicest neighborhoods either of them had ever seen. The houses weren’t big houses like the ones up the hill in Heron-Neck, but all were white with fresh paint, neat front lawns, and flowers. The lady’s car pulled into the crowded parking lot of a dainty church. Lights inside the church shone through stained glass windows.

  “You think they Baptists?” said Judith.

  “Don’t even ask,” said Cassie. “Just do what they want you to do an’ come back out.”

  “Ain’t you comin’ in?”

  “What-all would I do? They’ll make me sit in the back and give me dirty looks. I ain’t going in there.”

  “What if somethin’ crazy happen?” said Judith.

  “Like what, a man turning into a mule? These normal folk.”

  “What if I need you? You gots to come in.” Judith lowered her voice. “You my sister.”

  The woman and the man were getting out of their car. The man, Cassie saw at last, was a minister in a minister’s black suit. The woman was pudgy, dressed in blue. “All right,” Cassie said. “They gone to make me sit on the hardest chair in the room.”

  Judith bounced out of the car. “Y’all got the prettiest church I ever seen!”

  “Thank you,” said the minister. He introduced himself as Father Ash and the woman as his wife, Beatrice. “Won’t you come in?” he said, just to Judith. “You’ll want to see the windows before you meet our members.”

  “An’ mah gal here?” said Judith.

  Beatrice pointed Cassie to the rear of the church and led her around the back, while Father Ash took Judith up the front steps to see the stained-glass glory inside.

  “We don’t usually have a lot of singin’ on a Wednesday night,” said Beatrice. “It’s our prayer meetin’. But that gal got quite the singin’ voice.”

  “Oh, yessum. Miz Judith got the callin’, an’ I guess th’ callin’ took us here.” Cassie smiled with all her teeth. “We prayed on it together that someone who know good singin’ would hear her.”

  At the back of the church, stairs led down to a basement door. Beatrice waddled down and rattled the knob. “Anna May? Anna May! Open this door!”

  Anna May was just as round as Beatrice and wore her blondish hair in a varnished swirl at the top of her head. When she saw Cassie, she frowned, but Beatrice made impatient gestures with her hands, and Anna May stepped aside.

  The basement was brightly lit. Two dozen white ladies sat around long tables in fancy prayer-meeting hats. They turned as one when Cassie came in, and Cassie wished she’d insisted on waiting in the car. It wasn’t like Judith would crumple from stage fright if she was here by herself. Judith could sing hymns for a pack of wild dogs. Beatrice sat Cassie in a folding chair by the back door, right up against the cinderblock wall. All the while, not one of the prayer-meeting ladies took their eyes off her. Then Father Ash escorted Judith down the stairs on the other side of the room and heads turned like a flock of geese.

  Father Ash introduced Judith and helped her up onto the kind of low stage the churches back in Heron-Neck used for Christmas plays. Judith smoothed her cleaned-up dress, shuffled her worn-out shoes, and cleared her throat. Beatrice sat at an old upright piano looking self-important.

  Father Ash nodded at Judith. “What’ll you start with, Miss Forrest?”

  “‘Precious Lord,” said Judith, with terrible gravity, “Take My Hand.’”

  Beatrice played the opening chords. The basement was like a shoebox, and the piano was out of tune. The smells of rosewater and hand lotion thickened the air, but none of that could stop Judith. She opened her mouth and the song spilled out.

  It crammed itself against the walls and low ceiling. It practically drowned out the piano. Judith clenched her fists and squeezed shut her eyes. She crouched over the lyrics and sweated real sweat across her upper lip. Her drama carried across the long tables, revealing a girl who believed and who had been saved by every word that came out of her mouth. On the low rise of that church stage, Judith threw off her drunken nights with the Justice boys and her days of hauling laundry for nickels. The Judith Forrest who lied like she knew everything but wasn’t experienced enough to recognize a tube of used lipstick had disappeared; this Judith Forrest was a decent young gal of little means, traveling ’cross the southland to bring the message of Christ Our Lord to everybody, high and low, and so on and so on. Cassie leaned against the cool cinderblock and watched Judith work the room. The church ladies fanned themselves and clapped politely at first, fanned themselves a bit harder as Judith picked more energetic songs. They wiped their eyes over time-worn favorites and rose up and sang in their lily-white church lady voices when Judith called everyone to their feet.

  When she was done and had patted her brow, and the ladies had finished their applause, Father Ash stepped forward to pass the collection basket. Cassie watched from the back of the room as the dollar bills and silver dropped into the basket. Just about everyone put in something. Cassie counted twenty-four prayer-meeting hats. If each one put in only a quarter, it would be enough to buy gas for a couple of weeks. The basket made its way to the front of the room again, and Father Ash and Beatrice presented it to Judith with huge smiles and invited her to dinner. Cassie watched Judith nod graciously and walk away, up the stairs, and into the church proper, without a backward glance.

  * * *

  Judith came back to the car hours later. The church bell had chimed nine o’clock. Cassie was lying on the grass. The night was warm and clear, and the stars were thick as bees.

  Judith plopped down cross-legged beside Cassie on the grass. She had a worn fake-leather purse over one arm and a little basket covered with a picnic napkin over the other. “You hungry? I got fried chicken, mashed taters, an’ chock’lit cake.”

  Cassie found a drumstick and bit in. Barely warm, and the crunch had gone out of it. “They give you that purse?”

  “Yep.” Judith dangled it. “Prob’ly sumpin’ they woulda thowed out, but I don’t care. They put the money in it. And I think the gun’ll fit in there too.”

  “How much money?”

  “Thirty-one dollars and seventy-two cent.”

  Cassie blinked in amazement. Why even stop in Virginia when they could make more money than Bill Forrest would ever inherit? But this wasn’t the time to bring that up. Cassie finished the drumstick, found a fork in the basket, and started on the cake. “This good cake.”

  “Ain’t it? Kinda wisht we coulda started with it. The taters got too much water in ’em, and the chicken’s just all right.”

  “You din’t say that to ’em?”

  “Hail no. I knows how to be a guest.” She wrapped her arms around her knees. “How’d it sound to you?”

  “What? The singin’? It sounded good.”

  “Good like real good? Or good like real, real, real good.”

  “Now I ain’t gone say nothing to swell your head.”

  Judith picked a piece of grass and rolled it between her fingers. “It was good?”

  “Pretty good.”

&nb
sp; Judith got up and twirled around. “I kin do ennythin’!” She skipped in a circle around the car.“Ennythin’! Ennythin’!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  After that, the trip seemed to get easier at the same time it got harder. They tried driving all day and all night, but the car overheated, and they had to stop to let it rest. Judith sang for folks in a big Baptist church in the middle of a town called Sunderland. The Sunderland people gifted her with seventeen dollars and a basket of fried chicken. The following Wednesday she performed for the Ladies Auxiliary of the Halsey Church of the Nazarene. They gave her three dollars in dimes, two dresses, and a pair of shoes. In Elliston she got ten dollars and pork ribs. In Daysville she got a basket of apples, a loaf of bread, and a chunk of farmer’s cheese. Cassie and Judith kept their calendar up-to-date by looking at the local newspapers in the towns they passed through. They saw headlines in the papers about Elvis Presley and President Eisenhower, but all they really needed were the dates, not the news.

  Before long, it was March tenth, and they were barely through Georgia. Cassie sent Judith in for more maps at a gas station and saw how far away Virginia really was.

  “We ain’t never gonna git there at this rate,” said Judith. Cassie could tell how worried Judith was by how quiet she was as they drove.

  Cassie put in her left shoe the money Judith earned, and in her right, the money remaining from what Lil Ma had given her. At night when she took off her shoes, she took the right one off first, so as to think about her mother, and then the left, so as to think about what might be ahead the next day. In the morning, she put the shoes on in the opposite order with the same thoughts for each shoe, so she was prepared for the day but with a thought for Lil Ma foremost in her mind.

  At the South Carolina border, which they crossed on Tuesday, March fifteenth, Cassie asked Judith what was the point in going to Virginia. With less than a week until Eula Bonhomme-Forrest’s March twenty-first deadline, they weren’t going to make it on time. Cassie was carrying close to fifty dollars, not counting the change, which was so uncomfortable to walk on that she hid it in the trunk.

  “We could just pass through Virginia,” she said as they drove along on a county highway. Every day the weather was warmer, and it felt like spring. “You can sing and earn money and go on through without no trouble. We can get you some nice new clothes for New York City.”

  “Well now, you’re right,” said Judith, “an’ I bin thinkin’ ’long the same lines for a while, but you know what I come up with each time I considers it?”

  “What?”

  “I knows I’ll spend the rest of my life wishin’ I’d stopped in Virginia. I want him to see what he lef’ behind. I don’ care if he got enny money. I don’t care if he drunk as a skunk and hoorin’ around town.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “All right, I do. But I want him to know he cain’t jus’ run off an’ never see his fam’ly again, like we was somethin’ that never mattered.”

  “You gone follow him like a curse.”

  Judith looked out the window at the flowering trees and then back at the road. “What you gonna do in New York City when we gits there?”

  “Ain’t I staying with you?”

  “I ’magine you could do mos’ ennything you wanted. It’s s’posed to be different for colored folks up there. Ennyway, half the singin’ money’s yours.”

  “Now what’m I gone do in New York City if I ain’t helpin’ you get to be a reddio star?”

  “Mebbe start a laundry bizniss? Mebbe git your momma outta Mississippi?”

  These ideas had been at the edge of Cassie’s mind. Hearing them come out of Judith’s mouth made her stomach flutter the way it did when the car went down a steep hill. She opened her mouth to say I’ll think about that, when the car, which had been running just fine for weeks, belched blue smoke from under the hood. The greasy innards gave a clattering convulsion that shook the hood wide-open. The engine gasped, shuddered, and quit.

  Judith guided the car off the road into a damp patch of weeds and poison ivy. They got out and looked at the smoking engine without touching it. The last town was an hour behind them. It was late in the afternoon. It looked like it was going to rain.

  Judith took a sniff of the smoke and coughed. “Smells like a daid thing.”

  They sat back from the road eating the last of the apples. Judith drank a warm bottle of Coke from the trunk. Coke made Judith jumpy, and Cassie considered the stuff a waste of money, but hot or cold, Judith swigged it down with gusto.

  Before long they heard a car coming down the road. Judith stood up from behind the tall grass and thorny shrubs and shaded her eyes.

  “That a new car,” she reported. “Two-tone paint. Red an’ white.”

  “It’ll be a car fulla drunk white boys.”

  “They stoppin’. I kin hear their reddio playin’.” She took a quick little breath as though the best thing in the world had just happened. “Oh, Cassie, they colored. They colored men in suits!”

  She jumped out on the road shouting, “Hey y’all! Hey! Y’all know ennythin’ ’bout fixin’ cars?”

  Cassie followed, hoping they wouldn’t be scared off by the crazy white girl leaping out of the roadside weeds.

  Two cinnamon-colored men in dark suits—church or funeral suits, Cassie thought—were just getting out of their car, so new, the sidewalls of the tires were still sparkling white. They were about the same height and age, and when they looked up, Cassie thought they were at least brothers if not twins. She saw their eyes flicker between herself and Judith and watched their faces fill with the usual questions. One took off his hat and made a wide, gallant motion. “Ladies? Do y’all need some assistance?”

  “We shorely do,” said Judith. “Is you gentlemen know anythin’ ’bout cars?”

  “We’re mechanics,” said the second man. “We got a garage over in Porterville.”

  “Porterville?” said Cassie in amazement. Judith had already bounced off to ogle their car and its radio. “We been looking for Porterville,” she said. “You know a man by the name of Mistah Johnson Mallard?”

  One of the brothers was wearing a red kerchief in his breast pocket. “He’s our daddy. How you heard about him?”

  “Someone in a place called Hilltop told us to ask for him. We thought he was talking ’bout a town in Mississippi. We thought we missed it.”

  Judith skipped over, full of sugary energy. “Kin you git it to start? Ev’ry time I tries to start it, I wonder if it’s gonna turn over.”

  The brother with the red kerchief got into the car and tried the ignition. The engine clicked lifelessly. “Alternator?” he said.

  “Alternator,” said the other.

  “We’ll give you a tow into Porterville,” the first one told Cassie. “We’ll have you fixed up before suppertime.”

  “We kin pay,” said Cassie, “but how much you think it’ll be?”

  “Rebuilt model?” said the one with the red kerchief.

  “Rebuilt model,” agreed his brother.

  “New one costs twenty dollars,” said the one. “We can get you going for ten.”

  “Good as new?” said Cassie.

  “Good as new,” replied the other.

  * * *

  Charlie Mallard was the one with the red handkerchief. Junior was his twin. Their garage was in Porterville Township and took up the front yard of their family’s house. The house was set well back from the road behind newly leafed locust trees and looked the same as the dozens they’d passed—rough boards with a tin roof and a sagging front porch. The garage was a different story. It was new, painted white, built of cinderblock, with a big glass window that looked in on a neat little office. MALLARD BROTHERS AUTO REPAIR was painted over the double garage doors in professional-looking script. The two dozen cars in the gravel lot beside it were parked in rows, washed and waxed. Even in the overcast afternoon, the cars gleamed like they were new.

  Charlie got out to open the garage door. Ju
nior smiled at them in the rearview mirror. “Have a bite to eat at the house while you’re waiting. Dad’ll take care of you.”

  He led them past the garage, where Charlie had already shouldered into his stained blue mechanic’s coverall and was untying their car from its tow rope.

  Up close, the house wasn’t as raggedy as Cassie had first thought. The boards needed paint, but they’d been scraped recently. One side of the porch did sag, but the other was covered with pine boards so new, they smelled of the sawmill. Junior opened the front door into a parlor crowded with furniture, an upright piano, and bric-a-brac. It took a minute for Cassie to see Mister Mallard the elder sitting in an armchair by the room’s only window. He looked up from reading a newspaper, and Judith nearly stepped on Cassie’s heels as Cassie stopped short.

  His skin stretched tight over his wide cheekbones and the deep sockets of his eyes. He was so thin in the face, it made Cassie wonder if he could even stand, but it wasn’t just his starved appearance that stopped Cassie in her tracks. It was his eyes, which were pink, and his skin, which was the color of chalk.

  “You’re like Jack!” Judith blurted.

  Cassie caught Judith’s shoulder to keep her from saying any more. “It’s just—we know someone else who’s—the same.”

  “’Nother albino,” said Mister Mallard, in a tone too flat to tell if he was offended. “A true albino?”

  “Yessuh,” said Judith, ignoring Cassie’s grip. “He was as true an al-biner as I ever did see. Till now, course.”

  “He a Negro albino?” said Mister Mallard.

  “No, suh,” said Judith. “He just a white white boy.”

  “We rare,” said Mister Mallard. “Negro albinos real, real rare. Prob’ly more albino white folks than you think. Hard to tell with some of ’em. Now, I knew two colored albino boys when I was comin’ up; they both got lynched for ’tendin’ to be white men. Wasn’t neither one of ’em more’n sixteen years old.”