Absalom's Daughters

by Suzanne Feldman

  Charlie stopped in front of the strange arrangement of women and baby boy. He ducked his head. “My sincere condolences, Missus Legabee.”

  “Your daddy come?” said the widow.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “He still havin’ his problems?”

  “Yessum,” said Charlie. “Still havin’ his problems.”

  “He like the talkin’ skull,” said the daughter. “Lots to say, but nothin’ helpful comin’ outta his mouth.”

  “You’ll be buryin’ him next,” said the widow, which struck Cassie as truly improper, but Charlie just opened a hand toward Cassie.

  “Here the young lady the Reverend Glade told you ’bout.”

  The two women eyed Cassie like predatory birds, their eyes black as ink, and the baby’s somehow even blacker.

  “You a pretty girl,” said the widow. “You light-skinned too, like Ovid Beale said.”

  “Mister Beale told you ’bout me?” said Cassie. “Is he here?”

  “He ain’t here, but we talked to him,” said the daughter.

  The man who was a mule—or whatever they’d seen weeks ago in Mississippi—came back to Cassie as a bad feeling. “How—how can you talk to him?”

  “Girl, ain’t you heard of a telephone?” said the daughter. “He my daddy’s nephew. Course we talk. He told us you was headed to Virginia with a crazy white girl claimin’ to be your half sister. That true?”

  Cassie nodded. The bad feeling might have been just too much pie in her stomach.

  “Half sister,” said the widow. “You daddy a white man?”

  “Yessum.”

  “You almost light enough to pass,” said the widow. “Tell me that ain’t somethin’ you long for.”

  “I ain’t wishin’ for something that ain’t gone to happen.”

  “You a liar,” said the widow.

  “You meet Charlie Mallard’s daddy?” asked the daughter. “You see how white that black man is? And you see how black he is underneath that pale skin? He a cursed man, ’cause if his skull woulda look different, he coulda walked on outta the South that he was born into, free as a bird. Coulda gone to some white man’s school in the North, coulda got some good-payin’ white man’s job, but ’cause of the way he look underneath his skin, all he ever gone to be is a pink-eyed, white-lookin’ Negro. You hear me?”

  “Yessum,” said Cassie.

  “An’ don’t think he ain’t bitter ’bout it,” said the oil-black widow. “Don’t think he ain’t come to us asking for somethin’ to change his state of affairs.”

  “An’ don’t think we ain’t tried,” said her daughter. “An’ don’t think we don’t know what he likely told you ’bout us.”

  “He didn’t say anything.”

  “You a liar,” said the widow again. “But it don’t matter, because even if we cain’t do for him, I knows we kin do for you. We gone to gift you, little cinnamon-color gal. We gone to give you a gift like you ain’t never got before, and we givin’ it to you ’cause Ovid Beale sent you this way and ’cause Mister Charlie done brought you to us.”

  “You don’t have to give me anything,” said Cassie.

  “But we do,” said the daughter, “an’ you gone to take it. But first you gone to make a solemn pledge.” She held up her right hand, and Cassie did too. “I pledge never to forgit the past,” said the daughter. “I pledge to recollect my roots, no matter what my state of affairs.”

  Cassie repeated the words and was about to put her hand down, but the widow shook her head sharply, so she kept her hand up.

  “And you further pledge never to say a word ’bout what you gone to find out in a minute.”

  “I pledge it,” said Cassie.

  “That’s good,” said the widow. “Now touch the baby. Go on,” she said impatiently as Cassie hesitated. “Touch his head. Touch his hands.”

  Cassie put her fingers to the baby’s warm forehead. His jet eyes seemed to soften, and he smiled at her. He stuck out his baby hands, and she put her fingers into his palms. His palms were the same black color as the rest of him, not pale, like every other colored person she’d known. He gurgled and squeezed her fingers with his damp baby hands. When he released her and she turned her hands over, there was some kind of sticky substance left behind.

  Charlie, who’d been standing back this whole time, stepped forward. “Rub your hands together,” he said in a soft and urgent tone.

  Cassie did. The sticky stuff came off in a tarry black wad. Charlie took it from her fingers and turned her right hand so the knuckles were up. He rubbed the stuff across them.

  “Look,” he said.

  Her skin was lighter where he’d rubbed, like he’d taken an eraser and wiped away a layer of her.

  “God,” she said.

  He put the stuff into her palm and closed her fingers around it.

  “Now git,” said the daughter, “and ’member.” She shook her coal-black finger in Cassie’s face. “You don’t show nobody, or that black gonna come right back.”

  Charlie pulled Cassie away, and the next thing she was aware of was trembling beside a punch bowl on one of the buffet tables, gripping the wad in her right hand. Charlie was next to her with a paper cup and a ladle. Cassie heard herself ask where the bathroom was, and he pointed to the left. She wobbled off until she found the door marked WOMEN.

  She locked that door behind her and stared at herself in the mirror. She looked at the black wad of stuff in her hand. What was it exactly? It looked like tar, exactly like tar, and when she sniffed it, it had a faint tarry smell. She looked into the mirror again and touched the tar to her cheek. She took away the tar. The spot it had touched was ever so slightly lighter. She had the impression that if she started to scrub at herself, within an hour she would be as white as Judith, as white as some of the people out there at the wake, waiting to get behind the curtain, to leave their food at the candle-covered altar. Waiting to leave Porterville and their past behind.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Cassie lay awake that night with Judith beside her, snoring peacefully, while the lump of tar, or whatever it was, stayed hot inside Cassie’s fist. You don’t tell nobody, or that black gonna come right back. At home, she would have shown it to Lil Ma, shown her what it could do. And then what would have happened? Because she had told, would Lil Ma’s black come right back? Or only her own? Was this piece of tar for her and her alone? If she found some roundabout way to tell Lil Ma that Beanie Simms was right and there was no need to have a light-skinned child now, how could she help Lil Ma find this place, which seemed to be one place on the map and somewhere else in reality? Cassie sat up in the bed. Judith sighed in her sleep. Cassie put on one of the bathrobes Mrs. Glade had left at the foot of the bed. She put it on over the nightshirt she couldn’t remember ever seeing before, over the smell of scented soap from a bath she didn’t recall taking. Cassie went out of the bedroom, closed the door softly, and sat in the dark hallway at the top of the stairs. A clock somewhere on the first floor chimed two. She squeezed the tar in her hand until it oozed between her fingers, black in the blackness, just texture and warmth. Was it changing her now? Was it turning the back of her hand the same pale shade as the palm?

  She needed light.

  She went downstairs in the dark. On the first floor was a powder room with a toilet and a mirror over the sink. Cassie turned the electric light on with the switch. There was a rose in a little vase on one side of sink and a bar of scented soap on the other. Cassie recognized the way the soap smelled. She squinted in the light and checked her hands. The tar held the impression of the inside of her fist. The skin on the back of her hand still showed the light mark where Charlie had demonstrated what this gift could do. She peered at her face and found the pale streak she’d made herself. How hard would she have to scrub, how long would it take, to change herself completely? And what about her skull? Like Mister Mallard, would her bones give her away? She examined her features: her mother’s eyes, Judith’s mouth, and an unremar
kable nose that looked nothing in particular like one race or another. She touched her hair with the hand not holding the tar. It was dry, flat, and neglected. It needed to be healed with oils and experienced hands. What would happen to her hair?

  Someone turned on a light in the hallway, and a female voice said, “Cassie?”

  It was the minister’s wife, Mrs. Glade. It would be impolite to not answer. Cassie cracked the powder room door. Mrs. Glade came into view and smiled. Cassie pushed the hand with the tar into the pocket of the bathrobe.

  “Can’t you sleep?”

  “Nome.”

  “Come on. I’ll make you some warm milk.”

  In the kitchen, Cassie sat at the small table by the window. Mrs. Glade poured milk from a glass bottle into a pan on the stove and lit the gas burner. She adjusted the gas and came and sat down across from Cassie. “Reverend Glade and I were talking about you girls after you went to bed.” Mrs. Glade was a chatty woman, Cassie now recalled. She didn’t look a bit sleepy, and Cassie wondered if she’d been to bed at all. “Your friend—well, your sister—seems to have things all planned out for herself, but she didn’t really have anything to say about your future. Have you thought about your future?”

  “I want to get to New York with Judith.”

  “And do what when you get there?”

  It was hard to think. Hadn’t she and Judith discussed this? “If Judith can’t get famous, I can find laundry work.”

  “It takes years and years to get famous,” Mrs. Glade said, in a tone reserved for children—sleepy, uninformed children. “What’re you going to do for years and years?”

  “We’ve always been together one way or the other,” said Cassie.

  “Just because things have been one way for a long time, doesn’t mean they have to stay that one way,” said Mrs. Glade.

  This conversation, Cassie finally realized, was about sending Judith off on her own to become a reddio star and never seeing her again. Because telling anyone about the tar—and maybe especially telling Judith—would make all that black come right back.

  “For example,” Mrs. Glade said, “have you thought about learning a trade besides the laundry? Or starting a business of your own? Or going to school?”

  It was the middle of the night. What kind of questions were these to get asked in the middle of the night?

  “Reverend Glade and I have friends in Boston we’d like you to meet. They grew up here, but they’ve moved on. We could send you up on the train. You’d be welcome at their house and in their community.”

  “You’d send me to Boston?”

  “We’d be glad to pay for your ticket.” Mrs. Glade got up and went over to the stove. The milk was steaming. She took a spoon from a drawer and lifted the skin that had formed. She lifted it like it was a thin wet napkin and shook it off into the trash.

  “What about Judith?”

  “What about Judith?”

  “Well. She’s my sister.”

  “Your half sister, isn’t that right?” Mrs. Glade poured the milk into a pink coffee cup and brought it to the table. “No matter how you’re related to her, she’s really not your kin. Kin doesn’t ask kin to be their servant while they seek fame and fortune.”

  “She never asked me to do that.”

  “Of course not,” said Mrs. Glade. “But when she’s auditioning, what’ll you be doing? Waiting in the wings with her hat and coat? When she has a performance, where will you be? Cleaning her apartment?” Mrs. Glade pushed the pink coffee cup of steaming milk at Cassie. “Would you do anything for her because she’s your sister? Or is it that you haven’t given any thought to what you could be doing instead?”

  “You make her sound like a bad person.”

  “There’s nothing bad about knowing what you want out of life,” said Mrs. Glade. “It’s the waste of an opportunity that’s bad.”

  Mrs. Glade was a light-skinned woman. Her hair was straight and fine. She was lighter than what Cassie’s grandmother referred to as redbone, lighter even than what she’d heard white folks refer to as high yellow. If Mrs. Glade herself had her own piece of tar, why wasn’t she a white woman yet? Why was she still here? Why wasn’t she in Boston with her friends and their community? What opportunity was she waiting for? Or was she like Beanie Simms—only the messenger?

  Cassie gripped the sticky wad in her pocket. “You mean the—the tar.”

  “The what?”

  “The tar. From the baby. That’s what you mean about Boston and—community and opportunity.”

  Mrs. Glade smiled faintly. “You must’ve had a dream. I didn’t realize I was upsetting you with all this talk. Drink your milk now and go back to bed. You’ve had a long day.”

  * * *

  In the morning, the Reverend Glade let in Junior Mallard in his mechanic’s coverall. Junior was explaining that the old junk car the girls had driven across three and a half states was no longer fixable. It was dead, deceased.

  Judith had come downstairs in her nightgown and terry robe just before Junior knocked, and was standing in the kitchen doorway with a cup of tea when Junior broke the news. Cassie was at the top of the stairs, where she could see but not easily be seen.

  “How kin it be daid?” said Judith from the kitchen door. “It bin sittin’ inna woods for years. Some ign’rint redneck boys’t cain’t even read done made it run, an’ you cain’t—.” She stopped herself. In the uncomfortable silence, the smell of pancakes, syrup, and bacon drifted up the stairs.

  “Miss, you been runnin’ it without a lick of oil,” said Junior. “The engine got so hot it melted.”

  “Mistah Beale’s nephew made it run. All he hadda do was put gas innit.”

  “Sorry, miss,” said Junior. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Hail,” said Judith. Then, with a glance at the Reverend Glade: “’Scuse me.” She looked up the stairs to see Cassie. Cassie watched the Reverend Glade put a comforting arm around Judith’s shoulders and walk her back into the kitchen. He would be talking about putting her on the train to Virginia or New York, whichever she preferred. But I ain’t got that kinda money, Judith would say. Don’t you worry about that, the Reverend would say to her, and Cassie could almost hear him. We’d be glad to pay for your ticket. You can leave today if you’d like.

  After breakfast Cassie and Judith sat together in their bedroom upstairs. Mrs. Glade had left a basket of clean, neatly folded clothes for them, all from church donations.

  “For the needy,” said Judith. “I ain’t feelin’ so needy no more, though. One day soon I might buy me a new dress.” She held a light-blue frock up to her chest. “You like that?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “S’matter with you? These folks gonna pay t’put us onna train to New York or Virginia or ennywhere else we want to go. We kin git to Virginia with time to spare. These right Christian folks for sure—an’ I never said that ’bout ennyone else, not even all them white church ladies with their tater salads and fried chickens—so why you so sad-lookin’?”

  “I’m not sad.”

  Judith shook out a pink dress with dainty rosettes at the cuffs of the sleeves. “Now you know that’d look so pretty on you. Pink’s your color.”

  Because it gave her cinnamon skin a rosy cast. Lil Ma had always said so. “Ain’t there somethin plain in there?” said Cassie.

  “How ’bout this ugly ol’ apron dress? No, that’s for some woman with big boozums. Why you want somethin plain? Oh well, here’s a white dress with no ruffles or nuthin’.”

  It was a chalk-colored dress, short-sleeved, and would fall just below her knees. It would be a marker for her change. A yardstick to measure her difference by. Cassie held it against her chest and felt a surge of hatred for it. It was a particular and familiar hate she’d last felt at Tabitha Bromley’s estate sale, when a worthless old white woman on a sagging old porch called Lil Ma a nigger because of a wringer. Cassie’s grandmother had overseen the humiliation, to make sure it happened, becau
se there would be no new wringer without it. Nothing so simple as paying. She’d hated Grandmother for knowing that so well. It was that exact hate she felt for this dress and for the people in this house. She understood why it was important to erase everything dark, but it had never been so clear to her as now. It had never been so apparently possible. She hated that too.

  Judith paused her pawing through the basket of donated clothes. She was nearly to the bottom, where panties and brassieres were hidden underneath everything else. Judith looked at them doubtfully. “I kin see wearin’ some other gal’s dress, but I ain’t sure ’bout their knickers.”

  “You gonna need a bra in New York City. And clean knickers.”

  “I s’pose.” She picked out a bra with cups like soup bowls.

  Cassie fished out a pair of pink panties. “These’ll fit you.” She tossed them into Judith’s lap.

  Judith squealed and pitched them back. “I ain’t wearin somebody else’s panties!”

  “You’d wear ’em if they was mine.”

  “No, I wouldn’t neither!”

  “Yes, you would, I mean washed and all.” She shook the panties for emphasis. “These is washed. They even smell good.”

  “I don’t care.” Judith threw herself back on the bed, rumpling the covers and scattering pillows. She covered her face with both hands. “I don’t care. I ain’t wearin’ ’em!”

  “Why?” said Cassie. “Because they come off some colored girl?”

  Judith lay still with her hands over her eyes, breathing hard.

  “Oh, that’s just stupid,” said Cassie. “That’s stupid, and I don’t even believe it.”

  Judith let her hands fall away from her face. “I said a bad thing this morning.”

  “Judith, a day don’t pass when you don’t swear. I know you cain’t help yourself, not even in a minister’s house.”