Absalom's Daughters

by Suzanne Feldman

  “Hey!” shouted the woman and Cassie jerked back, but the woman was looking down at the groom. “Get that horse shit off his feet! What the hell is wrong with you?” She straightened and pawed at her headdress. “Damn niggers,” she said to Cassie.

  Trumpets rang out. The elephant stepped forward, and the woman on top of him swept past in a flash of red.

  Cassie glanced down at the groom. His face was hard to see. In the ring, the elephant strode around and stopped in the middle. The woman posed on his back, on his head. Trumpets tooted merrily. The elephant knelt in front of the man with the whip, and she stepped down. The man raised his whip. The elephant stood and raised one foot. With great drama, the woman lay down and put her head underneath. Drums rolled menacingly. The elephant lowered its foot until it was touching the woman’s head, and the three of them held that pose while the audience gasped. Cassie looked down at the groom, watching, his arms crossed. She knew what he was thinking as clearly as he felt her gaze. He looked up, impenetrable. She looked away before he saw right through her.

  She left before the lion and the clowns and the high trapeze act. They were lined up in that order outside the tent, and Cassie saw Gloria too. As a white girl, Cassie had the right to beat Gloria to a pulp to get her fifty cents back, but without the ice cream counter between them, Gloria looked spindly and underfed, and Cassie found herself feeling sorry for her the way she sometimes felt sorry for Judith. She kept going, away from the lights of the circus, back to the dense trees in the riverside park, up the hill until she found her suitcase. She took out Lil Ma’s shoes and put them on and sat in the cool evening until it was completely dark. She put on one of the sweaters Mrs. Glade had given her and wrapped her legs in another and went to sleep with the suitcase as a pillow. When she dreamed, she saw Lil Ma sitting across a table from Grandmother. Lil Ma was as dark as ever, but Grandmother, dressed in red sequins and a fancy feathered hat, had turned as white as white could be.

  In the morning Cassie straightened up as well as she could. The compact the Glades had put in her purse had no mirror; she could only guess at the state of her hair and her face. Her hands looked grimy, especially around the nails, and the fascinating blueness of the veins had turned to an unwashed bluish gray. Her clothes smelled of the damp ground. She needed to use a bathroom. She felt in the pocket of her dress for the tar. It was stuck there, not in any danger of falling out.

  She changed back into the ankle socks and the flats that hurt her feet, put Lil Ma’s shoes in her suitcase, and made her way out of the park.

  She was terribly hungry. She turned down the first big street she came to. Shops were starting to open. She had fixed her hair as well as she could, but she wasn’t used to this hair. It hung in tangled clumps and refused to obey her combing fingers. She found a bit of string in the bottom of the purse and tied it back. She felt sure her pale face looked puffy and dirty. For the first time since she and Judith had left Heron-Neck, Cassie felt a weepy desperation. She wiped her eyes, but that only made it worse. She stood where she was, eyes squeezed shut, clenching the suitcase in one hand, her purse in the other. People passed by. She felt them looking at her. A hand touched her arm, and she opened her eyes to see a well-dressed colored woman.

  “You cain’t be standin’ round here with your suitcase and your cryin’. You scarin’ away my bizniss.”

  Through the plate glass were dresses on hangers, scarves, handbags arranged prettily on shelves. There was a long counter lined with mirrors and fancy hats.

  “This my shop,” said the woman. “This our street and this our neighborhood. Y’hear? Now, you need some money?”

  Cassie wiped her eyes. “Nome.”

  “You know where your side o’ town is?”

  “Nome.”

  The colored woman cocked her head. Other colored people had stopped to see what was going on. All were well dressed—the men in top hats with canes, the women in stylish dresses and beautiful shoes.

  The woman pointed at the next intersection, where there was a traffic light. “Turn lef’ at that light. That’s Third. Walk all the way down the hill, an’ you’ll find a diner an’ a flophouse. I ’spect they’ll take care of you.”

  Big cars waited at the light, all driven by coloreds. At least one was driven by a colored chauffeur with colored passengers.

  What Community was this? What Opportunity did these people have? Did the Reverend and Mrs. Glade know about them? Did Mister Mallard know? She looked down at the mesmerizing blue veins in her own pale hands.

  “Is you witless?” said the woman. “Dincha hear me?”

  Cassie walked toward the traffic light. She turned the corner of Third and made her way down the hill past neat brick houses with roses in bloom, azaleas, apple blossoms, and tulips. Her own side of town was just ahead, past a used car lot and a vacant-looking warehouse. She could see the river. The railway station was visible past a jumble of industrial rooftops. Between her and the tracks were thrift stores and boardinghouses. She found a diner, called Ida’s, where a white waitress served her without a second glance at the state of her hair and clothes, probably because the rest of the white people there looked just as shabby. She sat at a table by the window and ordered coffee, pancakes, hash browns, and sausage. The pancakes and hash browns were good, but the sausage wasn’t cooked all the way through. She asked the waitress if she could borrow a pencil. The waitress said, “What fer?” and Cassie told her she needed to write a letter to her mother. The waitress looked around at the rest of the diner and said that since it wasn’t crowded, all right, but if anyone came in and wanted Cassie’s table, she would have to leave. She gave Cassie the pencil and asked what she was planning to write on. Cassie smoothed her unused napkin. The waitress said, “Wait a minnit,” walked away, and came back with a clean sheet of paper. It had the diner’s name and address at the top. “I should write my momma too,” said the waitress.

  Cassie wrote:

  Dear Lil Ma,

  The lead-pencil words lay on the crisp paper. The rest of the letter might as well be on the paper already. I have found the thing that has made me white. She could almost see the words. She erased Lil Ma and wrote Dear Grandmother instead.

  Cassie folded the paper with trembling white fingers and put it in her purse without writing any more. She put the pencil in too, without thinking that it belonged to the waitress. She got up to pay at the register, and the waitress asked if she’d gotten her letter all written. Cassie nodded, and the waitress told her there was a post office down a couple of blocks by the train station. She gave Cassie her change, and Cassie remembered the pencil. She dug fruitlessly for it in the gritty bottom of her purse while the waitress watched her in such a way that Cassie was certain she had turned colored again before the woman’s eyes. But the waitress took another pencil out of her apron and scribbled an address on the back of a used order slip. She pressed it into Cassie’s pale palm.

  “If you need somewheres to stay, you come over to my place. It’s a hell of a lot safer’n some o’ these damn flophouses, y’hear? An’ I don’t mean I’d charge you rent’r nothin’. You look like you could use a little help.”

  “Yessum,” said Cassie. “Thank you, ma’am.” Cassie walked out of the diner and turned left, down the hill. Judith, she thought, would have remarked upon the woman’s kindness, but Cassie could only imagine how long it might be before the words damn nigger came out of that mouth. When she came to the train station, she wadded up the slip with the waitress’s address and threw it in the trash. Then she sat on a bench in the shade, took the paper out of her purse, found the pencil, and finished writing to her grandmother.

  I have made it to Richmond, Virginia. I have met some very nice people on the way. One of them gave me this. I think it is what you have been looking for. I have used it myself, but I think it will still work for you. Scrub your hands and your face with it, and you will see. You can’t let anyone else know about it, not even Lil Ma, or the black will come right back.
You will have to leave Heron-Neck forever if you decide to stay the way it changes you.

  Cassie folded the paper in half, then in quarters. She took the tar out of her pocket and squeezed it and pressed it until it was absolutely flat, no bigger than a playing card. She folded it inside the letter to Grandmother and checked her hands. Still white. Would the tar work on Grandmother? Cassie had no doubt that it would. Would Grandmother leave Lil Ma, vanish from Heron-Neck, and make a new life for herself somewhere as a white woman? Where would she go? What if she came to Richmond—to the address on the diner’s stationery—expecting to find Cassie living her days and nights as a white girl? Cassie picked up her suitcase and purse and went into the post office. She got an envelope and stamp from the postal clerk, addressed the envelope to Grandmother at the Laundry on Negro Street, and sealed everything inside. Lil Ma would never see it or the tar.

  There was one thing left to do before she got back on the train.

  At the station, she found the phone inside a wooden booth. She had never used a phone before, but Tabitha Bromley had had one in her store, and Cassie had seen how other people did it. The door folded closed, and there was a seat inside. The booth was snug and almost soundproof, and far too small to fit the suitcase. She left it where she could see it and sat for a while in her terrible secondhand shoes. The white ankle socks were now dirty and bunched. Her heels had blisters. She took the receiver off the hook and waited for the operator to speak. She would give her the number and tell the Glades she was sorry, but she was going to stay a colored girl. She was going to go back to Judith, but only until the business with Bill Forrest was settled. Then she would come back to Richmond and find out how the colored woman had gotten her own store and how it was that a colored man chauffeured other colored men. She would ask the Glades if they knew anything about the coloreds in Richmond.

  “Operator,” said the operator abruptly, in her ear. “What city, please?”

  Cassie told her.

  “What number, please?”

  Cassie told her.

  For a moment there was silence. Then static, then a buzz.

  “I’m connecting you now,” said the operator, sounding far away.

  The buzz became intermittent. It went on for what seemed like a long time.

  “I can’t hear anyone,” said Cassie. “Are they there?”

  “There’s no answer, ma’am,” said the operator. “You’ll have to try again later.”

  She hung up the receiver and leaned against the booth’s wooden wall. If the tar had still been in her pocket, would someone have answered the phone? She repeated the number in her head, but this time wasn’t sure she had it right. Or perhaps she’d had it wrong the first time. She picked up the phone again and waited.

  A different woman’s voice spoke in her ear. “Operator. What city, please?”

  Cassie told her.

  “What number, please?”

  Cassie told her.

  “I’m connecting you now.”

  Another intermittent buzz, which Cassie guessed was the sound of the phone ringing. It rang for a long time.

  “There’s no answer, ma’am,” said the operator.

  “Thank you,” said Cassie.

  She never tried to reach the Glades again.

  * * *

  Cassie bought her ticket to Remington at the Richmond station from a white man in the ticket booth. This one was younger than the man in Remington. He had a thick black mustache, but it didn’t hide the look he gave her as she handed him the money for the ticket. It was the same look people gave to Judith—white people as well as colored people—which said, with languid movements of the eyebrows and corners of the mouth, that she was nothing, had never been more than nothing, and would never be more than nothing nohow. Cassie walked down the platform with her ticket, thinking that Judith could probably learn a lot from the Glades. With better clothes and a curl in her hair, Judith might be able to hoist herself up in the world. The Glades’s Opportunity probably included makeup, heels, and a really good hat. Cassie tried to picture herself dressed just so, but in her mind’s eye, it looked like a disguise, the same as this white skin.

  She got on the train, avoiding the colored porters’ helpful hands, and sat in the white car just in front of the colored car, in case something unexpected happened on her way south.

  * * *

  Cassie arrived in Remington at about four in the afternoon, almost exactly two days since she’d left Judith. To her surprise, Judith was still waiting on the platform, slumped beside her luggage in about the same spot Cassie had left her. She looked rumpled, like she’d been there the whole time. Cassie hunched down in the seat. She shouldn’t have left without saying anything, but what else could she have done? To ask what Judith would have done in her shoes was pointless, but what really surprised Cassie was that Judith had faltered. The girl with the bloody dress, the girl with the huge voice, the girl with the plan was still sitting out there, chin in her hands, bare dirty knees, and socks without shoes, like somebody’s lost child.

  The light dimmed inside the car, and Cassie caught a glimpse of her own pale reflection. What would happen now? Her cinnamon color remained on her body within the general outlines of a bathing suit. Her arms and legs and head stuck out of it. What if that was the way she stayed when Judith saw her? What if that was what the Glades and their community considered fair? Cassie dryly swallowed her doubts. The train shuddered to a stop. The conductor shouted “Remington!” She picked up her things and headed for the door.

  Judith saw her the minute she stepped onto the platform and rushed over, leaving purse and suitcase in a sad little pile.

  “What happened?” Judith demanded. “What happened? You fall ’sleep? You fergit to git off? I bin waitin’ here forever.”

  Cassie looked down at her arms, as brown as ever, maybe turning the moment Judith laid eyes on her. The white people around her, who had been on the same car with her, who hadn’t noticed her when she was white, took no notice now. Maybe the saddling gift of the tar was to encourage people to see what they expected to see, but she doubted it.

  “Sorry,” she said to Judith. “I fell asleep. I went all the way to Richmond, spent a night there, an’ I had to pay to come back.”

  “I din’t want you t’think I’d run off an’ left you,” said Judith, “so I stayed here till you came back.”

  “I’m real glad you did,” said Cassie.

  Judith squinted at her. “You miss me?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “For a while there, I was afraid you ain’t never comin’ back.”

  “It was only two days.”

  “Felt like longer.”

  “’Cause you was sittin’ by the tracks the entire time.”

  “Where’d you sleep in Richmond?”

  “Under a tree. Near a circus.”

  Judith’s eyes lit up. “You go in?”

  “I touched the elephant.”

  Judith looked impressed.

  “The lady riding him called me names.”

  “For touchin’ her elephant? That’s jes’ shameful.”

  “I thought so too.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Remington was smaller than Richmond and bigger than Enterprise. It lacked a dusty hardware store and a diner specializing in pie. No incongruous marble monuments stuck up out of its main street. But there were cars, bars, banks, and restaurants, tall brick buildings, and telephone poles. Drivers waited impatiently in the morning heat as people on foot made their way between traffic lights with speed and determination. The women—white and colored—wore heels and hats. The men wore ties and jackets. They all seemed to have business. Nobody took a second look at the girls from Heron-Neck.

  “Did you eat?” said Judith.

  “I had breakfast,” said Cassie.

  “Nice ol’ granny lady gave me a sandwich this morning,” said Judith. “Guess she thought I looked poor.”

  “You do look poor,” said Cass
ie. Compared to the hats and heels and suit jackets, they looked like beggars.

  “You don’t look no richer.” Judith smoothed her hair, uselessly. She straightened herself like a soldier, which made her look skinny as a stick. After her experience as a white girl, Cassie saw Judith’s self-importance as painfully revealing. Cassie knew just what was going through her mind. Progeny. Inheritance. New York City. Big reddio star. Cassie smiled, because it was good to be in familiar company.

  “What’s so funny?” said Judith.

  “Nothin’. Let’s find us a newspaper and see what the date is. Then let’s find your daddy.”

  * * *

  Newspapers were easy to find. A colored boy was selling them on the corner but refused to tell them even the date without a nickel for the paper first. Judith, exasperated and tired, finally gave him the nickel but didn’t take the paper. The boy told them that it was was Saturday, March nineteenth.

  They were two days early for whatever was going to happen with Bill Forrest, Eula Bonhomme-Forrest, and the riches left over from the estate.

  Up the hill from the train station, they found the Veranda Hotel: a white four-story building with white columns across the front, like an old plantation house. They stood across the street from it, surveying the front and the people going in and out.

  “It look kinda like Miz Tabitha’s ol’ place,” said Judith. “’Ceptin’ not so run down. You think they coulda made a hotel outta that ol’ house?”

  “Who’d come to Heron-Neck to stay inna hotel?”

  Judith crossed her arms. “Still. Shame to let a nice ol’ house jus’ fall to pieces.”

  “It was fulla ghosts,” said Cassie.

  Judith studied the hotel across the street. “You think this place got ghosts?”

  “It’s got your daddy in it.”

  “Our daddy.”

  “Ain’t that enough?” Now that they were so close, Cassie felt uncompelled to claim any part of Bill Forrest. “How much money you got, Judith?”

  “Half the singin’ money plus ’nuff to git to New York City.”