by Cheryl Reid
I told him, “White families have people working in their homes, holding their babies, feeding their children. Why can’t he deliver mail? I’ve known him his whole life. I knew his mother. She cared for us. If we help him, others will too, and we’ll be doing a good thing.”
Elias gave no reply. His gaze was fixed on his plate.
“I called Eli and told him about it.”
“What did he say?” Elias looked at me with calm green eyes.
“He said it was right.” It was strange to hear my voice outside my head, speaking firmly to Elias. As a young woman, I had doubted he or anyone else would take me seriously. Later in our marriage, when Elias became violent, I stayed quiet to preserve myself. But I felt it was time to say what I needed to say.
“That’s about what I expected.” Elias put his fork down. He smiled like a wolf and that old spiteful look came into his eyes. “Did you tell Marina?”
I was silent and looked at my untouched plate of food. I had called her and before I could finish my sentence, before I could tell her who Orlando Washington was and why I wanted to help him, she said, “Don’t do that, Mother. You won’t be helping him or yourself.”
“But I will help him,” I told her. I could hear tapping, her nails or a pencil on a hard surface. I was afraid to speak, that if I did, she would hang up and I would turn to salt. So I waited.
Finally, she said, “I will talk to you about this in person.” The line was dead before I could say another word, and all I could hope was to persuade her with my actions. I would tell her of my connection to the man, and how his mother had been the one to care for my mother on her deathbed, had been the one to console my grief, when everyone else—Papa, Aunt Elsa, Gus—was too consumed in their own sorrow to notice mine. Since she was soon to be a mother, she might understand.
“Well, what did she say?” Elias barked, still chewing the food in his mouth.
“She did not think it was a good idea.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “She knows better.”
“It’s not Marina’s decision.” I heard the conviction in my voice. I stood to clear the plates. “I’m going to allow it.” My mother had whispered her dying words into Thea’s ear. I owed it to Thea’s memory to help her son.
“All I’ve heard today is this race business.” He rubbed his forehead as if to soothe a headache. “All I want is quiet and I come home to you yammering on about it too.”
“I don’t see any harm in him doing the job.” I felt like Lila must feel on a horse, racing around barrels, catching speed in the straightaway. I could not stop myself.
“That’s because you grew up around them.” His anger seemed to surface like an itch, and his voice grew harsher by the moment. “You do that, and you’ll regret it.”
I had twisted my thinking to believe he would hear me, that things had changed, that maybe we were approaching a return to the early days of our marriage, when he had restraint, when he tolerated me, when kinder words flowed between us. I thought his anger had softened because of the coming grandchild. I thought the pressure he felt must have eased now that the children were out of the house and the business was strong and money was good. But when I spoke up, I scraped the surface of an old wound.
I had decided when I saw his name in print—Orlando Washington—that I would help him. I was soon to be a grandmother. My son was studying to be a priest, and his voice on the other end of the telephone line had sounded like Elias’s voice, but kind and soft. He’d said, “It’s the right thing to do.” My son agreed with me, despite knowing his father and what he was capable of. I replayed Eli’s words in my head. He was smart and kind, an authority on what was right and what was wrong. It’s the right thing to do. I worked on Marina’s layette. It’s the right thing. I prepared dinner. I waited for Elias to come home. It is the right thing to do. In my gut, I knew that if I did not do what was right, if I did not stand up to Elias and all the talkers at the store, I would die a coward.
“Hit me if you want,” I said to Elias.
He was a handsome man, his dark hair, his long face, and his bright-green eyes. He had aged well. Distinguished. I had wanted him to love me, but he had not. Out of his mouth came a gravelly, low laugh. “You have lost your mind.”
“All you can do is hurt me,” I said. “You’ve done that before.”
“I won’t have to,” he said. “If you do this, you’ll hurt yourself.”
In the afternoon two days later, on the first of August, Orlando Washington stood outside our front door. He wore a new starched uniform, and across his shoulder hung a heavy mailbag. He clutched our mail in his hand. “Hello, Mrs. Nassad.” I recognized the boy from my memory. He stood on the other side of the screen a grown man with Thea’s calm, serious eyes.
My neighbor Verna, ever vigilant, came down her drive to the street and watched us. She had a sign in her yard, the same as others on the street: No nigger mailman. But he was not that.
“Your street and the Negro section are my route,” he said. No doubt he had been given this street to satisfy the law and to ensure his failure. He shifted from one foot to the other, clearly nervous but determined to stand where he stood, at the front door of a white man’s house. “Would you and Mr. Nassad allow me to deliver your mail?”
He spoke nothing of his familiarity with my brother, of the two of them running ahead of me down the river trail or playing in the field behind my father’s store, or when he and Gus jumped a train to Nashville in the middle of the night to run away to the World’s Fair. He spoke nothing of his mother’s place in my family’s life.
Nor did I. “How are people treating you?”
Deep lines ran across his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. The help did not ring the front bell or walk up the front steps of a white man’s house. The lift of his chin reminded me of Thea. On my last visit to her before she died, she had been angry with me. She turned away from me, like a petulant girl. “You got too busy, too big, to come see me.”
I took her scolding. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m here now.” I waited for her to forgive me.
She scowled and shook her head against her pillow. “You got uppity like your Aunt Elsa.” She stared at me for several minutes, deciding what she would say or do, if she was angry with me or glad to see me. “You look like your mama,” she said. “She was a good woman.” She closed her eyes and dozed off. When she woke and saw that I was still there, she talked about Orlando. He had gone to Tuskegee and then flown an airplane in France. “He lives in New York.” She spoke with pride and wonder. “Wants me to come up there and be with him.”
Mr. Washington gripped the envelopes until they bent. “Most folks—this is as close as I’ve gotten today.”
I looked across the street and saw Verna with her hands cocked on her hips and her eyes glowering like hot coals.
“People don’t want me up on their front porch every day,” Mr. Washington said.
The talk at the store went round and round like a stuck needle on a record.
World’s been turned on its head.
Stealing a white man’s job.
Can’t be trusted with money and checks and documents.
It’s not his place to come to the front door of a white man’s house.
If he sees something he wants, and he don’t take it, someone he knows will.
Keep them in their place.
I felt deliberate. “Yes,” I said. As easy as that, I cracked the screen door and opened my hand. He placed the envelopes in my palm. The paper was warm and damp.
He stepped backward toward the steps, as if the second he took his eyes off of me, I would disappear, his one victory, the only victory he would have. No other white person in Riverton would allow him to deliver.
“Thank you, ma’am.” He tipped his cap.
Pea gravel crunched under his feet. I opened the mail. I stood tall behind my screen door. From the corner of my eye I could see Verna, red faced, standing like a stat
ue, in shock, in disbelief of what I had done.
Verna drove off in a hurry, and not long after, Elias pulled in. He rushed in the house and stood over me where I sat at the dining-room table working on the baby’s layette. “That heifer came in the store yelling that you let him deliver our mail today.” He meant Verna. He pulled me from my chair and pushed me against the wall. “If you want to go back to Blacktown, you have my permission. But he’s not delivering mail to this house.”
As calmly as I could, I said, “I’m working on Marina’s baby’s clothes.”
At the mention of Marina’s baby, he dropped his grip on my dress.
I walked back to the table and resumed my work.
“Tape the mailbox shut.” He stood over me. He snorted like a mad bull. He smelled of cigarettes. His temple throbbed. He stared at the baby clothes and I could see he was holding himself back.
I continued the whipstitch around the baby blanket. My heart beat fast in my chest, but I did not show him any fear.
He pushed my forearm on the table and his knuckles went white from the pressure. “You do what I say. Think of your children, for God’s sake.”
The next morning, he hammered one of the neighbors’ crude signs in our yard and he assumed I would obey. All our years together, I had succumbed to his shouting and pushing. I had done what I had to, to keep peace and be with my children, but they were gone now.
I began the day’s baking and he watched me as he ate a breakfast of cold leftovers from the icebox.
“Anna,” he said, and touched my arm gently as if he had an audience. “Remember what I said.” He brushed my cheek with his hand. “You let this go. It’s for the best, for the kids, for us.” My blood curdled that he would try to move me with charm. Too many times he had hit me or belittled me or ignored me.
He left for the store, and while my bread proofed on the counter, I kicked his sign down.
Growing up over my father’s store, I was never accepted into the fold of things. In high school, I ate alone and kept my nose stuck in a book to avoid the girls whose parents warned them against socializing with me, the foreign one who lived across the tracks. Later, around white women at church, at Elias’s store, there was an air of politeness, but when I joined the ladies’ conversations, the tone changed or the talk would cease altogether, lose its breath, as if a foul odor hung around me. I was the Syrian storekeeper’s daughter, then another’s wife.
That second day, after I kicked down Elias’s sign, I brought my bread to the store. Customers scoured me with their eyes. News of Verna’s rant and my allowing him to deliver had spread all over town. One customer politely said to me, “We need to be together on this. Make them understand where they belong.” Elias shook his head in apology to the man.
I left the store early and rushed home to be sure I saw Mr. Washington. My children were grown—Marina was in a fine position, married to a bright and good-looking lawyer who came from a good family. Eli was joining the priesthood. I could not lose Elias’s love or respect. I had never garnered those—not by my work for the store, or trying to make a good home, or raising the children we had made. I had no stake in him. I had risen as far as I could, and there was nothing left to gain between us.
That was my thinking when Orlando Washington walked up the porch steps that second day. He was my brother’s old playmate, my beloved Thea’s son, and he stood in front of me. When I took the mail from his hand, he stood taller. He smiled. I felt kinship to him, though I did not imagine he knew the feelings his presence conjured in me. To him, I was probably just another white lady—though a strange sort. He couldn’t have known what his mother meant to me, eight years old and hidden in the corner, as I watched her clean my mother’s crumpled, lifeless body. She had held that last baby and sung to him while he lingered. What harm could Orlando Washington do? It was a job, and if I did not do something on my own accord, would I ever?
When he was gone down the gravel drive, I saw Verna leave again. I readied myself for Elias’s outrage. He would not come home the man who had touched me softly that morning. The Elias coming home would be the one who used his fists or the back of his hand or a belt or the weight of his body as he forced me down on the bed. It would be the Elias who stalked me through the house, who jimmied open locks, who shoved open doors when chairs were pushed against them.
I picked up a white gown I was making for the layette and decided that I would not cook for him or bake for his store. With each stitch on the soft cotton that was to clothe our grandchild, I told myself that what I had done I would not undo, not for his threats or his temper, not for his hitting. I steeled myself against his worst and promised myself to show Marina whatever he did. I would make her look at my face, my arms, my back, whatever mark he left, and show her, because it was time for her to learn what her father was.
The sun was setting when he pulled into the driveway. The sky a deep cerulean blue. I sat still and waited. My heart banged in my chest. He got out of the car, shut the door, and lit a cigarette. The sweet tobacco smell drifted through the open window. A few minutes later, Marina’s car pulled in behind him. He had called her or she had called him, and now they were working together against me. I listened to their sweet talk: “Hello, Daddy,” and “How you feeling, darling?” Back and forth, with kindness dripping, they made their way up the drive and onto the porch to devour me.
Across Town
Papa had said immediately, so I drove fast up Poplar Street and west on Water Street. I slowed as I crossed Main and saw the post office and wondered if Mr. Washington might be there.
My hands gripped the wheel. I felt sick that I had put him in harm’s way by asking him inside the house. I wanted to go in and get word to him of the trouble Ivie was stirring, but he already knew, better than me. Ivie and Elias had been to his house. He might not even be at the post office, and no good would come for him or me if I searched him out. A lynch mob could come in the day as well as the night.
Across the street from the post office, the old courthouse sat on a hill overlooking the river. The old beacon of money and cotton and the river had survived the War because of its position on the hill, a lookout over the river, first for the Confederates and then the Union soldiers. I had run my fingers over the bullet holes in the stone columns.
Next to the courthouse, the soda fountain was busy with men on lunch break, kids and teenagers out of school for summer, and mothers with their young children. A sign in the store window said Whites Only: Maids in White Uniform Allowed. Elias had put a similar sign in our storefront in reaction to the bus boycotts. I had not wanted the sign because it reminded me how people liked to put me in my own place.
A customer of ours came out of the soda fountain and headed to the courthouse. His eyes landed on me and he nodded in recognition as I passed. Lawyers, officers, secretaries came and went. People I knew saw me driving by. They looked at me with cross expressions and I felt uneasy. Every person in town knew that Orlando Washington delivered my mail.
I was not where I should have been on the day of my husband’s death. I might have to explain myself, why I was where I was, just as my brother and I had to explain why we crossed the train tracks every morning and afternoon to go to school, or how my father went into too many details when the census taker came and wanted to mark us as Y for yellow. Papa argued too long with the man about how the Supreme Court said Syrians were white, like Jesus, because both were from the Holy Land. So Papa made sure the census taker wrote W, not Y or Neg. Papa was an O, owner, not an R, renter, like most of the Neg on the list before us. The census taker did not care that we were immigrants from the Holy Land, or that Papa came from the part of Syria that was now Lebanon, or that Papa called his native language Syrian, or that Papa came from the city of Deir al-Qamar, in Mount Lebanon, a city of stone houses and palaces with a history more ancient than Christ, or that my mother came from a city named Zahlé, a beautiful town famous for its wine and poetry. The census taker knew well enough we wer
e oddities, and no amount of explaining would make us anything else.
I continued west on Water Street toward the railroad crossing and Mounds. A fool to think I could help Mr. Washington, then or now. I could not understand my own thinking. Maybe Marina had been right—maybe Elias too—that it was cruel to allow him hope, with everyone and everything against him. He would have been better off if I had kept to myself and refused him as Elias and Marina had wished.
Two bridges—one for the train, one for cars—spanned south across the wide river. A half mile farther and across the tracks, Papa’s store stood along the riverbank. The car bobbed over the timber and metal of the tracks like a sailboat over a barge’s wake. I had been naive to think I’d cross them one last time on my wedding day. My connection to Papa and his store kept me coming back.
The wind was dead and the river was still. It looked dark and peaceful, like a sheet of black glass, but lurking beneath the surface was a current, cold and deep, with snakes and tangles of vegetation that could be your end. People could be the same. They could smile to your face with hatred in their heart while they pulled you down.
Papa
The sight of Papa’s store eased my nerves. Sunlight dappled the red brick through the breaks of tree branches. It was home, this two-story building with Khoury’s Groceries and Home Goods, Oriental Silk and Rugs painted in decorative letters on the brick wall. The rugs and the reams of lace and silk in Papa’s back room saved us from complete isolation in Riverton. Papa imported them from his old country and had them shipped by train from New York. White ladies with a maid in tow came to buy them. They’d brag of their big adventure to the colored grocery to buy one, how they bartered my father down, what a good deal they made, though he always got what he wanted out of it.
This day, cars and trucks lined the street in front of Papa’s store and the AME church across the way. A white hearse sat on the lawn. The roller shades covered Papa’s windows like dead eyelids. A Closed sign hung in the glass door.