Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  Lucille hadn't noticed the white man who had got on until he was almost on top of her, and then she realized that all the other seats in the car were filled, except for a colored seat—the one where the woman with the daisy hat had been sitting. But the white man simply set down his string bag of groceries, lifted the screen and moved it back a bench, dropping it into a new set of slots with a loud click, and then he sat in the empty seat. Right in front of Lucille the white man sat.

  She stared over the screen at the back of the man's neck and tried to puzzle out the sense of it. How could it be that with such a simple act the seat had changed from being for coloreds to white persons only? The wooden slats of the bench would still be warm from the Negro woman's body. On the brass armrest by the window, where her hand with its black skin had rested, his white hand now lay. What would happen, Lucille thought, if someone came along and moved the screen from in front of her to behind her? Suddenly she would be sitting in a white person's seat. She could be sent to jail for it, and her mama would never know what had become of her. The motorman would stop the car, the conductor would point her out to the police, and she would disappear. That happened to people from Pailet Lane sometimes; they came up against some trouble in the white man's world and they disappeared.

  Lucille looked down at her hands, which were gripped into a fist in her lap. Her hands that were a spoonful or two of chicory coffee darker than that white man's hands, that white man who was sitting on the other side of the screen, in the seat in front of hers.

  I'm comin' up light, she said to herself. Only this time the words were frightening to her, menacing somehow, and that was when it clicked in her mind, just as the streetcar screen had clicked into place, magically changing a seat from colored to white. He was white. The daddy her mama never would talk about except to say he was gone was a white man, and that was where he'd gone sure enough. Gone back to the whites-only world he had come from, once he was done with her mama.

  The summer Lucille turned thirteen a thing happened that was as surprising and wondrous as winning the lottery with the washerwoman's gig would ever have been. Mama got hired on as a live-in housekeeper for a white woman who lived on Conti Street in the Faubourg Tremé.

  Conti Street in those days was right smack in the middle of Storyville, that part of New Orleans the law had set aside for a time as the place where strumpets and their fancy men and madams would have the legal right to go about the making of their scandalous living. The white woman herself had led a most scandalous life. She had deserted her husband and children so that she could live with her lover.

  Mama had been washing clothes for the white woman for years, since before Lucille herself was even born. The first Lucille saw of her, though, was that day she and Mama came to live in her house. “You come on into the front parlorand say hey to Mrs. Rourke,” Mama said, puffing up the sleeves to Lucille's new white dress and tightening the sash. “But, mind, you stay out of that room otherwise, ' less you in-vited. An' don't you be forgettin' your manners while we in this house.”

  For this, their first day in their new life, Mama had put on a long white apron that covered her from her toes to the top of her generous bosom and was so stiff with starch it crackled every time she drew a breath. Mama was of a size that was always impressive, but in that apron she looked like a ferry boat steaming up the Mississippi. That morning when she got dressed, along with the apron, she had also put on a red tignon, wrapping the scarf around her head until all her hair and the tops of her ears were covered. Once long ago, during the slavery days, there had been a law, the tignon law, which said free women of color were only allowed to wear a simple madras handkerchief on their heads rather than the plumes and glittering jewelry they'd preferred—as if such a proclamation was all it would take to stifle their charms. So when Mama put on her red tignon, she was making a proclamation of her own.

  Mama's response, whenever Lucille complained about the unfairness of life, was to say, “You just forget 'bout that, 'cause ain't nothin' you can do 'bout it.” Yet whenever Augusta Durand wrapped her red tignon around her head and sailed forth into the unfair world, she was proclaiming: “Might be nothin' I can do 'bout it, but I still got my dignity. I got my pride.”

  Oddly, pride was also the word that came to Lucille's mind as she looked out from beneath her eyelashes at the white woman who sat in the tall, wing-backed chair. She was dressed in mourning black and her face was drawn with grief, but then Mama had said that her lover had died some few weeks before. For all her air of grave sadness, a proud and wary defiance burned in her eyes. It was the defiance of a woman who had lived her life to her own set of rules and suffered for it.

  Lucille stood in utter stillness before the white woman's gaze. When the woman spoke, her voice, like her face, was etched with grief. “You've raised a fine girl, Augusta.”

  At a sharp jab in her ribs from Mama, Lucille curtseyed again. “Thank you, ma'am,” she mumbled to the roses on the carpet.

  Mama led her from the parlor after that, even though Lucille had wanted to take a closer look at the gilded mirrors and marble-top tables, at the giant vases filled with palms and aspidistra, and the whatnot in the corner with its collection of china ballerinas. She knew white people didn't like Negroes who gaped, so she was careful to keep her eyes on her freshly blackened shoes as they followed Mama out the door.

  She ran into the white woman later that day, though, ran smack into her as she was coming out of her new bedroom, full up to bursting with the excitement of having seen the bed she would sleep in, the bed with its spooled headboard and soft white sheets. The woman caught her, steadied them both actually, by wrapping her arms around Lucille's back so that Lucille's face was pressed into her black shirtwaist that smelled of the Octagon bar soap Mama had washed it with.

  For a moment the white woman's hands gripped Lucille so tightly that Lucille could feel her fingers pressing into her flesh. “Do you like your room, Lucille?” she asked as she let her go.

  Lucille curtseyed. “Yes, ma'am.” She dropped her gaze to the floorboards and tried to sidle on past, into the safety of the kitchen, but the woman stopped her with but the cool, careful pronunciation of her name.

  “Lucille.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, Lucille lifted her head. A smile came and went across the woman's face, making her look younger. “If you curtsey every time our paths cross, your poor knees are liable to just wear out on you.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” Lucille said, and nearly curtseyed again.

  “And you will call me Miss Maeve. Please.”

  “Yes, ma—Miss Maeve,” Lucille said, and she wondered how they would ever manage to get on, the three of them in this house.

  Slowly, though, the awkwardness of the first days eased into the strained familiarity that came when people shared portions of their lives but lived in different worlds. Miss Maeve barely spoke except to give Mama instructions on the shopping and the chores, although her instructions were couched in the politest of phrases. They took their meals separately, of course: Miss Maeve alone in the dining room, at the long and well-polished walnut table; Mama and Lucille at the oak table in the kitchen. When Miss Maeve wanted to speak with Mama, she pressed a button in the floor or rang a bell and Mama would go to where she had been summoned. Lucille never went anywhere beyond the kitchen and her and Mama's bedrooms.

  One morning, though, Miss Maeve came into the kitchen to drop off a list of things she wanted fetched at the market and she lingered awhile, and Mama asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee and so Miss Maeve sat at the oak table and drank a cup of coffee while Mama washed the breakfast dishes and they talked about nothing in particular. Only after that it somehow came about that Miss Maeve was spending hours in the kitchen with Mama and even helping with the cooking sometimes. Then one strange day Mama was asked to join Miss Maeve for tea in the parlor, and after that it became a daily ritual they shared, even though they never once shared a meal at the long and shining walnut table.


  One time Lucille came upon them in the kitchen, Miss Maeve with a bowl of beans in her lap that she was snapping, and Mama at the sink making clabber, and Mama telling a story about some scandalous goings-on down on Pailet Lane that had Miss Maeve laughing so hard she was nearly choking with it. Another time Lucille looked out her bedroom window and saw Mama and Miss Maeve down in the courtyard, and Miss Maeve seemed to be crying hard over something, for her shoulders were hunched and heaving, and then she turned and went into Mama's arms and Mama held her and patted her back, and although Lucille couldn't hear her words she knew they were soothing by the way Miss Maeve was taking comfort.

  It was a strange accommodation the two women achieved, and like so much else in New Orleans it was a thing full of illusions. Somehow Mama and Miss Maeve had invented and defined their own rules, and those rules had managed to give them each what they wanted without destroying the conventions of their separate worlds. Perhaps two other women could not have done it, but Mama and Miss Maeve, so different in so many vital ways, were alike in their obstinacy. Once they both set their minds on a certain path they stayed there, come rain or shine or Jesus.

  It occurred to Lucille one day that Miss Maeve was lonely, and Mama had become her friend in every sense of the word but the most public one. She was too much a lady ever to consort with the neighborhood's riffraff, but no respectable woman had had a thing to say to her in years. When her lover had been alive and living with her in this house, he had been enough. But then her man had died and left her alone.

  It was the kind of aloneness the mamas and aunts on Pailet Lane would all have understood. The kind of alone-ness that could come into your house even when it was full of squabbling relatives and hungry babies. The kind of aloneness that came over a woman after her man had gone.

  Lucille went through an awkward stage where she grew up but not out, and was all elbows and knees and feelings. Then it seemed all in one summer she turned sixteen, grew hips and a bosom, and fell head over heels into her first mad crush.

  Miss Maeve had two sons by the husband she had left all those years before. The elder, Mr. Paul, was in the seminary and about to be ordained a priest. The younger, Mr. Day, had joined the New Orleans police force not so long ago. He was six years older than Lucille, he'd been a flying ace during the Great War, and he was all man compared to the silly boys she knew.

  Neither of Miss Maeve's sons had ever lived with her in the house on Conti Street, but Mr. Day had visited from time to time after her lover had passed, and more often since he'd come home from the war. Lucille was not so foolish as to fancy that he came calling to see her, but he did seem to enjoy her company. Whenever he saw her he would always pause to talk awhile. He would ask about her friends and school, and tease her a little, and her heart would be pounding so hard she was surprised he couldn't hear it.

  Although Mama no longer washed clothes for a living, Monday was still washday, and the linens and towels in the house on Conti Street still needed doing. It was a chore Mama had gladly given over to Lucille, while she stayed in the kitchen and cooked red beans and rice for supper.

  Even in the early hours of the morning, that Monday was a scorcher, and the charcoal brazier that burned in the back of the courtyard sent more heat waves floating into the air. On top of the brazier an old copper tub boiled and bubbled, and Lucille had been stirring the laundry with a long, soggy wooden pole until her arms had grown tired. She had taken off her straw hat to fan air in her face when she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye.

  He was lounging in the open carriageway to catch the little bit of breeze that was blowing off the river. He was wearing his policeman's blue uniform, but he'd taken off his own hat, and his hair was like warm honey in the sun.

  She knew he had seen her, had been watching the way her hips moved as she stirred the wash, but she pretended to be oblivious to him. She arched her back and stretched high, thrusting her breasts into the air. She held the pose a moment, then slowly turned. She made her eyes go wide and brought a splayed hand up to her chest.

  “Lawd God, Mr. Day. You almost scared me outta my skin.”

  He smiled at her, knowing her for a liar and a tease but too sweet to say so. He had the most ravishing smile she'd ever seen on a body, man or woman.

  It didn't matter either whether he saw through her, because she got what she wanted. He pushed himself off the wall and joined her out in the courtyard. He was tall and he had a sauntering way of walking that caught a girl's eye, like a lazy cat on a hot day.

  He came all the way up to her, so close she could see the golden stubble of his beard and the weariness of the night beat in his eyes. His eyes were bluer than his uniform.

  “Hey, Luce,” he said. “Can I help you hang up these wet things?”

  She laughed, pleased with herself, and handed him the sack of wooden pins. She swung the wicker basket full of washed linens up on her hip and led the way over to where the clothes poles had been thrust into the soft dirt at the edge of the flower bed.

  She took a pillowcase out of the basket and shook it, sending drops splattering onto the paving stones, and the small space between them was filled suddenly with the smell of cooling dust.

  She slanted a look up at him. The brass buttons on his uniform and his Crescent City policeman's badge outshone the sun but not his hair. She thought he could probably tell plain as day how she admired him, but she didn't care. “You sure lookin' almighty pleased this mornin',” she said. “Did you nab yo'self a big bad gangster, Mr. Po-liceman?”

  “Not hardly. I spent the night calling 'round to all the gammies and pimps, collecting the precinct captain's bag money.”

  “Ain't that the way it is.”

  She'd said the words, Pailet Lane words, without thought, but she saw how now his mouth had tightened and his eyes had darkened as if he suffered from some inner shame. She had noticed that about him before, that he was not only unhappy with the world the way it was, but he seemed to blame himself for all its failings.

  He looked as though he needed touching and she wanted to touch him, and so she laid her hand on his arm. “It's not like everybody else don' do it.”

  His arm tensed beneath hers, but he smiled. “Sure, I know that. My daddy was the kind of cop who drank up what the city paid him. My brother and I would've starved if our old man hadn't been on a pad.”

  He took the pillowcase out of her hands and turned to hang it on the line, averting his face and allowing her the pleasure of looking at him.

  His skin was tanned from the sun but oddly translucent still, even for a white man. When he was younger it had flushed easily, but he had gotten better at hiding his feelings. There was a hardness to his mouth and a tenseness around his eyes that hadn't been there before the war. She had overheard Miss Maeve telling Mama that he had gone off to fight in the war because the girl he'd been in love with had run off and left him with a broken heart. Mama said men suffered through a broken heart worse than women did. Mama said that a man's heart broke the way a seasoned hickory stick did, slow and hard and with a noise like a scream.

  Lucille took another pillowcase out of the basket, shook it out, and went to throw it over the line, deliberately losing her balance so that she stumbled into him, and his arms came around her, to steady her, but holding her tighter, surely, than they needed to. She tilted her head back and looked up at him, looked into his eyes, and slowly, so slowly she thought she'd faint for lack of breath, his head dipped until his lips were touching hers.

  His lips touched hers only for a moment before his arms fell open and he took a single step back, away from her.

  She put her fingers to his mouth, stopping his words before he could even think to say them. “Don't you be sorry for somethin' I wanted.”

  He took her hand by the wrist and pushed it back down to her side, although he gave it a gentle squeeze before he let it go. “Your mama would chase me out of here with a broom if she caught me kissing you like that.”

&n
bsp; “I liked it, though, Mr. Day. I liked it a lot.”

  “I liked it too,” he said, and then gave her one of his ravishing smiles.

  But although he helped her finish hanging up the wet linens, he didn't kiss her again, and he left soon as they were done. Lucille picked up the empty wicker basket and took it to the house, walking through the kitchen door and right into the flat of Mama's hand as it struck her hard across her face.

  The blow sent her staggering into the coal box and brought tears to her eyes. Less from the pain than from the shock of it—Mama had never raised a hand to her before in her life.

  Lucille brought the back of her own hand up to her throbbing mouth. “What you do that for?”

  Mama pointed a stiff finger at the window with its cheerful daisy-print curtains that overlooked the courtyard. “For the way you behavin' with Mr. Day out there—pushin' your bosom up in the air, wrigglin' your bottom like some two-bit who'. Small blessin' alls he did was kiss you.”

  Lucille touched her mouth again and then looked at the back of her hand as if she expected to see blood there. “If you was spyin' on us then I guess you saw how it wasn't much of a kiss. We only bein' friendly.”

  Mama slammed her hand on top of the icebox so hard the dishes in the safe above it rattled. “Don't give me none of that. I seen the way you been makin' moon eyes at him all this summer, and sure 'nough I knew that soon as he opened up his own eyes and got to noticin', there was goin' to be trouble.”

  “You mean the sort of trouble that happened 'tween you and my daddy?”

  Mama's face turned gray beneath her color, and for a moment she actually swayed on her feet as if she would faint. Then she seemed to gather herself, pulling in a deep breath and drawing herself up tall. It was only a different version of the same question Lucille had been asking all her life, and she knew she wasn't going to be given any answers this time either.

  “You save yo'self for some nice colored boy,” Mama said instead, “and don't you be messin' with the white mens. They only break yo' heart.”