PART TWO
Caroline
RHOMBUS
Back when Audrey’s daddy passed, she cried like a whitegirl, with that look on her like she’d just left all of us and warn’t coming back. Her mama ain’t cried one drop, and she give Audrey tissue to fresh up her face but Audrey pushed it away—just let them tears roll down her face and then down her chin to salt up the neck of her sweater. What really did it was when she bit her lip, just like a whitegirl, in a way that said This will hurt me forever and I’m just going to let it. Like her mind warn’t ground down by balcony-setting and back-door entering and settlement-cheating and other general whitefolk treatment, like she ain’t got the White kids’ used schoolbooks just like the rest of us, handed down to the Montgomery Colored with Nigger, can you read this? written across all the pages in red ink pen. Like her mind was free enough with time enough that it could skip around in whitegirl spaces and just grieve. Like she ain’t have to have the same stone-cold heart as everbody else out here under God’s gaze trying to scrape up two nickels, and that’s when I first knew Audrey thought she was better’n the rest of us. ’Cause she couldn’t stay cool at a funeral.
Come a couple years later, when Emmett Till got kilt, she come running over to the house all upset, with her fifteen-cent Jet magazine what done come in the mail to Grandpap Wallace for the dime subscription, telling me to look at them pictures of Emmett in his casket. “Look like he ought’ve had sense enough not to look at some White lady,” I told her, but she ain’t heard a word. I was soaping down the base of Grandmama’s door where the dirt daubers done stuck nests on it, and Audrey got down on her knees and opened the Jet out where both of us could see it.
“Here’s what his mama told them,” she said. “ ‘I looked at his teeth, because I took so much pride in his teeth. His teeth were the prettiest things I’d ever seen. And I only saw two. Where were the rest of them? They’d just been knocked out.’ ”
She read on to me, like I wasn’t setting right across the doorway from her reading it for myself, and it sounded like she was fixing to cry just reading about them teeth. But to me, look like them teeth’d been the least of old Emmett’s problems—looked like his face’d been shaved clean off’n his head. I was thinking on telling Audrey, but she whipped that magazine right out of my face and held the page with the pictures up to her chest. “I cannot believe someone could do this to another human being,” she said. “In America.” She shook her head so hard her glasses slid down to her nose. “America.”
She ran her mouth about it for long about a week, and it got to where I could see her across the street and hear the name “Emmett Till” running through my mind. She talked more stuff than the radio, about how sick it was, and how those poor Colored people down South done suffered long enough, and how we was all suffering—all us Negroes, everwhere around the world—and how enough was enough and we all had to pick our nappy heads up and do something about it. I ain’t said a word. Just nodded and said mm-hmmm, thinking maybe she’d shut up and give me a swig of her soda. But wouldn’t you know when we went downtown to the Varsity to see Love Me or Leave Me, she went right through the main doors and sat downstairs. Tried to get me to set down there with her—pulled on my arm and asked me what sense did it make to sit in a balcony. “It ain’t logical,” she said. “We got eyes to watch the movie just like they do. We paid the same price to get in the door.”
’Course, I wanted to ask her why she was whispering if it made all that much sense, and why she kept sneaking an eye back to the girl selling the tickets, like maybe she wanted to make sure the girl didn’t see her walking through that downstairs door. And maybe it didn’t make no logical sense for all the Coloreds to set up there in that pissy balcony, but for me, it didn’t have to. I wasn’t like Audrey, always needing ever little blessed thing to end up in a square. I was paying for a different experience than the White people was, and warn’t no reason to buck it, far as I could tell, so I broke away from Audrey and went on up to that balcony like I had some sense.
By the time I got up there and looked back down, she done already sat down middleways to the front of the theater, but the funny thing is, none of the White people noticed. She looked this way and that and hardly watched the movie a tall—she threw herself into a phony coughing fit, even, but all them White people was so hung up on Doris Day kissing James Cagney, ain’t nobody seent her. Nobody but us children up in the balcony, and we was all just a-laughing at her, aiming popcorn at her head and such. Emmett Till hollering at her from the grave, his mama putting them awful pictures out to throw the whole country off their appetite, but didn’t nobody notice Audrey setting there trying to make everthing right. Come the fifth or sixth dance number, she just got mad and stood up out of her seat, and knowing how special them Martins think they are, I was afraid she might start screaming or somesuch, but turnt out she just walked out the theater and missed the rest of the movie. Like the regular miracle of a good show just wasn’t good enough for her.
And then there was her whole to-do about that house out in the county, which anybody else would of give their eyetooth to live in. Out there on that meadow, she didn’t last one week. “Caroline, you got to come see this mess,” she told me. Me, tossing out dead mice in the morning and raising myself up ladders to patch shingles on my grandmama’s roof, and her, complaining about an upstairs-downstairs dream. Her mama’d moved them out there with big-bellied Mr. Barbour, who’d been watching Danaitha’s ass for years. Miss Ora Ray down Seventh Street had finally passed on (though Danaitha celebrated so much in the three days after, she was too drunk to make it to the lady’s funeral), and since she didn’t have a night job no more and no excuses neither, Mr. Barbour say why don’t she just move on in with him. Mr. Barbour’s people in Indiana in the house-renting business, and he has more money’n he know what to do with nohow, so he started hisself a tobacco farm and built a house what ever corner is seven degrees off.
“Seven degrees,” he explained to us, when I finally got the time to go out there and see for myself. “Seven is a powerful number.” It may and it may not be, but I was studying those wood floors, sanded clean as limestone without a knot anywhere. Them windows in the front room, big enough to let the whole day through. The three climbing stones of the walkway, carried in from the Camargo quarry by Mr. Barbour hisself and laid into the hill up to the yard, at an 83-degree angle from the road. Danaitha moved them in there and out of Grandpap Martin’s house thinking peculiar meant fine—Audrey’s mama, too, believes deeply in fineness—but them corners upset Audrey something fierce.
“Looka this,” she said to me, in a parlor that was a trapezoid. Mr. Barbour’d been baling all morning and was asleep on the couch, looking forty ways to gruesome, with his eyes half open and drool running all out his mouth. “This shit is as crazy as the day is long,” she said. Asleep, Mr. Barbour couldn’t fight her on what she was saying, even with his mouth wide open. And anyway, the house was awful unsettling. “Clearly, he don’t want me in his house,” she said, taking me from room to slanted room. Felt like standing sideways in a milk carton.
Her mama loved it, she loved them wood columns staggered by seven degrees on that big old front porch, and them stairsteps that rose to an angle so they landed seven degrees left of where they took off. But Audrey couldn’t see the point. The point seemed to be to set her off. “Mr. Barbour built this house ’fore he even knew you,” I told her, but she shook her head.
“I’m out soon as I get me some bread. Me and you can go to Lexington and find us a couple a cityboys.”
I just been swallowing Tyrone Boyd’s tongue out behind the Colored store, and some folk didn’t have to go all the way to no city to find them a good man, I wanted to tell her, but looking like she did with them glasses, like Poindexter, it didn’t seem right to say. “I’ll come visit you,” I told her.
’Course it warn’t just the crooked rooms, or Mr. Barbour looking like a ghoul when he slept (which was just about a
lways), or even the smell of cow shit from his tobacco field. Mr. Barbour done changed Danaitha too, to something fake and phony-dripping that jangled its bracelets when shaking hands with strangers and used a voice like sherbet when it said how do, and Audrey warn’t never going to be happy about that.
Long about the time they moved, Miss Tallulah Gorton over to the African Methodist Episcopal stroked up and knocked out the whole left side of her body. Audrey started to play for her on Sundays, and so when they left her granddaddy’s house, they strapped that big old piano on the truck with them. Took four little hungry men from Shake Rag to scoot and push that big piano out the house, and when it landed down on the porch steps you could hear the sound of all eighty-eight of them coils banging at once. The noise set Grandmama running to the window: she looked down the street and said a piano nice as that weigh about six times what one a them little men do. She made me go out to the front porch to watch: Mr. Barbour standing next to the truck with his chest puffed up like the king of Kentucky; Audrey’s granddaddy standing on the porch with his lip poked out like they sawing off his arm. But then onced the piano got to the new house, with Audrey hollering to put it on a inside wall to keep the dew out its guts, Mr. Barbour went sour. “Can’t stand to hear it,” he told the men down to the Tin Cup. “Works my nerves. She plays a little nub of a song without finishing, or she goes down the same piece a road over and over.”
Was a family by the name of Simmons what lived out by Mr. Barbour, renting a little shack on his property what used to be a curing house. Didn’t even have no plumbing, even, but them Simmonses seemed so low-down and trampy we figured they didn’t mind, even if the mama did have three childrens to wash and cook for. They’d lived all over everwhere, it was said, and Oval Murden told us he’d beat the father once in a card game all the way over in West Virginia. It was said the father (we weren’t sure he could rightly be called the husband) shaved his head ever time they moved, and by the time it grew out again, he done ruined his reputation in the new town. The oldest girl, Ruth, was in our class at school, and she bragged about all the places they done lived and all the things they done seent, said they used to live in a big mansion in Lexington and once at dinner with Sammy Davis, Jr. She told us all the details of it, down to how the color of Sammy’s fake eye was a little lighter than the color in his real one, and she built the lie up so pretty you didn’t want to break it down yourself, but then we saw her mama down to the Colored store, dressed in Mrs. Gertie Woodrow’s skirt she done stole out the trash, with its old elastic hanging off her belly so she’d had to knot it on the side of her waist. She slumped her shoulders when she walked, and spoke so low Mr. Barnett had to keep yelling at her to tell him again what she needed. “Sack of flour,” she’d say, and you could hear the tears in her voice. We knew such a person as that ain’t never shared candied bacon with no movie star.
Well, after I started going with Ralph, old Poindexter ended up hanging tight for a spell with Ruth Simmons. Ruth couldn’t hardly read her speller at school, and she was just as confounded as anybody else when Audrey opened her mouth and started talking about all them books she ordered through the mail, but they was the only two Colored girls out on that particular county road, so Ruth would come set on Mr. Barbour’s porch and play checkers with Audrey in the afternoon. Ruth told Audrey all her lies and Audrey told Ruth all her truths, not knowing that Ruth came to school and retold ever single bit of it. It was Ruth who told us that Audrey’s own mama eventually turnt sour on her piano playing. Asked her not to play lessun Mr. Barbour was out the house, but then he started complaining he could hear it when he was in the field picking his tobacco. His hired hands hummed the pieces of songs while Audrey played, Ruth told us, and finished them a capella when she stopped, and generally made things worse in Mr. Barbour’s head.
Danaitha had them four skinny men come back out to the meadow and scoot and pull the piano back onto the truck. Ever single one of Audrey’s other valuables fit in a big paper sack from the Colored store, and Ruth said Audrey threw that in the bed of the truck and then climbed up there herself and started playing her piano, all loud and happy, just to get under Mr. Barbour’s teeth. He pushed his hands in his pockets and started whistling and shuffling and jangling change and generally trying to ignore her, but she stood straight up in the back of the truck and played louder. Put her foot up on the high register and beat on the black keys with the toe of her shoe. They started the truck, but even with all that jumping and bumping over that dirt road, she didn’t miss a beat. She played all the way into town: “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” The four skinny men sang with her. Then they scooted and pulled that piano back into her granddaddy’s house, and her granddaddy stood there flashing his false teeth, handing out five-dollar bills. “Two kinds of people, and some of them stand on their feet,” he was saying. I was walking home from the fruit market when I saw all that commotion. She told me howdy. Said she was moving back to Queen Street. Told me she couldn’t decide whether it was a battle she done won or lost.
According to Ruth, she did go back to spend the night with her mama on weekends, but onced the piano was gone, Mr. Barbour wanted it still quieter in the house, told Danaitha to tell Audrey she was not to leave her room while he was napping. She had a might pretty little room, with the wood floors bleached to pink, a strong cane chair, and even a writing desk for Audrey to get her lessons, but seem like setting round looking at the nails in the wall made her feel like Rapunzel. Ruth told us one Saturday, Audrey walked down to get a glass of milk and Danaitha met her at the icebox. Danaitha had a glass of whiskey in one hand and a wet dishrag in the other, Audrey’d told Ruth; Danaitha’d had water fighting to stay in her eyes and a layer of flush under her cheeks.
“What you trying to do to us?” she said, and she slapped Audrey so hard with the dishrag that Mr. Barbour woke hisself up and ran in the kitchen. Audrey and Danaitha stared each other down, altogether ignoring Mr. Barbour. Audrey blinked first, though, and when she felt that one tear dripping down the side of her face, she ran out the front door, clear back to her granddaddy’s house. Four miles and she ain’t even stopped to catch her breath. She played at church that Sunday with a welt on her face, but the next weekend she went back to stay with her mama again anyway.
’Course she didn’t have no bed when she got there, and no dresser neither, on account of her mama done moved all her furniture out to the barn. Where Audrey’s bed should of been, it was a little crib, painted pink and set over a pedestal. In front of the window where Audrey’d looked out and dreamed that the meadow was an ocean rolling her straight to Paris, Danaitha done put a rocker chair with the outlines of baby ducks carved into its back. Audrey stood in the middle of the floor and watched the room, and her mama stood in the door and watched her watch it. “We can make you a pallet downstairs in the parlor,” Danaitha said. “You’re going to be a big sister.”
“A what?”
Danaitha blinked, blinked and then smiled. Her little nose went up and down one time like a rabbit’s. “Mr. Barbour and I are expecting,” she said.
“Ain’t you kind of old to have a baby?”
And then it was Danaitha’s turn to blink first. She smoothed her dress down over her flat belly. “I ain’t had my ministration for three months now.”
“Ever think you might just be going through the change of life?”
You’d think Audrey would of been happy, since it meant Mr. Barbour’d marry her mama and they’d be living out there in that big old house for perpetuity, but Audrey’d always been her mama’s one and only baby, even if being Danaitha’s baby ain’t meant much, and now her mama had one on the way and a grown man what done already replaced her sleeping downstairs on the couch. Ruth said Audrey sat herself down in the rocker, hugged her own neck, and got to going back and forth real fast. Said Audrey got to thinking about the last time she seent her daddy, how he hugged her and her mama too, too tight; how he jumped on that green Army bus and told them out the window
that everthing would work out, they’d see. Audrey’d heard him tell it so many times—he’d come back to Kentucky and make a doctor, just like Sam French, and then they’d have all that money and a big house somewhere. I remember how happy Audrey’d been when her daddy told her all that over his dinner plate, and how good it’d made me feel just to know that somebody in this town was aiming to kick up his feet and dance a little harder. It’d been enough to make Audrey eat her liver without Danaitha asking her, and it’d been enough to start me dreaming about getting out of this town myself. Now, ’course, her daddy’s dead and gone forever, and everything’s different. I got two dead parents, a mind what feels like it’s cracking like an egg, and no decent way to get myself fed for the winter let alone get to Hollywood. All Audrey has is Grandpap Martin, who’s going deaf and more and more can’t hear what she’s saying noways. She had me, but now I got Ralph. She’s got her piano, but you know music just travels.
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