Well, I don’t know what was said and what wasn’t, but the Vaughans took the night train back. Miss Ashby told me the next morning. I’d heard the little bell on the milkman’s truck, tinkling itself down the road like some kind of progress, and I went out on the porch to catch him and there Gail Ashby was too, standing over on her own porch, wearing a red sweater what stretched tight across her chest but puckered out on both sides of her belly. She’d left three bottom buttons undone to make up the difference, like they was supposed to stand to the right and left sides of her belly and say it was okay. She yelled over at me real cool— “Pop and Laverna on their way, gal”—and it was all she said. When the milkman grinned and tried to walk in her front door, she shook her head and said something low to him, so when he brought my two bottles over, he was right frosty. Took my three dimes and ain’t even said thank you. Didn’t make no nevermind to me, and when I held them cold bottles in the crook of my arm and licked the cream off the top of the milk, I felt specially satisfied. Seem like the cream tasted better without something on my tongue what ain’t been said.
Meantime, it was the very fourth of June, and the Franklin brothers what came to collect the extra manure was talking about them twenty-one Colored boys what been burnt to death at the state home out in Arkansas. Big Myrtle was cross the way, yelling to Peggy Burke about how they done kilt Anne Fletcher out the storyline on Guiding Light, but ain’t nobody said one word about Strawberry Festival. Come lunchtime, I ran the electric sweeper over Miss Laverna’s parlor rug, then made myself a little corncake out of the meal what was left in the Vaughans’ cupboard. Took some of that butter melting to cream in the icebox, dropped a pinch of paprika in it, and smeared it cross the top like strawberry frosting, even if it smelt like sin. I was just humming to myself, pursing my lips and sticking my tongue out to pretend like I was about to lick Roy McKinley’s teeth, when James Bundren’s little blue car came rolling down the drive in a big cloud of dust. I ran out on the front porch to meet them, and Miss Laverna jumped out the back just a smiling. Had on a happy pink housedress and a blue ten-gallon hat like you’d wear to a rodeo.
“Can’t thank you enough,” she said, while Pop bent his bad back over James Bundren’s trunk and finished getting the suitcases. We all went back in and peeked at the boys, both of them asleep in the crib with not a drop of shit nowhere, and Laverna smiled and patted one of their little hands. It was a right pretty day out, and there was Miss Laverna featuring right then on the goodness of her babies, and I got to thinking about how the only thing what really changes a situation is time. I remembered on how bad I’d wanted to go to Hollywood all them years, and how that just went away when it didn’t seem profitable, and how it ain’t even mattered whether it hurt me to stop thinking about it—it was just one more thing I couldn’t do. I got to thinking on how Audrey was probably up in New York making all that good money, living the life of Riley, and how there was a time when we might’ve run even, but now she’s so far ahead of me I’ll never catch up. How nothing happens for any reason—just some people are born lucky and some people ain’t; how Audrey never mentioned one time how she wanted to get out of this town and now here she was the one up in New York City, how all the designs of this world are completely unthought. Righteousness don’t make prosperity—if it is a God in heaven, He’s just setting up there playing dollhouse. Or maybe He does fix on doing things for the rest of us, but our hopes get too heavy on His nerves. Maybe He has to tune His ear away from whoever’s screaming loudest.
“You must be awful proud to be friends with her,” Sylvia French told me. She been down to North Carolina for the summer with her daddy’s side of the family, and now she was back, lording her gentility over all the rest of us. They stopped at a Colored motel on the way back and it’d had a big radio, and they was all flipping through, listening one minute to the Grand Old Opry and the next to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, when they heard the Rudolph Guzz Jazz Hour on WMAK out of Nashville. At the end of a set, Rudy scooted his mike all around the stage to talk about the band, and damn if old Audrey Martin didn’t get a whole bunch of clapping from the Manhattan studio audience when she said her name. Wolf whistles even, which made Dr. and Mrs. French wonder if they had the right Audrey Martin, the one with them coke-bottle glasses. Or maybe, Dr. French said, chuckling with that thin little mouth of his’n, the fellows in New York just weren’t that exacting when it came to women. Well, Rudolph Guzz asked Poindexter some questions, like what her favorite flavor Juju Bean was, and how she got started playing, and all them Frenches knew it was her. “She didn’t even sound like herself,” Mrs. French said. “She’s journeyed up to New York and learned how to say ‘picture show’ just as proper as the Queen herself.”
’Course, they ain’t had no way to know that everthing wasn’t all sunflowers up there for Poindexter. I’d get all the nitty-gritty in her letters, like how it was a big brown rat what done gnawed its way through the baseboard in her bedroom one night and kept her up listening under the bed for days after, until one day she caught sight of it in the kitchen and beat it to death with the poker. The Frenches ain’t known that Audrey had to wipe the blood trail off with an old cummerbund she took home from the Apollo with her just ’cause it was the prettiest shade of eggplant and reminded her of a hill full of blackberries, and they ain’t known that she left the house for work that day and watched sidewalk squares all the way to the bus stop to make sure she ended her walking on the count of four. They ain’t known that to catch her left foot right on 252, she’d had to cheat one skip step, and that she been feeling some upset with the world ever since. They ain’t known she wasn’t wearing her coke-bottle glasses no more, that the frames just ain’t looked right with her wig, that in order to be as glamorous as all them stars what came through the Apollo, she was having to feel the faces of the coins in her pocket to decide what denominations they was. They didn’t know she was floating around like a dandelion seed, with her head all tilted to angles, taking on the airs of a Rockefeller so she wouldn’t bump into banisters.
They ain’t known, either, that one day she was walking down 132nd on her way to Dean Jennings’s house to play his piano, when she come upon a crowd in the street. Pushed herself past a ninety-year-old Filipino nun standing on tiptoes and a baldheaded White man holding a tray of roast beef and found, there in the middle of all those people, Dean’s crunched-up body, its leg bone poking right through the skin over its calf muscle. Its skull crushed all the way flat in the back on account of Dean done walked right out his own third-story window flapping his arms like the wind’d catch under them; 128,205 pairs of good stockings, 657,895 long-playing record albums, they ain’t known. Plus they ain’t known that Audrey reckoned then that Dean was a right fool, ’cause as strong-headed as humans was, if a body was able to fly, somebody would’ve figured that out by 19 and 58. And then reckoned that probably, Letty Jones was that very minute thinking the same thing about country girls trying to make something out of New York City—they was fools to even try it.
Poindexter wrote me two whole pages about it, wrote me how a woman next to her’d whispered, “Dear God,” and rested the bell of her open umbrella over the side of Dean’s head that had exploded, so Audrey couldn’t see the tomato-soft bit of cheek muscle laying on the cold sidewalk. But the Frenches ain’t known that Audrey still stood there, with the smell of undercooked beef in her nose, wondering on what it felt like when Dean hit ground, whether it was just a quick blackness come over his eyes or if he felt the folds of his brain poking out through his skull like they’d been through an egg slicer. The Frenches ain’t known she stood there figuring on all that, and they ain’t known she stood there remembering on that hand he’d offered her a drink with just a few weeks previous, how he now had it pressed so unnaturally between his back and the concrete that the pinky was wrapped round the thumb. No, they ain’t known a bit of that. All they knew was that a lot of people in the Rudolph Guzz Jazz Hour studio seemed to love what come ou
t from under that gal’s fingers, and according to what they heard on the radio, she’d even walked round the audience signing autographs while Rudy read the list of sponsors. And ain’t nobody in Mt. Sterling—White nor Colored—never made the radio before.
Well, Sylvia was so excited about hearing Audrey’s good luck for herself, she told ever kid in Mt. Sterling. Even old Roy McKinley done heard about it, and when he showed up on the twenty-fifth to take me to the show, I had to hear about how incredible it was that some old country gal gone to school in a farmhouse just like all the rest of us done gone to New York City and made music her job.
“Incredible, huh,” I said. We was watching 3:10 to Yuma, and when I looked over at Roy, the white of the desert was lit up all over his face, making little white dots out of his pupils and glowing in the curls on top of his head. It was one other Colored man up in the balcony with us, but he was setting right in the front row, leant over the railing like he couldn’t hear. His head was right in the way of the picture, too, but the light wasn’t in his hair the same way it was in Roy’s, and I wondered why Roy. “Incredible,” I whispered to him, and then I leant over and did something with my mouth, right there in the show, what made him slouch in his seat and close his eyes like a Chinaman, clench his fist real tight against the armrest and drop his jaw open like he was floating away on a raft of balloons. When he finished, he ruint the edge of my pretty lime blouse.
“I’m incredible,” I told him. But I ain’t quite believed it myself.
FAITH
All this year since Poindexter hopped the train, she been mailing me letters. I been meaning to write her back, but ever time I read what she done got herself into up there in New York—the Saturday night cognac, the rich folks’ Sunday parties, the subway cars full of fine men—my life don’t even seem like it’s worth the postage stamp. What can I tell her? That Grandmama’s getting deaf, so deaf you have to touch her to get her to know you said something? That she whines and moans and carries on near ever night about the pain in her chest? That she’s gotten thinner and thinner with all the worrying she does? How I asked her whyn’t she go to the doctor, and she say we need that money to pay the iceman? That she’ll go out in the backyard to break up the tomato garden and forget she’s got food on the stove? That even just last night, she burnt up some food, and the house smelt so bad it stayed in my nose? How the smell of scorched turnip greens in my nightgown was so strong it woke me up in the middle of the night, and I thought, well, it was kind of a wonder? That here I am on my way to church, walking down the street, listening to the woodpecker tear up Preacher Fletcher’s tree and watching the white chrysanthemums sugar up the corner of Miss Nettie’s yard, and still my whole world smells like a burnt pot? How when I step up into church, I turn into my own hair and smell all those burnt-up never-eaten meals, thinking Grandmama’s just one more person in that house I have to keep my eye on now? Like I said, don’t none of it even seem worth the stamp. It just don’t seem like nothing to write off to New York about.
Sometimes I worry she might just stop writing altogether, on account of I never send her any answer, but Ruth Simmons’s mama just keeps bringing them letters with all them big proper words, and at the end of ever one, Audrey’ll say I ought to come to New York, get clear out of Kentucky, see the world. Like I ain’t got a little girl and a cat and an old lady and her broken-down piece a house to look after. And then yesterday, here come a new letter from Poindexter, telling me that she met a boy—a man, really, was the way she put it—and they’d kissed. Kissed. Kissed! And now, Poindexter says, this man is in love with her, just on account of some kissing. Meantime, while she’s up in New York City living this fairy tale, Junebug done come to the house and seent my whole body, done felt inside it even, with his finger and his something-else, and he ain’t in love with me a tall. Matter fact, he done run off with Colette Smith, on account of he done got her in a family way about the same time he was feeling the inside of me.
Ever time I think about it in the right light—this man in New York City—I get so mad, mad that it’s stupid, store-bought Audrey whose life done turnt magical, simple-ass Poindexter who climbed up on the roof to watch the moon with me, who goofed around on the swings at school and generally ain’t done a bit different in life than I had until the day she hopped that train. But here I’m the one’s up in church listening to Miss Aileen plunk out them square, boring church songs, so mad at the way the world works, I’m having to cool my neck off with one of them Pinchback & Sons paper fans with Mahalia Jackson on the front.
It gets me to thinking that maybe it happened for Poindexter on account of she was truly right with God when we got baptized, so when Reverend Owington stops preaching and Deacon Greaves gets out the folding chairs, when Miss Aileen starts stretching her fingers all over the black keys for “One Lost Sheep,” when I look down the pew and see that the makeup on Grandmama’s face done turnt waxy and started to melt, I walk down front to rededicate myself to the Christian life.
People always do wonder what kind of mess rededicating people done got theirselves into, and when I get up and walk down the aisle, I see Wanda Hagston cut her eyes at me. Wanda’s some phony who’s up in church shouting her arms off come eleven thirty and then back at the bottom of a bottle of bourbon by Sunday twilight, and I ain’t caring one whit what she nor nobody else thinks, and anyway ain’t nobody in town who knows what I truly been up to, except maybe Ralph Cundiff over on Fourth Street, and Deacon Ragland setting up on the second row, and ’course Roy McKinley out on the County Road. Well, and maybe Oval Murden over on Seventh Street. And Brock Carlton down to the ice plant. And Junebug, wherever he done flown off to with big fat Colette. But well. Even they ain’t got to know what’s going on in my head when I go down the aisle to set in that folding chair.
“Let’s all pray for the sister,” Reverend Owington says, when the music stops, and I’m shaking and crying and holding my right arm up to heaven. Ain’t spoke a word the first, on account of I can’t come up with the right kind of story. But I’m saying, in my head, Please, God—take me too. Please, God, lift me up out of Mt. Sterling, and seem like everbody in church done made up their own story about what my soul is lacking, must have, ’cause they all bowing their heads and spreading their hands out to the sky right over them, praying for me with a bunch of well’s and amen’s and shouting and speaking in tongues and Jesuses, like I’m dying of thirst in a desert and they’re setting right there watching me broil.
For the most of it, I’m bowing my head and trying to look godly, but when I turn my head up for a minute, I see that Sylvia French ain’t praying. She ain’t shouting, neither. I get a good look at her getting a good look at me, with a curl to her lip like she done stepped in some shit and don’t know how to scrape it off her shoe. She looks away right quick, but not before I catch on that she thinks I’m pitiful. She starts working her mouth and holding her hands up to the sky like everbody else, but that look she was giving me, it’s still there, and it’ll always be a part of me now, as much as the freckles on my nose. I ain’t sure why she ain’t over to the A.M.E. anyway. They don’t do no spur-of-the-moment praying and shouting and carrying on over to the A.M.E. All the Negroes there are some upstanding, and it ain’t people like me they can make into pity projects. Them Frenches been members over there for generations, and Sylvia just needs to go on back.
Come the end of service, the Women in White circle round and give me verses scribbled on scraps of bulletin paper. Psalms 20, Isaiah 41, Revelations 12 they give me, and Mother Beulah Gore leans over her four-footed cane and pats me on the back. Tells me trouble don’t last always. They all walk off, looking like a flock of geese in all that white, and I try to read their writing, but the words just bounce around in my head like puppies and all I can think is that I’m setting out in the June sun like a fool, sweating out my hairdo. I know my soul still ain’t right. But I remember Reverend Graves once saying that to believe is a verb, something a Christian body has t
o go out and do, so for the next two weeks I get down on my knees praying so much, I put a rip in the knee of my good stockings. I attend Sunday evening service and Wednesday night prayer meeting and even Tuesday morning’s meeting of the Ladies’ Missionary Circle, just a waiting for something to happen.
What happens is a bunch of regular mess like the mice laying turds in the cupboard and Imagene coming down with a fever in the middle of summer, and me not being able to go to the Tuesday night drive-in with Roy on account of I can’t find nobody to sit with her. It’s a new song out on the radio called “Caroline,” and Tom Toy’s singing Your father is a bad, bad man, talking about the weight of the world is on your shoulders and I’m going to carry you away from here Caroline. It’s some more words in that song, like about how this Caroline is an orphan, and how she has hair red as fire, and I sing it and hum it and even holler it out sometimes, on account of it’s like that song knows me. It’s like that song is my friend, and it knows how I am supposed to be in the world. But in the end I know them words is just a coincidence, and Tom Toy ain’t going to come through the radio and carry me off nowhere. I find a sworp of junebug beetles crawling on the porch post, and I notice how they’re all so pretty with their gold-green backs shining in the sun, and I crush them and crush them with the heel of my shoe. Junebug guts, smeared all over the wood; all them souls, just gone.
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