Sylvia French comes knocking on my door one day. It’s sheets of rain coming down behind her, but I just stand there looking, until she asks if she can come in.
“I don’t see why not,” I say, even though it’s about ten thousand reasons. The biggest one right then is that the house ain’t nowhere near clean, and I have to gather all my sewing off Grandmama’s couch just so Sylvia can have a place to set. When I set down myself, it’s in the rocking chair, on top of a dirty blanket Grandmama done took to rocking herself to sleep with. It’s thick and warm under my backside, and it makes me set a little higher, so I don’t mind, exactly.
“Well,” Sylvia says, and she has the nerve to look around the living room at all the little projects I got going on—the sewing that I just threw in a corner on the floor, the canned tomatoes in little jars on the dinette, the Bible with little pieces of ripped-up paper put on the verses I been told to read. All of it piling up to one big mess, I know, but it ain’t none of Sylvia’s business.
“Whatcha need?” I ask her.
“Got a proposition for you,” she says. “You are still in contact with Audrey Martin, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” I lie. I’m a mite surprised. I thought for sure she would of been in touch with Audrey herself, at least enough to know that I ain’t in touch with her. It was a time when we all might’ve run together, but now Sylvia and Audrey, both of them’s so far ahead of me I’ll never catch up.
“Well, then. I wanted to invite her to play at a New Year’s Eve ball in Lexington. Dr. Chenault’s daughter is one of the debutantes this year and he said to name the price. He saw Audrey perform when he was visiting New York, and then he found out she was a local girl. You can look at this as a business opportunity for yourself. You’re securing the performance, so you get a cut of whatever Dr. Chenault pays Audrey. You always were ambitious.”
A few things strike me wrong, like how she keeps talking about this Dr. Chenault, like she thinks even the poor hillbillies east of Lexington ought to know who the Cotillion-throwing Negroes in the city are, and how she puts the “were” before the “ambitous,” like I’m dead already. I ain’t liable to cry for nobody but myself, generally, but I reckon Sylvia French got enough money, she can afford to cry for me too. Pity’s a worrisome thing, and seems like she has a hard time setting with it. I want to tell her to go straight to hell, but I got to go long with her on account of I need the money. I don’t even know how much it is and I still got to lick her ass.
“Will do,” I tell her. “Thank you for remembering me.” It ain’t even the beginning of what I want to say to her. I show her to Grandmama’s door, and I set on that blanket and start writing a letter to Poindexter. How you doing? I start. We all of us miss you down here. It’s a lie, maybe the biggest one I’ve told since I got religion again. So I pray and read Proverbs and eat fish come Friday, and wait for Poindexter to get back to me with a yes or a no, but all the sudden seem like she can’t pick up a pen and write no more, and the second week of all that, Reverend Graves pays me a visit. He ain’t even made it to the porch when he stops and flings out his right arm.
“Sister Caroline,” he says, “I believe you are wed to the things of this world.” I know he’s looking on all that mess in the yard—Mama’s old ripped-up easy chair I can’t throw away on account of I’m fixing to sew it up, and an old pair of Imagene’s shoes I think I might polish over and give to the Deemers’ little girl. Imagene’s old shoo fly horse on its rotting springs, and the milk bottles what ain’t been rinsed out and collected back yet, some of them with milk curdling up in the bottom. “Material things,” Reverend Graves says, “will stifle your soul.” He turns up his nose like he’s going to sneeze, takes the toe of his shoe and makes a mark in the dirt right in front of an old burnt-out hotplate Roy said needs a new element.
“You need to just throw that away,” was what Roy told me, when I asked him to go down to the hardware store hisself and get me an element, but I ain’t featuring on people who don’t save things. People who burn love notes from their own young’uns and give away the very dresses they got married in. People with no sense of what small drops in a bucket months and years are, people who don’t understand how the future can’t get nowhere without its memories. So when I invite Reverend Graves in for a drink of water, and he comes in the living room sniffing at all the magazines stacked along the living room wall, I have to tell him. “They got recipes I might use someday,” I say. “But then I guess you wouldn’t know ’bout that, since you never cook for yourself.”
Well, that gets him, and all he can do is look at me right stupid, with his bottom lip hanging a little ahead of the top one, since everbody in town knows he been over to Towanda Graff’s house ever evening since Laurel left her, “for dinner,” is how Reverend Graves puts it when anybody asks. “Hebrews 13,” he spits out, right quick, ’cause he can put everbody else’s behavior in jail but he don’t like it when somebody puts handcuffs on his own. “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers.”
I don’t bother telling Reverend Graves that him and Towanda ain’t been strangers for years, ’cause I don’t want to take any chances with my salvation, and anyway I reckon he’s right about the things in the yard—rich man passing through the eye of a camel and all. Come Monday, I throw away some things, little things like a pair of broken nail clippers and my daddy’s old transistor radio. It liked to kill me, but I figure maybe God’s speaking through Reverend Graves, and I ain’t going to make it all the way out to California with all them material things on my soul.
I throw out some wood what’s too rotten to burn, and a bottle of fingernail polish what’s dried up and cracking, and even a coat with a hem I’ve sewed back so many times it won’t stay fixed no more. I throw away an old picture of Daddy—bamboo frame and all—but still, don’t nothing happen. Audrey, up in New York City having one swank time after another, letting it loose on Friday nights and playing piano with her feet probably, and me stuck down in Mt. Sterling, waiting for her letter, pressing Imagene’s nappy hair. Come Wednesday, Ruth Simmons’s mama finally brings a letter from Audrey, and looking at the return address with all them high numbers in it makes me figure on how just praying and disposing ain’t enough. The Holy Ghost ain’t coming all the way down to Mt. Sterling just to snatch me up out of church, on account of it’s something about Mt. Sterling that’s maybe just strong enough to stand in His way. It’s something about this town what just wants to stomp on all the Negroes what live here.
Audrey says in that letter how she’s going to fix it in her schedule to come, and how she’ll be happy to play at a ball but she’ll be even happier to see me, and she says again how I need to come up to New York City. She tells me her phone number, and it’s a big long one with a Numbering Plan code she says I need to remember to tell the operator about when I call. And then there’s a part she’s crossed out, about how she’s so glad she left town on account of we all got to follow our daddies’ dreams. And she’s crossed it out with a darker color pen than the one she’s used to write with, but still, I can read it. And that lets me know that I ain’t important enough for her to ball it up and start over on new stationery. And that lets me know that I got something to prove to Audrey Martin, even if it ain’t Christian to think so. My daddy had some dreams too, and them Martins ain’t the only ones what can fly up out of here.
So come the first of July, when I get my piece of money from the bingo hall, I go down to Mr. Barnett’s and buy me a Herald Leader. I check back in the ads section under “Employment,” figuring somebody needs a housemaid or somesuch, figuring I’ll save up a piece of money and buy me a nice dress for when Poindexter comes down for New Year’s. Maybe even get myself an honest steady respectable job by the time she comes, so I can set there with all them fancy people and make out like I’m the one doing folks a charity. Ring Audrey up in New York when she gets back and tell her a few things. But then, while I’m thinking all that, what do I see there on page 16B, staring right a
t me, but an advertisement from a Mr. S. B. Fuller, who’s looking for Negro girls to be cosmetics models.
It’s some more tomatoes out in Grandmama’s backyard need picking, and some beans that been picked what need snapping, and I have volunteered to be on the revival committee down to Second Baptist, but when I see that Mr. S. B. Fuller practically calling my name, I get down in the floor and pray one more time, throw the old busted breadbox out in the backyard, and hop the afternoon bus to Lexington. When the bus passes out of town, past the feed mill and the tobacco warehouse and Mr. Farrior’s old Model T growing weeds out its hood, when the bus gets on Highway 60 and shifts into higher gear for the trip, when the lady in the next seat finally stops staring at me out the corner of her eye and gets her chicken leg back out her handbag, I tell myself I’ll end up back in church anyway. Grandmama always does say people got to end up in church one last time ’fore they’re put in the ground.
PARTY
S. B. Fuller didn’t know where he was. That’s the only thing I could figure, ’cause when I got to his office, down on Third and Limestone, I saw that the man’d drilled a brass knocker into his office door, like he was selling lipstick to Queen Elizabeth. The door was plywood covered with cheap veneer, naturally, and it’d splintered and busted through where he’d drilled it for holes, and you could see where the glue Mr. S.B.’d pushed into the cracks had dried into something yellow and bubbling and nasty, and he’d nailed his plastic nameplate over some of the glue. But there was that brass knocker setting right in the middle of the disaster, like a lady cleaning hog guts in silk stockings, trying to put a fancy lie over everthing. So I lifted it and knocked three times. I hit it soft, but I heard a little piece of wood crack anyway, and it was right peculiar but I felt more embarrassed for myself than I did for the door.
“Yes?” said the man when he came to open it. Since the ad had asked for Colored girls, I reckoned he would of been Colored too, but here he was a White man sure enough, with freckles on his nose what looked like he’d smeared makeup over them.
“Are you him, then?” I asked. “And what does the S.B. stand for?”
“It stands for Samuel. Samuel . . . Birdsell. But I ain’t—” He straightened up in his checkered suit. “I’m not him.”
“Well, I’m here to see Mr. S.B. Is there a better time?”
“The better time, my dear, does not exist. Mr. Fuller conducts his business in Chicago, operating from a splendid Gold Coast apartment overlooking Lake Michigan.” I knew he was trying to put me in my place with the “splendid,” not to mention the talk of someplace I ain’t never seen. But the slow, careful way he was putting on airs, I felt like I still liked me, which made me like him. “I’m Mr. Fuller’s personal representative here in Lexington,” he said. “Allow me to assist you.”
“Well all right then. I’m a model. Come up from Mt. Sterling. Answering your ad.”
He was different from every man in the world, I found out right then, ’cause he didn’t look at my mouth when his face changed. “You’ve modeled before?” he asked me.
“Not truly.”
“Stand up. And turn for me.”
I got up, but all the sudden I ain’t known where to put my hands, so I ended up twirling around with them half a foot away from either side of me, like a paper doll’s. When I got back around to facing the man, I shook my hair. “It’s my best feature,” I told him.
“Bewitching. Can you do a model’s turn?” he asked, and I made the exact same circle again, but this time I put my arms straight down against my sides, and then I stood there, looking at him looking at me. “You may sit down,” he said.
“Well?”
“You’re lovely.” He picked up his pencil and chewed on it, took it out of his mouth, looked at the little dents he’d just made, and then back at me. “And I see you have a scar on your forearm. That must be ordinary for country girls. Quite charming, really. But I’m afraid Mr. Fuller is looking for a classic type. A beauty perhaps less stricken.”
The way he said it, we both knew he was talking about my teeth, but he’d used so much fancy language, I felt like the prettiest girl in Lexington. He leant into a side drawer and brought out a big chrome case, then came to the other side of the desk where I was setting. He knelt down on one of his knees, then took my arm and started spreading makeup over it. The stuff smeared on creamy and smooth, like floor wax, and I wanted him to keep on polishing my arm like that for the rest of my days, fixing the mistake on my skin, erasing whatever’d happened with the lye and whatever other stupid things’d happened since Daddy killed Mama, and even whatever’d happened before that. That man could’ve erased my stupid, poor, broken life, and Imagene’s along with it, and then Daddy’s and Mama’s and Grandmama’s and Sam Wofford’s, and Granddaddy Wallace’s, and even all the stupid, poor living that’d gone on in Mt. Sterling before any of them was born. But the man got up. Eventually, he did get up.
“There,” he said, holding my arm up where we could both look at it, “it’s like you don’t have nothing but an arm.”
“But if you can cover that scar, why can’t I be your model?”
“Shh,” he said, putting a finger to his lips. “I got a better offer. How many Negro women do you suppose live in Mt. Sterling?”
Going up there on the bus, I thought I’d be staying in Lexington for months, trying on fresh lipsticks in front of a mirror ringed with naked light bulbs, while some cute little man stood back in the shadows getting his camera ready. But that man in the checkered suit gave me a chrome case full of makeup, and told me to come back to Lexington when I’d sold it all. Said he usually made people pay him five dollars before they took the merchandise, on account of he’d had people run off with it and not come back, but he had a good feeling about me. “You’re not only honest but earnest,” is how he put it. And so there I come, back home, on the evening bus, and that’s how I ended up walking down Queen Street with this cosmetics case in the middle of a cold drizzle.
“Whatcha know good?” yells Melton Boyd, from his front porch. “Why you carrying that pretty suitcase?”
“None your beeswax,” I tell him. You’d think he’d still be mad at me for knocking out his best tooth, but then he always grins at me whenever he sees me, like the empty-headed jack-o’-lantern he is.
“Packing off to Hollywood yet?” He laughs real hard after he asks it and I stick out my tongue at him—Hollywood ain’t something he’s supposed to know about. It’s something I told his brother Tyrone while we was necking out behind his grandmama’s house, which means Melton and who all else probably knows a bunch of stuff they ain’t supposed to know about me. I keep my tongue out at him long enough it catches a raindrop, and I think, who cares? I’m leaving this place anyway. And when I leave out of here, it won’t matter what anybody thinks they know, ’cause I’ll be gone and then they won’t know one thing more. All they’ll have is their “she used to be’s” and their “she used to do’s,” which is like saying they won’t have a damn thing.
When the drizzle picks up to hoofbeats, I cover my head with the chrome case and run in the vestibule of Second Baptist, where Pastor’s wife done agreed I might throw a Fuller party in the basement. I’m happy, on account of I’m aiming to make a piece of money, but the whole thing done like to kill my nerves something terrible. All that checking to see which mirror’s in which compartment, and rearranging the lipsticks in order of deepening shade, all while Grandmama was out on the front porch setting up a howl about how awful her pains was acting up. The last Fuller party I’d thrown’d been in my very own living room, for some of Grandmama’s friends what seemed like they was probably too old to even understand what cosmetics was, and I had to make sure all the makeup from that party got washed out the pink Fuller flannel. It’s a tablecloth really, and it’s supposed to just set under the chrome case and look pretty, but old Hesterline Martin who done lost three quarters of her mind thought she was supposed to use it to blot her lipstick.
W
ell, I had to wash and wash that flannel to get it in presentable order for the ladies at Second Baptist, and then I had to make sure my nice skirt and blouse was pressed, and then put on all the Fuller cosmetics I could possibly fit on my face—it’s what the manual said. Grandmama was out there whimpering about going to meet her Savior, while I was swiping on lipstick and eyestick and mascara and eye shadow and rouge. I even blended the ivory foundation down onto my neck, just so it’d match my face. It clumped black on the ends of my lashes so you can’t see they’re really red lessun you look at the roots, and with all this eyestick on, I look like a scared rabbit, and I know the collar of my shirt’ll be all messed up with foundation by the end of it all, but don’t none of that matter, long as I sell something today. The man in Lexington said if I sell enough, I get to go to a seller’s convention in Chicago. And there’s one shindig I ain’t planning on missing.
Mother Owington’s already down in the basement, since she had to come open up church for me, and when I walk in, she gets up and comes to kiss me on both my made-up cheeks. “Why hello there,” she says, and I think the only reason she ain’t wiping her lips from all that greasy makeup is that she’s a preacher’s wife, so she can’t hurt my feelings. She’s so old she don’t need makeup. Not that she ain’t got wrinkles and a wattle just like any other old lady, but covering it up ain’t going to improve her none. Reverend Owington ain’t that straying type of preacher, so she don’t need to do much to keep him, and ain’t none of the rest of us she needs to impress. Seems to me like what she really needs is for something exciting to happen to her, but then as first lady of the church she’s got to focus on keeping her nose clean for the rest of her life, and makeup ain’t going to help one bit with that. I’m glad she’s getting the free hostess’s gift, on account of I always did like her, and she sat next to me and held my hand at Mama’s funeral, but I wonder what she’ll pick that won’t be a waste on a lady like her.
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