Ibby could tell she wasn’t buying it.
“What about you?” Birdelia asked. “Why you go?”
“We should support the boys that fight for this country, like T-Bone for instance,” Fannie said.
“Mama say not everybody thinks that way, especially about colored boys. Some say they don’t matter.”
“Exactly why I went,” Fannie said.
Birdelia tapped Fannie on the shoulder. “Miss Fannie, you can’t tell my mama. She gone tan my backside if she finds out I was at that protest. She told me not to go near it, afraid I might get arrested or something.”
Fannie patted Birdelia’s hand. “It’ll be our little secret.”
When they got home, Doll was standing at the back door, on the top step, with her hands on her hips. She peered down at Birdelia. “Where you all been?”
“Mozer’s,” Birdelia replied nonchalantly.
“For two hours?” Doll narrowed her eyes.
“Took our time.”
“Uh-huh.” Doll tapped her foot. “Where’s Miss Fannie’s lipstick, the one you were supposed to get for her?”
Birdelia’s eyes opened wide.
Without missing a beat, Fannie pulled a tube of lipstick from her purse and showed it to Doll. “She already gave it to me. I happened to see them walking from Mozer’s and gave them a ride home.”
“I see,” Doll said. “You girls better not be up to any mischief.”
“No, ma’am, we ain’t.” Birdelia brushed past Doll and went into the house.
“Where you think you’re going, Birdelia Trout? You march on upstairs and help me with the ironing,” Doll said. “And Miss Fannie, Wimbledon about to come on in about twenty minutes, the match you been wanting to see, the one between Margaret Smith Court and that woman who look like a man.”
Fannie glanced at her watch. “Where does the time go?” she said as she walked through the kitchen.
Ibby hurried behind Fannie into the front parlor. Queenie came in a few minutes later with two plates.
“It’s lunchtime, Miss Fannie. Made you a softshell po-boy, dressed the way you like.”
As she was putting the sandwiches on the coffee table, the midday news came on the television.
“There was a demonstration today on the Tulane campus. Hundreds of students protesting the war were led away in handcuffs,” the reporter said.
“Where is that thing?” Fannie began searching the folds of the couch.
The camera cut to a red convertible driving down McAlister Drive. Ibby held her breath as Queenie stepped closer to the TV.
“That Birdelia standing in the back of that car?” she asked.
By now, Fannie had found the clicker but was having trouble with the buttons.
Queenie leaned in. “Miss Fannie, that you driving that car?”
“What would I be doing at a protest?” Fannie said flatly as she pointed the clicker at the TV. The channel finally changed.
Ibby had to stifle a laugh.
Queenie gave Fannie a sideways glance. “I’m gone pretend I didn’t just see that.” As she turned to go, she called out over her shoulder, “By the way, Miss Fannie, guess you missed the word of the day.”
“Yeah, what’s that?” Fannie asked.
“Eccentric. It means ‘unconventional and slightly strange.’ Might be a good word for me to know,” Queenie said, going back into the kitchen.
“Ha-ha.” Fannie changed the channel to the tennis match.
After the match was over, Ibby sneaked up to her room. She opened the window, turned on the fan, and sat on her bed among the dolls she’d gotten for each birthday since she’d been living with Fannie. She shoved them aside, wondering why Fannie gave her such a silly gift every year. She took the newspaper from her back pocket, carefully unfolded it, and laid it on the bed. The poorly mimeographed paper was called The Express, an underground rag put out by a radical group on campus that was anti everything except drugs. Whenever she went anywhere near the Tulane campus, someone shoved a copy of The Express in her hands. She usually crumpled it up and threw it away without reading it. Not this time.
Ibby couldn’t take her eyes off the cartoon of the naked man with long hair and a scruffy beard. He had a peace sign tattooed on his rear end and a penis that stuck out farther than his feet. He was holding up a newspaper in one hand and little round glasses in the other. The caption read, “What kind of man reads The Express?” Ibby had never seen a naked man. The image was stirring up something in her. She turned the fan on her face, then went back to studying the cartoon.
She became vaguely aware of a noise just outside her window, but she was too absorbed in the newspaper to bother finding out what it was. It sounded like the branches of the oak tree scraping against the side of the house, so she paid it no mind. Then a banging on the other side of the wall caused clouds of dust to fall from the ceiling. She jumped up and was about to run from the room in a panic when she heard a voice.
“Miss Ibby, that you?” A young black man peered through the doorway. “T-Bone. Remember me?”
Ibby didn’t quite know what to think as T-Bone stepped lightly into the room. She never would have recognized him. She remembered him as a wiry teenager of sixteen full of bravado. He was now a man with a strong, sure face. Birdelia had told her that Vietnam had changed T-Bone, made him different, more serious.
“What are you doing up here?” Ibby stuffed the newspaper into her pocket.
“Didn’t mean to scare you, Miss Ibby. I was sanding down the house to prep it for painting when I ran across a window hidden under the turret roof. When I crawled in, I found an empty room and a door with no handle. So I pried the door open with a crowbar.” He looked down at his feet. “Didn’t think nobody was up here.”
“There’s another room up here?”
T-Bone pointed behind him. “Just on the other side of this wall. Nothing to it. See for yourself.”
Ibby followed T-Bone into the adjoining room. It was octagonal, no larger than her own room, with one small window facing the front of the house. Her eyes inadvertently landed on T-Bone, who was standing over in the far corner. She was surprised at how tall he was, well over six feet, and how muscular his arms and shoulders were. His hair was cropped close to his head.
“You grown right pretty,” T-Bone said.
She was sure he was just being polite, his way of getting rid of the awkwardness that filled the tiny room. She changed the subject. “They must have shut this room off for a reason. I wonder why.”
He scratched his head. “Don’t rightly know.”
Next to his feet was a small door, no more than two feet wide. She walked over and opened it. When he crouched down next to her, his thigh brushed hers.
He reached in. “Looks like somebody was trying mighty hard to hide this box, all tucked away in the corner like it was.”
Ibby plopped down cross-legged on the floor and opened the box as T-Bone came and sat next to her. Inside, she discovered a photo album covered in a faded pink taffeta, the lace edging hanging off the side in places where it had come unglued. She gently lifted the album from the box.
There was an inscription on the inside of the front cover. “Look. It says ‘To Pearl, the most beautiful woman in the world, from the luckiest man in the world.’”
“Who’s Woody?” T-Bone asked, pointing to the signature below the inscription.
“My grandfather’s name was Norwood. Maybe that was his nickname. But why would it say ‘To Pearl’?”
Ibby flipped through the yellowed pages of the album, pretending not to notice the sound of T-Bone’s breath and the smell of his musky cologne.
He leaned in closer. “What’s that?”
Ibby picked up the newspaper clipping stuck in the creases of the album and examined it. It was an ad for the Starlight Jazz Club on Bourbon S
treet and contained a photograph of two women—one sitting provocatively inside a giant oyster shell in a satin bathing suit, the other, scantily clad, standing with her foot atop a papier-mâché alligator.
“Looks like an ad promoting a couple of dance acts. One for Miss Pearl the Oyster Girl and one for Gertie the Gator Girl.”
T-Bone pointed to the picture. “I believe that there is Miss Fannie sitting in that oyster shell.”
The woman in the photo couldn’t have been more than about seventeen years old. Ibby gazed at the long legs and the ample bosom. It was the beauty mark on the side of her face that gave it away. Ibby let out a gasp.
“She sure was something,” T-Bone said after a while.
Ibby couldn’t take her eyes off Fannie. “She sure was” was all she could manage.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Doll’s words ripped through the air. “What are you two doing in here!”
T-Bone scrambled to his feet. “Nothing.”
Doll waved a finger at him. “How’d you get in here, boy?”
“I run across a window. Pried the shingles off. Found this here empty room. I didn’t know . . . I mean, I thought . . .” T-Bone was talking so fast his words ran together like one long sentence.
“And what? You thought what?” Doll snapped. “How long you been up here?”
“Just a minute or two.”
“You better not be lying to me, Thaddeus Trout.”
“I ain’t lying,” T-Bone said as he cast his eyes down.
“Get on out a here.” Doll jerked her head toward the open window. “And don’t let me catch you up here again. You hear?”
“I’m going,” T-Bone said, one leg already out the window.
As Ibby stood up, Doll noticed she was trying to hide something behind her back.
“Now, missy, what you got there?” She motioned for Ibby to hand it over.
“I found it hidden in the little closet in the corner.”
Doll turned the album over in her hand. “Anyone else know about this?”
“Just T-Bone,” Ibby replied.
“Come on out of this room,” Doll said.
Ibby slid past Doll and went over and sat on her bed. Doll came and sat next to her and opened the album.
As Doll was looking through it, Ibby asked, “Have you ever seen this before?”
“No, baby, never laid eyes on it until just now. I suspect it been locked away for a good long while. That turret room’s been locked up ever since Master Balfour fell out the window.”
“That is Fannie in that photo, isn’t it?” Ibby asked after a while.
“Yes, baby, believe it is.”
“Was Fannie really a stripper, like Annabelle Friedrichs said she was?”
Doll glanced over at her. “Wouldn’t exactly call her a stripper. More like an exotic dancer.”
“Did my mama know about Fannie?” Ibby asked.
“No, baby. I don’t even think your daddy knew.”
“How’d you find out?”
“Well, baby. It’s like this. Back when Queenie first started working for Miss Fannie, and Mr. Norwood would go off on one of his stints on the river, Miss Fannie would often take to drinking to keep the loneliness away. Sometimes she let her lips flap.” Doll turned and looked at Ibby. “Now I know what you’re thinking, but don’t go judging too harshly. Things was different back then. Them fools in Washington went and passed a law called Prohibition, making it illegal for people to buy liquor. Then the stock market crashed—people lost their homes, their jobs. Nobody had two wooden nickels to rub together. Your grandmother, she come from a family of sharecroppers. Her daddy had to give up his land, had no money coming in. So Miss Fannie, she had no choice really. She left home at sixteen, all on her own. Now, Miss Ibby, try to imagine how hard that was for a young girl.”
Fannie marched off into the night, away from the sharecroppers’ shack, made of hobbled logs and a rusty metal roof, down a long dirt road cloaked in darkness from the towering pine trees. She’d done it many times before, making her way sleepily toward the sugarcane fields before sunrise. Most mornings she could hear the shuffling of the other field workers and the occasional cough from one of the children trudging solemnly beside their parents. She remembered the first time she’d made this trip, at the ripe age of five. From sunup to sunset, her job was to gather the cut cane and load it onto the waiting donkey carts at the end of the row, weaving and ducking as she went along to avoid the sharp edges of the cane knives being wielded by the field hands.
On this late September morning, Fannie’s muted footsteps were barely distinguishable from the whispering of the pine needles high above her head. She was making an extra effort to be quiet. She didn’t want her father to catch her sneaking away in the middle of the night.
She walked nearly an hour before she reached the deserted highway. The sun was just peeking over the horizon marked with miles of green sugarcane fields. It was harvesting season, and white smoke from the burning of the cane before the harvest, something they did to make the cane cutting easier, billowed up from the fields, leaving a pungent scent of burnt sugar in the air. Fannie hated that smell.
When she reached the train station, a good five miles down the road, the front door was padlocked. She went around the back, climbed the steps to the train platform, and sat on the wooden bench by the back door to wait for the ticket master to arrive. She had no idea where she was going, but she prayed she had enough money to go far enough away that her father wouldn’t come looking for her.
As soon as she heard the rattle of the door being unlocked, she jumped up.
“My, ain’t we in a hurry this morning,” the stationmaster said as he opened the door.
She gave him a minute to settle himself behind the ticket window. “Where’s the first train out going this morning?”
“New Orleans.” The bleary-eyed man peered over the ticket counter. “Say, I know you. You’re Jake Hadley’s daughter, ain’t ya?”
“Yes sir.” She had hoped he wouldn’t recognize her.
The man behind the counter, O. D. Landry, also ran the only grocery in town. She was feeling a little guilty standing there in front of him, given that she had stolen an orange out of his store just last week.
“How much is a one-way ticket?” she asked.
He tilted his black visor back on his head. “One way, you say? Cost you about . . . well, let me see . . . how much you got?”
Fannie counted the coins in her hand. All she’d been able to scrape up for her journey was seven dollars and some change.
“Sorry about your mama,” Mr. Landry said.
“Thank you kindly.” She counted the money in her hand for the second time, trying hard not to think about her mama.
Fannie’s mother, Clara, had taken ill a few weeks ago, after she developed an infection and then a fever from a cut on the back of her leg she’d received from a cane knife while out in the fields. It festered, no matter how much Mercurochrome Fannie swathed on it. The Hadleys were too poor to afford a doctor, and within a few days, her mother was dead. With no money for a proper burial, her father covered Clara in a blanket and carried her out to the woods, where he buried her next to a tree with nothing more than two twigs tied together as a grave marker. When Fannie went to look for it the next day, the grave was covered in leaves, the twig marker gone, probably carried away by squirrels. She never forgave her father for burying her mother out in the woods like a wild animal, and that very day she swore on her life that she’d never suffer the same fate.
After he buried Clara, her daddy took to chasing Fannie around the cabin at night. At first, Fannie thought the wildness in his eyes was from the liquor, but then he caught her and tried to force himself on her. That same night she packed her little bag, scraped up what money she could find in his pants pockets, and left.
&n
bsp; “Tell ya what, sweetheart. Just give me a few dollars, and we’ll call it a day.” Mr. Landry gave her a friendly wink.
Fannie nervously handed over the coins.
“You ain’t changing your mind. ’Cause if you is, you can go on back home, and I won’t say nothing to nobody.” Mr. Landry set his eyes on her as if he understood her predicament.
She shook her head. “I ain’t changing my mind.”
“Okay then. You take care now, you hear?” Mr. Landry nodded.
The train was pulling up just as Fannie went out onto the platform. She hurried over to the door at the rear of the first car. She found an empty seat by the window and let her head fall back against the headrest as the train engine sputtered and the wheels squealed against the tracks. She pulled her worn brown leather satchel up on her lap. It held everything she possessed in the world—a pair of breeches, a few cotton panties, her Sunday church dress, a poplin shirt, a few undershirts, a nightie, and a small tattered prayer book that had been her mother’s.
Fannie rested her forehead on the window, watching the cane fields flash past—first green fields, then the burned fields dotted with the salt-and-pepper faces of the weathered field hands who would stop briefly from the cane cutting and look up with hollow glances, the same look she used to give the train as it passed, wishing one day that it would carry her away from all the misery. She turned away from the window and fingered the small gold cross around her neck, hoping that Mr. Landry would keep his promise not to let on where she’d gone. The last thing she wanted was for her father to come looking for her.
The swaying of the train soon sent Fannie into a deep slumber. She awoke with a start to a loud whistle as the conductor made his way down the aisle toward her.
“New Orleans!” the conductor called out. “The Crescent City. The City that Care Forgot. Last stop. All out. Laissez les bon temps rouler.”
Fannie grabbed her satchel and hastily followed the other sleepy-eyed people out of the train. When she emerged from the train station, she found herself on a wide boulevard called Loyola Avenue. Fannie had never seen so many cars puttering along in either direction, honking at the train passengers who were trying to cross the street. She’d only ridden inside one automobile, a rusted relic of a pickup truck that her father had owned ever since she could remember that had a hole in the floor the size of a tire.
Dollbaby Page 19