The Uncertain Season

by Ann Howard Creel

  And still Etta told herself to rein herself in—don’t go too far; don’t do anything to risk your opportunities here—and so she never dropped her outward offhand attitude. During the day Etta’s emotions flowed through her like water, sometimes softly coursing and other times churning like a wave, but her face remained unchanged no matter how the currents were moving under her surface. At night she reexperienced the seascape, the busy sounds, and pungent smells of this new and wealthy city in vivid dreams. All blurring and flowing and yet reachable, touchable. Hers for the taking. She had never dreamed a life like this would ever be made available to her. Even a love like she’d felt for Philo could come, and the men she encountered here were wealthy. Things were finally turning in her direction, and she would do everything to stay on course. She had lost the luminous glow of Philo’s love, but she would not lose the starry prospects that now lay before her.

  She would do whatever it took. She would grasp and hold the extravagant island in her fists and never let go.

  Chapter Nine

  THE GIRL

  The Negroes and poor white workers of the alleys took her in with little speculation and with occasional kindnesses, too, and unexpectedly, she was even looked over and worried about by two kind souls. She had located Reena, her family’s former housekeeper, who now cooked for her and patched clothes and acted as a mother of sorts.

  Back in her earliest years, when the girl was small enough to still sleep in a crib, she had awakened to Reena’s liquid black eyes staring back at her through the slats. Reena’s real name was Moreena, but when the girl was only a toddler, just learning to speak, she could only manage Reena, and the name had stuck. Even the white family she worked for now called her Reena, and everyone in the alleys had also picked it up, except for her boys, who simply called her Mama.

  A big woman, Reena had a love for buttered biscuits and brown gravy that kept her as stout as a stove, but her arms were muscled and tireless. Only the skin of her belly was like jellyfish. Reena was the most eye-twinkling person the girl had ever known, and better to be around than everyone else, maybe even Harry, because after all she was a mama. Every day the girl was thankful that on the day of the storm, her mother had sent Reena to her own home, thankful that Reena had made her way back to Ward Five, where she had lived at the time with her own family, where she and so many others had taken shelter in the Union Passenger Depot, a big brick building that had withstood the hurricane.

  Not long after the girl had located Reena, the woman had shaken her head and said, “We got to get you back in school somehow.”

  They were sitting on the stoop of the backhouse, facing the alley, which was normally quiet during the day.

  In the rears, those back sides of properties, the privileged people of Galveston kept their servants’ quarters, working kitchens, privies, woodpiles, chicken coops, gardens, and such, and the girl could keep company with mostly Negro washerwomen, housemaids, and gardeners. Many dockworkers, draymen, and laborers lived in the alleys, too. In the rears, she could move about nearly unnoted. Individual human existence was almost invisible here, but all these nearly invisible lives threaded together to form a mesh that could hold her.

  The winter of 1900–1901 was on the way, and a cold wind was blowing. The girl hugged her sides and shook her head. She had made a place for herself here, and she had no want of changing it.

  “You gonna grow up with no schooling. That ain’t good.”

  The girl lifted her hands, palm up, as if saying, How could I possibly go to school? She had learned to communicate with gestures, and Reena could read her well.

  Reena faced forward, and her chest heaved once. “I know what you saying. I done pondered this every night. I can’t take you to the colored school, and I suppose I can’t take you to the white school, neither. People is bound to ask questions, and people is searching for you anyways. But I do has me one idea. What if we dye your hair and cut it off so you don’t look like yourself no more? I could sew you some new school clothes. Then Harry there, he takes you and registers you as his sister. That might work.”

  The girl shook her head again adamantly. Then she pointed to her mouth.

  “I know, I know,” Reena said with the beginnings of resignation. “They bound to get all upset, cuz you ain’t speaking. I don’t know what to do about that. But maybe you start speaking again. Could you try that for me? Could you try that for me, baby girl? And then after that we can try to get you back in school. You always did like school. I remember. Will you try for me?”

  The girl had tried. She had tried and tried. But as surely as the storm had taken away her parents, most of the city, and six thousand souls, it had planted that stone of silence in her middle, and now it felt lodged there for life.

  Soon she gave up even trying.

  The girl had also befriended Madu, the old voodoo man, who scolded her and fussed about her almost constantly but scared others away who might have bothered her. Madu was a hunched-down raisin of a soul with long fingernails at the ends of long fingers, and he had yellow eyes that appeared as if rubbed with cornstarch. Madu didn’t reckon the girl much of a young lady, as was obvious by his silence and his scornful glances and the way he breathed out like a snake hissing at prey while in her presence. But he looked after her, often fed her, and gave her some old clothes that had belonged to his daughter.

  One day, they sat on his sagging porch facing an alley busier than Reena’s, and he produced a book he’d obviously borrowed, a scratched and scarred copy of The Baby’s Opera. He handed it to the girl, and she took it, although she had already read the book. Still, she ran her hands over it, savoring its feel.

  Madu said, “Me, I never done learnt how to read.”

  The girl listened.

  He started peeling potatoes, then sighed. “It shore would be nice if some good-for-nothing girl would read that there book to me.”

  The girl looked down at her hands, at her dirty fingernails and freckled skin, and her eyes began to burn. If she could have, of course she would have read aloud to Madu. Didn’t anyone understand that this silence was not her choice? She put the book down next to Madu, jumped to her feet, and took off.

  As she ran away, the old man called out, “Now you knows I didn’t mean you no harm. Where’s you going? You come on back now.” And then, almost out of earshot, she heard him call, “Just go on then!”

  But he forgave her, and she ended up reading The Baby’s Opera so many times to herself, she could recite many of the rhymes by heart in her head.

  For the next three years, she lived in the alleys, in the shadows of back-facing houses and businesses. She ran around neighborhood corner stores, charcoal shops, rows of white-painted servants’ quarters, commissary houses built identically right after the storm, and older backhouses with narrow-slatted wood fences enclosing miniature yards, pawnshops, and cluttered porches, clotheslines strung across sandy, grass-spiked yards, the ropes hung with bleached linens, and yards littered with crates.

  She pilfered bread and cast-off clothing and accepted pies and pails of unwanted fish given to her as she ran the oyster-shell and sand-covered alleys and ventured out on the city boardwalks and the docks from time to time. She moved often, always dodging police and relief workers and society types, who would have her caught and locked away. She slept in back kitchens, abandoned sheds, on splintered wood porches, and under houses.

  According to Harry, after her disappearance the Red Cross workers, convinced that he knew of her whereabouts, had hounded him. He sent word to her at Reena’s to stay away for a while. She had to avoid all people in positions of authority and even those who might have helped her, because she couldn’t tell the difference between them. Once, two men chased her, but she escaped through a small hole in a crosshatched fence, where they couldn’t follow.

  Another time a pack of older boys gave her a long chase, even using their dogs to terrify her with their barking, but the dogs weren’t the kind that could follow her sce
nt. And still another close call came when four women from the Trinity Episcopal Church set out to find her, combing every backstreet and alley, offering pennies to anyone who would give them information, but she had foiled them, too.

  The girl grew and thrived and developed into a young lady, while keeping her existence as quiet as possible. With eyes her father had once said were the same gray blue as seawater on overcast days and long bright hair, she had gone from a pretty girl to a striking young lady. And when her shape changed, the manner in which people, particularly men, observed her changed, too.

  Once she was chased by two police officers all over the ward and finally down an alley, where she was forced to stop. Ahead, the alley was blocked by a wagon loaded with crates. No longer as slight as she had been only a few months before, she couldn’t slip to either side of it.

  As she backed up against the wagon, her chest heaving, the two policemen, holding clubs in their hands, approached her step by step. So utterly exhausted, so tired, so consumed with the struggle to stay free, she considered giving in to it. Giving up. Let them do as they wanted with her. Hiding was too much work.

  As she softened, so did one of the policemen. She looked him squarely in the face and saw that he was young, only a boy, probably about eighteen years old, probably still in training. He had sandy-colored hair, brown eyebrows, and a face as open and filled with tenderheartedness as her brother Anson’s had once been. He set his club down on the ground without a sound and then gave her a nod that seemed to say he meant her no harm.

  The other officer—the older one—said, “It’s time to quit your running now. Let us help you,” and took a step closer.

  The young one said nothing but simply held her gaze. There was a peaceful air about him and something inviting about simply going with him. Surrender had a certain draw, a certain serenity, like the depths of the ocean. She came close in that moment, so close. She heard herself take a long deep breath and let it out.

  But then the older policeman stepped forward. It seemed he knew he was nearing his goal; he had won. He had succeeded where others had failed, and the slightest of smiles played on his lips. “We’ll take you into the station, but only for a little stay. We have food. Lemonade.”

  The young officer’s eyes pleaded with her to listen.

  The other one said, “We’ll find a place for you. Don’t you worry.”

  A place for her?

  In that instant, the girl’s hands balled into fists. The spell broke. Her determination returned, and she grabbed it tightly and held it inside her closed hands.

  No telling where they might take her. She had to be able to run and swim and move about at will. None of them, not even this tenderhearted young officer, could promise her that.

  Within a split second she was gone. Slithering under the wagon against the gritty ground was not easy, but on the other side sang freedom.

  After that she started wearing boy’s knickers and shirts and tucking her distinctive red hair up under an old straw hat so that people who didn’t know any better assumed her to be a poor urchin boy slipping in and out of the shadows of Galveston, as elusive as smoke.

  But at fourteen she was old enough to begin thinking about the future. Life was good for now, but as she got older, what would become of her? Harry Gobinet had found work along the docks and in the warehouses, but only men worked there. Sometimes she and Harry sat on the edge of a pier and watched the sunset after he got off work, and she could tell he was worried about her future, too.

  “You cain’t go on running and hiding,” he had said once a couple of years earlier.

  The girl had shrugged.

  “If I ever get a boat again, I might go away from here.”

  She grabbed his arm and peered pleadingly into his eyes.

  He looked away, squinted into the sun bleeding across the horizon, then glanced back at her. “You could always go with me. How does that sound?”

  Adamantly the girl shook her head.

  “That so? You don’t want to leave here ever?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Ever?”

  Again she shook her head.

  Harry gazed back toward the sun and sighed. “It’s no matter anyhow. I’m saving, but don’t look like I’ll have boat money for a long, long time.”

  That day, he gave her some coins and bought her an ice cream, but there was nothing else he could do. His eyes showed worry, but there was nothing to be done about that, either.

  She had hours to lie awake at night and ponder her possibilities. And during those quiet endless nights, she allowed herself to daydream. Not since before the storm had she done so. Fear had kept her too occupied, but now that was easing. Since the police episode several months earlier, no one had snooped around in a while. Perhaps they had finally given up.

  She drifted along on currents of daydreams that involved a kindred spirit: an imagined teenaged boy who also could not speak in words. He would be cute and kind. It mattered not if he was Negro or white, only that they would understand each other, and he would be loved by Reena, Madu, and Harry—her new family. Maybe someday she and the boy would get their own place together. Maybe Reena would teach her how to cook. Maybe Harry would teach the boy about the seas. Maybe they would love each other in the way that her mother and father had loved each other. Maybe she and the boy would bestow upon each other voices that only the other could hear.

  Chapter Ten

  GRACE

  I thought I had arisen early, but by the time I finished eating breakfast in the small dining hall by myself and instructed the maids to have Seamus bring around a carriage, the clock in the main floor hallway was already chiming the nine-o’clock hour, my appointed time to meet with the Reverend Ira Price, the exactor of my punishment, handpicked by my mother. By all accounts, he was a stern man, but I was determined not to appear ashamed, overwrought, or downtrodden. I would do as my mother pleased, because in truth I had no choice in the matter.

  I gathered my parasol and hat, picked up my skirt, and almost ran out of the house, not caring whom I disturbed, or about the curiosity I would arouse in those who might be happening by on Broadway. Everyone in our circle knew the story anyway, and I no longer cared. I had done a stupid thing simply out of spite, and now the boom had come down on me. The last thing I wanted was sympathy, even from Jonathan.

  Immediately after my mother had informed me of my penance, I began asking around and thus had already learned many things about Ira Price. He was a Yankee, from Philadelphia, who had come in search of a needy community. He believed that the upcoming grade-raising project would be hardest on the poor, most of whom would likely have no place to go while their homes were lifted and the land was filled in. This would particularly hurt the Negroes of our alleys, who lived such threadbare existences anyway; therefore, he had set up a headquarters down in the worst of it, in Ward Five; he was, in particular, seeking to help those who lived in Fat Alley and Tin Can Alley. Friends of mine who’d met Ira Price assured me that he was a nice enough gentleman, but Larke, who had attended a lecture of his, told me that he’d made reference to the virtue of promptness several times while speaking, all to the embarrassment of two young men who had come in late.

  And now I was going to be tardy on the first day of my servitude. In the carriage, I said to Seamus, “Please, let’s take our leave. You know where I am to go?”

  Seamus cracked the reins. He drove the carriage up to the front door of a small building facing Avenue D, past intrigued and amazed faces, eyes studying the carriage, peering for a look inside the windows. After I told Seamus there was no need to assist me further, I stepped out on my own.

  And then the sights and smells assaulted me. On the corner was a two-story grocery store, including a meat market on the front, and down the street sat a cobbler’s shop and a wood-sawing shop, a lime warehouse, and an old hotel. Canopies extended over the walkways, under which people stood and watched the happenings on the street. I could smell
rotting bananas and bad fish, raw meat, horse manure, and overwhelmingly, the odor of people who lived in too close of proximity to each other.

  I’d never given much thought to the poor before. In truth I’d simply pretended that poverty didn’t exist. In my art I sought only to re-create the lovely and sublime. Now poverty and ugliness were screaming in my face. Attempting to squelch my nausea and to quiet the flipping fish in my stomach, I entered the one-story building to find Ira Price.

  No one had told me that he was still on the younger side, probably only about thirty years old. I had imagined a tall, frail, gray-haired gentleman, stern of face, with glasses pushed down on his nose, with whom I might share heated discussions about Darwinism that affronted his sense of the religious truth. Mother and I attended church regularly and adhered to the doctrine, but I’d read The Origin of Species, although it was forbidden in school, and it fascinated me. I didn’t know if I completely believed Darwin’s theories. But what I most liked about the idea of evolution was the proposal that all life had emerged from the sea, fins and flippers becoming the precursors of arms and legs that allowed a creature to crawl up onto the soil. As always, life is never satisfied with what it has and longs to expand.

  Instead of matching my preconceptions, however, the Reverend Price was a bit on the heavy side, built solidly, like an overstuffed leather chair. Dressed in tweeds, he had some orange-smelling pomade combed into wavy, unassuming brown hair, and his beard was curled along the chin line. His cheeks were round and shaved and looked sunburned. He wore spectacles trimmed in gold wire, round discs set directly over the eyes, reflecting the light, making it difficult to catch his gaze directly.