The Reason for Time

by Mary Burns

  The recollection of my dawdling there on Prairie Avenue surprises me, I have to confess. Yet it is true I enjoyed the tweet of birds hidden in the branches above me. The rhythm of a hammer pounding not far off gave a kind of comforting order to the hour. Music, too, a piano, maybe a girl practicing the same over and over, scales. I dreamed then that when we married we would buy a piano for our children, and on a summer day I would step outside and listen to them playing simple melodies rivaled the songs of the thrush for their beauty. This got me going again, and once up, the vague image of those piano-playing children quickened my pace, for there’d be no wedding if no man to marry. And if I favored one foot the further I went, it was not the foot preoccupying me.

  §

  Used to be brick, and some of the yellow limestone mansions, one after another all along Prairie Avenue, the grandest set into lawns surrounded by iron fences, others closer together and nearer the sidewalk. Them houses used to be just for one family and all their hired help. But less than two years since Margaret ran off, a passel of them’d been turned into hotels and rooming houses. One with a sign, Risk Hotel, would a raised a smile if it’d been that kind of day. The risk of what? Bugs maybe or something worse, but to advertise it, as if proud, made you wonder what kind of body would ever want to rest there.

  The neighborhood changed from block to block. Soon came the stink of wax and dead animal hides from a boot maker, while across the street, people shouted from what had to be a gambling den, given the pair of dice painted on the blacked out window, smoke from cigarettes ribboning out the open door, someone in there bellowing as if there’s nothing to worry about as long as the dice rolled his way. Music from a storefront tavern. “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” the tune, and didn’t it remind me of my first date with Desmond and the upstairs ballroom from where the same song drifted down. A box factory, too, still running. I could hear the thwack of machines from a door didn’t need a sign, them boxes stacked outside saying all was needed to be said about the purpose of the industry inside.

  On a corner, further south on Prairie Avenue, two buxom ladies wearing the bright colors and lower necklines, the piled high hair and gaudy necklaces you see in stories of girls gone bad. These ladies were coffee skinned and when they called out to me, I understood the tone, fun-making, but the words were buried in deep-south accents I could barely understand, though I’d heard similar, in Florida. I did make out the word roses, though, pink roses, and I knew they were remarking my hat, actually Margaret’s hat. I paid them no mind, for in the distance—not so far along I couldn’t see it—Mercy Hospital, famous because hadn’t the authorities installed President Teddy Roosevelt there after someone tried to assassinate him? A hospital for white people, Mercy, and had Desmond been driven there, instead of the hospital known to be for coloreds, still ten blocks ahead, I would be where I wanted to be and the next would not have been so trying.

  The sun climbed to its highest, its hottest. Dazed, stomping on dogs might as well a been dead they were that numb. Words on signs entered my eyes naturally as light—apron factory, lamp shade maker, steam laundry, taxi yard, stables with an arrow pointing down an alley and the predictable stench of piss-soaked straw. Auto cushions, a little grocery with boxes and cans of foods in the window. Not much, nobody wanted to make deliveries to the Black Belt, said the papers, and not surprising so since a white peddler on his cart’d been shot somewhere not far from here. Didn’t I hope I would see no blood on the street. A child scrambling out the door of the little shop crossed my path, a colored child, barefoot, in short pants but with no shirt to cover shoulders round and burnished as oft-turned brass doorknobs. He ran, then disappeared into one of the skinny buildings with paper signs in the window advertising rooms for rent.

  Mercy Hospital next with its peaked gables and arched windows and shade trees along the walk in front. Policemen in groups of two or three at each side of Prairie, checking motor and horse traffic, and at the main door of the hospital, a doughboy with a rifle standing guard meant Mayor Thompson’d given in to the governor, and the newsies had it right about the troops helping out. If this’d been my destination, I would a had no fear of entering, not with that solider at the door. But, no, I had to leave the less magnificent here, but still quieter Prairie Avenue for Wabash, then State Street, to get to that corner of Dearborn where he lay.

  The shouts of two white boys on opposite corners, one with the Trib, one with the Examiner, comforted me for the familiarity of the sound of young voices bellowing, though the news had got no better, or much newer, in the hours had passed.

  WHOLE POLICE FORCE IS ON RIOT DUTY!

  AUTHORITIES SAY SITUATION IS IN HAND!

  BATTLES START UP AT NIGHT!

  I had not gained more than a couple of blocks past Mercy when I heard a sharp noise, could a been an automobile—they were always after blowing up back then—but that day, in that week, it was more certainly a gunshot. Not that I’d heard gunshots often. Cannons, yes, for celebration, and once, in Florida, someone firing a rifle at some wild animal. Too, the sad sound of a report back of Uncle Thomas’s house the day he had to shoot his only horse on account of her having gone lame, too lame to get herself out to the grass. Me inside the house, biting my lip because I knew he had to do it, but she was the only horse I’d ever climbed onto the back of, and though she’d only walked around a bit, it never took much of my healthy imagination to think myself Maeve of the faeries and us riding through the sky. Just a wee one I was then.

  It may be only because I am looking back I think it was a gunshot I heard on Prairie Avenue, the way you do when knowledge and experience work on memory. But whatever I thought it was stopped me. Stock still I stood there on Prairie Avenue. There were others on the street, a few, and they started running and someone hollered at me, “Better get out of here, miss.”

  Across Prairie, hand on my head, to steady the hat, I trotted down a street to the side, where I heard more gunshots—no mistaking them a second time—and the clanging bells of police cars driving as fast as they could. Yet closer, and strange, considering, the ragtime music would make you want to tap your feet some on some other occasion. Did the player not realize all going on outside his tavern or the bawdy house, whatever it might be? With the danger around me I had to find some kind of shelter, and picked out what looked like the entry of a store. From there, crouching in the shadow of an overhang, I saw a crowd of boys—they were boys with skin pale as mine, whipped by too fast for me to count, suspenders flying off the backs of some of them, many with their cloth caps, others in the fedoras men wore. Yelling, most of them, a terrible ruckus coming from their crowd. One throwing rocks I believe he must have taken from his pockets, aiming at whatever target seemed likely, maybe chasing someone, and then didn’t I want to turn around and go back to the Marquette Building or Bridey’s, somewhere safe? But how, how? And if I went back, would I ever find out about Desmond? More noticeable, too, were the grisly billows from fires rioters’d set. My nose stung and my face needed mopping. I opened the door of whatever enterprise I stood outside of and stepped inside. No store, though, only stairs leading up, and looking down, fright on her face, same as fright must’ve been on mine, a colored lady in a flowered yellow wrapper, as startled to see me, as me to see her.

  “Watch’all doin’ here? You getch yerself out ’fore you cause some trouble, white girl.”

  A rustling came from behind her then and another lady, bigger in size, also dressed in a wrapper, but a red one with black lace around the throat, and her hair straightened to twirl into an arrangement made her appear an Amazon queen like any you would a seen on the cover of a Tarzan book—though it’s true I was looking up and maybe she only seemed tall from my angle. Her lips full, rouged with something made them shiny, and that smaller woman in yellow moving behind her, letting her take over. While the lady in red did not invite me in, her voice had more kindness in it, so.

  “Y’all be ca
reful, honey. You keep yourself hid under your big ol’ garden hat and nobody’ll bother you. But you stay away from Walgreens, hear? Where those big mobs get together? Just stick to the side streets you gonna be all right. I don’ know where you belong but it ain’t here. You better get yourself on.”

  That voice of hers, lazy, even in the circumstances. Creamy like the cocoa the sisters would fix us at Christmas, when we got as many oranges as we could eat and sometimes a letter’d traveled from Ennis all the way to Florida and we’d read it again and again. That’s how I remember that lady, kind in her way, despite who she was, should a scandalized me. I should a been outraged to a stumbled into such a house, or maybe they were ordinary women wearing wrappers because they’d slept late, and the tall one’d started the day by putting on her makeup. She was a woman, anyhow, and had enough softness in her I wanted to shelter there until the trouble ended, or forever, and have her bathe my feet and offer me something cool to drink. But I didn’t say anything nor put so much as a toe on the stair leading up.

  “Go on,” she said, shooing me. “Git!” and I saw why when a man wearing no more than a soiled undershirt over his bare brown chest, and a hat, a straw fedora, raced past me, taking the stairs two, even three at a time, and the light streaming in with the open door flashed on something silver—a razor, a knife? She shooed me away for my own protection. But where to go?

  §

  Sign full of holes said Thirtieth Street, meaning six blocks more to walk before I reached Provident Hospital. Side streets not like the Chicago I knew at all, with buildings so important they had names, like a person—Marquette Building, Monadnock Building—and rose higher than a normal person’s eyes could reach. No, here stood narrow bungalows of wood or brick set on small lots, some nicer than others, painted, and with fences matched the railings ’round the porch. That’s the best of what this poor road offered. The worst consisted of simple bare boards, flimsy doors shut up despite the heat. In front of one had its parlor windows broken out, household belongings tumbled together on that patch of dirt and yellow weeds passed for a garden. Mixed in with the bushes against the house foundation, shirts and briefs spilling out an enamel basin, a simple chair on three legs, a pair of men’s shoes held together by the laces, a washboard. Down the block some front porches sagging, and a couple of children on one, others empty.

  Except for them two small heads I saw above the porch rail, there was no one out on this street, but people had to be inside the broken houses, and I feared someone watched me from behind them whole, and also shattered, windows and I walked faster. If I could a shut my eyes and still walk I would a done it, for hadn’t I gone and got myself into a situation bad as I’d ever been in and there was nothing for it but to continue, and I thought of praying and did pray, the way you do when it’s the first thing surfaces in your mind, before you think about the good of it or if you even believe. It’s that natural to some of us, and so I acknowledged my sins and promised penance—if this was not it arriving uninvited.

  Then I was there, at Wabash, and hurried over without looking left or right to find the source of the yelling, came from how far off I wouldn’t know. I was not the only innocent out, but one of few, and no one else dared raise their heads to see what color face would greet them, for if there were others like me, and there were, sure—those light-skinned people from other countries, got to Chicago first, and resented the Negroes moving into the neighborhood—there were not many, and there I was about to head further south, where the blend of brown and white would begin to favor the darker of the two.

  I just had to slip across State, under the El track, and continue along to Dearborn. I had to do it same as crossing the endless ocean of water on the Mauretania. To get to where you wanted to be, you had to make the crossing and, so, waiting only for the now and again traffic braved South State—not even letting myself enjoy the bit of cool beneath the elevated—I hobbled over with my eyes down on the bricks made the street. One glance was enough to see the way was clear, but that one glance also showed me the big crowd a few blocks down on State, had to be gangs of Negro men, and policemen keeping them from getting out of hand, soldiers, too, in their brown uniforms, carrying rifles and standing firm along the edge of the street blocks down near the Walgreens drug store the big lady warned me about.

  I did not let myself enjoy the fact that I’d made it to the other side, but turned left once I’d got to Dearborn and passed houses so poor the three-flat Margaret and me called home looked like a Prairie Avenue mansion by comparison. Wasn’t everyone in the city got rich, but I’d never thought myself among the well off till I spied those clapboard excuses for dwellings, near bad as the poorest parts of Ennis. Pools of water in vacant lots, though it hadn’t rained for days or even weeks, and maybe sewage’d seeped there, smelled bad enough. Garbage, cats nosing after rats. Clothes hanging limp and dirty from lines strung across the distance between one porch and another, same as back of Bridey’s, but the nappies gray as if they’d never been washed at all.

  I’d not walked all this way to gawk and, in the smoke, dense as autumn fog, I could not see clear anyway. Throat burning it was, air worse than it ever got downtown and Lord help us if the wind changed direction and came from the west, gathering the stench of Bubbly Creek. Not that much wind blew, if I recall, and I do trust my recollections, because, for a while, I had the book where I wrote my notes—all of what came before that week in Chicago, then the airship crash to the Sunday and what transpired after. I skirted the actual event of the Sunday just as the pictures would skirt it with billowy clouds and lush music.

  I can see it now, my writing good as the nuns’d taught us. “He kissed me and then it happened, the thing that ensured we would be, were already, man and wife.” More than I needed to write, and all the gushing, too, about Anna Eva Fay. Came the time I didn’t want to be reminded of Anna Eva and of my sightings of the good people, because them, or magic or God, whatever it was, had forsaken me at the hour when I was most in need. Must have been the lying did it. All I’d invented and excused, on account of necessity, guaranteed I’d suffer in this world if not the next, and I’ll soon enough find out about that, having reached the age I have.

  Writing the week on paper firmed the memories in my brain, like photographs do. I had few of those, even if more in the years followed when the family took pictures for every occasion and I was always included in the one snapped when a new baby came home. Looking over those pictures I could tell which child it was only by the changes in my mug, a hair no one told me about growing out of my chin, or I would have plucked it, for it brought back an image of Bridey. I kept a magnifying glass to use with the paper and it would have worked just as well with the mirror, had I thought to use it with the tweezers. That hair, the fleshy sags beneath the corners of my mouth. The book then, what few photographs there were, and of course her, too, reminds me of everything without saying a word. These things support my recollections.

  §

  As grand as Mercy, Provident was not. Blockier so, with none of the peaked gables and arched windows of the bigger hospital well behind me, but a covered entrance all the same and it nearly as high, and as many armed men guarded it as the other, for, as I would find out when time and the quieting of my heart let me concentrate on the papers again, there’d been more of the storming going on, same as the Palmer House, a white mob looking for whites inside. Black mobs, too, but why they should siege their own hospital I never did learn. Did explain, though, why the doughboys in their brown, flat-brimmed hats and their long rifles stood in front, for the policemen in Chicago were none too popular with the coloreds and those didn’t know why found out later in news of the injustices done.

  Trouble’d been simmering since the month before when they never arrested any of the gang’d murdered two Negro men, right on the street, even though a white woman had witnessed the crime and told the papers as much. Nobody official ever paid the price for their wrongs,
but so went Chicago then, and so it may go now. It has been years and all since I visited Margaret on the Bluebird bus, and even if I could a made the trip and sat down with my sister and her husband—when Harry was alive—wouldn’t a been them set the record straight, for Harry in particular never thought much of the coloreds to begin with, and after the riot summer, things only got worse in his eyes.

  But, then, the second Wednesday of them ten days unforgettable, there I finally stood, near him who’d drawn me across the city, half on feet would never be the same—not that I could a bragged about their previous condition. I needed to catch my breath and freshen myself, hope for a washroom, or water from somewhere to drink and splash on my face felt red as a poker straight out of the fire.

  Here at last, and I let it flood, all the feeling the pictures and stories call love, warm and terrifying at once. Every bit I’d been holding back for the man inside. The hair rich in color as the most beautiful bay horse, them eyebrows made me smile with all they said, joking. The eyes themselves, including the one tended to wander, not such a deficit after all, for it’d kept him from the worst of the war. Them beautiful hands, long fingered, and the feel of his mouth so close to my cheek and the weight of him on me pressing down. Desmond, I’d whispered, and I whispered it again on the front step of Provident Hospital. Minutes away from seeing him, and I prayed—though God must have thought me a fickle one—prayed he’d be awake, the head injury maybe knocked him out eased enough by this day he could recognize her who’d made her way through the chaos to lay a loving hand on his cheek. Desmond.

  A hospital for Negroes, especially for Negroes, so what would I be doing there? ’Twas the first question asked me by the soldier at the entrance.