“Sarah, did you hear me?”
Miss Dunn was sitting primly on the bench at the front of the tiny basement room, which was barely bigger than the cabin she and Louvenia had left behind in Delta. Sarah liked Miss Dunn, and hated to hear her sound cross. Miss Dunn talked prettier than any colored woman Sarah had ever met—she was from up north, she’d told them, from a city called Phil-a-del-phi-a, where there had been no slaves before the war. Her hair was always pulled back tight behind her head in a bun, and the simple gingham dresses she wore were perfectly neat and clean. Miss Dunn was a very young woman, younger than some of the grown men and women who came to her class, and her cocoa-colored face looked as smooth as glass. If she ever smiled, Sarah thought, Miss Dunn would be truly beautiful.
“It’s your turn to read. Come on up here.”
“To … read … ?” Sarah said, nearly choking on the words. She sat frozen on her bench, and she heard two boys behind her snicker. Sarah shook her head. “N-no, ma’am, I can’t… .”
“No back-talking, Sarah. Everybody has a turn.”
Walking on legs that threatened to betray her at any instant, Sarah made her way to the front of the class. She glanced at the watching students; there were at least fifty of them of every age, from children younger than her to old men and women with gray hair who needed canes to walk, and they were all crammed on their benches with their eyes on her. Some of the students in the back, who’d arrived late, had to sit on the floor, and they shifted uncomfortably as they fanned themselves. Sarah couldn’t remember a time when so many people had been watching her.
And expecting her to read! She couldn’t read. That was the whole reason Sarah had asked Louvenia if she could take time off from her washing in the mornings to come to the school held every weekday in the basement of the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Washington Street. She told Louvenia she’d promised Mama, and Louvenia had asked their colored employer, Miss Brown, who said it was fine with her, so long as Sarah made up for the lost time in the evenings. Louvenia had told Sarah not to expect any fancy school clothes, so Sarah wore the same simple clothes she wore when she did washing and wrapped herself up a sandwich for lunch, which she kept in her lap. In this way, she’d been going to school each day, trying to pay close attention to every word Miss Dunn said.
Sarah loved school, much more than she had the few months she attended the Negro school in the woods not far from the fields when she was very little. Miss Dunn was a better teacher; her old teacher, Sarah remembered, could barely read herself, and she’d been painfully slow at her figures. But not Miss Dunn. Miss Dunn had been to a college, and she read without any pauses or having to sound out her words one letter at a time.
And Miss Dunn knew a wealth of information Sarah was sure her other teacher had not. She taught them about the battle in the Civil War that had taken place in Vicksburg before Sarah was born, and how people had hidden in the caves. If they looked carefully, Miss Dunn told them, they could still see the caves, trees that had been split by cannonballs, and even a few exploded bombshells. She taught them about the president of the United States, the leader of the country voted on in the election, whose name was Rutherford B. Hayes. He lived in Washington, D.C., which Miss Dunn had told them was a thousand miles away. And President Hayes was a Re-pub-li-can, she’d told them, which meant he was from the party that had fought to end slavery, just like the last president, Ulysses Grant, who had been the general of the Union Army that had come to invade Vicksburg.
In fact, every day it seemed Miss Dunn had a fascinating new piece of information to share that made Sarah realize how little she really knew about anything except cropping and washing. And Miss Brown, their employer, was always telling her and Louvenia they barely knew anything about washing, either. “Washing clothes in water straight from the river!” Miss Brown had exclaimed when they told her about their experiences in Delta. “That water wasn’t proper. Didn’t y’all see how gray and brown the clothes got? Might as well have been using bathwater!”
Sarah didn’t want to disappoint Miss Dunn, so her hands were shaking when Miss Dunn gave her a small square chalkboard and told her to read the first word written in white chalk. Although Sarah didn’t dare disobey, in that instant she felt she would rather run off and never come to school again than shame herself in front of Miss Dunn and the class.
With unblinking eyes, Sarah stared at the letters Miss Dunn had written on the board in neat block letters. S-K-Y. F-L-Y. M-O-R-N-I-N-G. She sighed and started to sound them out the way Miss Dunn was teaching them, beginning with the first letter, then blending the first letter to the second and third.
“Ssssss … kyyy?” she said at last, faintly.
“Louder, Sarah,” Miss Dunn prompted. “And don’t say it like a question.”
Sarah took a deep breath. Her fingers were so sweaty she was afraid she would drop Miss Dunn’s board and break it in two on the floor. “Sssss … kyyy.”
“Next word.”
“Ffffffff … lllyyy,” Sarah said.
“Next.”
The third word was a long one, with a lot of letters. “Mmmm … oooorrrn,” she said, then licked her dry lips.
“Go on,” Miss Dunn said.
“Mmmmmooorrrrn … ing?” Sarah said, relieved to be finished. She couldn’t help saying the word like a question, even though Miss Dunn had told her not to. The sounds felt awkward in her mouth, and she was sure Miss Dunn would correct her now that she’d finished.
But instead, her teacher was gazing at her with a tiny smile. Just as Sarah had suspected, the smile made Miss Dunn look angelic. “You see that? And you’ve been coming only a couple of months. You can too read, Sarah Breedlove, so read with confidence. Now go sit back down.”
You can too read, Sarah Breedlove. Drinking in Miss Dunn’s words, Sarah felt as if she’d been lifted from the floor and was floating high above the room. She didn’t remember walking back to her seat, because she kept turning the idea over and over in her head: You can too read, Sarah Breedlove. She was so ecstatic, she barely even heard one of the boys whisper “Li’l ol’ nappy-head, country pickaninny” as he walked past her. Usually his words would have upset her, but not today. Sarah sat, her heart trundling inside her chest with joy. Miss Dunn had said she could read! Was that all reading was? Sounding out the letters? She’d been doing that at home, borrowing Miss Dunn’s books.
She couldn’t wait to go tell Lou she was reading! Maybe she could teach Lou, too.
When Miss Dunn dismissed them for the day, Sarah practically ran up the widely set cobblestones on Washington Street, no longer cowed by the sight of so many people walking in a midday flood, or the parade of carriages and mule-drawn wagons that had shocked her so after she and Louvenia first came to the city. On cotton market day, despite the disappointing crops, there had been so many wagons with bales of cotton clogging Vicksburg’s streets that Sarah could see nothing else. She’d been nearly afraid to walk by herself, convinced she would get swallowed up in so much activity and chaos. And Washington Street, where the small church was nestled next to a colored eating-house called Dolly’s, was always in a flurry of excitement. She saw white folks and colored folks, men and women, some dressed in finery, some dressed in rags, everyone with fixed expressions as if they were on their way somewhere important.
There was also joy and relief in Vicksburg, since the shadow of last year’s epidemic of Yellow Jack had finally lifted. It had seemed to Sarah and Lou that as soon as they arrived in their new town, Yellow Jack enveloped them as surely as if it had followed them to create more heartache and terror in their lives. All over the city, reports of Yellow Jack had begun first as cautiously muttered fears, then as confirmed reports of mounting deaths. Killing white and colored alike, Yellow Jack had swept through Vicksburg until Sarah had seen wooden coffins piled up outside carpenters’ shops awaiting new corpses from the undertakers. Newsboys shouted out new death tolls each morning, the devil’s messengers. Sarah and Lou had le
ft their room only when necessary, avoiding contact with anyone who might give them Yellow Jack. At night, Sarah had woken up sweating from nightmares about Mama and Papa, reliving Papa’s hollow-eyed look as he sat on the front porch the day Mama died, and how Mama had retched up black sickness. By the end of the epidemic, which had lasted from July until November, Sarah heard that at least a thousand people had died from yellow fever in Vicksburg, and more in other parts of Mississippi.
But now that was over. Sarah’s nightmares had stopped, and Vicksburg had come to life with the promise of a new frontier. Sarah had noted that town folk walked faster than country folk, so she dodged out of the path of riders on horseback, men arguing over newspaper articles, browsers gazing into shop windows, or ladies strolling with parasols. Sarah especially liked the well-dressed colored hotel porters who smiled at her as she walked past, proud of their uniforms. Sarah wondered if Alex had worn a uniform, too, when he was a porter.
Carpenters carried lumber, draymen drove their loaded carts, and bricklayers stacked bricks onto new walls. Sarah had learned to enjoy Vicksburg’s sights and sounds, although she was sure to walk very carefully and steer clear of whites she might accidentally offend. If she accidentally splashed a shiny shoe with mud or brushed her shoulder against the wrong person, she had learned there were quick penalties. “Impudent little Negress!” an old white woman had practically spit at her two months before, when Sarah lost her balance and bumped against her. The woman lunged before Sarah could utter an apology, flinging her handbag across Sarah’s cheek so hard that Sarah wondered if she was bleeding. “Never thought I’d live to see the damned streets full of niggers.”
Miss Dunn had already explained that the colored population of Vicksburg was swelling as more sharecroppers and their families sought better lives in the city because of poor cotton crops. Whites didn’t like it, she said, because now Negroes weren’t competing only with each other for jobs, they were competing with whites, too. Folks were slow to change their thinking and ways, Miss Dunn said. She said salaries for Negro teachers were less than for white teachers, and they were still being lowered.
Sarah could tell by the sun above her that it was high noon—almost time for her to be back at Miss Brown’s—but she quickened her pace so she could walk a block west out of her way, to the wharves. The water had risen, as it did each spring, so the riverfront was even more intriguing to Sarah’s senses; she inhaled the briny, fish-scented air from the water and watched seagulls wheel in the skies and gather in noisy groups whenever fishmongers tossed away raw fish that weren’t fit to sell. She also enjoyed watching the sailors and their fascinating cargos of furniture, livestock, and large crates she imagined were filled with jewels or gold and silver.
Barely sated by her meager noonday meal of dried pork and corn bread, Sarah felt her stomach growl when she walked past the colored fish lady frying fish on an open fire on the street. The price was only a nickel, but Sarah rarely had money to spend. She and Louvenia spent practically everything they earned to pay their keep at the boardinghouse where they lived, which provided dinner and the room they shared. Anything extra was saved for hard times.
Lingering near the fish stand full of longing, Sarah finally noticed a crowd of young Negro men causing a flurry near the pier. Many of them had sacks slung over their shoulders, and they were fidgeting with excitement. “Who they?” Sarah asked the fish lady. She didn’t know the woman’s name, but they knew each other’s faces. In town, Sarah had learned, folks didn’t always greet each other by name but could still be friends.
The fish lady grinned, exposing her missing front tooth. “Goin’ off to Kansas, chile.”
“Where that is? That in America?”
“Sho is,” the fish lady said. She flipped over a catfish until the brown side was up, and the oil sizzled and popped seductively in her grill. “Kansas in what they call the Midwest. Men passin’ ’round papers talkin’ ’bout how pretty it is, an’ how much land they got. I speck those colored men think they gon’ get their forty acres an’ a mule at last. ’Fore that, it was a colored man, Reverend Collins, goin’ ’round talkin’ ’bout boats to Africa. Seem like folks wanna be everywhere but here. But white folks ain’t likin’ it. That’s how come there’s all the fuss.”
Sure enough, when Sarah looked more closely, she saw three white men standing in front of the group, apparently in the midst of a shouting match with two very large colored men. The sight nearly made her gasp; she’d never seen a colored man talk back to a white man. The boldness of the colored town men both excited and frightened her.
“What they care for?” Sarah said. “Seem like white folks don’t want us ’round nohow.”
“Sho, some of ’em don’t. But look like plenty of ’em do. They been writin’ ’bout it in the newspapers, callin’ it the Exodus. See, they figger if they ain’t got niggers to work for ’em, who gon’ do it?” With that, she cackled cheerfully, and Sarah smiled, too. “I hear ’em always talkin’ ’bout bringin’ them Chinese coolies over here to take the place o’ niggers. They say Chinamen don’t eat but once a day, and say niggers got too many complaints. But ’til that happens, I guess they stuck with us. Oh, Lord—we better keep a distance, chile.”
The rumble from the crowd turned to a roar, and Sarah took a frightened step back when she saw half a dozen white men rush toward the Negroes with sticks in the air. As shouts erupted, the white men began to strike at the Negroes, who either threw up their hands to try to defend themselves or immediately began to run and scatter. Although the turmoil was more than thirty yards away, Sarah clearly saw a Negro man knocked unconscious when a heavy stick landed squarely at his temple. A white man had hit him from behind. From where she stood, Sarah even saw a spurt of blood from the man’s head. At the instant of the impact, she’d felt all of her nerves pinch tight, as if she’d taken the blow herself. Her mouth fell open, soundless, as the man crumpled to the ground.
“You see that?” the fish lady said. “An’ the sheriff ain’t gon’ do nothin’ ’bout it, ’cept lock up what niggers they can find an’ say they’s vagrants. No suh, they don’t want us goin’ nowhere yet. Chile, you stand out here sellin’ fish long enough, you’ll see plenty o’ blood spillin’ in these streets. An’ you know the worst of it?” At this, the woman leaned closer to Sarah and spoke to her conspiratorially, and Sarah could smell the spruce gum on her breath. “I know a fella come back from Kansas cuz he missed his mama. He say there ain’t nothin’ out there for niggers, neither. The Promised Land ain’t nothin’ but promises, he say.”
Sarah realized her hands were shaking. Watching the Negro man lying motionless, unattended, it occurred to her that Alex might not have written to them because he’d gotten himself killed somewhere. She hoped the man on the street wasn’t dead.
“I don’t unnerstand …” Sarah whispered, near tears.
“What you don’t understand?”
“How come … they don’t want us to get nothin’?” Sarah said.
“What you said?” the woman said, cackling again. Her laugh, which had seemed pleasant to Sarah at first, had turned ugly to her ear. “Go find yo’self a mirror one day an’ take a look. You a nigger, that’s why. That’s all we ever gon’ be to white folks, cuz if we ever get sump’n, that’s less for them. You better learn that quick.”
But Miss Dunn and Miss Brown did have something, Sarah thought stubbornly. Miss Dunn was a schoolteacher, the smartest colored woman Sarah had ever met. And Miss Brown was a Prize Medal washerwoman with her own laundry business, and four women worked for her, including her and Louvenia. With that thought, Sarah suddenly realized that her diversion had made her late to work. Nothing made Miss Brown madder than workers who weren’t punc-tu-al, as she always put it. She’d told Sarah more than once that if she couldn’t make it back from school on time, she’d better stop going to school.
And nothing was going to stop Sarah from going to school. Nothing and nobody.
“I read three wo
rds today in class,” Sarah announced over her shoulder to the fish lady before she turned to run back toward Miss Brown’s house on Pearl Street.
“Good for you, chile! I read ev’ry newspaper that come out in Vicksburg,” the fish lady called after her. “You bes’ read, to keep up with the plans them white folks got for you!” Sarah could hear the woman’s cackling mingling with the seagulls’ cries and the curses of frustrated men even as she turned the corner and ran well into the next block.
America Brown was a woman with a heft to match the grandness of her name. She was the big kind of woman Sarah’s mama used to call meaty, with rolling thighs and a protruding backside underneath her bustles. She kept herself very neat, with a collection of two-piece, floor-length dresses called suits for each day of the week, the likes of which Sarah had never seen on a colored woman; her navy-and-sky-blue seersucker dress for Mondays, her rose-colored chambray dress for Tuesdays, and all through the week until she made her way to the gray cashmere dress with ornamental cords running across its length she wore on Sundays. The suits must have been special-made for her size, Sarah thought. And Miss Brown loved hats: she had a different hat to match each of her seven dresses.
Sarah was relieved Miss Brown wasn’t in sight as she slipped beside Louvenia in the oversize kitchen where the washerwomen worked. The room was steamy because of the two large cast-iron pots boiling over the stove fires, stirred by Miss Brown’s seventeen-year-old cousin, a gangly girl named Sally who worked in exchange for room and board.
Miss Janie, one of the other washerwomen, nodded at Sarah and went on with her wringing and scrubbing as water splashed in the tub and flies buzzed near her face. Miss Janie was older and had her own family, but she had trouble walking because of a bad leg; if not for that, she’d told Sarah and Lou, she’d go find her own customers instead of working for Miss Brown. Miss Janie had told them Miss Brown’s laundry business was making thirty-five dollars a month because she was so prized by her customers. Of that, Miss Janie got eight dollars a month because she had worked with Miss Brown for so long, but Sarah and Lou shared only five dollars a month between them. That was less than they would have made in Delta! But Sarah and her sister were grateful for the work, and Miss Brown had promised that if they continued to work hard, she would raise their pay soon.
The Black Rose Page 7