Hadley started to get that uneasy feeling that he only ever got when he and Dickie were alone. No! I won’t do it. I won’t feel sorry for someone like Dickie Worther-Holmes. Even if Dickie had been pushed into marrying Lucinda, he’d still gotten himself one hell of a compromise. He was rich and handsome and lived in a big house. He drove the best cars and drank the best scotch. He slept every night with Lucinda. Hadley experienced a momentary sense of relief. Social injustice for a man like Dickie Worther-Holmes still meant that Dickie came out on top. So long as Dickie was on top, Hadley could cling to his sense of resentment like a baby blanket rubbed soft from year after year of needy handling.
“We did a bang up job on the salt box, didn’t we, Crump?” Dickie said, nodding at the newest radio. It was typical of Dickie to say “we” when really Hadley built the radio, and Dickie just sat there burping. Hadley turned his chair so he wouldn’t have to look at him anymore.
“I hope Quindora did okay for herself.”
Hadley clenched his fists under the table. He wished Dickie would just go on and pass out like he sometimes did, but the man was strangely bushy-tailed tonight. “She washes for Mr. Buckley now.”
“Washes?” Dickie said, as though Hadley had just informed him that she’d popped up dead in the river. “Now that’s a gosh damned shame. That woman had a real way with a needle.”
“Yes she did,” Hadley agreed. Whenever he pictured Quindora, he saw her with a mouth full of pins, and a yellow tape measurer looped around her neck. “She wanted to make dresses.”
Dickie stared at his knuckles. “A gosh damned shame,” he said.
###
On Wednesday, Hadley was engaged in an all-out battle with a bad case of Crown Gall when Lucinda marched into the backyard dressed for the seashore and unfolded a beach chair next to where he was working. She had a book in one hand (How to Diet Your Hips Off) and a bottle of Coca-Cola in the other, and it took her a full minute for her to wiggle her behind into a comfortable place on the chair. Not that Hadley noticed. He had his diseased roots to keep him busy.
“You’re looking awfully sweaty over there, Mr. Crump,” she said.
The fact that Hadley wasn’t sweaty in the least until all that wiggling started was certainly typical enough. What wasn’t typical was the way he was able to turn his attention elsewhere without any trouble at all. He was, in fact, so fuming mad at himself for putting in an infected plant, he was only dimly aware of Lucinda’s new skin-tight tank suit.
“The wisteria is under attack,” he told her. “I’m going to have to pull all this out and make a fresh start of it.”
He went off to fetch a shovel and didn’t return until sunbathing time was over.
###
All week long, Hadley thought about Flora and wished for an opportunity to visit her at the colored library. He passed it once on his way to J.C. Penney’s to pick up curtain rods, but there wasn’t time to stop. When Sunday finally rolled around, he went out to the garden shed and mixed up the perfect shade of blue. It was two parts the color of a robin’s egg and one part the color of Flora Gibb’s dress the last time that he’d seen her. He dipped a brush in the bucket to test it and painted the back of a rock dress-blue. It was just right.
After church, he set off across town with his paint bucket and a big fistful of Johnny Jump-Ups. “Johnny Jump-Ups are a symbol of happy thoughts,” he told Flora when he gave her the yellow bouquet.
“Have you been having happy thoughts?” she asked.
“Yes I have. I’ve been thinking of you all week.”
Mr. Gibbs gave the paint a stir with his finger and held it up to the wall. He must have liked the color because he said, “I’m making creamed peas & eggs for lunch. We’d be happy if you’d join us, Mr. Crump.” He wiped his finger on his pants and disappeared into the kitchen.
Hadley stared at the first wall. “What message should we put on the wall before we make it blue?” he asked Flora.
“Message?”
Hadley tapped the brush handle against his chin as he carefully considered his blank canvas. “It’s sort of a tradition I’ve started. A few years ago, a painter did some work at Browning House, and he let me do a kitchen wall on my own. At the time, I was mad at a friend of mine for cheating at Crokinole so I put something nasty about him on the wall before I painted it. LOOMIS SACKETT IS A NO GOOD DIRTY ROTTEN CHISLER.
“I can’t tell you how satisfying it was for me, and anyway, it was the gosh awful truth. After that, every time I got peeved at Loomis, all I need do was look at that yellow wall, and I’d have to laugh a little. Of course, I don’t live at Browning House no more, but my secret still does. I’ve got a message at Wisteria Walk, too.” It wasn’t polite to say what that message was, though. “Get a brush, Flora. You have to help me with this.”
“I thought I was banned from painting?”
“It doesn’t have to be neat.” Hadley lifted himself up on the balls of his feet and wrote his name as high as he could in concise expert strokes.
Meanwhile, Flora welded her paintbrush like it was a knife. “You sure you trust me with this thing?”
To be on the safe side, Hadley stepped back.
Flora wrote her name in drippy splats about six inches under Hadley’s.
Between their names, he squeezed in the word “thinks.”
Flora read the wall aloud. “Hadley thinks Flora . . . ”
She wrote two letters after her name, dribbling paint on her feet: “i” and “s”.
Hadley began a new word, making these letters bigger and bolder than all the rest. The first he painted was a big blue “B”. Flora stood back and watched him work. It was a long word, and Hadley took his time with it. When he was done, he moved clear so she could read the whole big bird-egg blue thing.
“Beautiful?” she exclaimed. “Lordy be. No one has ever called me beautiful before.”
“Well, if ever you get to doubting it, just look at this here wall. Unless you decide to scrape off the blue, it’s gonna be here for all of time like a little reminder. A reminder that there’s a fella walking around out there who knows how beautiful you are.”
He started to paint the top corner of the wall, but Flora grabbed his arm. “Hold on, Hadley. I want to look at my message a little longer before it becomes a secret.”
###
In the centre yawned the circular pit from whose jaws I had escaped; but it was not the only one in the dungeon...
~ The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe
Hadley was proud of himself. Over the course of two weeks time, he’d survived rape, incest, and a pact with the devil with an uncommon amount of aplomb. To be on the safe side, though, he didn’t congratulate himself until he turned the final page of The Monk. It officially became a worthy accomplishment then. Hadley didn’t touch Lucinda once.
“I think I’d like to read The Arrow of Gold next,” he told her, when at long last the temptations of The Monk were past.
Lucinda was predictably abhorred. “Dear God, why? It sounds hideously boring.”
“It’s very popular, Lucinda. Never mind, I’ll read it on my own.” The Arrow of Gold seemed like just the ticket after two weeks spent in a lurid triangle with a lust-crazed priest and Lucinda’s pink fingernails running down his arm.
“Since when do you read books on your own, Hadley?”
“Since tonight, when I start The Arrow of Gold.”
Lucinda wiggled in next to him on the window seat. “Will you never forgive me, darling?”
“Sure,” Hadley said. “You’re forgiven. What’s next on the list?”
“Candide. I’ve read ahead, and it’s delicious. The chambermaid, Paquette, gives syphilis to a gentleman called Pangloss.”
“Nice,” Hadley said, half-heartedly, because he really didn’t long to read dirty passages with her the way he used to.
Lucinda slapped at an old stain on his knee. “Pangloss is a philosophical man, yet he foolishly forgot the most important rule
of all: An aristocrat should never lie down with the lower classes.”
Hadley saw no point in remarking on this. He opened Candide and began reading it out loud, fully resigned to the torture that lie ahead. He hadn’t stopped wanting Lucinda, of course, and he reckoned he never would. In recent weeks, however, he’d gotten better at keeping his feelings to himself. If he wasn’t mistaken, she didn’t like it so awful much now that he’d learned to hold his horses.
The previous Sunday, she’d snatched up his hands when he came in from Flora’s and proceeded to feverishly examine his cuticles. “Whose house have you been painting?” she demanded to know.
“It’s my day off, Lucinda. I don’t have to tell you nothing.”
Lucinda threw his hands away in disgust. “You’re a wicked man, Hadley Crump. I hate you!”
It smarted a little, hearing that, but it was just as well. As Hadley fell into Candide, he said a silent prayer that someday he’d build up a strong immunity to dirty books.
###
“In olden days, the arrival of the painter was cause for big celebration,” Hadley explained on Sunday while adding another coat of blue paint.
“I can believe that,” Flora said. “Ever since you started painting, Daddy’s been celebrating with an old bottle of Guckenheimer’s he was saving for a special occasion.”
Hadley had strong notions about the effects of paint color on a home. The right shade of color could add spice, bring harmony, or make a man want to put a bullet in his head. The color he used in the sunroom tinted everything from skin to sunlight a soft hydrangea blue.
“I think the walls of a home say a lot about a person,” Hadley said. “For instance, choosing red paint for this room announced to everyone what a game young woman you are, Flora. You aren’t afraid to try new things, even if they are uncomfortable. Maybe your daddy’s reaction to all that red was really more a fearful reaction to your independent nature. Maybe painting the porch blue is his way of trying to go back to a safer time when you were still his little girl.”
Hadley’s ears got hot when he saw how closely she was listening. “Then again, maybe he just likes blue.” He shrugged and laughed at himself. “Sorry, Flora. Gardeners have a lot of time on their hands to think.”
“Actually, you might be onto something there. My mama liked everything sunny yellow and that suited her to a T.”
Flora sure did look beautiful with hydrangea tinted skin.
“What color are your walls, Hadley?”
“White. White’s the safest color for folks like me who are afraid to make a choice.”
###
The subject of color came up again the following Sunday when Hadley and Flora started Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Hadley hadn’t ventured out in public with Flora since the day they had coffee at the High Point diner. Mama insisted that no one would ever guess his “dual nature,” but Hadley listened to the radio every day. Shoot, if Lucinda’s maids cleaned half as well as they gossiped, they’d have polished the knobs off the doors long ago. Every time a Negro came to ill, Hadley got an earful one way or another.
“What do you think of people who are part white and part Negro?” he asked Flora. They were sitting side-by-side on the porch swing, holding hands in the place where the folds of her dress bunched up against his pants leg.
Flora was sniffing the chrysanthemum he’d brought from Wisteria Walk. “That’s a funny question.”
“Well? Do you like them?”
“Let me see, I like myself so I guess I do like them.”
Hadley looked closer at Flora’s caramel brown skin. It was much darker than his own, but it was pale compared to Tilly’s. It was the color of a candy apple when she blushed. “Was your mama a white woman, Flora?”
“No, but her mama was. Does that bother you?”
“Not me, no.” Hadley tugged on the rusted links that attached the swing to the roof. There was a grinding sound coming from somewhere and every time they swung forward, the chain objected. “Does it bother you, Flora?”
“My mother had a hard way to go. Someone set her family’s house on fire the day they passed the White Drop Rule.”
The chain whined as Hadley moved the swing back and forth with his foot. “That’s sad.”
“Why did you ask me about this?”
Hadley had been dreading this for weeks. He hadn’t known Flora long, but he couldn’t imagine his life without her. “My daddy is a white man.”
“Well then, I see.” Flora pressed the flower to her nose and closed her eyes. “I’m disappointed.”
Hadley closed his eyes, too. “I should have told you right off. I know that. But . . . ”
How could he explain? It wasn’t right to put a nice girl like Flora in danger when she didn’t even know she was in danger, but he didn’t want to lose her.
Flora gave him a little thump. “I will not take but for an answer,” she growled. “That’s what Mr. Langston Hughes always says.”
“I’m awfully sorry.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t like you, is that it?”
“People never look at me the same way once they know the truth. Happens every time.”
“Listen to me.” She turned him by his chin so they were stuck there face to face. “I’m not disappointed that you’ve got a white daddy, and I understand why you’d be hesitant to tell people the truth. I’m just disappointed that you couldn’t tell that I’d never use something like that to hurt anybody.”
“You mean you’re not gonna kick me out of your life?” he asked.
“Not for that, Hadley. Never for that.”
Hadley wanted to kiss her worse than ever, and yet, now that the cat was out of the bag, he needed to know that she understood the ramifications of what he was telling her. It was one thing to live your life without judgment, another to live in a world that was full of it.
“This is no small thing, Flora. I’ve had rocks thrown at me, it makes some folks so mad when they see a white Negro walking down their street. There are men out there who would kill me for sitting on this swing with you if they knew about my white side.”
Flora nodded bravely. “You’re just going to have to learn to trust me. I know real trust takes time to grow, but if you give me a chance, you’ll find I’m up to it.”
“I know,” he said. “You’ve got apple-slice ears.”
Flora touched her ears and blushed.
“My mama believes you can tell all there is to know about a person’s character by their ears. Apple-slice ears indicate a trust-worthy and upright soul.”
“So when do I get to meet your mama anyway?” Flora asked.
Hadley ran a finger around the edge of her ear. “Do you want to meet her?”
“Now what do you think? She’s the one who made you, isn’t she?”
“According to my mama, making babies ain’t nothing special in our family. Everyone does it.”
Flora held up her chrysanthemum. “What’s this mean?”
“Truth,” he said.
“I like the sound of that.” Flora popped up off the swing so quick, he was sent flying. “Stay put, now. I made us a treat.” She slid the flower over her apple-slice ear and ran inside the house.
Hadley had learned that Flora wasn’t a girl to carry on about things that couldn’t be helped. Her biggest flaw was his saving grace: Flora took to every adventure with a chipper sense of faith.
“Here you go,” she said. She handed him the palm tree spoon and a little red bowl of applesauce.
“What’s on yours?” Hadley asked, as he slurped the treat off his special spoon. Flora was eating with a little spoon too.
“Davy Crockett.”
He turned her hand so he could see it. A wilderness man stood before the silver-plated mountains of Tennessee with applesauce running down his legs. “How’s he taste?”
“Yummy. And your palm tree?”
Hadley gleefully popped Florida into his mouth. “It’s even better than I thought it w
ould be.”
###
The following week, Hadley invited Flora to go on a picnic and meet his mama. “I could skip First Street Meth if you’d like and go to church with you?” Flora offered.
Hadley tried to picture himself walking into Rocky Bottoms with a girl. He could hear the sound of a hundred asses turning in their seats to look at Flora. Bottomites traditionally spoke their minds in church. Each and every Sunday was a revival. When Edgecomb Nagle brought that creole lady a few weeks after his wife died, there was nearly a riot. As a general rule of thumb, you didn’t want to subject a person to the scrutiny of Rocky Bottoms unless you were mating for life.
“I think we best stick to meeting Mama for now.”
As it turned out, the Reverend Blackmon chose this particular Sunday to join the Young Men’s Bible Study at the park for some spareribs and horseshoes after he finished up preaching. Once the YMBS spotted Hadley with Flora, the jig was up. More than a few horseshoes were thrown off course by the gawking men of the bible group.
Mama gave them the evil eye and shook her finger at Wilkee Brown who was staring worse than all the rest. “Stop judging that you may not be judged; for with what judgment you are judging, you will be judged; and with the measure that you are measuring out, they will measure out to you.”
Hadley gave Mama the evil eye. “Huh?”
“Matthew 7:1-3.”
The study group was picnicking under the pavilion officially known as The Mami Thomas Pavilion. Unofficially, it was called The Negro Tables. Hadley had spread his tablecloth nearby on the picnic grounds. Everything was going fine with Mama and Flora until Mama decided to take her bread crusts down to the pond for the ducks, and the reverend cornered her near the water.
“You got to forgive all the staring,” the reverend said to Mama. “But tensions are running high right now. Didn’t young Hadley hear about that nigger over in Doddsville who got hanged for asking a white woman in marriage?”
The Reading Lessons Page 18