No matter. It was a successful partnership. With the profits the Dorseys got a new car and a kitchen stove, a new piano and long pale green silk curtains for the living room.
For two years I remained friends with the Dorsey family. I went to their house for every holiday. I went on a canoeing trip with them; the wind blew so hard that we gave up paddling, made camp on a sandbar, and waited to be picked up by the motor launch. I went to their university homecoming football game one November. I went to an Easter sunrise service way up in the hills, in a natural bald where the ground glittered with frost and the whole expanse of earth seemed to stretch away from my feet. If Christ had risen, I thought, it would have been from a place like this, not the rock and stone and twisted cedars of Palestine.
And one afternoon during my junior year, in his mother’s dyeing shed where I was coloring endless yards of cheesecloth for a school pageant, I seduced Tom Dorsey. I don’t know why. I did not find him particularly attractive. Certainly my heart did not race at the thought of his body; I did not smile to myself at the memory of his face. I think it was simple curiosity; I had never had a man. My mother had taught me about sex, its refinements, its amusements, its delights, but the trouble seemed scarcely worth it, until that afternoon when I decided to experiment and Tom Dorsey happened to be there. He’d been bragging about the women he’d had. Some, he hinted, were friends of his parents. “All right,” I said, stepping close to him, “show me.” He looked frightened, but because he was a man, however young, he had to agree. Within a few minutes I had demonstrated that I knew far more than he.
His parents found out. I suspect it was Tom himself who told them, either in contrition or an excess of machismo. The invitations stopped; I never entered their house again. Tom and I continued to meet, stubbornly determined. What had once seemed an adventure became a kind of duty, a chore. Winter cold ended our meetings. I think Tom was relieved. I know I was.
Some years ago, in St. Catherine’s Alumnae News (which comes regularly twice a year), I read that Thomas Dorsey married Alicia Parker. I remembered her: two years younger than I, a short fat giggling girl with fuzzy blond hair.
Because I was home only in the summer months, my impressions of my mother come in separate flashes, like photographs. They tell a story, to be sure, but without continuity. Run through the projector of my memory, the images move jerkily, imperfectly, like an old movie. Even so I could see a change in my mother’s world. Black and white were reversing themselves.…
My mother’s business grew. As the black community prospered, so did she. At her original shop, Mary Woods Modiste, the showings were crowded with eager buyers. Here she dressed the black debutantes, their mothers and grandmothers. Here she planned the big expensive black weddings. She insisted on doing the entire thing herself, bride and bridesmaids, flower girls and ring bearer, the mother of the bride, the mother of the groom. It must all go together for the right effect, she said. She even designed the bouquets and the flowers for the church. (David owned the florist shop.) Her veils were particularly elaborate, with half a dozen different kinds of lace and seed pearls and masses of fresh flowers to be sewn on at the last minute.
Now, the summer of my last year of high school, my mother opened a new shop, the most ambitious one of all. It was on LaFreniere Square, one of those historical districts which are remodeled ever so carefully according to nineteenth-century blueprints and plans. There was an iron-fenced park in the center: very green grass and pink crepe-myrtle trees and a bronze general holding out his arm to the pigeons. Around the park was a tight circle of expensive town houses and stores: interior decorators, jewelers, architects, a couple of law offices, a haberdasher, two tailors, and a half-dozen dress shops. And my mother. Her door was marked by a polished-brass sign with a single word in flowing Spencerian script: Mary. Nothing else. It was very low key, very discreet, until you got inside. Then it was all art deco, glass brick and steel and shining chrome. My mother had copied the rooms from a thirties magazine.
The customers who came through that handsome doorway in a steady stream were exclusively white.
At this shop I worked as a saleswoman, silent, efficient, helpful. Two college students were the models. One in particular appealed to my mother. Her name was Melissa. She was tall as I, as thin as I, with short blond hair and huge blue eyes naturally shadowed in black. Thanks to my mother’s magic, the women who bought the clothes saw themselves as Melissa every time they looked in their mirrors.
My mother patrolled her small kingdom carefully, according to a rigid unvarying schedule. Early each morning the ready-to-wear workrooms, which turned out a line of expensive children’s clothes for the hotel boutiques downtown. I’d designed this label, three trees, thin brown stems and green crowns as puffy as a cumulus cloud. No name. No other identification.…Next the made-to-order workrooms. These women were Spanish speaking—my mother had learned their language (when had she done that?) and always spent an extra few minutes gossiping with them about love affairs and children. The rest of the day she divided between her two shops. By ten o’clock she was displaying her clothes to the customers at Mary Woods Modiste. She understood these women; she knew how to make them accept her ideas as their own. She knew how to manipulate their dreams and flatter their egos, all so subtly, so gently. By three o’clock she reached her new shop, the one of gleaming art deco behind a nineteenth-century facade.
Here she changed clothes, growing even taller with high heels and fitted dresses that emphasized the thin angles of her body. Like a presiding goddess in her temple, her presence filled the structure. I walked in her shadow, watching, learning. Her successor, yes, but not her model, no longer the bones and flesh on which her dream images were hung. My black skin was unsuitable for her increasingly white audience.
Like any princess I valued my position. I watched for signs of palace coups; I searched for evidence of power shifts. When my mother fitted her thoughts to Melissa’s white body, I watched for signs of betrayal. I looked distrustfully at the suppliers, the white women who sold my mother hand-dyed silks and taffetas, the special seamstresses who made the fine trousseau lingerie. How exquisite the work was, I touched it with the very tips of my fingers, carefully.…And I remained alert in this new world.
My mother had conquered the black kingdom. She had triumphed in her own land; now she was entering neighboring territory. And she was—I remembered Melissa’s pale blondness—using enemy troops, mercenaries, to invade it.
Or so I thought during that last summer of high school. That long image-ridden legend-filled summer when my mother led us into new and dangerous territory on voyages of conquest and discovery.
Every evening after work a group of Melissa’s friends met her at the door. College students like herself, laughing and hugging, so healthy and slender with well-tanned faces and dentist-perfect teeth, they seemed to have stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine. My mother and I bade them good evening and watched them go. Then we finished the last of the day’s details, smiling at each other with satisfaction, until David came to pick us up. Over the years he had changed into a handsome man, tall, portly, brown skin, and silver hair. The three of us were a striking group, silver and black, very theatrical. We too were figures from a slick magazine. Our caption: Modern black family enjoys new prosperity.
Well fed and clothed and groomed, each evening we progressed in triumphant splendor along the walks of the nineteenth-century square to David’s new Cadillac. Like my mother, David was prospering. His downtown lunch restaurants were successful; his cab company had expanded to sight-seeing buses.
One day Melissa invited me to join her friends for a drink. “We go to a place called Jacob’s. Just about everybody is there.”
“Fine.” I had never been to a bar. “Fine.”
Jacob’s was at the end of a row of brick buildings, on the corner. In front was a small patio with tables and umbrellas. Inside was a single large room, with red plush curtains hanging from brass rods
and a mirrored brass-trimmed bar across the far wall. It was crowded, inside and out, the music almost lost under the roar of voices.
“It’s the place to be right now.” Melissa showed me around with a proprietary air. “Ladies’ room’s over there. We always sit on the patio.”
So I became part of that jolly laughing group at last. We drank beer and frozen daiquiris and inhaled each other’s perfumes and aftershaves mixed with dust and gasoline fumes from the passing traffic. It was indeed just like one big party. After an initial surprised pause—how often in my life have I seen that—people were eager to talk to me, to ask where I was from, and where I worked, and what school I went to. They wanted, I think, to see if I was really truly black, and not just a painted-up joke. Of course I told them that I was Indian, and I hinted gently that I was also a princess. They looked impressed, even if only for a moment. I was content with that. After all, their attention never stayed long on any one thing. A change of breeze, a passing car horn, a different song battering our ears—and they forgot what they were saying or thinking.
I began to enjoy myself as I had never done before. Senses dimmed by alcohol, I forgot their color and they forgot mine. We were people drinking together after a day’s work, flirting, seeking partners for the later evening, wrapped by the music and our own noisy chatter, young bodies in a summer night.
Later, as I waited in line in the ladies’ room, I preened myself in the mirror, running my fingers lightly through my long straight hair, dabbing at my mascara, adding more lipstick.
A single sharp crashing bang on the door, and a shout: “Police on the way. Everybody under twenty-one get out right now. Use the fire doors behind the bar.”
Immediately the small room began to boil all around me. Girls swirled in tight circles, snatching up purses and lipsticks and spray perfume bottles. Then I was quite alone.
Were they all underage, I thought. Was that possible? Or were they running because they had been startled, because a man’s voice had shouted alarm? Did they scatter because it was pleasant and satisfying to panic?
I was nineteen—the law said I should not be here. But I wasn’t about to go scrabbling off through that exit behind the bar, my full bladder aching at every step. I went into a stall, locked the door after me, and urinated slowly, unhurriedly. The floor shook with running feet; there were shrieks and shouts; a man laughed. I adjusted my panty hose carefully, washed my hands, massaged them with scented lotion from a small bottle in my purse. I settled my dress at shoulders and hips, snapped closed my purse. And opened the door.
The air reeked of perfume and sweat and tingled with the dust lifted by running feet. The velvet curtain behind the bar had been pulled half aside, but the fire door was properly closed. Some of the tables had been knocked over; a white-coated waiter was lazily picking them up. Music was still playing; couples still sat at their tables; a second waiter was taking orders. Uniformed police moved through the room, politely checking identification.
I walked out the front door. Three prowl cars, blue lights flashing, were partially blocking traffic. A policeman appeared directly in front of me. He was, I noticed, as dark as I. He looked at me deliberately and carefully, then stepped aside, without a word, to let me pass. As he did, he winked. One of his large puffy eyes hooded itself for a second and slowly opened again.
There was no sign of Melissa. I walked a block, then caught a cab home.
The following day I met Melissa in my mother’s office. (My mother ignored us both. She sat at her desk, a large rectangle of dark wood, a banker’s desk from a 1940 movie, sketching, drumming her fingers and tapping her pencil between strokes.)
Melissa said, “Your mother just got a wedding order. First one from this shop.”
Well, I thought, a white bride. That would pose a problem for my mother. She would no longer have the advantage of contrast, of skin darker than fabric.
The bride’s sketch was pinned to the wall. It was a dress from a fairy tale, a dress for a princess in an enchanted castle, all lace and seed pearls. At the neck was a single large pearl pin, carefully sketched in full detail.
Melissa sighed. “That’s the bride’s grandmother’s brooch. I wish I had a grandmother like that.”
I shrugged.
“You know, it used to be that the groom gave his bride a piece of jewelry, and the best man delivered it for him on the morning of the wedding.”
“Melissa,” I said, “you’ve been reading too many novels.”
“No.” She turned her large pale blue eyes on me. “That’s the honest-to-God truth. That’s what he was expected to do. Just like he was expected to pay her a formal visit after the birth of a child and give her another piece of jewelry, each and every time.”
“Okay,” I said. “I believe you. Now tell me what happened to you last night.”
She giggled at the memory. “The police raid Jacob’s all the time. There’s always a couple of minutes’ warning, and everybody illegal rushes out those doors behind the bar. And goes somewhere else, of course.”
“I walked out the front door.”
“Nobody stopped you, nobody carded you?”
“No,” I said.
She sat on the edge of my mother’s desk, gracefully, long legs displayed. “Nobody even looked at you?”
“One policeman walked right past me.”
“Just like that? When they were checking all the IDs?”
“He winked. And I just kept walking.”
Melissa was silent for a moment. “Maybe you look older, maybe…” A different note slipped into her light high voice. “Was it a black cop?”
“Yes,” I said cautiously. “Yes, it was.”
“Well, there you are.” Melissa rubbed one carefully manicured hand down a long smooth arm. “There you are.”
That summer ended and I went back to St. Catherine’s. As always there were changes. Mrs. Alvin, who taught biology, was now principal of the Upper School. There were new lay teachers for math and American government and European history. What had happened to the nuns who used to teach those subjects? I couldn’t remember their names.
The day before classes started, Mrs. Alvin called me to her office. She was a short woman, square-bodied and sharp-faced, like some undiscovered and unclassified burrowing rodent.
She did not waste time in pleasantries. “My dear, this year we have fourteen black students in the Middle and Upper schools. I do not worry about their academic success—their test scores were very good. I do want to make their social adjustments as smooth as possible. And that is where I need your help. You have been through it. You know the problems they will have. I want you to try and anticipate those problems and solve them before they happen.”
“You’re asking for a miracle, Mrs. Alvin.”
She bared her teeth in an animal smile. “Perhaps. But this is a convent, and miracles have been known to happen in convents.”
“I can try.”
“The Lord will bless you.”
She was, I think, trying to be amusing.
Obediently I set out to find my fourteen little black lambs. I found the youngest first. She was in the infirmary. High fever and a flushed skin. The doctor had prescribed antibiotics, Sister Gertrude told me. (Nuns were still in charge of such things as the infirmary.)
“Sister Gertrude,” I said, “how do you tell a flush on black skin?”
She stared at me for a long few seconds, then turned on her heel. “You are enough to try the patience of a saint.”
I found others in their rooms. Again they shared with their own color. One, Mimi Desmond, was already packing to go home. She did not look up when I entered the room, and she would not talk to me. Her roommate, Beth, sat cross-legged on the other bed and spoke for her.
“She’s had enough,” Beth said.
“After two days?”
Mimi went on packing methodically. She wrapped a china figure of the Virgin in a sweater and put it in the corner of a suitcase.
; “The nuns will want to talk to you first.”
Mimi turned, looked at her roommate, then resumed her packing.
“She says this isn’t jail and she can leave whenever she wants to.”
Why on earth was Beth translating Mimi’s thoughts, as if from a foreign language?
“Suit yourself,” I said.
Again Mimi glanced at Beth, who obligingly translated for me. “She says she hates it here and she doesn’t want to pretend she is white anymore.”
I shrugged. What could I do? I reported to Mrs. Alvin.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “One must expect this, I suppose.”
After Mimi Desmond left, Beth stayed in the half-empty room, refusing to move. She wouldn’t go to class; she wouldn’t go to the dining room. (For two days I brought her meals. I do not think I was very gracious about it; I did not like being a serving maid.) Finally, her parents came for her. Her father, who was in army uniform, looked embarrassed. Her mother held a handkerchief squashed up against her face.
Mrs. Alvin said, “They had great hopes for Beth, the sergeant especially.”
“Mrs. Alvin, have you noticed what is happening to my group? A disease called black flight is decimating them.”
She pursed her lips. “You do like to aggravate people, my dear. You’ll just have to take especially good care of your survivors, won’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am, indeed.”
That senior year was very quiet. I think that I was happy. Yes, I am quite sure I was. I’d created a desert and called it peace—whichever old Roman said that, he seemed to be speaking directly to me from my textbook. My desert was peaceful. My battles were all over. If I hadn’t won, I had at least achieved a truce. Some of my classmates now invited me to their homes for parties, for holiday dinners, for special occasions.
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