And so one April morning, she walked into the classroom and said loudly, “Leave the lights on, Winerip,” to the old Berea groundskeeper. To the young man and woman, Winerip’s son and daughter, waiting stealthily in the hallway, she said, “Come in now, no need to wait for cover of darkness; we will no longer pretend in my classroom that we honor the laws of a decadent land.” It was Byron whom she quoted to begin the day’s lesson.
“‘On with the dance!’” she intoned, eyes blazing and cheeks inflamed, as two male faculty members arrived to escort her from her classroom. “‘Let joy be unconfin’d!’” And as they grasped her arms and pulled her toward the hallway she called back over her shoulder, “‘No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet!’” She could barely make out the gaping mouths and staring eyes of the rows of students at her back, but she caught a glimpse of Winerip’s daughter, smiling. And weak and feverish and frightened as she felt then, something in that smile unleashed a cold, reckless wind, blinding white sunlight warming her face as they reached the open doorway, and Miss Georginea Ward left her last class at Berea College smiling and laughing. Like a madwoman, the students in her class that day would later say.
Pilgrim and Stranger
1961
At first Maze thought Berea College might be the way Sister Georgia remembered it—a place to read and study and weave amid the towering oak trees. Solid brick buildings filled with books and music in the middle of a land of hardscrabble farms and sharecroppers’ shacks. A kind of island at the smoothed-out edges of Kentucky’s eastern knobs, not yet given over to horses and their wealthy owners. Someplace different from the rest of the state.
At first she’d thought that. Here, for instance, was her roommate, Mary Elizabeth Cox—a Negro girl. Shy and prickly, eyeing Maze warily, not ready to trust her, assuming the worst. But that was all right with Maze; edgy, mistrustful women were about the only kind she’d known. Sister Georgia, the woman Maze’s mama, Vista, cared for, was “a mountain of mistrust,” Vista said. Took one to know one, Maze might have told her mama. Now the two of them were back in Shakertown without her. Who would protect Vista and Georgia from each other? Maze had wondered many times since she’d agreed to enroll at Berea College in the fall of 1961. That was for them to figure out now. Two mountains facing off.
Most of Maze’s first day at Berea had in fact been ridiculous. Miserable and ridiculous. Everyone—her mama, Mary Elizabeth’s parents—so nervous and polite. It will be better when they’re gone, Maze thought, and it was. Mary Elizabeth’s mama and daddy left first, and after Maze finally walked Vista back to her car, she came back into their room and met her roommate’s uncertain eyes with a roll of her own, and then they both laughed with relief. And Maze thought—in fact, she said—“Well, that’s better.” And Mary Elizabeth laughed again.
Not that it was easy at first. Over and over Maze tried to remind herself, you don’t have to speak aloud every little thought you’re thinkin’, girl. Lord.
But it seemed she couldn’t stop herself. When Mary Elizabeth played something classical and unfamiliar on the piano for her that evening, Maze asked to hear some hymns, saying, “You don’t have to work so hard to impress me.” Then later, back in their room: “Your mama is a beautiful woman. I love the name Sarah.” And when this brought no response: “You look like her, but your eyes aren’t near as sad.”
Too much news too fast from the mind and heart of Miss Maze Jansen, she heard in her head then. “You need to put a lid on it once in a while, Maze,” her mama had told her more than once.
But Mary Elizabeth surprised her that evening when she finally turned to answer her. “How do you know I’m not just as sad?”
That was all she needed. “Well, I’m not sayin’ you aren’t sad. That’s somethin’ I wouldn’t know yet, of course. I’m just sayin’ your eyes don’t have the same sad look your mama’s eyes do. All I said was what I saw. And anyway, I’d imagine your mama’s lived long enough to have more to be sad about than you have. My mama sure has.” At this Maze finally caught a reaction, a fleeting glance, from the other girl. Was she curious? Angry?
“I mean, she’s got a good bit more to be sad about than I do,” Maze went on. She thought Mary Elizabeth might ask “Like what?” But she only looked at her for a moment longer, then went back to unpacking her boxes and suitcases.
The next day was hot by seven in the morning, as they walked to the dining hall for breakfast. A full day of “get-acquainted activities” with the other new students nearly convinced Maze to call Vista and beg her to come take her home. Not that she would have done it.
Maze stayed close to Mary Elizabeth whenever she could. After lunch she tried to persuade her to duck out of the big assembly on “God’s Will for the Freshman Class” and walk into town, but Mary Elizabeth only stared at her like she’d suggested they go off to commit a murder. So she closed her eyes through the long, boring speeches by the college president, then a mess of deans, and took herself someplace else in her mind—first to Berea the way it must have been seventy years before, when Georgia had first arrived; then to the edge of Shawnee Run Creek, at the end of the trail behind the Sisters’ Shop, on a first warm day of spring. Three different people, Mary Elizabeth among them, nudged her to try to make her open her eyes. But she ignored them all.
After dinner that night, Maze dragged Mary Elizabeth away from the social with the faculty to a grand piano she’d seen in another room, a kind of formal lounge, down the hall. “Play for me again,” she begged.
Mary Elizabeth pulled her arm free and stared hard at Maze. “You are one strange girl,” she said.
That stung a bit, and Maze thought, I thought she was different, but she might be like the others. “You aren’t the first person to tell me that,” she answered, thinking only, Please. Please don’t be like them. It was clear to Maze by the second day of freshman orientation that Berea College was as full of people who would find her peculiar as her high school in Harrodsburg had been. “I reckon that’s why you’re stuck with me,” she added.
Mary Elizabeth stared at her for a while, then opened her mouth as if she were about to say something but abruptly closed it. She turned to the piano, closed her eyes, then lifted her hands to the keys. She paused for a moment, just long enough to tell Maze that this time she’d play something by Debussy, one of the Images, and Maze, who’d learned a little French in high school, recognized the accuracy of her accent. Then her fingers came down so lightly, like two feathers floating free from a featherbed, that Maze was surprised by the rich, echoing tones that came from within the piano’s depths.
When she finished playing, her eyes were closed, her face softer than Maze had yet seen it; there were tears in her eyes when she opened them and looked over at Maze. She smiled shyly and looked down.
“Debussy’s French,” she said, then shrugged. “It’s different when I play the French composers for some reason. I mean, I’m different.…” She shrugged again. “It’s hard to explain.”
“I’ve never heard anything like that,” Maze said, surprised by how quiet her voice was. She truly never had. She shook her head and looked down. “I guess that was silly, me askin’ for church music last night,” she said, then looked up to meet Mary Elizabeth’s eyes. “I don’t know what to say when I hear something like that.”
Mary Elizabeth smiled at her. “Well, that’s a first,” she said, and they both laughed. “And it’s okay; I do play a lot of church music, too,” and before Maze could answer she started in on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” At the last “by and by” Maze interrupted her to say, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear you play some more Debussy.” She wondered, when she said it, if she’d pronounced it right.
If she was wrong, Mary Elizabeth didn’t correct her. “All right,” she said, lifting her fingers from the keys and stretching them out in all directions a few times. “I’ll play some pieces from The Children’s Corner,” she said. “I worked and worked on these when I was youn
ger, with my aunt. She loved Debussy. He wrote these for his daughter. This one’s called ‘Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum.’”
While Mary Elizabeth played, Maze closed her eyes and leaned back into her chair and tried to imagine the life of a child in Paris, France. But the more she listened, the more she found herself dreaming of her own childhood, of happy summer days along the creek, of the rhythm of the loom as Georgia held her on her lap, her feet pumping the pedals and her big, gnarled hands guiding Maze’s own small ones.
When, after the slow, fading notes at the end of “The Snow Is Dancing,” a security guard came to lock up the building and shooed them out of the lounge, Maze opened her eyes and looked at the clock, shocked to realize it was eleven o’clock. Their classes would begin the next day. This time she was the one with tears in her eyes.
If she’d just looked more closely, she might not have misjudged Maze so, Mary Elizabeth often thought later when she relived that first day. She also might not have wasted time trying to play the Brahms Intermezzo—a piece she hadn’t yet mastered and in truth didn’t much like—and instead gotten right to the works she loved. When she finished playing that first night and looked over at Maze, she watched as the girl breathed in and then out, deep and slow. She noticed her freckles then; before that she’d been too distracted by the uncontrollable waves of Maze’s reddish-blond hair, kinkier even than her own since she’d begun to straighten it years before.
And of course then Maze had done what Mary Elizabeth expected her to do; she’d asked for hymns, or for some country tune. But there was the other thing she’d said then, too: “You don’t have to try to impress me.” She’d known what Mary Elizabeth was up to. But then she tried to take it back. She nearly tripped over herself trying to undo what she’d done. She could not close her mouth. But somehow, strangely, only with her, only with Mary Elizabeth. Why was that?
“Why do you do that to your hair?” Maze asked the first time she walked into the room to find Mary Elizabeth holding a scorching hot comb to a hank of it.
“Well, why don’t you do it to yours?” she might have snapped in reply, but didn’t. Other girls had already tried with Maze. Dare Mills and Ferne Denney (who would be crowned May Queen at the end of that first year), blond, blue-eyed roommates two doors down from Maze and Mary Elizabeth, had cooed at her like she was a baby the first time they’d laid eyes on her.
“Oooh! Would you look at those freckles? And I wish you’d let me get my hands on those curls, Maze,” Ferne squealed. “You’d have a nice head of hair if you just got them under control.”
Dare looked Maze over from head to toe in a way only Dare Mills, who was from Ohio, could do, letting her gaze come to rest on Maze’s faded, old-fashioned cotton blouse. “Grace,” she said (she refused to call Maze by a nickname that, she said, she found peculiar), “you could be downright pretty if you tried.”
Maze’s answer? A toss of her curls, a quiet, breathy little laugh, and then, yes, silence. Simply staring back at Dare—a gleam in her eye, more than a hint of a challenge in that unblinking gaze. One night during their first week in Ladies Hall, Mary Elizabeth stepped out of the bathroom down the hall from their room, and there in the hallway she found Maze, cornered again by Ferne and Dare. At first she assumed they were after her again about her hair, which she’d taken to pulling back in a big, unwieldy braid so the girls on the hall would stop grabbing at her curls. But then Mary Elizabeth heard what Ferne was saying, with Dare standing next to her and nodding her agreement.
“My daddy made sure before I came that I wouldn’t have to share a room with one of them. If you just asked, I know they’d have to let you change.”
Ferne’s back was to Mary Elizabeth, and Maze, who stood leaning dreamily against the wall, saw her approaching well before Ferne finished and turned to see what Maze was looking at. She kept quiet, watching her roommate’s slow approach. As Mary Elizabeth passed the three of them, Maze simply looked over at her and said, “Hard to sleep with all the racket some folks make, ain’t it, Mary Elizabeth?” Then she shook her head, laughed a hollow little laugh, and followed her roommate into their room while Ferne and Dare stared at the floor and slunk back into theirs.
Visitor
1938 · 1943
Vista Combs, Maze’s mother, had scraped knees and bruised shins long past the age when a girl ought to have stopped having such things. That was Vista’s mother’s one and only observation about her fifteen-year-old daughter on her final visit home to Torchlight, Kentucky, in 1938.
“What does my mama do in Memphis?” Vista had asked her grandmother once as a child, and her mamaw, a woman of few words, had simply said, “Well, I don’t reckon we’d want to know.” And that was the last time Vista asked.
Her mother showed up every few years for a meal and a night’s sleep and to borrow money, her hair blackened and permed and her lips painted ruby-red. She was the only person who ever called Vista by her given name: “And how’s the little Visitor doin’?” she’d croon on her way up the front steps, lacing her fingers through Vista’s dark curls absentmindedly. Then on she’d go, in search of her own mother, and Vista would go back to playing with her rag doll or rereading one of the Elsie Dinsmore books Miss Drury had lent her. The fact that this guest was her mother hardly seemed to register.
But her mother would laugh with Mamaw Marthie. They shared the same sense of humor, if nothing else. Years later, Vista would learn that they’d chosen her name, with a smile and a wink, together. Visitor Lane Combs—named both for the long-gone male visitor who’d left the way he had come, along the back lane, and for another visitor, the monthly kind, that failed to show up after the first one had left. Over time, and at the teacher Miss Drury’s urging, Mamaw had shortened the name to Vista. But on her mother’s infrequent visits, she was always reminded: “And how’s the little Visitor?” And all Vista thought then, though she never said it, was, Seems to me you’re the only visitor here.
When they learned her mother had been hit by a streetcar and killed, not too long after that visit when Vista was fifteen, Vista didn’t shed a tear, and if Mamaw mourned, Vista never saw it.
The only real sadness in her life that long, hot summer was the fact that Miss Drury was gone. She’d finally finished her own schooling over at Berea, and she’d met and married another schoolteacher and moved north with him, to Ohio. North seemed to be where everyone was moving who could get there, for the factory jobs and houses with brand-new kitchens, a million miles away from any old Kentucky hollow and outside the grip of coal or lumber.
Even as a child, Vista had understood where the color of evil came from: coal. Evil was black like coal, which had killed her papaw before she could even know him and made her mother run away to Memphis to get away from all those wide-shouldered, blackness-breathing men. But when she got to feeling sad about it all, Vista would think about Miss Drury and her brand-new house in Ohio, her kitchen bright yellow and filled with sun, as Vista imagined it—no ragged trees or rocky hillside to block a single ray of light.
Mamaw Marthie had not objected to her going to school, as it was only the two of them at home most of the time and there wasn’t much of anything left to do—just a little patch of greens to tend and a rooster and laying hen to feed. So when Miss Drury Badgett showed up with a pair of shoes that just fit the child’s feet and brushed her dark curls and made a fuss about her pretty freckles, there seemed to be no reason not to let her go.
That was when Vista was eight and didn’t know the first thing about the alphabet, much less what it meant to read. And it was a ragtag group, that first class at Miss Drury’s Torchlight school (really just a room off to the side of the Free Light Church). Six holler children, all of them younger than Vista—no other child her age could be spared for school—and Miss Drury cleaned each one up and made sure they all had shoes for the walk. And then she started them on the alphabet. By the time Vista was twelve, the school had grown to fifteen pupils, and she was charged with helping the littl
e ones with their letters.
And then she was happy, comforted by her importance and the ever-present softness of Miss Drury’s eyes and hands. When she wasn’t busy at the school, she’d wander through the hills in search of pretty spots to sit and read the latest book Miss Drury had given her—brushing through brambles that she hardly noticed, in love with the birdsongs and the sweet mountain air and the way, when she read those books, everything around her seemed to smell and sound so much more alive. That was how she kept on getting scrapes and bruises—well past the age when most girls had stopped, it was true, but she never even noticed, and she certainly didn’t care.
But then Miss Drury left, when Vista was fourteen, and Vista turned moony-eyed and sad. While her black curls (always brushed now), combined with those surprising freckles and a sweet, dimpled smile and even sweeter singing voice at church, could make a boy look twice, most knew not to bother by the time Vista was a womanly sixteen and her beloved teacher was gone and her mama was dead, though she’d say she hardly noticed. Now Vista’s smile rarely showed up at all.
One thing, and one thing only, could make Vista smile as she grew into womanhood, when even her beloved books were no longer enough; there was no one to talk to about them, after all. That thing was music and dancing. She never missed a church singing retreat or a barn dance, and with a mamaw who gave her leave to attend both as she pleased, she never bothered to notice any contradictions in those passions.
Boys loved to dance with her, though they couldn’t say why. There was never any sense that the way she held their eyes or let them spin her meant a damned thing. With other girls at the dances, that kind of touch and motion might well be a prelude to other pleasures, but Vista’s only interest was the music. And when she danced, she lost herself in it, just as she did when she sang the old ballads and the hymns. She’d sing “Amazing Grace” and “Down in the Valley” like she meant them; words and music did something to her, and the boys at the dances and at the retreats knew enough to realize that for Vista Combs, unlike other girls, what the words and music did was enough.
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