When Vista opened her eyes, Mamaw Marthie smiled at her. “You reckon Shade Nixon’s decided to court you, little Visitor?”
Vista opened her eyes wide and looked down at her protruding stomach, and then they both burst into laughter that was as loud as the singing from the Victrola had been. Vista realized it was the kind of thing her mama would have laughed about with her mamaw. All of a sudden, the idea of a man—any man, but particularly Shade Nixon—making his way up the back lane to their cabin to court her seemed unbearably funny, the kind of funny that left you laughing till you thought you just might cry.
Pilgrim and Stranger
1961
Two girls and their big wooden boxes. Their machines. When Maze and Mary Elizabeth weren’t in their room or at class or a meal, or off on a long Saturday hike, that was where you’d find them that fall: Maze at a loom, Mary Elizabeth at a piano in the Music Building. The piano teacher at Berea, Mr. Roth, was stunned by Mary Elizabeth’s skill; the first time he heard her play, he told her he had nothing to teach her.
“Where’d you learn to play like that?” he asked. He didn’t mean it unkindly, Mary Elizabeth knew, yet she’d heard the extra emphasis, however slight, he’d placed on the you. It rankled, but she would not let that show.
She looked down at her hands on her lap. “First from my aunt. She lived for some years in Paris and learned there,” she said. “Then from Professor Hallis at the University of Kentucky.” She looked up, knowing Mr. Roth would be waiting for further explanation. “He was a friend of hers.”
“I see.” The young teacher, who was probably only a few years older than Mary Elizabeth, nodded slowly, watching her. “Well,” he said, “I may not have much to teach you, but I can work with you, and I can make some folks around here sit up and take notice of you.” A few days later, he arranged for her to play for the College president and the board of trustees at a special concert in December. They got started on a program right away.
“Only two pieces,” Mr. Roth said, a relief to Mary Elizabeth. His lanky blond hair was always falling in his eyes, and he whisked it back now with delicate fingers. “More than that and the old geezers’ll start nodding off. You like the Frenchmen, so let’s have you play one of the Debussy pieces. And then Chopin. You should work on the Études.”
She agreed. Secretly she was ecstatic at the thought. Aunt Paulie, who’d loved Chopin, had worked with her on some of the Waltzes. “Like the sound of a steady rain when there’s been a long, dusty drought” was how she’d described it after she’d played the “Waltz in E Minor” on her record player. Mr. Roth loved it when Mary Elizabeth recalled the things Aunt Paulie had said. Cortot was a nervous little collaborator. Ravel was a mama’s boy. Horowitz had hands like racehorses. Gottschalk stole his best ideas from black musicians. He’d make her take a break and have some tea and tell him stories about her aunt. He’d toss back his blond hair and laugh with abandon.
There was one thing she would eventually wish she hadn’t told him. Aunt Paulie always wished she’d been able to play Stravinsky. Petrushka, the version he’d adapted for piano. Three movements, and she’d never mastered any of them. That was one Mary Elizabeth should have kept to herself.
“We’ll work on that, then, after the concert in December” was Mr. Roth’s answer the day, after a lesson in late September, when she told him. “You’ll master it, and then you’ll play it at an even bigger concert at the end of the year. President, trustees, all the big-money people, all the faculty … it’ll be marvelous. They’ll see how good you are, what you can do; you’ll prove it to them.” He never mentioned her race. He didn’t have to. What she never understood was why it seemed to matter so much to him. It unnerved her, and it made her talk too much, made her tell him too many things.
Both of them, Maze and Mary Elizabeth, were happier that fall than either had expected to be at Berea. On bright autumn Saturdays, after practicing and weaving through the morning, they’d hike into the hills together, out along Scaffold Cane or up the rocky slope of the hill they called Devil’s Slide, sandwiches and water in a rucksack that they took turns carrying. Town boys in cars along Scaffold Cane—“scoads,” the students called them—would yell at them out their windows. But they barely noticed, Mary Elizabeth’s fingers still tingling and her ears filled with Chopin, Maze walking, unconsciously, to the rhythm of her feet on the loom that morning.
They talked on their hikes about many things. Mary Elizabeth’s progress on the Études, Maze’s battles with the know-it-all girl who’d replaced the former weaving crew chief.
Maze had hidden her skill at the loom to get the college work assignment she wanted: part of the crew of weavers working at the varied looms in the Weaving Cabin. There they created table runners and blankets and throws to sell at the stores in town. Technically, students assigned to the weaving crew were supposed to be novices, learning a new skill, but when her crew supervisor saw how quick and efficient a weaver Maze already was—and how quickly his crew would therefore be able to fill its quotas—he pretended not to notice that there would be little left for her to learn.
She’d learned from Sister Georgia, the woman her mother had cared for, on a big old loom that had belonged to the early Shakers. Georgia had learned at Berea, where she’d been a teacher sixty years before. Though she bickered endlessly with Maze’s mother, with Maze Georgia was endlessly patient and tender, a perfect teacher. Maze was competent at the big loom at twelve, accomplished by fourteen; Vista sold the table covers she and Georgia made to the owners of the Beau Rive Hotel, where she was a laundress.
Maze never tired of it, and knowing she could weave while at Berea was one of the things that had made her give in to Vista and agree to go. Even the monotony, the rhythmic sameness—in fact, especially this—soothed her. She was known to sneak into the Weaving Cabin after hours, even sometimes to skip a class or two, to finish work on a complicated overshot blanket or one of her favorites, the pretty indigo Bronson weave.
“You’d best keep your mouth shut, you know,” Mary Elizabeth warned her, “if you want to keep that job. And you’d best slow down a little and make a few mistakes.” She’d watched Maze at the loom many times; often, as their dormitory’s eleven o’clock curfew approached and Maze still wasn’t back at the room, she had hurried over to the Weaving Cabin to drag her there.
“Don’t you ever get bored with it?” Mary Elizabeth couldn’t help asking one night, watching Maze use her feet to manipulate the rows of yarn, then lift and slide the shuttle, over and over again, counting, Mary Elizabeth knew, the whole time—even while she talked. Mary Elizabeth’s own eyes glazed as she watched; try as she might, she could never remember which was warp and which was weft, could never understand how the whole contraption worked, how the pattern at Maze’s side was transferred to this massive rack of wood and wires, sticks and strings, and rows of yarn that somehow came together into a big expanse of patterned cloth, soft and lovely, this time in muted pink and gray.
“Bored?” Maze said, still counting somewhere in her head, somehow. “Well, no. Do you get bored when you play the piano? Don’t you go other places in your mind while you’re playin’? Don’t you forget about all the pads and wires inside the thing and just feel the music in your bones somehow? Isn’t that what you told me the other night after you played?”
She’d stopped now, and she was looking at Mary Elizabeth. It was hard to read her expression.
“I didn’t mean that to be insulting, Maze,” Mary Elizabeth said, worried.
“I’m not insulted. I’m just sayin’ that while I’m doin’ this, I can go anywhere I want to in my head.” She tied a thread and moved the shuttle and started up on the pedals again. “Back to Pleasant Hill.” She spoke in rhythm with her moving legs. “Back up Devil’s Slide. Places I have never even been.” Her feet did not stop moving, her fingers somehow tracking rows even as she spoke.
Mary Elizabeth was still baffled. “But how do you not lose track?”
“Well.” Beat, beat. “How can you”—beat—“pound those keys”—beat—“and talk to me the way I’ve seen you do?” Beat, beat.
Mary Elizabeth laughed and shook her head. “Only when I play the old hymns, girl, you know that. I can do those in my sleep.”
“Well, it’s like I’m doin’ this in my sleep sometimes, too,” Maze said, stopping again now, tying another thread. She smiled and started up again, looking at Mary Elizabeth. “Just dreamin’ along.” Beat. “A pilgrim and a stranger,” beat, “I journey here below,” she was singing now—the words to a hymn they’d sung at chapel services the week before, one that had made Maze roll her eyes and laugh.
“Far distant is my country,” Mary Elizabeth joined in, singing with the same stilted emphasis to the beat Maze set with her feet. “The home to which I go.”
Christian talk about heaven set Maze’s teeth on edge; at chapel services, she’d scowl and slump down in the pew at any talk of a better life beyond. “What’s any of that got to do with livin’ right here right now?” she’d lean over and ask Mary Elizabeth in a stage whisper.
They finished the verse just as Maze reached the end of a row on the loom. She stopped her pedaling then, and the college bells started to chime eleven o’clock. There was really no comparison, Mary Elizabeth thought as they walked back to their room, humming together. Though truthfully, she could go somewhere else, the way Maze described, when she played certain things. Maybe the Debussy “Reflections in the Water” from the Images, the piece she’d learned first. Certainly some of the hymns, the old ones that she still loved. “Precious Lord,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Wayfaring Stranger,” “Amazing Grace”—Maze’s hymn.
But it was all changing now, her playing. It started when Mr. Roth had arranged for her to play for the college president and his wife and some of their guests at a reception at the beginning of October. She’d played pieces she knew well, really in the background, while they all drank their punch and talked, but eventually the front parlor of the president’s house, with its beautiful grand piano, had grown quiet and everyone had stopped to listen, looking over at her. She’d nearly forgotten where she was, but she’d closed her eyes and recovered and kept on playing.
When she’d first arrived at the house, she’d been told to go around back, to the kitchen, where the other servers were. Until the president’s wife had seen her and stepped over to invite her in. “You must be the pianist we’ve been hearing so much about!” she said. And Mary Elizabeth knew why they’d been hearing about her, why the president’s wife knew immediately who she was, but she smiled, then looked down at the ground and said, “Yes, ma’am, I’ve come to play.”
Now every week or so someone from the president’s office called Mr. Roth to schedule something else. An alumni dinner. The opening of a new building. They’d started trotting her out for every donor or newspaper reporter they could get on campus. Hers was “the new face of Berea College.” Over the Thanksgiving recess, Mr. Roth told her, he’d be heading up to Louisville to pick up the sheet music for Petrushka that he’d ordered.
But hers wasn’t the face of Berea College. Not even the “new” face. Not her real face, anyway, the face none of those white men in suits and women in pearls ever saw, the face no one ever saw. Except maybe Maze, sometimes.
Maze, who didn’t care at all about whom Mary Elizabeth played for the rest of the time, really only wanted her roommate to play private concerts for her, any night she could get her to, over at the lounge where she’d played that second night they were together. After dinner, after their work assignments, after studying, whenever she wasn’t weaving, whenever she could get Mary Elizabeth to go.
When Maze wasn’t weaving, she always seemed to have the time. Maze would cut class, miss curfew, spend all kinds of extra hours at the Weaving Cabin just because she liked it more than studying. Mary Elizabeth’s work assignment, on the other hand, was washing dishes after meals in the cafeteria, along with most of the other black students that year. That was the only other time she could let down her guard, show her true face. For twelve hours a week.
Her daddy told her, the night before she left, never to slip. He needn’t have said anything; by then she was already expert at it. Live where they live, eat where they eat, learn where they learn—but keep your eyes down. Do it all well, but not so well they think you’re uppity. Let them know you aren’t a threat.
Aunt Paulie would have laughed at that advice, then spat on the ground. But that was why her daddy did his best to limit her aunt’s influence. Mary Elizabeth had figured that much out early. Once a week for her lesson when she was younger, an occasional overnight for a concert in Lexington after that. But with explicit instructions then: no jazz. No exposure to the men and women who might normally play music at Aunt Paulie’s house on a Saturday night.
And one unforgettable time, for a trip to Cincinnati to hear a young pianist Aunt Paulie had heard about, playing with the symphony at Music Hall. Mary Elizabeth was twelve then. “I want to do that,” she said to Aunt Paulie when the lights came up at the end. It was the only time Aunt Paulie, whose eyes were wet with tears, couldn’t answer her. She only looked away.
By the time Mary Elizabeth was eighteen and ready for college, she knew the drill. Funny that now, at Berea, the only times she could show her real face, and rest, were when she was sleeping and when she was working. There in the bowels of the kitchen, with other students like her, who were every bit as tired as she was. You could see it in their faces while they scraped and scrubbed, rinsed and dried.
And sometimes, too, with Maze. She realized this on a bright, cold day early in November when they climbed Devil’s Slide. They’d stopped for water and to talk a bit. Usually on their walks, their talk eventually came around to some version of Maze’s main preoccupation: Who are our mamas, and will we become like them?
Maze generally did most of the talking. Vista distrusted most men, she said. Maze didn’t know enough to decide whether to trust them or not. Vista was ashamed to have come from the mountains of eastern Kentucky; Maze would move there, to her Mamaw Marthie’s crumbling old cabin, in a heartbeat if she could. And she’d take Sister Georgia and the big old loom in the Sisters’ Shop with her.
Vista was a Baptist, though not a very devout one. Maze didn’t necessarily believe in God, though she had some sense of a spirit, or spirits, and she had believed Sister Georgia and the other old Shakers when they’d said they saw them. In fact, Maze said, she sometimes thought of becoming a Shaker herself, even though the only other one left in the state of Kentucky, or west of the Appalachian Trail, for that matter, was Sister Georgia.
On this November Saturday, though, Maze was pensive. Mary Elizabeth was even quieter. Her practicing had not gone well that morning. The day before, she’d gotten a letter from her father; her mother was back in the hospital, he said.
Maze took a long drink of water and looked over at Mary Elizabeth. They were sitting on a wide rock. The trees had shed many of their leaves, and the air was crystal-clear. Below them they could see bits of the town and campus through the normally dense curtain of leaves, the spire of a church here and there, smoke from a handful of chimneys.
“You know, M. E.,” Maze said (she’d begun to call her that, finding that nothing else, like the shorter Mary or Mary Liz, seemed to suit her, she said), “I believe you’re right. Your eyes do look as sad as your mama’s sometimes. Maybe even sadder. Why is it you never tell me any news about her and your daddy?” And Mary Elizabeth began to cry.
She started talking then, inexplicably telling Maze things, too many things. Her mother was sick or something, she said, not quite right in the head.
“Not right in the head?” Maze said, and the words sounded horrible, echoing back to Mary Elizabeth like that. “What does that mean?”
Of course Maze would never do the delicate, tactful thing. Change the subject, look away. Not Maze. Maze would thunder onward, ask for more.
All right, the
n, Mary Elizabeth decided. All right, then.
Sometimes her mother had fits of a sort, and they’d have to steer her up to her room and put her to bed. Once they did, she might not emerge for days.
Fits? What kind of fits?
Talking to herself. Almost like she was singing. But in a language no one could understand. Ah bay. Rorororo. Thissss, tisss, sisss. Strange like that. Nonsense. Quiet-like usually, but still, of course people would stare.
What kind of singing? Like a hymn? Pretty like that? Or sad sometimes like when you play the piano? Maybe she wanted to sing along.
No, no—not like that. How to convey that terrifying sound? It could have been music almost, sometimes, like a kind of singing, maybe like blues singing. Low and kind of rumbling, scary almost. In a minor key if it was in any key at all. Just a few strange sounds, and she’d repeat them over and over.
“I went to a prayer service over in Torchlight once when I was little,” Maze said, “over in the mountains, and when the people there got the spirit, that’s what they sounded like. Kind of like animal sounds, growls and mumbles, but it also sounded like words some of the time, just words in a language I didn’t know. Then they’d fall on the ground and jerk around, and when it was all over they went right back to being normal, singin’ hymns and actin’ just like everyone else.”
“I suppose they handled snakes, too.”
“M. E., I’m just sayin’—”
“I know what you’re sayin’, Maze, but my daddy doesn’t believe in all that getting the spirit and speaking in tongues nonsense. That’s not part of his church, and it wasn’t part of my mama’s growing up, either, and that is not what she is doing when this happens to her.”
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