She turned to go, embarrassed now herself, but he called after her. He took her hand and brought her up to the front of the church. He sat down at the piano and motioned for her to join him.
“Don’t you miss singing?” he asked her. He started to tap a melody with two fingers—“I’ll Fly Away”—and he hummed along, his voice deep and rich.
All this time, and no one had ever asked her about singing. She felt something stirring in her chest, and she realized it was her breath. She had started to hum.
At church on Sunday he preached about the messages God sends his people. “Be still and know that he is God!” he shouted, and when the others called back—“Amen!” and “Be still, be still!”—she felt that rush of air in her chest again.
By the end of that week, she was giving whispered answers to her parents’ questions. “Yes, ma’am, please.” “No, thank you, Daddy.” Her mother declared it a miracle, and George Cox God’s obvious messenger. By the end of the summer George had come to ask Sarah’s parents to let her marry him the next year, when he finished his training as a preacher and, he hoped, began work at a church of his own.
“I know she’s young,” he told her daddy. “But I can take care of her. I can take her away from all that’s made her so sad.”
After he left, Aunt Paulie, who had been driven to the cabin on Black Pool Road that afternoon by a gentleman friend from Lexington, paced the floor and raged. “She is still a child! You can’t let him take her away from you.”
Paulie storming and raging would have frightened Sarah not long before, but now somehow it made her want to laugh. He could take her away, take her somewhere else. He had told her so. “It’s best, after all you’ve seen,” he said. How did he know? She’d seen and heard Robert countless times, before he died, telling his friends, “Ain’t nothin’ in Kentucky worth stayin’ around for. I’m going to Chicago when I get me some money saved.”
Sometimes they paid him when he played his guitar. He carried the money around in a little sack in his pocket so their mama wouldn’t know.
And hadn’t Aunt Paulie left Black Pool Road and the entire state of Kentucky behind as soon as she’d met Claude, a man who’d taken her as far away as a person could surely get, all the way to Paris, France? She hadn’t been much older then than Sarah herself. Sarah’d heard her mother tell about it many times, clicking her tongue and shaking her head at the end.
Sarah loved her mama and daddy. She loved the way they took care of her, the way they’d never tried to make her talk. Their warm cabin, the loft where she could whisper herself to sleep at night. Where she could hide.
But to walk to the creek now was to see the stump of that tree. They’d cut it down shortly after, for her parents and for her. But its roots were still there, deep as ever. In her dreams at night it grew back, its branches reaching all the way to their front porch.
Robert got away, she’d tell herself after those dreams, in the sounds of her new language. The language she shared with him. He’d take her with him one day, someplace where the gnarled branches couldn’t reach her. That was what Reverend Spies had said when they’d buried him: “He’s waiting for us there.” Her mama let out a wail, and Sarah knew it was because knowing that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for her, either, but she held in any wailing, any sound, saved it up and told herself, heaven or hell, it didn’t matter; she’d get away from Black Pool Road somehow. She’d find a way to join him.
Pilgrim and Stranger
1962
Mary Elizabeth walked down Big Hill Road at dusk on New Year’s Eve, home from cleaning her daddy’s church. The sky was red, the air damp; she could smell the train that had just left town, its lonesome whistle fading as it curved west, out of Richmond. Ever since she was a child, the sound of a train had made her dream of traveling, going somewhere else.
Money from cleaning the church along with the houses of several women in town—up the hill, across the tracks—would set her up with some spending money when she got back to school. Not that there’d be much to spend it on. Breakfast at a diner with Maze, maybe; Maze never had any extra money to spend. Mr. Roth insisted on buying the music for her, no matter that she told him she had money of her own. He’d sent her home with the Stravinsky. So far she hadn’t been able to bring herself to open it.
She’d played some, though. After she waxed the sanctuary floor at Big Hill Christian Church, she sat down at the piano, breathed in and out a few times, then let her fingers go through the motions of a bunch of hymns. She played them slowly, unthinkingly. “Wayfaring Stranger.” “Precious Lord, Hear My Prayer.” “The Old Rugged Cross.” On Christmas day, she played for the carol sing, “Silent Night,” “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem,” but when her daddy asked her to play one of the pieces from her concert at the college—swelling with pride then, embarrassing her—she shook her head and stared at the floor.
She knew how they’d be looking at her, even if he couldn’t see it. Wouldn’t see it. Shaking their heads and clicking their tongues behind her back. Thinks she’s somethin’ special. Aunt Paulie had warned her. “If you plan to learn to play like that,” she’d said, pointing at the empty stage after they’d heard that pianist play in Cincinnati, “get ready to be lonely.”
That she could ignore; she was practiced, already, at ignoring it, the eye-rolling, the tongue-clicking. Her own aloneness. But she hadn’t expected to mind the other faces so much. The smiling ones, the surprised ones, the ones that expected her to be grateful. The president’s face, his wife’s face. Mr. Roth’s.
Now kids she knew from high school or from her daddy’s church sat on their porches and gave her halfhearted waves. No one invited her to join them. They knew, she supposed, that she didn’t want them to.
When she was little, she’d played with other children in the neighborhood. One, Hannah Wilson, had been her special friend. She remembered a sweet, breathless sorrow when she had to tell Hannah good-bye at dark, when both were called in for bed. But when Mary Elizabeth was nine, Hannah Wilson moved to Atlanta with her mother.
Her sense of isolation, of being somehow set apart from the others there on Big Hill Road, had only grown since Mary Elizabeth had left for Berea. How different the college felt from her hometown, from these tattered, noisy blocks between her house and her daddy’s church, the train tracks, the corner store. Now she felt adrift, more than a little lost, not really at home in Richmond or Berea.
Yet the walk home from the church still felt so familiar that it left a lump in her throat. The smell of someone’s chicken frying for supper. The mangy dogs that roamed the streets, trying out every back door for scraps. The red light of dusk, filling the spaces between little houses with peeling paint and ratty old sofas on their front porches—little snatches of a view of the hills beyond. All of it warming her but then quickly eluding her, somehow just beyond her grasp.
At her house, a lamp was lit in the front parlor, and she heard voices as she approached. She could see her mama’s tea things spread out on the table when she looked in the window. Some nosy churchwomen, no doubt, come to see how Sarah Cox was getting on. But she’d been fine since they’d gotten back from Berea—no more fits. Maybe this visit would be all right, maybe Mary Elizabeth would not have to usher her whispering, hissing mother from the room. Satisfying those women who came to call. When she opened the front door, she was shocked to see her mother sipping tea and nodding, sitting across the room from Maze.
Maze put down her cup then and jumped up to hug Mary Elizabeth. “M. E.!” she said, “we were just talkin’ about where your mama grew up. Elba Helton comes from over around Stanford—remember her? Girl on my weaving crew?” She looked over at Sarah Cox. “I’m not braggin’ as much as it sounds like I am when I say that Elba and I are the best ones on the crew. Elba learned from her old granny. She says it’s pretty over there around Stanford, but she doesn’t believe she’ll want to go back there to live.” She looked expectantly at Sarah, then at Mary Elizabeth, but n
either said anything.
“The rest of ‘em on our crew need about a week to finish a row.” She laughed then, a little hollowly, as she sat down and took a sip of tea. “I hope it’s okay I came, Mary Elizabeth,” she said then. “You kinda look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
To Mary Elizabeth’s amazement, her mama answered the girl. “It’s fine that you came,” she said, her voice so quiet that Maze had to sit forward on her chair to hear her. “Mary Elizabeth, sit down and have a cup of tea.”
She sat down slowly on the doily-covered sofa next to Maze, who grabbed her hand eagerly. “I’ve got so much I want to tell you, M. E.!” she said. “I tried to write it all in a letter, but then I just thought it’d be easier and better to talk to you in person. The Christmas vacation is so long, don’t you think? I never thought I’d miss Berea College, did you?”
“How did you get here, Maze?” Mary Elizabeth said. How, she wondered, had the girl even known how to find her house? She was torn between elation—here was Maze, right here in her house in Richmond!—and terror. What things might her mama have said or done already, before she got home? And what outlandish questions might Maze have asked her?
“Harris Whitman brought me,” Maze said as she stirred a spoonful of sugar into her tea.
“Who?” Now Mary Elizabeth looked nervously at her mother, who’d begun to worry the pleats of her skirt with two fingers.
Maze laughed and, remarkably, looked over at Sarah as if she were somehow in on the joke. Sarah looked up from her pleats and smiled at the girl.
“Harris Whitman—don’t you remember? From Berea—you met him that day after your concert. The woodworker who lives in town, the one the girls on the hall were always talkin’ about.”
But Mary Elizabeth could hardly take any of it in. What was someone from Berea, from that other life, doing in her parents’ tiny house, in their front parlor, drinking tea from one of her mama’s good china cups?
“I thought maybe we could spend New Year’s Eve together.” Maze was talking again, but to Mary Elizabeth or her mother? It was hard to tell. Now she looked at Mary Elizabeth. “There’s a dance over in Berea tomorrow,” she said. “Harris said he’ll be glad to come get us both tomorrow and take us.” She smiled brightly at Sarah. “He came in to meet your mama and daddy, and they said that would be all right. It takes under an hour to drive from here to Berea, he says.”
For the first time, Mary Elizabeth noticed Maze’s hair, in a neat braid down her back. She was dressed neatly, too, in wool slacks and a red cardigan buttoned over a white blouse. Where were her wild hair and the faded dresses or dungarees she wore at school?
“There’s church tomorrow, Maze,” Mary Elizabeth said, looking over at her mama and taking a sip of her tea. Those damn country dances again; why couldn’t Maze let that rest? “I’ll have to be here to play the piano.”
“Well, what time is church?” Maze said.
“At eleven,” Mary Elizabeth said, then suddenly wondered where Maze’s ride back to Berea had gone. “Where is this Harris Whitman?” The pitch of her voice—like that of her old schoolteacher Miss Wright, she thought, hearing it—surprised her.
“He had to get back to Berea, M. E. He’ll come back tomorrow. The dance isn’t till four, so we could go to church here first and—”
“Are you planning to stay here tonight?” She couldn’t even imagine such a thing.
Maze stared back at her, then lowered her eyes. “I thought maybe I could, M. E.” She looked up then, and over at Sarah. “I should have asked first. I’m sorry, I just thought …”
“Maze, we don’t really have any extra room here,” Mary Elizabeth said, sweeping her hand in front of her as if to take in the house’s small dimensions. “There’s just the two bedrooms upstairs.”
“We can make up a pallet on the floor of your room, Mary Elizabeth.” Sarah spoke again, her voice still quiet as a whisper but strangely assured. “If you think that would be comfortable for you,” she added, turning to Maze.
Maze smiled. “That’s what I slept on for a good part of my life, ma’am,” she said. Her smile dimmed as she turned to Mary Elizabeth. “But I can call Harris and ask him to come back for me, M. E., if you don’t want me to stay.”
Both women looked at Mary Elizabeth now. “Well, all right,” she said, still uncertain and a little afraid, but a little giddy, too, at the thought of having Maze in her house for the night.
Maze looked down at her slacks. “But I left my dress for the dance in Harris Whitman’s car. I don’t really have any proper church clothes along.”
None anywhere else, either, Mary Elizabeth thought, thinking of Maze’s one good dress, the one she surely planned to wear to the dance, of a cut and style that had been in fashion a good twenty years before. And then the evening took an even stranger turn.
“I think you’re about the size of my Aunt Paulie,” Sarah Cox said. “We could get her trunk down from the attic and see if any of those dresses she brought back from France might fit you.”
So that night after supper, they got the trunk down with Reverend Cox’s help. He left the house then, to go to the church and work more on his sermon, he said, but Mary Elizabeth suspected otherwise, watching him smile nervously at dinner while his small house grew smaller, most of the air taken up by this big, loud girl who’d suddenly appeared from nowhere.
Mary Elizabeth couldn’t help but laugh when Maze pulled a pair of Aunt Paulie’s lace bloomers on over her slacks and did a mincing walk from the kitchen table out to the front room and back. They pulled everything out of the trunk that night—more lacey bloomers and slips, strands of pearls, a pressed gardenia, and several dresses made of a silk so old and soft it felt like it might dissolve between your fingers.
“Try this one on,” Sarah said, handing Maze a shimmering black dress with rhinestones at the neck and a dropped waist.
It fit her perfectly. When she walked back into the kitchen with it on, she looked radiant. And almost sheepish—a way Mary Elizabeth had never seen Maze look.
“You should wear that to your dance tomorrow,” Sarah Cox said then, but Maze said, “Oh, no, ma’am. I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?” Sarah said. “It’s never gonna fit Mary Elizabeth or me.”
Maze laughed. “Well, no, I reckon not.” There was no denying that she was a good two or three sizes larger than either Sarah or Mary Elizabeth. As Aunt Paulie had been.
“Only if we can take up another one for Mary Elizabeth to wear,” Maze said, looking over at her.
But Mary Elizabeth held up her hands and shook her head. “No, no. No dress for me—I won’t be doin’ any country dancing tomorrow.” She had no intention of going along with Maze and her new beau. Though secretly she longed to feel a dress like that against her skin, brushing her legs as she walked.
Later, after Sarah and George Cox had gone to bed, Maze pulled a little bottle of whiskey from her bag. “Harris gave me this so you and I could drink a toast at midnight,” she said. Giggling like children, they poured glasses of Coca-Cola to mix it with, then put on their coats and sat out on the front porch to drink it.
“So why aren’t you spending your New Year’s Eve with him?” Mary Elizabeth asked while they took dainty sips, swinging slowly on the porch swing.
Maze looked over at Mary Elizabeth, then smoothed her friend’s hair away from her face in the way she liked to do. “I promised my mama and Sister Georgia that I’d be spendin’ the night here with you, not at Harris’s place,” she said. “And besides, I wanted to see you, M. E. I never got to talk to you at the end of the term, and then not even after you finished your concert. There’s so much I need to tell you! I’ve been dyin’ to tell somebody, and I sure couldn’t tell my mama or Sister Georgia any of it.”
She pulled the whiskey bottle out from under the swing and added some more to both of their glasses. And then she told Mary Elizabeth, sparing no details, about how, on the night she had gone to her first Berea Country Da
nce, she had danced—happily, deliriously—right into the world of adulthood. Of sex.
Later both girls stumbled, laughing and then shushing each other, up to Mary Elizabeth’s room. Neither could fall asleep with all they had on their minds. Lying on the soft featherbed Sarah Cox had arranged for her in the narrow space on the floor beside Mary Elizabeth’s bed, Maze said, “M. E., this is comfortable enough and all. But couldn’t I just get in your bed with you?”
Mary Elizabeth hesitated, then laughed when she felt Maze tickle her foot. She felt warm and happy at that moment, and curious. Maybe a little jealous, too.
“All right,” she said, and then, after Maze had climbed in next to her and wrapped one long arm and one long leg around her, she said, “What did it feel like—honestly? Didn’t it hurt, at least at first?”
Maze pulled herself up on one elbow, resting her head on her hand. The room was completely dark on that moonless night, but Mary Elizabeth could feel Maze looking at her, could smell the sweet smell of Coke and whiskey on her breath.
“I thought it would,” she said. “Everybody says it does, Fern and Dare and all of them, not that they’d have any way to know. I can’t explain it, M. E., but all of a sudden I just wanted it to happen so bad! But I’ll admit I was scared, too.” She lay on her back then, and Mary Elizabeth felt the stretch of her arm as she raised it above her head.
“But he did things first that just got me ready for it, I guess. Things that felt so good, M. E.…” She stretched again, then shivered. “And nothing about it hurt at all after that. I promise you.”
Mary Elizabeth sighed. She doubted, somehow, that she’d ever know a feeling like that herself. And then Maze said, “I could show you.”
Mary Elizabeth wondered what Vista Jansen would say to that, to the fact that it was her daughter who introduced Mary Elizabeth to that particular type of pleasure—the purring, stretching, shivering delight of that kind of touch. Vista, who, Mary Elizabeth could tell that first day at Berea, had serious concerns about her daughter sharing a room with a black girl. A black girl with a lusty beast inside her in place of a soul. Maybe she was right, Mary Elizabeth thought that night, in the dark cave of her room, in the tent of her small bed, with Maze touching her all over, putting her tongue in her ear and giggling, then reaching a finger deep inside her, exploring there, trying everywhere until Mary Elizabeth surprised herself by letting out a little cry.
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