“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” Sister Georgia said. “I only came to say …” and she stopped, looking confused, as if she’d forgotten why she had come.
“Ma’am?” Vista said, walking toward the old woman and reaching out a hand to her, wondering if she was ill.
Sister Georgia looked at Vista then, declining her hand, and her eyes grew clear. They were piercing eyes; Vista felt the woman was looking through her, or deep inside her, searching for something. Looking for her soul, if she had such a thing. Maybe trying to count up all her sins.
“What I came to say is that I do not believe Russell and Nora Taylor have your best interests, or the best interests of your child, at heart. It may seem unlikely, but I have money of my own. I could pay you and provide lodging for you and your daughter. I can offer you that, if it would interest you.”
Vista stared at her, still unnerved by her clear, unblinking eyes. Surely they were brown, but to Vista, they looked black. Her face had a strange kind of energy, almost a kind of youthfulness; she looked ageless somehow. She stood erect now, not wavering at all, and Vista was struck by how strong she seemed—strong and tall, not the least bit bent or curled by arthritis or rheumatism like Mamaw Marthie was, like all the other old women Vista knew.
And what a strange offer. “Well, thank you, ma’am,” she began, trying to be polite, “but I reckon …” But before she could finish, Sister Georgia turned and quickly walked away.
After that Vista worked doggedly, determined to shake off the old woman’s ghostly appearance. Had it even happened, or was the heat just getting to her? She laughed to herself at the thought of moving in with the crazy old woman, pounding the hard earth with her hoe while sweat trickled down her back.
She worked without stopping, the hoe’s blade cutting faster and deeper, more determined than ever to make this a good day. She finished clearing the front flower bed and moved around to begin digging in the back garden just as Nora pulled into the drive.
The first sign that it might not, in fact, be a good day after all was the appearance of Russell’s Cadillac not far behind Nora’s. Though she was hot and tired and in need of a glass of water, Vista kept working; she wanted to avoid the stuffy interior of the East Family Dwelling House for a while longer. When her thirst finally drove her to the back door, she was startled to find both Nora and Russell in the kitchen, laughing like children, popping the cork on what appeared to be their second bottle of champagne.
“Vista!” Nora shouted when she saw her at the door. “Vista, sweetheart, come and join us for a toast!” And before she knew it, Vista had a crystal water goblet full of champagne in her hand (a grievous breach of decorum, Vista knew from Russell’s notes), and she was toasting something or someone—it wasn’t clear what or whom—while Nora shimmied around the kitchen in her beautiful silk-stockinged feet and Russell stood watching her, slowly sipping from his own goblet, an unreadable look on his face.
Later Vista would blame the heat, her thirst, her own confusion and discomfort at walking in on what seemed a strange scene to her, both embarrassingly intimate and, at the same time, strangely cold. Whatever the reason—and maybe it was simply that that expensive champagne tasted very good to her—she drank the whole glass as if it were water, and she was well along on the second glass that Nora immediately poured her before she thought to ask what they were celebrating.
“Russell has a new job!” Nora crowed, grabbing the bottle and steering Vista and Russell toward the front parlor.
“I didn’t know you were lookin’—” Vista began, but before she could say more, Nora had gathered her in a sweaty embrace and begun dancing around the room with her to the Bing Crosby tune Russell had started on the record player.
And by now Vista was dizzy and giddy herself, laughing as Nora spun her round and round the room, and she assumed she must have been mistaken when she thought she heard Russell say something about “a banking job—in Philadelphia.”
Vista poured herself a third glass then as Nora collapsed on the sofa, saying something dreamy and slurred about a house in Chestnut Hill. She drank it as fast as the first two—this time to drown a gnawing dread that was creeping in at the corners of her foggy mind.
And then, just as suddenly as it had started, the celebration seemed to be over. Nora was fast asleep on the sofa, snoring lightly, and the long-finished record went on spinning, scratching and popping, while Russell stood next to it, that same odd expression on his face, staring now, unmistakably, at Vista. She stood still across the room from him, half-filled glass in hand, suddenly as stunned and disoriented as a trapped animal.
For a moment she stared back at him, and a chill—a not entirely unpleasant one—made its way up her sweating back. And then, because she did not know what else to do or say, she set down her glass and went to work. First she lifted Nora’s feet onto the sofa and arranged the cushions around her more comfortably, as she’d done on countless other afternoons. Then she gathered the goblets and the nearly empty bottle and carried them into the kitchen, trying as best she could not to stumble or weave under Russell’s relentless stare. In the kitchen she washed the glasses, disposed of the bottles, wiped up the sticky spills on the floor. Then she drank a tall glass of cold water—the thing she should have done in the first place, a voice inside her said, while another voice, a surprising one, chastised her for dumping the remainder of that delicious, bubbly champagne down the sink—and headed back outside to continue her work in the back garden.
She’d cleared another quarter of the plot when she heard him coming, stumbling even more than she had as she’d walked away from him in the parlor. It was the stumbling that surprised her, not the fact that he had eventually followed her; that she had known, somehow, to expect.
The day had turned even hotter, and she’d begun to feel dry-mouthed and queasy. She stood to stretch her tired legs and pulled the wet curls up from the back of her neck, and as she did she felt his hand there, cupping her neck, gently first but then with more pressure. She turned her head and felt his mouth at her ear, his breath hot and wine-sweet.
“How long’s it been since you’ve been with a man?” he whispered in her ear, still holding her neck, and with his other hand he reached for her side, then trailed his fingers over her breasts. Slowly, lingeringly, he licked the edge of her ear.
For a moment, just a moment, she forgot who this was. It was hot, she was exhausted and fuzzy, still, from the champagne. And, it must be said, it had truly been an awfully long time since she had been touched in that way. And so she closed her eyes for a moment longer and allowed herself to go first chilled, then damp and weak-kneed, at the touch of his fingers, his hot breath on her neck. But then she pulled herself away and looked around her, afraid that someone might have seen.
He took her hand then and pulled her back behind the old Brethren’s Shop, where Nora stored her gardening tools, and she let him kiss her full on the mouth and rub himself against her. She felt the pressure of his erection through her thin cotton dress, and the one thing that saved her, that stopped her from giving in completely, returning his kiss, using her tongue the way he was using his, was her sudden, horrified awareness that she was going to be sick. Once again she pulled away, just in time to throw herself back around the corner of the Brethren’s Shop and begin to retch there, in full view of the Shaker Inn.
When she’d finished, she looked up to see Russell lurching back toward the kitchen door. And then, though later she would think she must have imagined it (surely she was still fast asleep in the front parlor?), she could have sworn she saw Nora there, in the shadows inside the back doorway, watching her husband’s approach and turning away as soon as he reached the door.
Pilgrim and Stranger
1962
They trotted her out like a show pony. A circus act. When they asked her to play, she played—the Waltzes, Debussy, the Chopin “Étude” she’d mastered.
They reported on her perfect grade-point average before she
began, every time. She was exceptional! A remarkable exception! Proof of something, surely, of the rightness of the school’s mission. Virginal and pure to boot. Studious. Accomplished on the piano, on which she played not race music, but the classics.
Mary Elizabeth kept picturing that young man’s hands floating over the keys, from such a distance, from the faraway seats where she and Aunt Paulie had been sitting. And yet she felt like she was right there, beside him, or somehow inside him, her hands his hands, glazing the keys like rainwater. Fingers like the legs of racehorses.
She thought if she could play the French composers, and also now Stravinsky, the pieces Aunt Paulie had regretted never learning, the music might somehow still be hers. Hers and Aunt Paulie’s. Those years in Paris, that longing in Paulie’s chest, in both their chests, when they played. Sometimes, when she finished playing Chopin, Mary Elizabeth sat at the piano and wept.
But a funny thing: She couldn’t play the Stravinksy. She knew now that she never would.
Only the first movement, Mr. Roth said, the “Russian Dance.” Then the familiar Chopin “Étude,” but a new piece here, too, one of the Preludes, that also needed plenty of attention. Every day, at least six hours a day—before breakfast, before dinner, before bed, study another time somehow—from January until the concert in May. He’d never even thought of playing Petrushka, he told her one day. He laughed when he said it.
On the evening of the concert—a dreamy May evening, crushed magnolia leaves under her feet; for the first time in weeks, in months, she noticed her surroundings—the Music Building auditorium was filled. Invited guests, president and trustees and wives in suits in a light weave and pearls and hats. Every single music student, Maze and Harris Whitman and their friends, all of them itchy in their stockings and dresses and ties. Her daddy and mama in the front row. “Right there beside the president,” he’d be planning to tell them all in church on Sunday. “Right there in the very next seat.”
What a torment it all had to be for her poor mama, Mary Elizabeth thought at the stage door, looking out. She stopped there after she was introduced and stared out into the big, dim room, the Steinway in front of her, bathed in white light. She stared down at her own hands while everything went silent.
And then she turned around and walked behind the curtain hanging at the back of the stage, then out through the building’s back entrance. She walked, her eyes wide open, seeing everything but hearing nothing, all the way back to Ladies Hall, where she carefully finished packing her things.
Eventually Maze found her, sitting in the backseat of her daddy’s car in the dormitory parking lot, hands folded in her lap. Waiting.
Sarah
1939 · 1945
When her daddy finally said, “It’s the girl’s own choice” and looked at her with a sadness she couldn’t understand, Sarah watched Aunt Paulie roll her eyes and hiss again, “She is a child.” Then she turned to see her mama, crying silently, not looking at her. Later Sarah would remember this moment, her daddy’s sad eyes, the way her mama wouldn’t look at her, and wonder why on earth they didn’t tell her then what that meant—being married. Being his.
But at that moment she only thought of how he had sung that Saturday morning she’d found him in the church. How he spoke to her in a way that was different from the others—like he didn’t see anything wrong with her. They were all looking at her, and she started to nod, then stopped; they’d believe her, she knew, if she spoke the word. Her mama could hold on to her miracle, and somehow Sarah knew she needed to give her that miracle now. Her daddy’s eyes might stay sad, but maybe his bony shoulders would relax a little, his chest fill up with more air. She’d seen what it did to her parents, when she’d finally spoken several months before, and she felt sorry, at that moment, that it had taken her so long.
Even Aunt Paulie grew quiet now, visibly shocked (and maybe disappointed, Sarah sometimes thought), when she pulled in her breath and started to say the words. It was Aunt Paulie she looked at when she answered them now, when she nodded and pulled in the air and breathed out the first word she’d said that wasn’t a whisper.
“Yes,” she said, “I will marry him.” The sound of her own voice shocked her. It sounded husky and full, like the voice of a woman.
In the end he didn’t take her away from Kentucky. He took her only twenty miles away, to the Big Hill Baptist Church in Richmond, Kentucky, and a tiny box of a house, built for them by the men of the church, a little way up Big Hill Road.
She was sixteen years old. She had had her first period only a year before. Her mother’s eyes had looked afraid, then looked away, when she’d told Sarah what to expect on her wedding night. It was the day before she was to marry George Cox, and she wondered if she hadn’t heard right.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t gentle. He seemed not to know much more than she did. It frightened them both when she cried out in pain. In the morning he washed the bloodied sheets himself, in a bucket in the back.
The second night she didn’t bleed as much. He’d given her two big glasses of sweet wine at supper. Church wine, he whispered to her and laughed, a little nervously, she thought. What would make him nervous? Jesus’s blood. She laughed, too. Her whole body turned warm, she felt her cheeks flush. She was pleasantly numb. It hurt less then, it felt different. After that he brought the wine to their room at night and poured each of them a glass. It was sweet and potent on his breath and tongue. He dipped his finger in the glass, then spread its sweetness slowly over her. On her lips, on her breasts, then there. Jesus’s blood and hers. She laughed, then covered her foolish mouth. She rolled over on her side, her back to him. She lifted her hips and let him enter her from behind. She felt a white light all around her. Robert. She almost said his name aloud. She saw his smooth arms, the way his muscles had frightened her. She heard his guitar strumming, felt it strumming, inside her.
Over the next five years, she was pregnant three times. Each time she lost the baby. The last one was born dead. She stayed in her mama and daddy’s house for a long time then. Once again she stopped speaking, except for the gurgling and hissing, the sounds of something none of them could understand. In the spring, when George Cox came to take her home, Sarah’s daddy, grown suddenly old and stooped, tried to send him away.
“Find yourself another woman,” he said, and Sarah’s mama hid behind the door and cried.
But she saw her husband’s sagging shoulders, his tired red eyes. Had she made them all so old and sad? Her hopeless womb? All those children gone to be with Robert. Why not her?
She rose to pack her bag and join her husband. There was nothing else to do.
She returned to cook his meals and clean his house. To answer his questions with “Yes” or “No.” In church she stayed silent, and they all watched her, slant-eyed. He touched her lightly, her shoulder, the small of her back, her waist, to steer her toward home, toward her room. He slept now on the front-room sofa.
Until one night when she woke to find herself crying, moonlight flooding the little bedroom. She’d been dreaming a song, one she didn’t recognize. A child’s voice singing it, strange and haunting as the moon. She went to him then and curled inside his arms. He trembled while he held her. She lifted her gown. The child they made that night would live. Sarah knew this, from the singing. She was a healthy girl, and they named her Mary Elizabeth, after their mothers.
And then suddenly no one watched her nervously anymore. The new mama. She saw the change herself when she looked in the mirror. Hers was the face of a woman now. Aunt Paulie straightened her hair, then curved it into gleaming waves while her daddy bounced the baby on his knee. Her mama made her two new dresses, with room for her suddenly ample breasts. When Mary Elizabeth cried, only Sarah could soothe her. It was a kind of power, something she’d never known or even imagined.
But the doctor had said when Mary Elizabeth was born, this would have to be her only child. He was a white man, working in the hospital in Lexington, where Aunt Paulie had i
nsisted she go to have the baby. On the colored ward. The doctor was young, and his eyes were sad. She’d seen Aunt Paulie whisper with him in the corner of the ward, then later him whispering to George in the same corner. Both of them had cast their eyes down to the floor when they’d realized she was watching them.
No more children, then. She always wondered: Whose idea had that been?
The men from the church built an upstairs for their house—two more bedrooms and a bathroom inside on the first floor. Their old room became George’s study. His church, where he preached a gospel of peaceful acceptance, of quietly “lifting up the race,” was growing. He had breakfast once a month with a group of preachers from all around the county.
“White ones, too,” he told her with a kind of reverence that disturbed her. She only nodded. White people in downtown Richmond still crossed the street to avoid walking on the same side as her. Having a baby hadn’t changed that. White people had also killed her brother. That was what she knew about white people.
But now there was this small being, this baby girl with eyes like hers and fat, round arms like her doting father’s. This baby girl who would need her, for a time. Suddenly the people at church weren’t afraid of her anymore. If she hardly spoke, still, what was the harm in that? She was the mother of a healthy, beautiful child. Normal enough, then.
Sarah’s mama had gone to church every Sunday for a time. But her daddy and Robert had had no use for it. Not long after Robert died, her mama had stopped dragging Sarah along. That morning when she’d stepped in to hear George’s singing, she hadn’t been to church in more than a year.
“We need to bring you back to Jesus,” he said to her when they were married.
“This is the way up for us, for black folks. Up, and closer to God.
“We will prove ourselves worthy, and God will make us all one.
“He is the vine, we are the branches. No one comes to the Father but by him.”
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