Stranger Here Below

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  When Mary Elizabeth looked away then, down at the ground, Maze let out a loud, impatient sigh. “I guess I’m just askin’, M. E.,” she said, “what good has bein’ an upright Christian girl ever done you?”

  Mary Elizabeth didn’t have an answer. She only stared at Maze for a moment, then turned her gaze back to Sister Georgia, who stood still before them now, maybe fifty feet away. Her eyes were closed and her lips were moving, whispering, mumbling something, words in no language Mary Elizabeth could understand. It reminded her, suddenly, of her mama.

  “I’m leaving now, Maze,” she said. She walked briskly down the path back to the Sisters’ Shop, dodging nettles and slapping at a buzzing horsefly. She didn’t go back to Holy Sinai’s Plain, during that visit, again.

  A week after she’d arrived at Pleasant Hill, Mary Elizabeth’s daddy came to drive her back to Richmond. It was a few days earlier than she’d planned, but “Your mama needs you home,” he told her.

  What he meant, she knew, was that he needed her there, needed her to keep an eye on her mother, to clean the pews and the floor of his church, to play the piano on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, to be his strong and true, good Christian daughter. At the end of that week at Pleasant Hill, she could see it: She was going home, to his house, for him.

  As they slowed to turn off the main road through Shaker-town and onto the highway, they passed Sister Georgia on her way to Holy Sinai’s Plain for that day’s worship. She was talking, to no one they could see. To Sister Daphna, maybe.

  “She says Sister Daphna’s the one who invited her in,” Maze had said. “The one who released her, who helped her drop the burden she’d been carrying.”

  Whatever that was, Mary Elizabeth thought. “Why’s she always got to make such a fuss about her being ‘black as coal’?” she asked Maze.

  “I don’t know, M. E.,” Maze said with a shrug. “It seems like it matters to her. I can’t tell you why.”

  “Who in the world is that crazy old woman?” Reverend Cox asked now, as they drove away from Pleasant Hill and waited for Sister Georgia to cross the road in front of them. “And what’s she doin’ dressed like that, with that little bonnet on her head in this kind of heat?”

  “That’s Sister Georgia,” Mary Elizabeth said, and she gave a faint wave, though she knew Georgia would not see her. She gazed out the window then, her mind racing backward, through the past week and then further back. After they’d turned onto the highway and picked up some speed, she turned to face her father.

  “Daddy, how come there’s a guitar up in our attic,” she said, “up there with the rest of Aunt Paulie’s things?”

  Sister

  1908 · 1911

  She was not beautiful, even in her youth. This had always been clear to Georginea, but it had hardly mattered. “You are,” her father had said to his daughter almost daily when she was a girl, “a gift to me from God, full of your grandfather’s fiery spirit. You will rage against injustice, just as he did.”

  And so her tall and large-boned frame seemed well suited to her, fitting for the work that lay ahead. When she went walking with Tobias Jewell after choir practice that first day, it stunned her to hear him say, “You are as lovely as an angel.” She had to ask him to repeat what he had said.

  By age thirty-six, she could have been what was known as a handsome woman—buxom, healthy, strong-limbed—except for the fact that she had stopped exercising altogether (in brazen defiance of the Berea code) and ate only enough to survive. Largeframed as she was, this practice did not make her look thin—more malproportioned. Her head and eyes loomed large over her angular frame. Her face, oddly, retained its roundness and softness. By the spring of 1908, her eyes, though often red-rimmed and sunk deep inside the caverns that surrounded them, seemed to dance with unreliable flames. In truth, most of the girls in Ladies Hall were frightened of her, and even the Ladies’ Principal chose to avoid her by the end.

  She packed her bag and traveled by train to Lexington, to the home of her Aunt Lenora, now a widow tended to daily by her son, Georginea’s cousin, Tilden Rose.

  “Look what they’ve done to you, Georginea—you’ve wasted away to nothing, and here is how they show their thanks. You’re better off here with me, I’ve always said so.”

  Any trace of the wind and light that had greeted Georginea as she’d been escorted from her classroom at Berea that final day, the stunning freedom of defiance and of poetry that had carried her, as if on a cloud, during her last days there, had long since vanished. As she glanced around her Aunt Lenora’s sitting room, with its polished brass and dark mahogany, heavy brocade and Victorian opulence everywhere she looked, she felt herself struggling to breathe, sinking back into that black, bottomless pool from the summer before she’d left her father’s house for Berea.

  Bringing her eyes to rest on her own hands in her lap, which looked strangely fish-like to her, like dead, useless animals completely severed from her mind, from what was truly her, she found sufficient breath to whisper hoarsely, “I will need to find work.” It was, she knew, the only thing that could save her. When her aunt gasped in indignation, asking, incredulously, if she needed to be reminded of her inheritance—all that railroad money, barely touched by her father all those years—Georginea lifted her eyes and silenced her aunt with her burning gaze. Those strange, unnerving eyes again. She had begun to discover their odd power.

  Tilden knew of a position at the school his wife’s sister attended, and by the fall of 1909, Georginea was again Miss Ward, the serious and sad teacher of literature, this time at the Beau Rive Daughters’ College near Harrodsburg, Kentucky—offering “art, elocution, a conservatory of music, and the strongest of literary courses in preparation for the best American and European schools.” Her students were, without exception, the daughters of Kentucky planters—the granddaughters of Kentucky’s wealthiest slave owners.

  It was made clear to her, during her first meeting with Colonel and Mrs. Bryant, the owners and only other faculty at the school, that the “radical” sentiments she had been surrounded by at Berea would be quite inappropriate for the students of Daughters’ College. When they asked her if they need say more, she assured them that they did not.

  She read the later Wordsworth to her students, with no particular passion, as they nodded over their needlework. And by the spring of her second year at Beau Rive, she had decided—mistakenly, as it turned out—that there was really nothing left for her to do but die.

  It was Mrs. Bryant who suggested a weekend of rest at the nearby Shaker Inn, the former East Family Dwelling House of the members of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. Once housing female Shakers of all ages, the building was now an inn for the public, tended by the few surviving members of the society.

  “It will do you a world of good, Georginea,” Mrs. Bryant said one morning at breakfast at the end of March. “I remember wonderful excursions there when I was a girl. Sister Jane made the most wonderful meals for the young people, and more than one of us met our mates this way.” And here she seemed to wink at Georginea, who could not comprehend why she was telling her this. “We’d ride on the wagon and laugh and sing. It was a grand time to be young. That was where I met Colonel Bryant, you know,” she whispered conspiratorially.

  A weekend at the Shaker Inn would have struck Georginea as a ludicrous suggestion. (“No time is a good time to be young,” was all she’d said to Mrs. Bryant that day, prompting the woman to sigh dramatically and leave the table.) Simply ludicrous, except for one thing: a photograph she had carried with her since she was a child. It was poorly focused and shot from too great a distance, taken by her Uncle Tilden with a new camera that he did not completely understand, she came to realize as she grew older and his photographs did not improve. But she had kept it with her always, from Oberlin to Berea to Beau Rive Daughters’ College, as a reminder of a strange trip when she was five or six—floating, as if through fog, to the surface of her mind from time to
time, in the manner of a dream—taken with her aunt and uncle and cousin during one of her summer visits to Lexington.

  They had traveled by train, and she remembered the thrill of crossing the high, narrow bridge over the Kentucky River, from Jessamine to Mercer County. She had never seen such steep and rocky land beside a river as the Kentucky River Palisades, so unlike the smooth plain along the banks of the Ohio back in Cincinnati.

  In the photograph, she stood with her back to the camera, peering through a fence, a black ribbon in her hair. On her right was her Aunt Lenora, with young Tilden Rose in her arms; on her left an elderly woman with a formal apron and odd little bonnet stood solidly, looking at the camera as if she didn’t quite trust it, or perhaps its owner. Young Georginea was looking through the fence toward the river; they were standing near the old fulling mill. Many years later, Sister Mary would tell her, smiling fondly, that the elderly woman was Sister Hortency Hooser.

  When the image of that visit floated through the fog of recent events, though, it wasn’t Sister Hortency that Georginea remembered. It was the sight of rapidly moving feet and hands, the sound of clapping and stomping, but not of the barn-dance variety, the only kind of clapping and stomping she had seen as a child of six. It was rhythmic in that way, but stranger; she had gone with Lenora, Tilden, Tilden Rose, and a sizable group of other curious onlookers, to watch the Shaker worship service. There were only a small group of Shakers dancing, perhaps a dozen at most, nothing like the crowded spiritual gatherings of the years of Mother Ann’s work. But still, those ten or twelve Shakers sent up a loud and memorable ruckus from the wooden meetinghouse floor—loud and memorable enough to stay with Georginea for more than thirty years.

  They had frightened her at the time. Yet she’d carried that photograph with her always. Thinking of that trip again, what she remembered was her father’s derision when he learned where her aunt and uncle had taken her. “It’s no wonder they’ve shrunk to a dying group of ten,” he’d spat out, “calling themselves the elect of God while living in such clear defiance of God’s will. I should have known better than to have entrusted you to that woman’s care for a week.” She’d never mentioned the Shakers again.

  Thirty years later, when she woke in her bed at the Shaker Inn, her mouth dry and her wrists heavily bandaged, Sister Mary was sewing at her bedside. Before Georginea could speak, the old woman offered her a sip of a strange and pungent tea—the same milky brown color as the creek—then patted her arm gently and said, “It seems that something has brought you to us, child.”

  “I knew the river here, and the railroad bridge,” Georginea whispered, “and the stream—I knew just where the stream was and that that was where I needed to go.”

  She grew silent, remembering. She had known, as if by instinct, how to find her way to the river, to the crumbling remains of the fulling mill—and later, her mind racing, a blur of rage and fear and despair, to the muddy bank of the Shawnee Run, stained now with her blood.

  It was Sister Mary who had greeted her on her arrival at the Shaker Inn, offering her a glass of ginger lemonade. It startled her to realize it now, to remember the strange agitation that overtook her as soon as she carried her bag up the steps and over the threshold of this oddly familiar inn.

  Her agitation persisted as she was shown to her room, feeling all the while that she could hardly breathe, and it drove her from her room as soon as Sister Mary left her, drove her blindly, then, along the path to the river, now barely visible below a tangle of weeds and brambles that stuck to her skirt and stockings. And then, when she reached the ruins of the mill and the fence she had peered through as the child in the photograph, to her left, up the river, she could see the high railroad bridge, its monstrous, rusting bulk terrifyingly near. And she heard her own heart pounding in her ears, pounding like the feet of those long-ago Shakers, and in its beating she heard the voices and felt the hot, stale breath of countless black-coated men—Berea’s president, Colonel Bryant with a loaded gun, her father’s pale face twisted with disgust at her, at her woman’s scent and woman’s needs, her grandfather’s eyes blazing from the framed photograph in the front hallway of her childhood home.

  And just as quickly as she had arrived, she was off again, running from the teeming whirl of her own mind, back over the weed-choked path, back behind the Shaker Inn and down another, smoother path. And then she found herself, suddenly, at the edge of the quietly flowing Shawnee Run. The smell of wet mud filling her nostrils. The air damp and heavy, hurting her lungs. The unbearable closeness of it all so familiar, and so suitable for what she knew she had to do. She felt in her pocket for the blades she had taken from her dresser drawer that morning. Without thought she dipped her wrists into the icy water, pulling them out again, one at a time, to slice two deft cuts at the veins. When the blood burst free like a long-dammed river, she gasped at her astonished relief.

  Later, aching and dry-mouthed in a clean, narrow bed, she felt a wave of revulsion at the memory of that sudden flood. Not at what she had done, but at what she had failed to do, at what was awaiting her now that she had failed to die and would have to go on living.

  When she had first arrived at Beau Rive, she had vowed to keep silent. To read harmless poems about nature and God to her students and to refuse to be troubled by their ignorance of the world around them. She understood the Bryants’ implicit threat in their reference to the “radical ideas” of a place like Berea College. And she shuddered at the thought of having no work of her own at all, living out her days at teas and luncheons in her Aunt Lenora’s airless Lexington home. And so she had kept quiet, at first.

  Until she began to realize that silence in a place like the Beau Rive Daughters’ College was hardly different from nodding through a Lexington matron’s teas and luncheons, and she felt the black pool closing around her again, heard the menacing crows taunting her from the branches outside her window and found herself, once again, sick with headaches, waking from baffling dreams.

  She began innocently enough—a few poems by Blake, a smattering of Stowe, a few brief tracts by Berea’s founder, John Fee. When she saw an occasional young woman look up from her needlework with curiosity—even, on rare occasions, with apparent interest—she would begin to seek that student out for afternoon walks over the college’s grounds or a secretive cup of tea in her own room. There she would provide additional books and tracts, asking the wide-eyed girl how much she truly knew about her own state’s violent history.

  Most of these students kept Miss Ward’s strange passions to themselves; no matter how fascinating they might find her, they feared her as well and wondered, to themselves, at the true state of her mind and health. Occasionally other students would complain to the Bryants about their teacher’s strange turns of mind, her odd choices of reading material during their lessons in literature and diction. By the winter of her second year at Beau Rive, Georginea had begun to receive increasingly strident warnings from Colonel Bryant and his wife.

  But it was Jessamine Parks, the bashful, club-footed daughter of one of the wealthiest landowners in Mercer County, who prompted, quite unintentionally, Georginea’s desperate act. A new student at the school during Georginea’s second year there, she was clearly a worry to her family, bookish, maimed, and unmarriageable as she was; years later Georgia would finally be able to smile at the image of the girl’s angry pluck when she asked her father, one night at a large family gathering, if he was aware that Harriet Beecher Stowe had based the Shelbys, the slave-owning family in the opening chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on an actual slave-owning family in the heart of the Kentucky bluegrass. A family very much like their own, in fact, she pointed out to her father and his assembled family.

  Shortly afterward Georginea received a letter from Mr. Henry Wyatt Parks, reminding her in no uncertain terms of another important feature of the state of Kentucky’s history: the willingness of its sons and daughters to rid themselves, by whatever means necessary, of dangerous and unwanted interlop
ers—”be they foreigners, colored, or Northerners”—in their midst.

  The threat was clear to Georginea, and now her dreams turned darker still, peopled with dangling corpses and raging fires and, strangely, guns that would suddenly appear in her own hands. When Jessamine Parks knocked on her door in the quiet late afternoon, eager to talk and to borrow more books, Georginea would fumble nervously, tripping over her own apologies, before sending her away.

  He had written to the Bryants as well—a very different letter, formal and civilized and expressing, he said, only his “fatherly concern”—and Georginea knew she was once again certain to lose her position, the only work she knew how to do, her one way of being fully occupied and genuinely self-sufficient. As spring arrived and the Bryants’ mistrust grew stronger, she felt herself sinking and then floating, her body turning thin and weak, insubstantial, utterly useless in such a world. She decided then to visit the strange land she remembered from her childhood. And she convinced herself that it would be a fitting place for her to die.

  “God has brought all of us here,” Sister Mary said, bringing Georginea back to her failure by the creek’s edge. And then, apparently noticing the cloud passing over Georginea’s face, Sister Mary began to stroke her hair. “God, and Mother Ann, and the vagaries of the world. Only two of us are left now,” she sighed. Then she quoted a poem by one of her long-dead sisters with a strange name: Hortency Hooser. “Near on to a thousand have dried up their tears, within this community the past seventy years,” she recited, eyes closed and head tilted toward the ceiling, in an old woman’s quavering voice.

  And then, her voice growing more powerful, she sang to Georginea, who closed her eyes and gave in to this strange music and what had to be, she thought as she drifted, the effects of the peculiar-smelling tea.

  The father of one of her students at Beau Rive Daughters’ College had threatened to kill her, she told Sister Mary when she woke again, this time at dusk, with thinner bandages on her arms. After drinking some broth and swallowing a few bites of bread, she saw that Sister Mary had been joined by an old man with a full white beard, whom she introduced to Georginea as Brother Benjamin.