Stranger Here Below

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  Mary Elizabeth smiled and shook her head. “I don’t know, Maze,” she said. “It sure does sound like somebody’s idea of a joke.” She herself would be back in the cafeteria washroom.

  Maze kicked off her shoes that night and fell onto her narrow bed with a groan. “Well at least I’m back here with you, M. E.,” she said. She pointed a finger at her and said, “You better not go anywhere. I want you right here, in this room, or at your classes, or out with me. You’re the only thing that’s keepin’ me at this godforsaken place.”

  Mary Elizabeth gave a snort. “Oh, sure, Maze.” Maze had come back from a long walk with Harris Whitman only an hour before.

  That fall Maze spent a good part of her time with Harris, and also with his friends, who became her friends, too. They were mostly seniors, and because Mary Elizabeth had no idea what else to do, she sometimes tagged along—like a pesky little sister, she felt at first, though they didn’t treat her that way. She spent her days walking in wide circles to avoid the Music Building and ducking behind buildings or groups of students whenever she saw Mr. Roth walking on one of the campus paths. Once early in the summer he’d called her daddy’s church and left his number, but she never called him back, and he hadn’t called again.

  Maze never said a word about the piano. Instead she dragged Mary Elizabeth along for evening walks with this new group of friends, hours of drinking coffee and talking and, eventually, meetings of the college newspaper staff. The student in charge of editorials that year was Daniel Burgett, Mary Elizabeth’s would-be dance partner back on New Year’s Day. A different lifetime, it seemed to her.

  Daniel was a mystery. Sometimes, when he was clean-shaven, he reminded Mary Elizabeth of pictures she’d seen of William Kapell, the handsome pianist who had died in a plane crash when she was a child. Dark and brooding like that, movie star–like. He was skinny, though, and not very tall; he usually had a beard he hadn’t tended to, and he was intellectual, so not of much interest to most of the Berea girls. Still, stories circulated about him on campus. He was from West Virginia, some said, grandson of a miner killed at the Battle of Blair Mountain; that was why he was so gung-ho for the unions. No, others said, he was Creole, son of a white soldier and a black woman from New Orleans; that was where all the talking and writing about Berea and its “race problem” came from.

  He did look too dark and curly-haired to be white, Mary Elizabeth thought. But he didn’t seem black, either. He was quiet and serious, and the truth was, he scared her. He revealed nothing about his past, or his race, even when people asked him up front. He smoked an endless stream of cigarettes, carried around books by Sartre and Camus, and never missed one of the Tuesday-night fireside chats in the student lounge, where Dr. Wendt and a group of students, mostly seniors and mostly boys, got together and talked about books they were reading. Maze went because Harris Whitman still liked to go, and sometimes Mary Elizabeth went along. That fall Franz Kafka was all the rage.

  Daniel was in two of Mary Elizabeth’s classes that fall: third-term French and Dr. Wendt’s existentialist philosophy class. Mary Elizabeth feared she was in over her head in the second one—but it was Wendt himself who’d encouraged her to take it, at the end of the introductory course she’d taken with him the year before.

  Dr. Wendt was thin and wiry and bald, and also a chain smoker. Not too long before he came to Berea, the school had still forbidden smoking anywhere on campus, he told the students in class one day, then laughed loud and long. “Can you imagine that?”

  He was from the North, from Minnesota, and he spoke so rapidly that his slower-moving, slower-speaking students at Berea had to struggle to understand him sometimes, and it was always a challenge to follow the train of his rapidly shifting thoughts and ideas as he lectured. It was a challenge that some students—like Mary Elizabeth, like Daniel—found exhilarating.

  His classes were wild, free-wheeling affairs. It was Dr. Wendt who explained the terms “race music” and “hillbilly music” in class one day. He’d been talking about Sartre, but something had led him around to this.

  “And do you know why you think all music except for classical music, and now rock and roll, falls into one of these two categories?” he asked that day. The sea of confused faces in front of him shook back and forth: No idea, sir, no.

  “Because Ralph Peer, the owner of the Victor recording label, created those categories out of thin air, as a way to categorize the music he was trying to sell, and make more money by telling people what they ought to like”—here his voice reached a particularly high pitch—“based solely on the color of their skin, or on where they might have grown up.

  “So. Keep this in mind when you are looking for a radio station to listen to or a record to buy: Your tastes may seem to be your own, but they are not. They are being handed to you on a platter, dished out to you without your own control or choice, not by any musician, mind you, but by a plain American businessman.” With that he turned back to his notes and, without missing a beat, asked a question about their assigned reading for that day, Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew.

  Mary Elizabeth had bought the Sartre book at the college bookstore as soon as she had gotten to campus and carried it to class the first day, clutching it nervously. There, when she arrived, standing outside the classroom door, was Dr. Wendt. He was chatting with a few other students, but when he saw her, he smiled warmly, then pulled her aside.

  “I’m so sorry about what happened last spring, Mary Elizabeth,” he said, patting her shoulder. “I’m happy to see you, and I’m glad you’ll be in my class.” He was the only person at Berea who said a word about what had happened to her the spring before.

  One Saturday in October, Maze finally persuaded Mary Elizabeth to come to one of the country dances in the school gymnasium. “Hillbilly music, I know it,” she said. “But there’ll be a whole group of us, M. E. Why don’t you come along just once and try it?”

  The “whole group” turned out to be Maze and Harris and Daniel.

  They were barely through the door before Daniel turned to Mary Elizabeth, said, “I need a cigarette,” and invited her to step outside with him. He offered her a cigarette, which she refused. She’d never smoked in public, and never with anyone but Maze. Inside, they could hear a fiddler play a fancy phrase, and then a loud whoop from the crowd of dancers.

  He’d never been particularly fond of country music, Daniel told her, shifting from foot to foot and taking a long, slow drag that made Mary Elizabeth wish she’d said yes to his offer of a cigarette.

  Neither was she, she said.

  He was more fond of the blues. Did she like the blues?

  She wasn’t all that familiar with the blues, really, she said.

  He especially liked Muddy Waters. He should play one of his Muddy Waters records for her sometime. Maybe “I Feel Like Going Home.” That was probably his favorite. Had she heard that one?

  No, she said, she hadn’t.

  He took a last drag on his cigarette, then crushed the butt with his shoe while they both watched. Then they looked up at each other and laughed. She looked toward the door.

  “I guess maybe we should go in,” she said.

  But he touched her lightly on the arm. She was so much better at French than he was, he said. Maybe she could help him with something. He was trying to read The Stranger in the original French.

  “L’Étranger,” he said, and she thought he might be blushing below his beard. He pulled a copy of the book out of the pocket of his jacket, and she laughed.

  He looked at her, surprised. Maybe even hurt.

  She pointed at the book. “You brought a book along to a dance?”

  He smiled and nodded, then looked at the ground.

  “Well, I wish I’d thought of that,” she said.

  They walked to town then, to the coffee shop on the main square. After their coffee came, he found the lines in the book and showed them to her. “It’s the part where Mersault is imagining being free and watching a
n execution,” he said.

  Á l’idée d’être le spectateur qui vient voir et qui pourra vomir après, un flot de joie empoisonnée me montait au cœur.

  She took a sip of coffee and cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, “I guess something like ‘At the idea of being a spectator who comes to watch and who vomits after, a wave of poisoned joy rose from my heart.’” She looked across the table at Daniel, trying to decide if he was joking, or maybe teasing her somehow.

  “What part were you having trouble with?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s just that I can’t really tell, and I thought maybe if I could understand the French better, I could figure it out,” he said, reaching for the book and looking at the passage again. “Is he talking about watching someone else’s execution or his own?”

  “Oh,” she said then, feeling young and limited. “Well, I guess I don’t know.” It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder about that when she had read The Stranger the year before. In English.

  Sarah

  1949 · 1961

  Every Sunday after church, they drove to Lexington to see Aunt Paulie and to listen to her play the piano in her front parlor.

  “Only the old hymns and the classics,” George insisted. “Music that will lift our spirits.”

  When Mary Elizabeth turned six, her feet dangling from the bench and her stretched-out hand nowhere near wide enough to reach an octave, Paulie started teaching her.

  “No gin-joint music, you hear?” George said before he lit his pipe and stepped out onto the porch.

  Before long the girl could play. “She’s a natural,” Aunt Paulie said, and George bought a secondhand upright piano for the house.

  “She’ll be able to give her students music lessons,” he said. From the day she was born, a healthy child at last, he’d said they would raise her to be a teacher, like his mother, like his sisters. God’s work for a good colored woman.

  By the time Mary Elizabeth was ten, she dressed herself and kept her shoes clean and buffed and plaited her hair. She fixed breakfast for herself and made a pot of coffee for her mama and daddy. She did her lessons and practiced the piano on her own.

  Was she a normal child? What would be normal, coming from her? Sarah wondered. The older Mary Elizabeth grew, the more she worked to please her daddy. A good thing, too; the older her child grew and the less she needed her mother, the harder it was for Sarah to get up in the morning. It was like a giant hand held her down in the bed. The hand of God, she supposed. Refusing to let her rise.

  It was because she was wicked. Because she thought, day and night, about Robert. Not the way she’d last seen him. Now when he came to her, she saw the smooth, firm muscles of his arms. Her breath grew short, her lips dry. Robert in his clean white shirt. The curve from his neck to his shoulder when he stepped down from the porch and turned to tell them good-bye. The way the late-summer sun shone on him, gold and warm. The green curtain around the road that swallowed him.

  She wanted it to swallow her. She wanted, again, to go with Robert. When George came to her at night, she turned her head to hide her tears. When his heaving finally stopped, she rolled away in relief. She left the bed and emptied herself of him. She scrubbed herself clean. She made herself a hollow husk. One day, when the hand of God stopped pressing her back to earth, she would fly away to Robert.

  In the meantime, she watched her daughter grow. Aunt Paulie eyed her curiously when they drove to her house on Sundays for Mary Elizabeth’s lesson. So she started bringing along the notebook Paulie had given her years before. She pulled out a pencil and pretended to write things in there, and Paulie looked relieved and turned back to the piano and the girl.

  But she only wrote a word or two, then stopped. Let them think she was writing a grocery list or a poem or notes to herself, whatever they wanted. There weren’t words for what she needed to say. There was only her old language, the sounds she made at night. Ah-bay. Ah. Dee. Ahll. Ahl-lay. Her daughter grew and pleased George and did not need her, and she spoke a language no one knew. No one but Robert.

  The summer day when a neighbor found her gasping and gagging in his barn, she couldn’t find a way to tell them that mostly she had tied the rope because she was curious. To see what it might feel like. She hadn’t necessarily hoped to die, then. Now the churchwomen all watched her with real fear. And this girl, the young woman who played Chopin and Ravel and “I’ll Fly Away”? Sarah hardly knew her. George took the girl to the home of a neighbor, a woman from the church, when she started to bleed. Let her be the one to tell Mary Elizabeth what her mama had told her the night before her wedding, Sarah thought. There was nothing to say, really, to prepare a girl for all that was about. But she tried to tell her daughter more with her eyes: Don’t be fooled by how a man can make you feel.

  Ah. Say-eee. Ah-bay. Ah-dee.

  Mary Elizabeth, dutiful girl. Her eyes worried back. Her hands then on Sarah’s shoulders, pulling her, steering her toward her room. “Let’s take you up to lie down a while, Mama.” George had taught her to do that whenever Sarah started to speak the words they didn’t understand. When she tried to push off the heavy weight of God’s hand. Like her husband’s suffocating weight at night.

  Sarah did feel sorry to have caused so many people so much worry through the years. When her daddy had died, a year after Mary Elizabeth was born, she’d almost felt relieved. No more looking into those sad eyes, like two bruises. Two years later her mama was dead, too, and ten years after that, Aunt Paulie. Sarah watched her daughter for signs of sadness, but if Mary Elizabeth cried, she did not see it. After that George drove his daughter to Lexington, for a lesson with someone Paulie had known at the university, every Saturday.

  At the end of the summer after Mary Elizabeth graduated from high school, she packed her bags to leave for Berea College, the place George Cox had planned for his daughter to attend since the day it had reopened its doors to black students, in 1950. That fall of 1961, Mary Elizabeth would be one of a dozen black students in the freshman class. Sarah nearly choked when she thought of it, the air suddenly gone from her lungs.

  “You need to come along and do your best,” George said to her on the Saturday morning they were to drive Mary Elizabeth to the college. “You need to do this for your girl.”

  And so she went, and she did her best to be the way they wanted her to be. She shook the roommate’s mother’s hand. She reminded herself to keep on breathing. She kept her eye on the door.

  All the while, that roommate watched her. That fearless, smiling white girl and her unrelenting gaze. Maze. What kind of a name was that? Puzzle, mystery, lots of ways in and no way out.

  It rained hard during the whole ride home to Richmond. Neither she nor George said a word. Another child gone, she thought, over and over. Away and gone for good. Ah-bay. Oh. I been, I seen. Robert, I been and I seen and I am lost—tell me: where is our home?

  Pilgrim and Stranger

  1962

  In the end Mary Elizabeth never got to listen to Daniel’s Muddy Waters records. They were both so busy, she tried explaining to Maze, who’d wanted every detail about that night when she and Daniel never made it through the door to the country dance.

  “But wouldn’t you like to go out with him again, Mary Elizabeth?” Maze asked her the next day, and several times after that. “Don’t you like him?”

  “Well, sure I do,” Mary Elizabeth said. Though the truth was, she was afraid of Daniel. He was too smart, she thought, too mysterious—and surely not really interested in her. Sometimes she tried to imagine bringing him home to meet her mama and daddy, but found that she couldn’t.

  Also, by the middle of the term she was preoccupied with other things. One day Dr. Wendt asked her to come talk to him in his office. “Are you happy here at Berea, Mary Elizabeth?” he asked her.

  “Happy?” she said, and before she could figure out how to answer that question, he was off and running, talking fast. The Northern way.

  Because, he said, it seemed
to him she might be better off at a different kind of school. Someplace larger, better, a place that could offer her more—in the North. For instance, he himself was a graduate of the University of Chicago. He knew of a scholarship for students there, one she was qualified for. He would be glad to recommend her for it. He had all the application materials right there, as a matter of fact, if she was interested. She would need to write a thorough, polished essay as part of her application. He might suggest an expanded and more fully researched version of her paper on Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew from earlier in the semester. He would be happy to help her work on it.

  The next day, without thinking more about it and without telling anyone what she was doing, Mary Elizabeth sat down in the library to get to work. She pulled out as many books on Sartre as she could find, and she worked right through dinner and nearly forgot to go to work in the kitchen washroom.

  As she rinsed and stacked the dishes that night, she imagined herself as a scholarship student somewhere else. In Chicago. The only city of any size she’d been to was Cincinnati, and then only for an evening, for the concert Aunt Paulie had taken her to when she was twelve.

  Her fingers tingled, then ached, but she suppressed the desire—to find a piano and start to play—that always came over her when she felt happy or excited.

  This was surely it, she told herself—what she was meant to do, a reasonable thing to reach for, unlike the foolish thing she’d tried to reach for the year before. That night, as she crawled into her bed with a book, she noticed that for the first time in weeks, maybe even in months, the pain between her shoulders was gone.

  She made slow, steady progress on her essay, working on it during the weeks that followed, shyly handing over drafts to Dr. Wendt and taking careful notes as he made suggestions. On the weekends she excused herself when Maze, Harris, and the others invited her along for hikes or parties. Then, as the end of the term approached, she put the application aside for a while; it wasn’t due until the end of January, and she had papers to write and exams to study for.