by Minrose Gwin
Alice had stopped telling the story of her family because, she said, it didn’t fit their lives now. Tupelo was a forward-looking city. There were telephones and electricity and air shows and the fishery and mill and now the new garment factory. Bustle, progress, everything cotton could buy and more. No need to focus on the past when the present shone so bright.
But the shadow of the past had lingered. When Jo was little and Alice still told the story of Ellen Long and James Langstrom, Jo imagined the two of them, Ellen in her long dress, James in his waistcoat and boots, walking hand in hand among the fallen acorns from the giant oaks and the tumble of wild iris in swampland and muscadine vines that climbed the trunks of ancient trees. In the early days, Alice said, there had been wolves and panthers and Carolina parakeets, now extinct from the farmers’ guns; strange red-headed creatures called scorpions, which barked like dogs and jumped from tree to tree like squirrels; vast virgin forests with sage grasses as high as a man’s head. Bloodshed too, men fighting over land and railroads, and cotton, always the eternal cotton and the fields with the bent figures planting and picking and hauling despite the hilly red-clay ground.
She and this girl mother were in it now, the long arc of history; they were playing their part, larger and more daring than either of them would ever have imagined, and what they did now would shape what came after and what stories might be told and listened to. The storm, it had changed everything, it had made their lives large and momentous.
Looking into the girl’s face, Jo thought, This storm is the most important thing that will ever happen to me, not thinking of Dreama at all but of her own self, for really nothing of any consequence had happened to her up until the storm, at least nothing she wished to remember. She walked along the ledge of history now. She, Jo McNabb, had been blown through the air with that coat hanger outstretched and where it went and what it did were miracles like an angel is a miracle, like the way a bone resetting itself is a miracle. One day she would say to someone somewhere that she had lived through the Tupelo tornado of 1936 and she had met this colored girl on the way into town and they had spoken about how babies could fly through the sky and arrive safe and sound with barely a scratch to show for it. And why not? She’d seen a baby who’d flown through the air and landed in a bush; she herself had been lifted off her feet. This would be her story when she was old and sitting by the fire and sipping her tea, for as long as she drew breath: this would be who she was. And the part of the story that could only be whispered, that this girl was in more than one way her sister, would she tell that too? Or would that part of the story slip into the night like a cat, leaving no trace of its secret, hungry life?
Dreama turned to go. Jo followed her a few paces and touched her arm. “Just be careful. There’s some mean boys roaming around.”
“White boys?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve had my fill of white boys.”
“Me too,” Jo said. “Take care. There are three of them. They have on white undershirts. You ought to be able to spot them in the dark.”
Dreama reached out as if she were going to take Jo’s hand but then didn’t. “Did they bother you?”
Jo shook her head. “No, but they almost did.” Just then Jo saw some men coming up the street. She pulled Dreama into the shadows of a ruined house. They crouched together in the rubble, clutching each other. Dreama’s hair tickled Jo’s face like a spider web, sticky and wet.
There were four of them. Two carried what looked like laundry, one carried some picks and shovels, another something that appeared to be a first-aid kit.
“They look all right,” Dreama whispered.
“You stay here,” said Jo. “Then if they get after me, you run for help.” It was the least she could do for the girl. She found a loose board on the side of the house and pried it off, glad to see that a nail was still imbedded in the end.
When she stepped out, the men stopped what they were doing and flashed their lights at her. She brandished her board.
“You need help, miss?” one said, and the way he said it made her know he was all right, they were all of them all right. Then she saw their uniforms. CCC boys. Now, at long last, she could give the things that burdened her over to them: her horn (heavier and heavier it had grown over the course of the night) and her mother’s leg and her famished little brother and her treacherous big brother, too long dead, and they would take them all off her hands and she could rest. She could have herself a good sleep. She began to cry then and it was loud and embarrassing for an ordinary girl like herself to cry that way, especially with the girl, who could have cried a bucket of tears over all she’d lost, watching.
Jo told the boys where to go and that there was a baby to take care of, not to forget the baby, and they said they were heading to the corner of Church and Walnut anyhow, an old Negro woman had sent them yesterday, but they’d gotten sidetracked fighting fires. Then one of them took her by the arm, her good arm—so careful he was with her. She looked back for Dreama—where had she gone?—and the CCC boy told her not to worry, the other three would go straight to her mother and little brother. See? They were already on their way. And yes, not to worry, they had milk too; they knew about the babies, how they had to eat or they would die. Jo should see the babies they’d rescued, lined up like glads in a funeral spray down at the Lyric. And yes, they would send someone for her deader-than-dead brother after they got the living sorted away. Now, though, it was her turn and she needed to go with him, the CCC boy. She needed to get that thing out of her head and her arm back in a cast. His face had a dappled look in the moonlight, like the skin of a trout wet from the stream.
Jo began to laugh then and talk to him about the ants. How they’d probably return to plague her once she got her cast back on. How she’d missed them!
She looked back again. She was going to tell that girl to come on, come on back to town with her and the nice CCC boy and they’d find her grandmother, who was surely there somewhere. But the girl, Dreama, her face a petal floating on the moonlight, shook her head no and shouted to Jo something about the baby she was bound and determined to find. Then she melted into the night.
9
10:02 A.M.
Dovey woke to the smell of popcorn. How she’d loved that smell when she was a girl and scrounged up the nickel it took to get into the picture show, inhaled the odor of rancid, smoky oil from below, leaning over the balcony to see the little paper sacks the white children held, her mouth watering for a piece, just one piece. She’d wanted it so much she could actually taste it on her tongue, crunch it between her teeth. She’d have done anything, almost anything for a handful. The slimy peanuts her mother had boiled and put in a brown paper bag didn’t alleviate her craving. Later on, when she went with Virgil, he said he didn’t care they wouldn’t sell to colored, he didn’t care for popcorn, reminded him of cotton.
The spot where they’d laid her was dusty and still, a corner at the back. She’d been put on a pallet on the floor and someone had covered her with a blanket and her arms were folded over her chest as if she’d died in the night. What a joke. Had to have been white folks who’d arranged her body like a corpse. White folks been trying to kill her and hers since the beginning of time. If not the merman in the tree, then working her and Virgil and everybody else she knew to death for peanuts. And if all that weren’t trouble enough, weren’t a big-enough mess, then what that boy had went and done to Dreama was sure enough the icing on the cake.
She looked down and saw she was in different clothes, something large and rough, a gown of some sort that smelled of bleach. It swallowed her. She reached for the ear that bled and found it bandaged over. The thought of white hands touching her in such an intimate way was a tickle in her throat.
Her foot was bandaged and on a pile of towels. That much she appreciated.
The room plunged as if a wave had broken over it. It was only when the seats began to float in the waves that it came to her: where she was. The Lyric, wh
ose downstairs she’d never entered. She’d thought it was finer than this, finer and cleaner. (Why had they laid her on this nasty floor?) Now that she’d seen it, she preferred the balcony.
Something skittered across the floor. Peering through the dark, she could see wads of gum on the undersides of the upturned theater seats. Then here it came again, among scattered popcorn kernels and candy wrappers. A roach? Roaches plagued her. She hated the sickening crunch they made when Virgil stomped them, the way they dodged and pitched and hissed and squeezed themselves into cracks in the floor, only to return when least expected. Once, after her family was gone and the aunt took her in, she woke in the middle of the night to find one preening itself on her bare arm, not far from her open mouth, bathing its nasty self in the trickle of spit that had gathered in the elbow crevasse of her outstretched arm. When the tickle aroused her and she opened her eyes, it had stared at her like it was boss of the world. She’d screamed and jumped up to shake it off her arm. Her aunt came running and swatted at it and it stood on its back haunches in a corner of the room and boxed the air until she mashed it with one of Dovey’s slippers. Then she whapped Dovey up side the head for waking her up in the middle of the night for a roach.
Dovey lifted her head. There was the stage and the heavy red velvet curtains that hung to either side of it. When she was a girl, she always came early to the picture show so she’d get to listen to the piano man play and watch those curtains go up and the lights go down.
Now there was a commotion on stage. Somebody screamed a piercing scream, then hollered no. A line of screens hid the people on the stage from view but the lights were bright and Dovey could see a table of some sort and clusters of people in white around it. A scramble and then someone raised something that look like a giant sausage in his hand and dropped it to the floor with a thud. Then someone else came and picked it up in a towel and hurried off with it.
On a theater seat one row up, a man bent double and moaned. Then a baby from over the way started up. Through Dovey’s bandaged ear, the sounds gurgled and waned as if coming from underwater.
Now something, a monster with sharp teeth and long fingernails and hair all over its body, climbed onto her chest. Then it kicked open the door and memory flooded in.
The storm. Virgil. Dreama and the baby. She sat bolt upright.
A Red Cross lady saw her and brought over a cup of juice and asked her how she was feeling. She said she couldn’t rightly tell, her words echoing back to her.
The Red Cross lady leaned down and pushed her back onto her pallet on the floor. “You need to lie back. You’ve got a concussion. The more you rest, the sooner you’ll feel better.” The lady’s eyes were shiny, like she was proud of herself.
Dovey popped back up. “My people.” She spoke louder than she meant to and the lady put her finger to her lips. “I got to find my people,” Dovey whispered to the finger. “I got people.”
The lady whipped a notebook out of her breast pocket. “A husband? Any children?”
Charlesetta. The world was filled with lost children on the other side. But it was this side she needed to tell. She tried to sit back up but couldn’t. “Dreama Grand’homme, sixteen years. Promise Grand’homme, three months.”
“How do you spell that? Are they boys or girls?”
“Dreama’s the girl, Promise the boy.”
The lady looked up from her notebook. “Her baby?” Of course that’s what she’d be thinking. Dovey would have loved to sit her shiny-eyed self down and tell her the whole story, rub her nose in it. Dreama had been a good girl.
The notebook the lady wrote in reminded Dovey of the notebooks she used for laundry, the spiral at the top like a stenographer’s pad, the lines across and the one red line down the middle. Dovey was good at numbers, Charlesetta had taken after her in that way. Dovey kept a running tally of her laundry in the books, always counting everything before she left white ladies’ houses. She had her own form of shorthand: capital S for sheets, lowercase for shirts, SK for socks, T for tablecloths, N for napkins. If something looked off, one sock instead of two or an odd number of napkins, she’d ask about it. No point in getting blamed for losing something she didn’t lose. She inspected things too. If a sheet had the beginnings of a tear, she’d be sure to point it out and ask whether the lady of the house wanted her to mend it before it got worse and she got accused of doing the damage. Then she’d charge extra for the mending. The books she had kept her tallies in, all of them, she saved in a corner of the bedroom. There were piles of them now, or had been before the storm took them, halfway up to the ceiling. Virgil grumbled about them. They didn’t have room to be stacking useless things in corners. But Dovey kept them. One day, when she was old, she was going to take them down and count all the loads of laundry she’d taken in over the course of her grown-up life. Now that would be a pretty number! Then she’d figure on how much money each load had brought in over the last fifty years. She’d raised her rates four times, at the beginning of each new decade, as a gift to herself for the special new year, the zero at the end of the number. When she did her final tally, she’d have to remember to add that in.
“Where do you live?” the lady asked and Dovey said she lived up on the Hill, or used to.
The lady frowned, then touched Dovey’s hand. “Do you want me to check the funeral home up there for you, honey?”
Dovey hated her then, talking about funeral homes, not minding her own business.
“Porter’s, right?”
“My folks ain’t dead, they just missing.”
The lady looked at her and the shiny eyes got shinier.
So there was nothing left to say. The lady went off and Dovey fell back, first resting, then gauging her strength, flexing her legs. All in working order. The years at the washtub had made her strong. She moved her arms, then mustered her courage to try to sit up again. The dizziness had returned, crashing and surging back like the tide. Dovey knew the comings and goings of tides. A year ago, she’d ridden the M&O down to New Orleans with Virgil to see his people. She hadn’t wanted to go. What had happened to Dreama was still fresh and fresher yet the knowledge that she was carrying a child. But Virgil’s father had died portering. He’d been hoisting some luggage onto the train and collapsed right there on the landing, just as he was throwing a heavy trunk into the underside of the M&O passenger car for two girls going from Tupelo to New Orleans for a debutante party. An ambulance was called. By the time it got there, the train was on the way, Virgil’s father was dead, and the young ladies were seen by one of Virgil’s father’s porter friends giggling among themselves while they pulled dinners of fried chicken and potato salad out of a large hamper. Virgil was determined to take his father home to New Orleans and just as determined to take Dovey along. He asked Etherene Johnson to let Dreama stay with her. Etherene jumped at the chance to drill Dreama on her grammar so everything was settled before Dovey knew it.
The family gathered in the little shotgun on Galvez after the funeral and burial, which involved sliding Virgil’s father into a concrete vault aboveground, one that housed other members of the family. How did they all fit? She didn’t ask, knew it would be wrong to. Later Virgil would explain how each coffin took its time. Then when the tomb was needed again, a crew came out and opened the oldest one and dumped what was left, not much, into the back corner. Virgil had a cousin who did that kind of work, which he said was like a treasure hunt. There were rings and brooches and pocket watches. You’d be surprised what people take with them, he’d told Virgil. Bone picking. She’d shivered when Virgil had told her and was glad she took in laundry.
It was the first time she’d met any of Virgil’s New Orleans family and they’d taken her in like one of their own. There were pots simmering on the stove, collards and pickled pork, a gumbo with shards of crab shell floating on top, some oyster dressing in the oven. It was crab season so there was a pit fire and a big boil. She’d never tasted such food, had never eaten any fish but the catfish and tr
out that Virgil and his friends caught in the Tallahatchie River. She ate what Virgil’s people fixed with no discrimination, some of it more than one helping. Virgil’s sister Hattie said that for such a scrawny little thing Dovey sure knew how to pack it in, and everybody laughed. When she finished, she sat down on the couch with everybody talking around her and fell asleep sitting up. She was dead tired. They’d sat up on the train overnight and she hadn’t slept. She’d never set foot on a train, much less riding almost 350 miles in one trip. The seats in the colored car were lacquered pine, hard and splintery, and the clatter of the wheels kept her awake. She sat next to a window and over the early morning hours she watched the strong jaw of her own serious face float like a ghost over the dim first light of the piney woods of southern Mississippi and later the still, green swamps of Louisiana; she’d never seen water that still. White birds with long necks waded in the swamps on gold needle legs and portly blue herons stood on the edges, staring down. Gulls swooped and screamed and she shivered thinking of the snakes that must surely live their secret lives under the water, busy with the cycle of killing and birthing, slashing the water. The swamps must be teeming with them, the smoky cottonmouths with their blunted heads and little necks, the harmless green water snakes that scooted here and there.
Cushioned so nicely on the couch between the plump thighs of Virgil’s sister and Virgil himself, her head against an afghan somebody had kindly placed behind her, she’d drifted off, dreaming an elaborate dream about a bloodstain on a nice white dress that wouldn’t come out, scrubbing and bleaching the spot over and over until it shrunk to the size of a grain of pepper, which only she could see but which bothered her nonetheless. Bloodstains were the easiest—cold water, every woman knew that. Why wouldn’t this one disappear?