by Mary Morony
Miz Ginny was standin’ in the doorway of the parlor, watchin’ me. “Damnation, Ethel, you tell me what is going on right now.” Bein’ so scared myself, I couldn’ tell if it was fire or fear in them blue eyes.
“Miz Ginny, you needs to come up here with me right now.” I marched up the stairs with as much authority as I could manage, prayin’ that she would follow. I stopped on a step and looked over my shoulder. Thank the good Lord, there she was. “I gotta talk with you and I don’ want no one hearin’ what I gotta say,” I said.
I marched to the head of the stairs and took a right turn and stepped on into her room as if it was my very own. When she come in after me I said, “Shut the do’. You and me’s gotta talk.” I patted the pink bedspread across from where I stood. “Sit down on this here bed.” I was surprised she wasn’t putting on any of her high and mighty ways—she looked for all the world like a scolded puppy. She sat right down where I had just patted my hand and waited. I sat down next to her.
It probably was only a few moments, but it seemed like my whole life had passed when Miz Ginny finally said something.
“You saw us didn’t you? Ethel, promise me you won’t tell.” She had tears in them big eyes, looking as scared as a hare caught in a snare. “Please, Daddy would kill me. You don’t have any idea.”
“Miz Ginny, I got mo’ idea of it than you know. But yo’ daddy won’ kill you, he’ll kill Cy, and skin ‘im ‘fore he do. I can promise you that.”
“I love him and he loves me.”
I shook my head, just lettin’ it hang there, rockin’ back and forth; thinkin’ about what kind of mess I done got myself in. And that slip of a white girl sittin’ next to me with no more sense ‘bout the world than that bed she was sittin’ on.
“Lord have mercy,” I said. “You ain’t got no more idea what love is than my left shoe.” I looked down and seen I was barefooted. She did too and we both sorta laughed. “Lord, Miz Ginny, if you loves that boy you best be leavin’ him alone. I’m tellin’ you dey still string colored men up around here for touchin’ white women. You ain’t doin’ him no favors lovin’ him, if that’s what you wanna call it.” Miz Ginny was cryin’. Her shoulders shook as she sat on that bed lookin’ like I done kicked her good.
“But Cy looks as white as I do.”
“Yes’m, he might do, but he ain’t, and ev’rybody ‘round these parts know it. He gon’ be lyin’ in his grave wit’ you to thank in no time if’n you keep up like you was today. Ya’ll lucky it was me that come lookin’ this mornin’. Anybody else and they woulda called out the dogs.”
The last ice in her seemed to melt away and she near collapsed. She throwed herself at me and wrapped her long arms round my shoulders. She started up bawlin’ like I never heard. “What am I going to do, Ethel? We weren’t hurting anybody. He loves me, too. I just know he does.”
I sat there with that girl draped over me thinkin’ to myself, That damn fool Cy oughta know better. Cy was Mama’s sister’s boy, and after she passed, Mama took him in. Cy and I was the same age; he had been living with us since as long back as I could remember. Mama told him, more times than I can count, he best be keeping his hands to hisself with all his girl cousins round, and don’t be trying to charm her or no body else with them spirituals he was always singing.
One day Mama sat us all down—Cy, too—and told us how you get babies. Cy started up singing and she cut him a hard look. “I can’t help it. De jest bubble up,” he said, with that quick smile of his that would melt butter on a cold day. Then she say she better not be gettin’ no baby surprises from the likes of us. She was lookin’ Cy square in the face when she said it, too. Weren’t too many peoples that wanted that look more than about once.
“Miz Ginny, it ain’t none of my bid’ness what you and Cy be up ta. But I loves him like a brother my ownself and I gots ta know if’n ya been at more than jest kissin’.”
She looked like I done throwed hot milk at her. “Kissing, that’s all. Ethel, what kind of girl do you think I am?” She sat up straight and started takin’ on some of her high and mightiness again.
Well, Miz Ginny, I thought, but didn’t have the courage to say, that’s ‘xactly what I’m tryin’ to figure out.
“Ethel,” she said, like she had just snapped out of a trance, “You didn’t get Mother out of the way so that you could talk with me about Cy. What’s going on?”
Chapter 4
Sallee
Sometimes Ethel would take us children with her on her errands. Those trips occurred when my mother had made plans to be out and there was no one to leave us with; or she was feeling blue and didn’t want us around. So Ethel would suggest that she had an errand to do, and couldn’t we come with her? We’d always take the bus since Ethel couldn’t drive. Few adventures were more alluring than riding the bus to Ethel’s appointments.
One Friday afternoon a few days before school started, Ethel was scheduled to have her half day off. But my mother suddenly asked her to stay, saying she had something important to do away from the house. Ethel told her that she couldn’t because she had a dentist appointment that afternoon, but she could take us with her. My mother hemmed and hawed then finally gave her permission.
In preparation for our adventure, Ethel gathered all her possessions: her purse, her sweater—despite the blistering heat—her hat, and her ubiquitous brown shopping bag. She walked from the house with the folded bag tucked under her arm, her purse dangling, and Helen planted high up on her ample hip. She instructed Gordy to hold my hand, and then grabbed my other hand. As we left the yard she said, “Gordy, don’ you let go of ‘er hand no matter what. If’n I gotta let go, you hol’ tight, ya hear?” Gordy nodded and squeezed my hand harder. I did my best to shake free. Before we’d even gotten to the bus stop at the corner in front of our house, Ethel stopped twice: once to adjust Helen, her purse, and her bag, and again to ask Gordy and me, “Does I have to git a switch?”
“He’s squeezing my hand too hard,” I whined.
“But Ethel told me to,” Gordy protested, his face screwed up with earnest responsibility.
“Honey, jest hold ‘er hand an’ don’ let go. Now hurry on, here’s de bus.”
Like a monstrous green and yellow dragon spewing diesel fumes, the bus hissed to a stop in front of us. Its enormous doors sprang open, revealing steps. A uniformed driver at the wheel peered down at us.
“How did it know we wanted it to stop, Ethel?” I asked, mesmerized by the vehicle’s enormity.
“Cuz it’s a bus stop,” she said. I didn’t think that was much of an explanation since I’d often watched from the house as bus after bus drove up and down the road never stopping. But I let the subject drop. I’d learned that even with Ethel questions sometimes weren’t worth pursuing, and you could never tell which ones they might be until it was already too late. I learned that the hard way the time I asked her how Lil’ Early could be her grandson when she didn’t have any children of her own.
“He be Big Early’s son’s boy,” she said.
“How come Big Early has a son and he’s not yours, too?”
“Big Early was married befo’.”
Then I went one question too far. I had heard my mother say that Big Early and Ethel were only married in common-law. I had no idea what the phrase meant, but I remembered it, so I said, “Common-law, like you and Big Early?”
“What you know ‘bout dat?” Ethel shot back, giving me a cross look that ended my questions.
Boarding the bus proved to be awkward. Ethel, juggling Helen and her purse on one arm, let go of my hand to pay the bus driver. The driver had a mean look on his face like he didn’t like us. I glared at him. He kept putting his foot on the brake pedal then taking it off so the bus jumped and bounced as Ethel tried to pay him. I was going to help, but Gordy took it upon himself to be my sole protector while Ethel was otherwise occupied. After we had a small skirmish at the head of the steps out of Ethel’s line of sight, I wrested my hand from Gordy and
tripped to the vacant seat at the back of the bus. Gordy trailed after me doing his best to follow Ethel’s orders.
“Leave me alone,” I hissed. “I can’t get lost on the bus. There’s no one on it but us anyway.” With the fare paid, Ethel plodded down the aisle then plopped herself breathlessly down next to me. She placed Helen on her other side. She sat there on the wide back seat, legs splayed, fanning herself with her brown bag, sweat pouring down her face.
As the bus rattled and lurched its way downtown, Gordy and I stood on the seat and waved at the drivers following us. The honk of a car horn or the friendly wave of a hand through the great cloud of black diesel exhaust behind us provoked squeals of delight. We stopped several times to pick up passengers along the way. Just before our stop, Ethel said, “Gordy, reach up there an’ grab hold’a that cord. Give it a yank.” With great self-importance, Gordy climbed up on the seat and grasped the cord. A little bell down near the driver rang and rang. “Let it go, boy,” Ethel directed. I could see the driver scowling at Ethel in his big mirror.
The stop was across the street from Ethel’s dentist’s office, a worn red brick house with a crooked roof next door to the taxi office. Ethel gathered up her belongings, including Helen. I scampered ahead down the aisle toward the front of the bus, Gordy following. The back door swished open. Ethel stood at the top of the steps, jostling her load. “Com’on now, you two, git back here,” she said. Several passengers stood up between us, blocking the way.
As Gordy and I were swept toward the front door, he clung to my hand so tightly my fingers turned white. “Cut it out,” I said, trying to loosen his grip. “You’re hurting me.” As we stepped down, we were greeted by an out of breath Ethel who’d already made her way from the rear exit up the sidewalk to us. She glared at the bus driver as if he were solely responsible for our being separated from her. She helped Gordy and me down to the curb. The driver flashed us a nasty smile as he shut the door and the bus roared off in a cloud of fumes.
“Let go a’me,” I said, shaking Gordy’s sweaty hand from mine.
“Honey, you hol’ his hand, now. We gotta cross the street right chere. Now,” she said. She grabbed my free hand and proceeded across the street, dragging me like the tail of a kite.
From what I could see, Ethel’s dentist must have lived in his office. The building looked like someone’s house. It had a crusty porch that was as lopsided as the roof, barely clinging to the front of the red brick structure. The gray floorboards were scarred and rotten. They looked as if they’d been gnawed on.
“Sit on the stoop an’ don’ let me catch you off it when I git back,” Ethel instructed us.
Gordy and I perched on the edge of the porch and dangled our legs over the side. Ethel disappeared with Helen into the darkness of the office. Every so often we could see someone peering out the door glass to check on us. We watched from the porch as people walked by. Only if a passerby called out, “Morning,” would we say hello.
The taxi office next door offered up considerable interest. Drivers sat behind the steering wheels of their cabs with the windows rolled down, talking to a man inside the office. He was smoking cigarettes and complaining about the heat. When he wasn’t reporting about how much he could drink or who he saw somebody out with last night, he was answering the phone then shouting destinations and instructions out the window. After a driver received an address from the man in the office, he’d pull away in his cab. But there didn’t seem to be any pattern. One cab and driver sat idle the whole time we were watching from the porch, while another, which had just pulled up, left moments after the man shouted an address out the window.
I moved over and stood up in the weeds just off the porch. Gordy, his pale eyes filled with concern, warned, “You better get back here before Ethel catches you.” I slouched back onto the porch and scowled at my older, wiser brother. But his advice was good. Just then Ethel emerged from the door with Helen.
As we walked downtown, Ethel released my hand and let me skip ahead with Gordy, giving a cautionary grunt if we ventured too far ahead. I had to tug on Gordy to get him to do much skipping, but after a while he acquiesced. We skipped along as high and as fast as our overseer behind us would allow.
Our next stop was a tiny office with a large metal and glass door. Big white letters read, “Public Finance Company.” Metal venetian blinds covered the windows like aluminum foil: all dull, dirty, and bent at the edges. My mother said venetian blinds were tacky, but I liked them. I’d play with them whenever I got the chance, snapping the slats up and down to cast ribbons of sun and shadow over a room. I was wise enough to gather that the blinds in the public finance office were off-limits to children. Ethel grunted as she pushed open the big door to the office.
There was a man in a shortsleeved shirt and a greasy tie sitting behind a massive ugly, gray desk that bisected the room. The fabric of his shirt was so thin you could see his sleeveless undershirt through it. Two gray metal chairs sat on our side of the desk. There were magazines scattered haphazardly on the windowsill along with a couple of dusty looking plants. Gordy and I stood in front of the desk beside Ethel. She set Helen down and pulled out a frayed little book, just like the little books my daddy had. He called them our “saving accounts.” Ethel’s book was wrapped in a rubber band. She also pulled out her change purse and took out some money. After removing the rubber band, she handed the book and her money to the man. He unfolded the money, counted it, and then wrote something in Ethel’s book. He picked up a stamp from his desk, smacked it down on a big black pad, and stamped the book at a precise spot. As he returned it to Ethel, his thin mustache twitched like a horse’s back when a fly lands. There was an ugly black stain on the edge of his hand from the inkpad. He placed the money in a drawer. Ethel carefully rewound the rubber band around the book and said something pleasant to the man. They both laughed, though he didn’t look like he thought it was funny.
Even though the room was so small that you could sling a cat from one end of the room to the other, the man pretended not to notice that the door was proving to be problematic for us to open. Ethel had her arms full of Helen and her belongings. Gordy and I weren’t big enough; try as we might, we didn’t have the heft to move it. Ethel tried to pull the door without disgorging herself of her load, but she couldn’t. She put Helen in a chair, pulled the door open, instructed Gordy to hold it, picked Helen up again, grabbed my hand, and went through, checking herself to make sure she had everything she came with. As we emerged, Gordy stood still as a post, holding the door. She told him to come along, muttering and fussing as we walked down the street.
Then a friend of Ethel’s spotted us. “How ya doin’, Miz Ethel?” the woman said. “Is them Mr. Mackey’s chil’ren? Mighty fine lookin’, they is! Ya keepin’ pretty good? Hot, ain’t it?” Ethel held Helen on her hip as she chatted. Whenever Gordy and I ventured farther down the sidewalk than she thought we should, she’d grunt in midsentence to call us back. Before long, we were on our way again. The bus stop was in front of the bakery, and this was always our last errand. No trip downtown was complete without a cookie for the four of us to share on the bus ride home.
As we looked over the counter, mulling over just which cookie to buy, Mrs. Dabney walked into the shop. “Hey, Miz Dabney,” I said, skipping over to her. “Are you gonna be riding the bus, too?”
“Well, what a surprise,” Mrs. Dabney said. She smiled and patted me on the head, then ordered a half dozen dinner rolls. “My darling little neighbor children, what brings you down this way?”
I heard the bus hiss to a stop, and then Ethel hustled us outside with barely a glance in Mrs. Dabney’s direction. Mrs. Dabney waved to me as she came out of the shop and the bus door smacked closed behind us.
A week or two later it had, thankfully, cooled off a bit. While Ethel made mayonnaise, I watched with my head nestled in the crook of my arm and my legs swinging lazily up against the chair legs. “Was it ‘cause my granddaddy gave her the locket? Did he git t
o decide whose picture is in it? Was he the boss of everything?”
“What you talkin’ ‘bout?” she asked as she worked the mayonnaise churn up and down.
“Momma told me that she put Cy’s picture in her locket. You know Cy what took care of Momma’s horses, True Love and Puddin’?”
Ethel chuckled. “Whew wee, I bet them was some fireworks,” she said. “Ol’ Mista Stuart would have been righ’ smart hard on Miz Ginny ‘bout that had he known. Miz Ginny was hiz prize n’ joy. He spoilt that child rottn’.”
“That’s why she thinks he’s so great?” I asked.
“Yea, honey, that man thought the sun rose an setted on yo’ mama. Ya know she was his only girl. Mista Gordon and Mista Jimmy worried yo’ granddaddy and Miz Bess sick with the shenanigan day gots up ta. And Mista Dennis, he weren’t never right in the head, po’ soul.”
“Why was he mean to Granny Bess?”
“Who was mean to Miz Bess?”
“Granddaddy.”
“Who say he was?”
“I don’t know. She lived in that little house. He didn’t give her his big one when he died. That’s mean, isn’t it?”
“He’d done lost all his money.”
“Why?”
“He was a drunk,” she said, finishing the mayonnaise. She put it away in the cupboard and walked over to the sink to peel eggs. “Befo’ the accident he used to hole up in the Annex on a drankin’ binge. Nobody’d see ‘im fo’ weeks, ‘cept Miz Bess. She’d tend ‘im and you’d hear him yellin’ an’ cussin’ clear down to the kitchen. After a while he’d give it up. You know—clean hisself up an’ go on ‘bout his bid’ness. Then somethin’ would set ‘im off again. I don’t ‘spect ya can hang on to yo’ money an’ keep that kinda livin’ up fo’ long,” she said philosophically.
“What accident? I never heard about any accident.”