The Queen of Palmyra

by Minrose Gwin

  After Navis left, Mama went into the living room and collected a handful of dollar bills and some change from the coffee table. A piece of her blouse had come out of her belt. She undid her belt by pulling it with one hand and then releasing it. She threw it on the couch. Mama loved that belt. It showed off her little waist, and she pulled it so tight that the hole had become a slit. Then she tossed the dollars and some coins on the couch. Some fell on the floor. She didn’t pick them up but turned around and looked down at me. She had a fan blowing across the floor, first one side and then the other, the way she always did on pickup morning, so the dollars began to flutter here and there. I snatched them up.

  She caught my arm and made me stop, so I just stood there until she said what she was so bound and determined to say. “Florence, listen to me, we say ‘Negroes’ in this house. I talked to Zenie and Uldine and Gertrude about this, and that’s what they all said they like to be called. Negroes. Never ‘colored.’” She grabbed at my head to make me look up at her. “Do you hear me, young lady?”

  “Yes ma’am.” I met her stare and we both froze solid for a minute. A heaviness landslid over me and I felt buried under it. Then some meanness rose up in me. From whence it came or why I do not know, but there it was, as full of itself as a peacock. “You going to make Daddy say it too?” I asked in a quiet little voice. I looked down at a knothole in the floor when I said it. I was expecting her to say in return don’t sass me young lady, go get in your room. Which would have been fine with me. I was getting more and more nervous about making up the fourth grade. Mimi had given me a list of states and capitals and state birds and trees. I had plans to settle in and learn them all that very day.

  What my mother did instead of fussing was slap me right across the face. Not too hard, but hard enough to make me miss a breath. Hard enough to make my eyes tear up, which made me hate her guts even more.

  Then she said what I thought she’d say, but when she said it, her face looked like somebody had snuck up behind her and pinched her. “Don’t sass me, Florence! Go get in your room. Right now.”

  I could see she’d added the slap into the deal because I’d added something else into my badness. An extra ingredient, like the broken pecans Mama mixed in with her caramel icing at Christmas. Except that they were good. What I’d added was gravel. A mouthful of it.

  I wanted to say I was sorry, but something in my mother’s eyes stopped me. She was trembling a little and looking down at me with both fear and surprise. I could see my reflection in her eyes, but it wasn’t the same girl I saw in my father’s eyes, the one with long blond hair that flowed like a river of gold. It wasn’t a girl at all. It was the serpent crawled out from under the rock. The old poison come home.

  On baking nights in the days to come, Mama would plop her poison bottle out on the counter like another one of her ingredients. As she mixed and sifted and clattered her way through the night, she’d commence to singing. She had a sleepy voice, or maybe I was just sleepy while I listened to it. Sometimes she turned on the radio and sang along. Other times she just spooned and crooned her own way through the soft May nights. Her favorite song was “The Wayward Wind,” and she’d sing snatches of it over and over, how old Wayward was a restless wind that yearned to wander and how he’d left her alone with a broken heart. When she sang it, she belted out the “Now I’m alone with a broken heart” and then hum a few more bars before starting all over again. Every time she sang it, it sounded a little different and a little sadder. It brought tears to my eyes, but it made me happy too because when she sang it, I could tell she was shooing her sadness out of the house and into the night.

  Not long after we returned to Millwood, Daddy started coming into my room and lying down with me while my mother baked. When he opened my door and stood a minute getting his eyes adjusted to the dark, he smelled like man sweat and cigarette smoke and sweet oil. The oil was in a hair balm he bought every other week from a door-to-door man named Mr. Fred Holcomb. It came in a clear jar with a piece of paper taped to it that said “Sweet Hair Oil.” When Mr. Holcomb showed up in the early morning every other Saturday as May got under way, Mama kept him out on the front stoop because he couldn’t be trusted around her cakes, which were lined up on the table and ready for pickup. If she didn’t offer him a piece of something and she turned her back or went into the bedroom for some change, she’d return to find a poke here, a corner sideswiped there. The first week he came she didn’t notice a finger hole in the side of the angel icing on a devil’s food, and Mrs. Bell Leake called to ask what on earth had happened to her cake, it looked like somebody had poked it with a cigar.

  I confess I didn’t like the smell of that hair oil. Of course I didn’t tell my father that. It was a sweet smell but not like Mama’s burnt-sugar lightness from the baking, which came and went like a breeze when she moved. Or the sour bite of the cloves she chewed to cover over her poison breath. Mama had aromas that fluttered by your nose every now and then like pretty yellow butterflies. Daddy’s hair oil smell reminded me of a swamp that was deep and muddy and got into everything. What I know now is that seeing and even hearing can confound you. Not smell. Smell is true. A body has to smell right. Of course, that was not my father’s own true smell, but he took it as his own and the hair oil seemed to seep into his pores so that when he sweated, it came on stronger than ever.

  Groping his way in the dark, Daddy would come sit on the side of my bed and take off his shoes and socks. Because of his short leg and turned-in foot, Daddy had to wear his shoes everywhere all the time. His brick shoe clumped when he walked and its weight made him tired. When he got his shoes off, he’d groan and stretch out next to me in the space I had left for him. Then he turned on his side and put one hand flat on my stomach right over my belly button. His hand was heavy yet light. Cool to my bare skin at first, then warming, then like fire. I was strung tight like him, he said, so I needed something to calm me down, like you’d put a gentle hand on a horse and say now whoa up. Just a pressure to pin me to earth so I wouldn’t fly into pieces. That hand and my hidden parts all mashed up underneath. Liver, gut, bladder washed in the blood. It was like Daddy was the preacher and I was the offering and praise God from whom all blessings flow.

  I would lie quiet under his hand for a long while, but then I would start to toss and turn.

  “Sister,” he’d say, “settle down now.” I don’t know why Daddy called me Sister. I was nobody’s sister, nor would I ever be, since Mama had barely made it out alive from having me on Lou Ellen Chauncey’s living-room floor.

  This was before Mama came into her true calling of the cake business, and she was still the one and only Welcome Wagon lady for Millwood. Her water broke right there on Mrs. Chauncey’s door stoop one dusty hot September afternoon, after she’d knocked on the door and Mrs. C had opened it wide. What a welcome! It was a precipitous birth, at least that’s what the doctor called it. I was coming on strong when he and the ambulance men came bursting in the door, so they let me keep on, seeing as how I was so bound and determined to be born that I was tearing up my poor mother stretched out on Mrs. C’s Oriental rug cursing my father—who was at that very moment getting fired for being surly to customers at Holcomb’s Hardware—for having planted me with his Big You Know What. She rued all the stories she had read about girls and princes. She rued the night she’d seen him across the dance floor at the fall mixer. She rued that lock of hair that had fallen over his left eye and made her yearn to smooth it back. She rued the unaccountable way her feet took her across the room to him and the way her heart shifted in her chest when she saw his poor ruined foot. So this was why he wasn’t dancing! She rued the way she’d followed my daddy right out the front door of the Millwood High School auditorium and into the sound of the cicadas. Now she rued it all, every last bit of it, right down to her toenails, which was the only part of her that wasn’t hurting.

  I came out a raggedy mess, trailing blood and slime. The doctor cut the cord and wrapped me tight
in a clean red-and-white-checked dish towel so that I looked like a lively loaf of bread. He plopped me down on the sofa, which Mrs. Chauncey later told people she thought was a bit much, her nice living-room rug long gone from my mother’s hemorrhaging and the sofa being almost brand-new. What kind of man was Winburn Forrest to let his wife work in that condition, anyway?

  It was Mama who named me Florence. She’d come upon pictures of the city in Look magazine at the doctor’s office and thought it was the most beautiful place she’d ever seen. All that art. Mama’s name was Martha, and she believed in serious names. No Susies or Kathys or Judys or Peggy Sues. “You want a name that’s worth all this trouble,” she would say to me. She’d give her batter a thumping stir. “And don’t let anybody call you Flo.”

  This was not the story my father told when he started coming into my room that May. Lying on his side, he peered at me through the shadows. I turned my head toward him because I loved to home in on his eyes. When the moon was bright, I could see my own face swimming in their soft darkness. I thought I looked beautiful, like a girl in a dream. The stories he told me were about brave Christian men who, yes siree bobtail, fought to the death like true soldiers for little girls like me and beautiful and pure women like my mother. In the early days they rode horses. White horses. He would get excited in the telling and start rubbing my belly hard. Round and round, like he was shaping a pot. One way for a while. Then the other way. Sometimes he would flop over on his back and sing “Onward Christian Soldiers marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before,” sweet and low, like a lullaby.

  Daddy’s stories faded into the warning no no no no of the trains that clattered through Millwood all night long, leaving only the tracks of dreams. Valiant knights stamping out evil monsters in the kingdom, saving the ladies in distress, riding off with them draped like drooping Easter lilies across the fronts of their white steeds, the ladies’ long blond curls trawling the dust. My hair was short and no color at all, but it was a different girl I saw in Daddy’s melting eyes, a girl in all white with that long blond hair flowing along behind like a river of gold. Pure and innocent and beautiful beyond belief. Sometimes, when I dreamed, Daddy’s stories would get mixed together with my old storybook favorite, the gentleman rabbit Uncle Wiggily, who limped along with his satchel and crutch seeking his fortune, and who was always getting into scraps and having to be rescued from getting eaten up by savage beasts and giants. They all wanted a bite of him, old and tough as he was, but story after story, book after book, he always got away in the nick of time. You have to wonder how lucky one rabbit can be.

  So I didn’t really hear my father’s stories so much as they washed over me as if they were the sea and I was a lonesome stretch of sandbar. I waited for them and they rescued me like the brave men on the white horses. And when they came, they flooded my heart and changed me into something unrecognizable and strange.

  Finally, in the early morning hours when the oven had cooled down, Mama would sift into my room to turn off my fan. She would wake me up saying, “Win, come on to bed,” and Daddy would rise up like a dark mountain and stumble after her.

  If my father could stumble through the long night and find his way back into this story, he’d say I wasn’t telling it right. All this business about his box and Mama’s icings and Mrs. Chauncey’s ruined rug. He would say tell about the brave men of olden times, how they rode through the night on white horses, like heat lightning shooting across the sky. How they saved the precious ones from darkness. He’d say this story of mine has too much clutter.

  But some stories are whiskery old men. You walk past them fast, but they snatch at you with their fingers of bone and make you stay. They hold you up to their faces and scratch you. But after going through all that, you still don’t know them. You don’t know the little boy who had one leg that was shorter than the other and a foot that turned in. The one who loved the smell of the sea in the old oyster shells on his mother’s dresser. The one who wanted to grow figs.

  That one, that dark-eyed boy, is the slippery fish. What’s left is nothing but scum on the pond.

  It’s easier to look deep into what you know will stay put. What doesn’t wander in and out and cry for mercy. The details. Our town of Millwood, a place on a map of the world as it was in 1963, stays calm in my mind in spite of the terrible thing that happened that summer.

  It was called Millwood on account of there being a big cotton mill, which was the town’s largest employer, followed by two plants that were always in danger of exploding and in third place a fish hatchery run by the government. The Feds, Daddy would say, and his lip would curl. The plants, the Millwood Fertilizer factory and the smaller sulphuric acid plant, roosted on the north-south railroad line like two buzzards eating roadkill. Their stacks pumped out twin clouds of black soot day and night, seven days a week.

  A sign on the outskirts of town read: “Welcome to Millwood: Transportation Hub of the South,” and though that was an overstatement, it was true that the only reason Millwood had for existing in the first place, with its bustle of factory and mill workers and county courthouse lawyers in their straw hats, was the fact that the Mobile & Ohio and the Frisco Railway lines crossed in a big X just west of downtown in the exact spot where Highways 78 and 45 crossed. We called the X Crosstown. There were pull-outs and railcar exchanges there, plus the Curb Market, where farmers brought in cantaloupe and watermelon and butter beans in summer and greens and turnips in the fall and spring. As May progressed and the produce began to come in, Mama took me nosing through the Curb Market for berries to garnish the angel icing on her devil’s food cakes. “Hold up the baskets and look at the bottom for drips and stains,” she’d command, “and watch out for trains, don’t get near the track.”

  The trains went through Crosstown slow, but they made me jump and start when they’d lurch and bang together without warning, coupling and uncoupling like testy old lovers. The Negroes bought their tickets from the Colored Only window outside the Crosstown depot and stood out front to wait. When it rained, they huddled under the dripping eaves, being careful not to block the door.

  The trains came through the other crossings all over town like noisy threads through a garment. You couldn’t get them out of your head because once you did, here they’d come again. Midnight, one thirty, three, four thirty. In the deep early-morning dark, they howled and blew and cried. When you first heard them, they seemed to call you to them. They wanted you because they were oh so lonesome, lonesome. But as they got closer and moved through the crossings dotted all over town they had to warn you against their loneliness, and then they screamed out no, no, no, no, their big cyclops eyes glowing, hunting you down.

  If you grew up as I did listening to trains every single night, you could begin to hear the turning point where a train moves from its coming to its going. It is a slipping moment. The awful tormented thing that is coming does not come. In its place is something ordinary, just another clattery train to make you toss and turn in the heat of a summer night.

  The people who worked at the mill and the fertilizer factory lived in Milltown, which was downwind from the factory just over the railroad tracks in Millwood. Milltown was actually part of Millwood, but it looked like a different place altogether. Up and down the streets you could see nothing but rented duplexes with peeling paint and a coat of gray powder rising from the red clay dirt like huge misshapen toadstools. The children who lived in them were so white they looked like puffs of cotton themselves, hanging on porch railings as if they had been dropped from a giant picker in the sky. No dusty crape myrtle blooming or pretty wisteria bells, just worn-out honeysuckle and weeds. The Health Department squatted in the dead center of Milltown, a monstrous brown toad of a building that made me want to whimper just looking at it when Mama would take me in for my free boosters and checkups.

  Nobody in Milltown, where the poor white mill workers lived, ordered Mama’s cakes. Neither did anybody in Shake Rag on the south side of the color
line, which ran straight down Goodlett Street by the cemetery. White people called it Shake Rag. I never heard anyone who actually lived there call it that. Zenie, for example, would never in a million years say, “See you later. I’m going back to Shake Rag now.” Instead she’d give Mimi’s kitchen table a final swipe, tuck in the loose ends of her bun, and say, “All right. I wore out sure enough. Going home now. Done enough for one day’s work. Way more than enough.” When Eva Greene, who was Zenie’s niece, came to live with Zenie and Ray that summer, she tossed her flipped hair and laughed out loud when she first heard somebody say Shake Rag. “Who’s shaking that rag, I’d like to know,” she said. “Only rags I’ve laid eyes on around here are dust rags. Nobody around here’s wearing rags.”

  People lived in all sorts of places in what was called Shake Rag, ranging from two-story houses with rusted screens rolled up at the windows like curled eyelashes to a wisteria-wrapped school bus on a well-kept lot across the street from Zenie and Ray’s. Mama told me four generations of folks lived in the old bus, no telling how many of each. They had to keep the windows pushed up in the heat and sometimes I saw a girl hanging out one window and playing one potato two potato three potato four with another girl hanging out the next one. An old man in the family kept bees in two white boxes behind the bus. There was a sign written on a board propped up against the side of the bus that said HONY,” which Eva, who was studying to be a schoolteacher and said there was never any excuse for misspelling with dictionaries in the world, snuck over to one night and put an E in the middle of.

  Whatever kinds of houses they lived in, the ladies in Shake Rag had their zinnias and petunias planted out front and their tomato and cucumber vines staked out in the back or the side alley if there wasn’t a back. Down in Milltown the poor white people gathered up their sickly children and moved on. Who knows where. You hope for better days and better places, though places are sometimes not so easy to leave. Shake Rag people planted themselves on their front porches, babies blooming like dark red roses from the laps of great-grandmothers, who held them with swollen fingers in a death grip.