The Queen of Palmyra

by Minrose Gwin

  I looked down at myself. My chest was glowing red from the cross. I looked like a piece of raw meat. “Yessir.” I crossed my hands over my chest.

  “All right then. Let’s see. Miss Kay Linda said she made it up a little large so you wouldn’t outgrow it so fast, but whoa, looks just right.” He held up the white robe. It had two ties in the front, one at the neck and one at the waist. He helped me put one arm in, then the other. Then he tied the ties in little bows, his fingers busy little butterflies. He pulled out the pointed hat. “Let’s see now. How does this work?” It had a pretty little white satin ribbon that tied under the chin. He put it on my head and tied the ribbon. “Oh, look at you!” Then he gathered me in his arms and gave me a big bear hug. I hugged him back because I could tell how much he liked me. Which is not something I took for granted in my situation. I couldn’t remember the last time I got hugged, much less bear-hugged. I hugged him hard. I didn’t want to let him go.

  “Bet you still hot, right?”

  I nodded. The robe wasn’t heavy, but it was head to toe. I was steaming.

  “Let’s get off those shorts then. That’ll help.”

  Before I could say no thank you sir, I’ll keep them on, he opened up the robe in front and gave them a quick little jerk. They came down fast because they had elastic in the waist. My underpants came down too, but I grabbed hold of them and pulled them back up. “Oopsy daisy. Step out now, honey.” He leaned down and pulled the shorts away from my feet. “Here, now, honey, I’ll put your clothes in this sack. Isn’t that better?” He reached under the robe and rubbed me up and down on the leg.

  It was airier underneath, though now I was sweating more than ever.

  “Where’s my daddy?” It came out fretful.

  “Sure, honey, let’s go find him. See if he’s done with his work. This is just a social meeting. You so cute in that outfit everybody’s going to want to get a look at you.”

  I saw Daddy across the room. He’d taken off his hood so he just looked like a member of the church choir in his black robe. He had a cup in his hand and he was laughing. I ran over to him.

  “Well, hey now, look at my girl!” He put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me over in front of him. “Look at my girl!” The second time he hollered it, all the men stopped talking and looked. I stood there, my back pressing into his dark middle, his fingers digging holes in my shoulders. “Wave at everybody, honey,” he hollered. I waved and everybody clapped and cheered like they were at a parade.

  Then they all crowded round. One of them pulled me over, and then they started passing me around like I was the body and the blood, the communion cup everybody wanted a sip of. After a while they got their paper cups from the table and sat in little groups sipping and laughing and got me to walk from one to the other. One with brown teeth and a cheek of tobacco reached through the place between the ties of my robe. He tickled me till I wet my pants a little, then a little more. I was screaming bloody murder by then, Daddy way across the room, he looked over once but then just smiled real big at me. You know how you scream when you’re getting tickled. It sounds like you’re excited and happy. “Look out,” the brown-tooth man hollered. “She’s wetting like a baby. I’m getting rid of this one.” Then he passed me onto the lap of a real old man with yellow skin. He rubbed his scratchy face on me. Then he shoved me over to the next one, who opened his knees and pulled me in and gave me a big old hug. They were thick as bees. I went around once, then again. “Let me have her back,” the really old one kept hollering. One of them pulled me onto his lap and bounced me hard. My teeth snapped and kicked. I bit my tongue and tasted blood. Daddy kept on with his laughing and smiling across the way.

  After a while there came up a fog. It rose in front of my eyes so that I didn’t see any of them anymore. It was so thick that I had a minute when I thought I was somewhere else, out on the street, and the mosquito truck had just passed by. Or maybe I was in a black dismal swamp and the gases were rising fast. All of them floated back and away before my eyes, though their hands still reached through the fog.

  When I got home that night, somebody had taken off my wet underpants and put my shorts and top back on, so I was dry at least. When Daddy lay down in the bed and reached for me, he said, “You were real good tonight, Sister. I was proud of you. Look at me.”

  I was too tired to roll over. I turned my face to look at him, but the fog was still in my eyes. All I could see was the outline of his head in the pearly light of the moon coming through the window behind him. A dark blank circle with a halo. He looked like pictures I’d seen of the angel of the Lord when he told Mary she was going to have God’s baby.

  “You know how much I love you, Sister honey?” The way he said it was like a song.

  I was too tired to say yessir, so I just nodded. He felt it, though. My head was right there beside him. Precious Cargo.

  12

  The next morning I felt different. It wasn’t the soreness. It was something else. Something that had the feel of long distances. It unfolded out ahead of me, world without end. I had gotten on the M & O going to Memphis but it had passed Memphis by. It had decided to go on and on. All I could see were tracks and the tracks didn’t stop anywhere. I was in a story without an ending. Nobody was found, nobody saved. Nobody got out of the briar patch or made the alligator laugh. Just the never-ending tracks as far as the eye could see.

  I woke up thinking about Miss Josephine counting leaves. Was she thinking about long distances, what numbers were so far out there ahead of her that she’d never get to them? They kept pulling her on, though. They wouldn’t let her stop and say this is it, this is the end of the line. This is my house and I am home now.

  That morning, for the first time ever, my father made me some breakfast. He put some butter on a piece of bread and stuck it under the oven broiler. Then he poured out a glass of milk and handed it to me. The milk had turned, but I drank it anyway. I hardly tasted its bite. The toast burned black, but I ate it. I was happy for it. He kept telling me how much he loved me, right down to my bones, he said, and when he said it, he came around and gave me a bear hug like the one Big Dan had given me. It hurt but it felt good too. We made the finger sign because we had secrets. I was a member of his club.

  When he dropped me at Mimi and Grandpops’ like always, instead of opening the car door and hopping right out like I was supposed to, I held on to his arm like a lady with her partner on the dance floor.

  “I want to go with you.” Just as the words came out of my mouth like sickly sweet syrup, I heard the seven-thirty train. It called out no, no, no, no.

  “Sister baby, I’ll see you tonight.” He smoothed down my hair on top. It was the first time he’d ever done that. My eyes started up. “Now you go on in like a good girl. I know you a good girl. Now remember…” He put his right finger up under his nose and smiled so sweet it almost broke my heart.

  “Yessir.” I put my finger up too. The right one.

  He reached over and opened the car door, and out I went. Plop on the curb. The thud made my legs ache all the way up into my backside. I felt the jarring in my bones. I watched him drive off the way Mama had, but I knew he’d be back. I ached all over, felt hollowed out, but I had a full and satisfied heart because I didn’t have to worry about him coming back for me. He loved me too much to leave me high and dry.

  After noon dinner I dragged on home with Zenie. By the time we got to her house, her legs had made brown spots on her support hose so that she was in a hurry to soak them in a tub of Epsom salts. The longer they stayed like that, the harder it was to get the hose to let go. For once, she pulled me along instead of the other way around. She cast an irritated eye at me. “What you so lazy for today, girl?” My arms and legs didn’t feel like they belonged to me. They were logs I was carrying. Even my insides felt sore and used up.

  That afternoon it seemed as if I’d just gotten to Zenie’s, much less settled there, when here came Grandpops to pick me up. I popped up off the couch
and saw little blackbirds flying before my eyes. They looked like pieces of dark gauze, torn with a rough hand. Zenie and Grandpops made me sit back down and pushed my head between my legs until the blackbirds flew away.

  “She’s acting poorly,” Zenie said. “She act like she got the weak blood, sleeping all the time. Maybe she need to go to the doctor. Maybe she need some of the iron medicine.”

  Grandpops leaned over and fanned me with his hat. He always took it off when he came in, but he never sat down in Zenie’s house. She never asked him to. She’d bring him a cold glass of water and he’d drink it in a few quiet swallows standing in the middle of the room.

  “All right, then. Thank you, Zenie,” Grandpops said when I could hold up my head. “We’ll get her some vitamins.” He opened the door and nodded his head politely to Zenie. He had to look up to talk to her. She was so hefty and tall she made him look like a little old boy, wrinkled and wizen.

  “Good-bye until tomorrow,” Zenie said.

  He put his hand on my shoulder and tapped. “Florence.” I knew that meant to tell Zenie thank you.

  “Thank you.” I looked down at the floor when I said it. It shamed me to have to thank her for keeping me when I was old enough to do for myself.

  “You welcome.” She still had on her white outfit from work, though her stockings were soaking in the kitchen sink. She nodded and smiled, arms crossed over her bosoms, standing on one leg and then the other, willing us out the door so she could sigh and sit in her flowered easy chair with the foot stool to match. Looking back through her front window, I could see her settle in, her face framed by the geraniums on the sill.

  “You dragging, girl. What’s wrong with you?” Grandpops asked on the way home. I couldn’t seem to put one foot in front of the other.

  “Nothing except getting dragged from pillar to post every day of the week.”

  He touched me on the top of the head. “How’s your daddy doing?”

  “Fine.” I pulled my head away.

  “Y’all getting along all right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You heard anything from your mother?”

  “No sir.” Daddy had said not to tell anybody about the letters from Mama.

  He patted me on the shoulder. “It’ll be all right. Your mother will be back soon and you can stay home. School’ll be starting up sooner than you think—less than three months from now—and you’ll find some friends to play with. You’ll see. It’s going to all work out. You just been having a hard summer. We all have.” His voice sounded like salt hitting a hot frying pan. Scratchy and brisk.

  Nothing he said impressed me. I didn’t have high hopes for Mama. Judging from her letters, she was getting more mental by the minute. Plus even the word school made my heart skip a beat. I’d been telling myself I was making progress on my studies, but Eva’s remark about diagramming chilled me to the bone. I could read, thanks to Grandpops, and I was making progress in social studies with Mimi despite the hat business, though I knew she was teaching me what she taught in high school, not what I needed for fifth grade. Sometimes I watched Ray add and subtract, but I still needed to memorize the multiplication tables, which Miss Josephine said she’d drill me on, but she kept falling asleep and so did I. All in all, I didn’t have high hopes about how the fifth grade was going to turn out. Plus I dreaded the morning I had to try to find an outfit that still fit and walk down the sidewalk with all those girls with shining hair in their color-coordinated sets. Would they still look right through me like I was a ghost? I’d rather sleep on Zenie’s couch the rest of my life, world without end.

  For supper, Mimi had her tomato aspic and a cooling tuna salad with celery and sweet pickles ready for Grandpops and me. Then at long last the day was over, and I was at the curb swatting mosquitoes waiting for the firecracker pop of Daddy’s Chevy coming for to carry me home. Mimi and Grandpops crouched in the burrow of their living room waiting for me to leave so they could go out on the front porch and enjoy the evening without having to talk to Daddy. They never turned on the light. When Daddy was pulling away from the curb, I looked back and saw their double shadow shading the screen door. The door opened just a little before we got all the way down the street.

  The days went on. Daddy and I were like one piece of water that parted in the morning and flowed back together at night. I wasn’t sad like I’d been before. I didn’t think about Mama as much. Her not being there had settled in on me. The places where she wasn’t, the things she wasn’t there to do, they seemed to shrink, and after a while they began to dry up like puddles in the sun. Daddy had put her pots and pans and beaters and measuring cups back up in the cabinets. If you opened the doors, they all came falling out. As long as I didn’t open them, though, our kitchen seemed regular, not a cake lady’s kitchen but any old body’s, except of course nobody ever cooked in it.

  Eva was laying low, but she was busy. She’d given up on being the policy lady after getting roughed up by the peckerwoods. She had other plans. She had decided what the folks in Shake Rag needed was literacy. I asked her what that was and she said it was reading and writing and she was going to work in her spare time to help grown-ups learn to read. She’d gotten some books in the mail on teaching people to read by the sounds of words and she’d read them cover to cover, turning down every other page. It was called Phonics, though the word itself didn’t seem like a good advertisement for the idea of it. It wasn’t that hard, Eva said. All you had to do was learn the sounds of all the letters. Then you could sound out anything but the trickiest words. And even those had rules to go by.

  Every Sunday after church she was down at the AME Church signing people up for lessons, which she said would make them better citizens. The AMEs were more forward thinking than the folks at St. John the Baptist. A change was coming and many of them wanted to pass the literacy requirement so they could sign up to vote, which was easier said than done, no matter how literate you were. Eva had gotten a copy of the Mississippi Constitution, and they were studying it like the Bible. The law said you had to be able to copy out a passage from the Constitution and explain it, though Eva said the passages given to the people from Shake Rag were so complicated Einstein couldn’t explain them, which was the whole point. But they kept trying. Every few weeks a group of Eva’s pupils would go down to the courthouse like they were going off to fight World War III and walk through the dopers on one side and the guns on the other the way Mama and I did when we visited the sheriff. They tried again and again to register, but they always came back shaking their heads. Word got around that over in Harmony, in Leake County next door, Winson Harmon, who’d raised a ruckus in Washington about not getting to vote, got the Justice Department to come down and stand with her to register. She wrote out her passage from the Mississippi Constitution and when they asked her what it meant for the umpteenth time, she answered, “It said what it meant, and it meant what it said,” and they finally let her register. The AMEs tried that, but it didn’t work for them. No surprise, Eva said, since the Justice Department seemed to think everything was just hunky-dory over in Millwood.

  Zenie and Ray and Miss Josephine had all about given up on getting her to go on back to Raleigh. She was being mulish. Worse than mulish. She was like a nesting owl in a hollowed-out tree and nothing short of a stick of dynamite was going to budge her. They begged and pleaded. They got ugly with her. They told her she couldn’t live with them anymore, but she said she wasn’t studying leaving whether she lived in their house or not. She said, “It’s not like I’m going to be here forever, only till school starts in the fall. You going to put your one and only niece outdoors?” That one always kicked the wind out of Zenie. Then, to finish her off, Eva would cock her head and wink and say slow and sweet, in a dripping voice that didn’t sound at all like Raleigh, “Lordy mercy, I just got here and you-all kicking me out already!” They couldn’t do a thing with her, but they stopped short of buying her a one-way ticket and taking her down to the station. I heard Ray te
ll Zenie maybe that’s what they ought to do, but Zenie said Eva was so stubborn that even if they managed to get her on the train, which would take all the deacons at St. John’s and the AME combined, she’d just get off in Memphis and buy herself a ticket right on back to Millwood. So why waste good money?

  The one thing nobody threatened to do was to tell her daddy. I heard Ray and Zenie stew about it. Whether to go down to Lafitte’s and call Marie without Jake knowing, but everybody who knew Marie knew she was a fool with no spine. She’d tell Jake and he’d be on the doorstep snatching Eva bald-headed for raising a ruckus. That was something nobody wanted to see.

  Meanwhile Eva was charging out of the house every morning loaded down with books and magazines and pamphlets. She had a determined look in her eye. I thought all grown-ups knew how to read. I thought it was like walking on your own two feet and using the commode. The stories just grabbed you and you just fell into them after a while, which is what had happened to me when Grandpops read to me. It was a mystery to me how I’d learned to read, but one day I just started reading along with Grandpops, surprising us both. That’s just it, Eva said with a gleam in her eyes that matched the rhinestones on her glasses, you had to get somebody to teach you, to facilitate. Literacy wasn’t like a piece of my mama’s lemon cake you handed over to somebody on a plate. And if nobody at home could read, you had to learn in school, but some people had to quit school and go to work before they learned what they needed to know. So they needed extra help to get caught up.

  Eva said that literacy wasn’t just about stories; it was about structure and logic and how words belonged to each other. One afternoon she and Ray were sitting at the table working on his vocabulary. Ray’d told Eva he wanted more words. Since she’d been in town, he’d started reading the old newspapers and Saturday Evening Posts Zenie brought home from work; now he’d pilfered The Hunchback of Notre Dame from Eva. She caught me hovering in the doorway between the kitchen and living room trying to pick up as much of the lesson as I could.