The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

by Ann Weisgarber

  I turned away to hide my smile.

  “That was just the beginning. She’d hardly sat down when she saw Mr. Booker T. Washington’s photograph on the mantel. She looked right at Elizabeth and said, ‘That man has sold out the black race, bowing and scraping to the white man.’ I thought Elizabeth was going to strangle her. And she didn’t say anything about sightseeing in England, not even when we asked her about Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. All she talked about were lynchings, how we need to organize protest rallies, stop being so mealy-mouthed like Booker T. Washington. Then she passed around a picture of this colored boy hanging from a tree, his neck all twisted. It turned my stomach. He’d been set on fire.”

  Rose Douglas picked up the coffee urn. “Hurry up with that cake. The sooner we eat, the sooner we can get that woman out of here.” She backed out of the kitchen with the urn.

  Her standing up to the Circle of Eight made me admire Mrs. Wells-Barnett all the more. It pleased me that she had shocked them. They should have known better. If they’d been reading her columns, they would have known what kind of woman she was.

  I scooted the chicken fryers to the side, waved off a scattering of flies, and wiped my hands again. I sliced the cakes, making sure that the servings were the same size. I arranged each slice just so on the china dessert plates, knowing Mrs. DuPree would notice if I got it wrong. From the icebox I got out the wooden container of vanilla ice cream and scooped one dip for each slice of cake. Rose Douglas hurried in and out of the kitchen with the tray, doing her best to serve the desserts before the ice cream melted.

  I wiped my neck and face with a dish towel, then flapped it at the flies crawling on the bloody chicken parts. What I would give to see Mrs. Wells-Barnett one more time.

  I looked out the back window, wishing I was in the parlor sitting right next to her. Outside, Peaches Orwell from two doors down was walking her baby in the alley, carrying her on her hip, trying to get her to stop fussing. Peaches had a tight look on her face, and I didn’t blame her. Lily cried all the time. Ignoring her didn’t stop her, and giving her attention just gave her more reason to cry. Lily was a baby born to scream.

  A train on the elevated tracks a few blocks over thundered past, rattling the kitchen walls and blocking out the baby’s cries.

  Mrs. Wells-Barnett had sure cooked her goose. She wouldn’t be getting any more invitations from Mrs. DuPree, not if she didn’t see eye to eye with her over Booker T. Washington. Mrs. DuPree thought he was a living example of a self-made man what had overcome the shameful obstacle of being the son of common slaves. He was a college president, and for Mrs. DuPree that was almost as good as being a man of medicine. Then too, she approved of his views. She liked how he encouraged Negroes to be clean, go to school, and learn a trade like bricklaying or carpentry.

  “You’d do well to remember that,” Mrs. DuPree had told the boarders more than once.

  Baby Lily shrieked right in my ear. I jumped, nearly dropping a bread pan. It wasn’t Baby Lily, and I wasn’t in Chicago. It was my two-year-old Emma screaming, sitting next to the cookstove, her legs ramrod stiff out before her, her face balled up tight with pain.

  I tried to reach for her but my big belly was in the way. I dropped to my knees, ignoring the pain that shot through me. I grabbed Emma’s arms to pull her to me. She jerked away and screamed louder, flapping her right hand high in the air. I caught her arm; her palm was slashed with red streaks. White blisters bubbled to the surface on her fingers.

  The cast-iron cookstove. Emma had put her hand on it.

  I got myself up. I dipped a rag in the water bucket and got back down on the floor. Emma arched her back, screaming, and kicked at me. I heard a funny yelp. Alise sat wide-eyed under the table, staring in horror. I pinned Emma to the floor, half lying on her. I wrapped the wet rag around her burned hand. She screamed louder, flinging the rag.

  “Liz!” I hollered. “The blue compound.” I looked over my shoulder. Liz stood frozen by the table. Emma bucked and shrieked with pain.

  “The blue compound,” I hollered again at Liz, jerking my head at the cupboard.

  Liz’s hands fluttered but she couldn’t get her feet moving, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she had. The compound was on the top shelf. I got to my feet, Emma’s screams tearing at my nerves.

  By now all three girls were crying. “Stop it,” I snapped at Liz and Alise. “Right now!” I got the compound and the soothing syrup. I got myself back down on the floor, held up Emma’s head, and between screams, poured syrup in her open mouth. She sputtered and spit.

  She buckled then and fell back, her head thumping on the floor. Pinning her down, I grasped her wrist. I dabbed ointment on her blistering palm.

  Emma screamed again; I got a little more syrup down her. Then, because it looked like Liz and Alise were working up to having another good cry, I gave them each a sip of the syrup. Waiting for the compound to deaden the pain, we sat on the floor, me rocking Emma while she cried, her hand curled up close to her chest. Liz and Alise huddled against my back. Sniffling, they wrapped their arms around my neck and shoulders.

  “My handkerchief,” I said to Liz. Just as she was reaching to pull it from my sleeve, a bitter stink filled the kitchen.

  I slid Emma off my lap and onto the floor. She let out a wail. I got up, tears now running down my face. Grabbing the potholders, I pushed the pot of mush off the cookstove’s burner.

  Too late. The mush was burned and stuck to the bottom of the pot. Supper was ruined.

  I stood over that pot and let myself cry. There were supplies for four weeks, and I had let some of it burn. I had let Emma burn her hand. I hadn’t been watching; my mind had been wandering. Now the pan needed a hard scrubbing, Mary wasn’t home to help, and I had to start over on supper. I cried all the harder. Liz and Alise had their arms around Emma, all of them making whimpering sounds, watching me. They weren’t used to seeing me cry.

  I wiped my face with a rag, ashamed of myself, a grown woman bawling like a baby. I said, “It’s all right, girls, it’s all right.” They blinked back their tears, even Emma with her hurt hand tucked close to her. I wiped their faces. I got a fresh rag, wet it, and this time Emma let me wrap it around her hand.

  “You’re my good girl,” I said. “Mama’s brave girl.”

  Liz picked up the compound jar and the bottle of soothing syrup for me. It was a wonder, I thought, that the bottle hadn’t overturned. I held it up. It was two-thirds full. Emma, I knew, was going to need more in a little while and again at bedtime.

  “Come on out on the porch,” I said to the girls. “It stinks in here, hot too. Can’t hardly breathe. You can have your naps out there.”

  “I’m too big,” Liz said.

  I gave her a warning look. “Get the red blanket,” I said.

  I put the compound and the syrup on the shelf. On the label of the syrup bottle was a picture of a smiling white woman. Her lips were red and she wore a frilly blouse, just like Mrs. DuPree and the Circle of Eight ladies. The white woman’s yellow hair was piled high and there wasn’t a strand out of place. She has a maid, I thought. In one hand she held a bottle and in the other she had a big spoon filled with what I took to be the soothing syrup. She leaned toward her little boy. He had yellow curls like hers. He sat up against crisp, clean pillows. His round white arms rested on a turned-down blanket. He smiled up at his mother. He didn’t look the least bit sick.

  I looked over my shoulder. Alise and Emma weren’t looking; they were studying Emma’s wrapped hand. The white woman on the bottle didn’t have the first worry. I picked it up and unscrewed the cap. I heard Liz coming down the hall with the blanket. I took a quick swallow. Then I took another. Just the taste of it on my tongue made me feel better. I’d get to the burned pot in a few minutes; supper wouldn’t be all that late. I put the cap back on the bottle.

  I gathered the girls, and we went outside to let our nerves settle.

  10

  JERSEYBELL

 
I sat in my porch rocker with Emma on my lap. It was hot, but I wanted her close. It was going to take a long time for her hand to heal, and even when it did, she’d likely have scars. What kinds of stories, I wondered, will Emma tell about them.

  I rubbed her back, making big circles. She looked up at me and then put her head on my big belly, stuck her good thumb in her mouth, and held her burned hand close to her chest. Liz and Alise, on the red blanket, laid on their bellies with their heads propped up in their hands.

  An easy breeze had come up. The high clouds overhead had a pink cast along the bottom, and off to the far west, they were dark. I couldn’t let myself hope, though. The sun was as bright as ever, and to the north, there wasn’t the first cloud.

  “Which way’s Daddy and the others?” Liz said.

  I pointed northeast toward Vulture’s Pinnacle. Liz and Alise strained their eyes. “Can’t see them,” Liz said.

  “Maybe they’re behind a table somewhere,” I said.

  Tall squares of flat-topped grass rose up everywhere in the Badlands. They put me in mind of sheet cake sliced perfect on all four sides. Isaac had laughed the first time I told him that. “I guess you could say that,” he had said. “But out here we call them tables.”

  “How’d they come to be?” I said.

  “Erosion.”

  I wasn’t all that sure what the word meant, but it made me think about how the land in Louisiana ran in dark streams after a storm. I said, “It rains that hard?”

  “Sometimes. But mostly it’s the wind.”

  Rocking back and forth, I patted Emma’s back. I lifted my chin, letting the breeze dry the sweat on my face.

  “Tell us a story, Mama,” Alise said, now lying flat on her back.

  I didn’t feel like telling a story. I just wanted to sit; I just wanted to be quiet with my girls close to me. The soothing syrup made me feel slow, and I didn’t have it in me to think up a story. “No,” I said. Then I thought about Mrs. Wells-Barnett. She would expect me to do better.

  I said, “Liz, get the Longfellow book.”

  She acted as if she hadn’t heard me. “Liz,” I said, and this time she got up and went into the house to get the book.

  The Longfellow book of poems had been Mrs. DuPree’s gift when Mary was born. It was the first piece of mail we’d gotten from her even though Isaac wrote her a letter the third Sunday of every month. When the book came, surprising us both, Isaac said it was a peace offering. I didn’t see it that way. The book was empty—no letter or signature on the title page. That was how all Mrs. DuPree’s books came. They were just empty recognitions of the birth of each of our children.

  It was me what wrote the child’s name in each book. It was me, using my best Palmer penmanship, what wrote, From your loving grandmother, Elizabeth DuPree. If Isaac ever noticed that it wasn’t his mother’s hand, he never said the first word. Neither did I.

  Liz brought the book to me and got back on the blanket. I opened it to “Hiawatha.” It was a restful poem, not like “Paul Revere’s Ride,” that dashed with excitement all over the countryside. “Hiawatha” was a poem about a lake and forests of pine trees, a place different—better—than the Badlands. Then, too, it made me think about when I was a schoolgirl. I had recited the first part of “Hiawatha” at my eighth-grade commencement.

  I began to read to the girls, one arm around Emma.

  By the shores of Gitche Gumee,

  By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

  Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,

  Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

  Indians. I had picked a poem about Indians. I stopped. The girls looked at me, waiting. I read on.

  Dark behind it rose the forest,

  Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,

  Rose the firs with cones upon them;

  Bright before it beat the water,

  Beat the clear and sunny water,

  Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

  The sound of the words lulled me. The soothing syrup did too. Emma burning her hand, I told myself as I read the familiar words, was an accident. Accidents happened to children.

  An accident was how our Isaac Two died. He had just turned five; it was February 27, 1911. On that particular day, spring came for the afternoon, melting the icicles that hung from the dugout’s roof and turning the skin of snow on the ground to a slippery slush. Isaac had ridden off to the south pasture to check on the cows expected to calve come April. I was slow and headachy, but I wanted to hang the laundry outside. Mary, Isaac Two, and John played soldiers and Indians on a small outcrop of low rocks. They hid and ducked as they pointed their forefingers, pretending to shoot each other and making soft popping noises with their lips.

  I had been watching; I always did. But it didn’t matter. Isaac Two slipped and fell. A sharp point on a rock pierced his right temple, and he was dead before I could spit the clothespins from my mouth.

  Three days later, Liz was born.

  On their blanket, Liz and Alise looked more asleep than awake. Emma’s eyes were closed. The wind had picked up, making the grasses ripple.

  At the door on summer evenings,

  Sat the little Hiawatha;

  Heard the whispering of the pine-trees,

  Heard the lapping of the waters,

  Sounds of music, words of wonder.

  Accidents happened everywhere; I knew that. It wasn’t just the Badlands, but it seemed to me that accidents and death were harder to bear here. When you lost a child, you wanted your family. In the Badlands, though, neighbors had to stand in. When Isaac Two died, Isaac got the preacher from Interior, a white man not much over twenty. He didn’t know what to do for me, so he read from the Bible, standing over me as I sat blank-eyed in my rocker. It was the neighbor women, Mindy McKee and Mabel Walker, what washed my face, fixed my hair, and dressed me. They did the same for Isaac Two. During the burial, they held on to my arms, keeping me on my feet. It was Mindy, with her red hair that always flashed in the sunlight, what saw I was in labor and stayed on to help with the birthing. It was Mabel, whose mouth was usually set in a frown, what came back after Liz was born and told me the new baby needed me more than the memory of Isaac Two did.

  I was grateful to Mindy and Mabel; I’d always be. But when accidents happened, it was my mother what I most wanted.

  The girls were asleep. I stopped reading. Off to the west, the darkening clouds rolled on top of each other like they were being chased by something bigger. The wind picked up. The sky glowed silver, and clouds were piling up in the north. A scattered flock of magpies blew past, pitching wildly, their hard-beating black wings sparkling in that sky’s funny color.

  The air smelled of dusty rain. Tumbleweed skittled past. The buttes shined pink. My heart began to beat fast with hope, the sluggishness in my arms and legs brought on by the soothing syrup suddenly gone.

  I sat there watching the sky, waiting, the Longfellow book in one hand, my other arm around Emma. I knew that Isaac would be watching too. I hoped that he, Mary, John, and Rounder were heading home, doing their best to beat the storm that was surely going to break loose any time. I shook my head. Don’t get your hopes up, I told myself. Don’t. These clouds could pass, turn into nothing.

  I rocked back and forth, the girls asleep, my eyes fixed on the clouds as the day’s light turned dark.

  If it rained, things would work out. If it rained, I’d put the Indian woman and the half-breed boy behind me. If it rained, things between me and Isaac would be like before. That was what I told myself.

  The wind gusted. There was a chill in it. All at once, snakes of lightning etched the sky everywhere. I braced for the thunder. When it came, it started with a moaning rumble and then gathered itself, rumbling louder and louder until it cracked into a boom. The girls, startled awake, started to cry. I drew them to me.

  “A storm,” I said to them, my heart skipping. “A storm.”

  Raindrops, one at a time, hit the tin roof. Single drops pocked the white grit on the g
round, making little craters. I lifted my face, closed my eyes, and waited, scared I’d run the rain off if I wanted it too much. A raindrop splashed on my cheek.

  “Mama!” The wind had taken the red blanket, and it tumbled down toward the cottonwood. “Let it go,” I said, and then I smiled.

  Lightning darted across the sky and this time the crack of thunder made me jump. The girls yelped and then cried all the louder.

  “Lord,” I said, thinking how this was just like the Badlands to hit us hard when it finally rained. The rain began to come in earnest. “Lord,” I said again, and this time it was praise. I slid Emma to her feet. “Come on,” I said, all at once in a hurry. We went inside, the Longfellow book in my hand.

  We gathered up all the washbasins, every pot and pan, anything I had that could hold water. I lined them up on the edge of the porch, the plinking of raindrops in them filling my heart with joy. Back inside, I wanted to sit at the parlor window and watch the prairie grasses come alive. I wanted to see the rain barrels overflow, and I wanted to see the wells fill up. I wished for Isaac so we could see it together. The Indian squaw and her boy, Isaac’s anger about Mrs. Fills the Pipe, my hard feelings against the Badlands, Liz in the well, all of that was gone. The rain changed everything.

  Lightning flashed. “Mama!” Hands pulled at me. “It’s all right,” I said. I looked out the kitchen window and my heart dropped. Jerseybell. She was staked to a wooden post on the side of the house, scared silly. Her neck was stretched as she pulled against her rope, wanting to break free. If there was any chance for milk, being out in this storm would put Jerseybell off for good. I had to get her in; I should have done it at the first sign of the storm. At least there weren’t the horses to worry over. Isaac had taken all four.

  The rain was harder. Thunder surrounded us with its crashes; lightning lit up the room and just as quick, left us in the gloom. “Just a storm,” I told the crying girls. “We’re all right, just a little thunder.”

  They held fast to my skirt. “Come on,” I said, and I shuffled them to their bedroom. “Get under the bed.”