The Hope Chest

by Karen Schwabach

  This last sentence seemed to deflate Mr. Martin, like an inner tube with a pin stuck in it. His face went from red to pink to pale, and his fists unmade themselves.

  The conductor pressed his advantage. “The ticket discount is only on this tourist car, sir. It'll be two dollars extra for the child's ticket in the colored car. Or one dollar if she's under eight.”

  “I'm seven,” said Myrtle. She held Violet's hand tightly but still didn't look at her—her eyes had been going from Mr. Martin to the conductor and back to Mr. Martin like someone watching a tennis match.

  Mr. Martin reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of change. He counted out four silver quarters. All the fight had gone out of him, Violet thought. The conductor pocketed the dollar and made out a ticket, looking victorious. He slapped the ticket down on the seat beside Myrtle.

  “Hurry up, girl,” he said. “This train's about to start moving.”

  Myrtle walked off down the corridor, her head held high. She did not look back. The conductor stalked close behind her.

  Mr. Martin hadn't sat down yet and was trying to get Miss Dexter to look at him. “Miss Dexter, I'd have thought, since the suffragists have taken the whole car, it would have been possible to argue that—”

  Miss Dexter turned suddenly from the window and glared at him. “Mr. Martin, I'll thank you to refrain from making any more scenes between here and Tennessee. This may be just a tourist jaunt to you, but to us it represents the culmination of a seventy-two-year battle.”

  Mr. Martin glowered at her. Then the train started with a lurch that threw him into her lap.

  “A thousand pardons, Miss Dexter,” Mr. Martin apologized, getting into his own seat with difficulty. “I can assure you that I care every bit as much about the woman suffrage issue as you do,” he added frostily.

  “I find that very hard to believe,” said Miss Dexter. “But if you actually care about the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, then don't jeopardize our chances by making ugly scenes about unrelated issues.”

  “It is not an unrelated issue!” Mr. Martin said heatedly. “It's all the same issue. If you can't see that—”

  “You sound like a Bolshevik,” said Miss Dexter, and turned pointedly to look out the window. Mr. Martin turned the other way and stared across the aisle out the opposite window. The other suffragists in the seats around them were all trying hard to look like they weren't staring at Miss Dexter and Mr. Martin. Violet felt extremely uncomfortable. This was going to be a long train trip. She wished Myrtle had been allowed to stay.

  In the Jim Crow Car

  MYRTLE HAD HER BUNDLE TUCKED UNDER one arm—the extra cut-down dress and a toothbrush and a comb that Miss Burns had bought for her. The only possession she really cared about she always carried in her pocket, like a talisman. It was a tiny tin-framed snapshot that Mama and Daddy had had taken the day they were married. Mama had come through clearly, looking just like Mama only not as tired as Myrtle remembered her. Daddy was mostly hidden. The flash powder had left a blurred spot in the middle of Daddy's face, so that she could only see the edges of it. She wished whoever had taken the picture had known this was going to be the only time William Davies's daughter would ever see him and had tried again.

  Daddy had gone down to Panama to work on Mr. Roosevelt's canal just before Myrtle was born. Then he had died, either of yellow fever or in a cave-in; the boss who wrote to Mama wasn't sure. So many American colored men died digging the Panama Canal, according to Mama, that the bosses couldn't keep track of them. Myrtle imagined that Daddy might have looked a bit like Mr. Martin, only much handsomer, and colored, of course. She liked Mr. Martin. He reminded her of Daddy somehow, which was dumb, considering Myrtle had never actually met her father.

  The conductor followed Myrtle down the length of the train car to the vestibule between the cars, then said, “The colored car's all the way at the back,” and left her. Myrtle struggled to open the door into the next car, the one behind the one that Mr. Martin and the other white people were in. The door wouldn't budge. She braced one foot against the side of the train car and hauled as hard as she could at the handle. The door opened and she stumbled backward but managed to recover and get through the door before it closed.

  The next car was full of white people, and Myrtle hurried through it. Some of them gave her cold stares over their newspapers. One woman smiled at Myrtle and said to the man next to her, “They're so cute when they're little.”

  The train started and Myrtle fell down. Somebody laughed. Myrtle got to her feet, angry but schooling her face to perfect passive indifference. She made her way backward as the train sped forward. A conductor grabbed her arm.

  “You're in the wrong car, girl,” he said.

  Myrtle gave him a vacant look. “I'm going to the colored car, mister.”

  “The Jim Crow car is in the back,” the conductor said. He opened the door at the rear of the car and shoved Myrtle through it. “Keep walking.”

  The floor of the vestibule shifted and creaked under Myrtle's feet. The doors to the cars were even harder to open now that the train was moving. Myrtle found she couldn't open the next one at all, and against her will, tears of frustration started in her eyes. Then a white man came through going in the other direction and Myrtle was able to pass through. He didn't even see her. Colored people were completely invisible to some white people, Myrtle had noticed. If she worked at it, she could make herself even more invisible. It was the only kind of magic she knew how to do.

  Finally she got to the colored car. It was older than the other cars, with an open platform at the end instead of a vestibule. That made the door the hardest of all to open, but a young woman sitting at the front of the car saw Myrtle through the window and came and opened the door for her.

  This car was made all of wood, and the seats were covered with woven rattan instead of mohair. The people in the seats were all colored. Myrtle felt relieved, knowing that nobody in the car was going to give her evil looks over their newspapers. But there was a conductor at the end of the car, coming toward her. He was white, of course; all conductors were. He was taking tickets, reading them carefully, and snapping them neatly with his hole puncher. Myrtle felt for the ticket she had in her pocket and hoped that other stupid conductor hadn't made any mistakes on it.

  Myrtle looked around for an empty seat. The car was very full. She saw a space next to an old woman— remarkably old. The woman looked almost too old to be human. She looked more like a very ancient tree that Myrtle knew of that grew in Anacostia, Washington. The woman was wearing the full, long skirts that had gone out of fashion before Myrtle was born.

  The old woman saw her looking and patted the rattan seat beside her. “No one sitting here, child.”

  “Thank you, ma'am,” Myrtle said. The rattan seat creaked as Myrtle sat down in the space between the woman's full skirts and the wooden wall of the train car. The seat had no springs, and Myrtle jolted with each clank of the wheels rattling against the rails. Myrtle had heard someone say that trains ran on paper-cored wheels, but she didn't see how a train could run on paper, and the wheels sounded like metal to her.

  The conductor stopped in front of the old woman and held out his hand for her ticket.

  “Where are we headed to today, Auntie?” he said.

  The old woman murmured something in reply. Her voice was so weak Myrtle couldn't make it out.

  “Change trains in Lexington, Auntie,” said the conductor. He punched her ticket and reached for Myrtle's.

  “Change in Chattanooga for Nashville,” he said to Myrtle. She guessed her ticket was all right.

  “Mrs. Merganser is my name,” said the old woman, speaking quite clearly once the conductor had moved on.

  “Pleased to meet you, ma'am,” said Myrtle politely. “I'm Myrtle Davies.”

  They rode on in silence for a while.

  “You have people in Tennessee?” Mrs. Merganser asked eventually.

  “Yes, ma'am.” Myrtle had never hea
rd that she had people there, but there were people in Tennessee, no doubt, so it was possible that some of them were Myrtle's.

  Mrs. Merganser seemed to accept this as reason enough for Myrtle's traveling. People sometimes sent their children on trains alone, because who could afford an extra adult's fare just to escort a child who presumably had brains enough to change trains by herself?

  “How old do you think I am, child?” Mrs. Merganser asked.

  “I don't know, ma'am,” said Myrtle, thinking that the woman must be at least a hundred.

  “I don't know either. I was born in Alabama a long time before freedom came. When I was no bigger than you, I was sold away from my mother into Georgia, and I never saw her again.”

  Myrtle kept her eyes cast down and listened respectfully. She had met old people who had been slaves before. None of them had been as old as Mrs. Merganser, though.

  “My first baby was sold away from me when he was one year old. The second as well. Then my master died and left me to his brother in his will, along with some cows and a horse.” Myrtle heard the sarcasm in the old woman's voice. “But my husband he left to another brother. So I lost him too. Do you want an apple?”

  Myrtle felt derailed by the sudden change of subject. “Yes, ma'am.”

  Mrs. Merganser dug an apple out of her handbag, polished it against her skirt, and gave it to Myrtle. Myrtle was struck by how bright and smooth the apple looked against Mrs. Merganser's wrinkled old skin.

  Myrtle savored the first bite of apple, crushing it between her teeth and letting the cider run over her tongue. Mrs. Merganser went on.

  “After freedom, I searched for my first two children, but I never found them. I didn't look for my first husband, because by that time I was married again.”

  Mrs. Merganser looked at Myrtle sharply, as though daring her to say anything.

  Myrtle said, “Yes, ma'am.”

  “Nowadays they'd call that bigamy.” She shook her finger at Myrtle. “You can't marry another husband unless you divorce the first one or he dies. But back then it didn't matter. Colored folk marrying didn't matter any more than dogs or cattle marrying, in the eyes of the law.”

  Myrtle wiped apple juice from her chin with her sleeve. Mrs. Merganser shook her head disapprovingly and handed her a handkerchief.

  “I had eight children before freedom and four after,” she went on. “And only three are alive today, not counting the two I don't know about.”

  Myrtle tried to think of something comforting to say and came up with, “Pretty soon, though, ma'am, they're going to let women vote.”

  Mrs. Merganser shook her head in disbelief. “You think they're going to let us vote? Even if they do pass this amendment and let white women vote, you think they're going to let colored women vote? You haven't been listening to a word I've said, child.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” Myrtle contradicted.

  “You don't know much, child. I've just been telling you how I was sold and willed and bartered about like so much livestock, and you've got it into your head that white folks are going to let me vote?”

  Myrtle said nothing. To say “yes, ma'am” again would, she felt, be pushing her luck.

  “I guess you don't know,” said Mrs. Merganser, “that these white people talked about amending this amendment of theirs. They talked about fixing it to say that white women could vote and colored women couldn't. They said that would make it easier to get the amendment passed. And I'll tell you something.”

  “Ma'am?”

  “These white people were right. If they could've fixed that amendment to leave out colored women, it would've passed a long time ago.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” said Myrtle. She didn't know if what Mrs. Merganser said about the amendment was true. She hadn't paid very close attention to the news stories about it. But she did know one thing. “I'm going to vote, ma'am, when I grow up.”

  Mrs. Merganser huffed derisively. “We're sitting here in this Jim Crow car because white people don't want to have to look at us when they ride on a train. And you think these same white people are going to let you pick their president for them.”

  Myrtle looked at the floorboards. Put that way, it did sound foolish.

  “And if you live in Washington, D.C.,” Mrs. Merganser added, “you can't vote anyway, man, woman, or child; white or colored.”

  “Then I won't live in Washington,” said Myrtle.

  “I think you must be the most stubborn child ever born,” said Mrs. Merganser.

  “Yes, ma'am,” said Myrtle, glad they'd gotten that straight.

  Mr. Martin's Escape

  THE TRAIN CLIMBED STEEPLY UP INTO WHAT Miss Dexter said (when she started speaking again) were the Blue Ridge Mountains. But darkness had fallen, and the only thing Violet could see out the window was the reflection of the inside of the train car, two long rows of passengers, mostly women, on red mohair-covered seats, surrounded by their handbags, hatboxes, picnic baskets, valises, and traveling pillows.

  “I hope you understand I'm not a racialist, Violet,” Miss Dexter was saying as she unpacked fried chicken, biscuits, and apples from a picnic basket. “Mr. Martin doesn't seem to understand this. He doesn't seem to realize that with everything we women have worked so hard for in the balance, we can't be distracted by every little battle that comes our way.”

  Mr. Martin had gone to look for something for them to drink.

  “Can I take some of this to Myrtle?” Violet asked, indicating the meal Miss Dexter was serving out. A few days ago she would have considered it the very height of bad breeding to ask her hostess for more food. But she was starting to realize that being well brought up had its disadvantages. It kept you from asking for the things you needed.

  “Yes, of course,” said Miss Dexter. “I certainly don't intend to starve the child,” she added, wrapping some food up in a napkin. “Separation of the races doesn't necessarily mean inequality, Violet, it just …”

  In honor of her newfound rudeness, Violet walked away without waiting to hear the end of this.

  Violet worked her way toward the back of the train. There was no point in asking directions, she thought, on a train. She found the colored car all the way at the back. Clutching the napkin in her fist, she opened the last door and walked back through the aisle of colored passengers. She found Myrtle sitting next to an elderly woman.

  “I brought you some dinner,” said Violet. She held out the napkin.

  “Thanks,” said Myrtle. “Mrs. Merganser, this is my friend Violet.”

  Mrs. Merganser looked at Violet and nodded a greeting. Then she closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep. Violet supposed she must be too old to stay awake.

  “Can I sit down?” she asked. She felt uncomfortable being the only white person in the colored car, but she was tired of Miss Dexter and in no hurry to get back to her. And there was something she wanted to ask Myrtle about anyway.

  “Sure.” Myrtle made a space between herself and the window, and Violet squeezed into it. The rattan seats in the colored car were even more uncomfortable than the mohair-covered iron springs. Why didn't they make train seats out of something more comfortable?

  “I think Mr. Martin might be on the run from the police,” she said to Myrtle.

  “Did you only just now figure that out?” said Myrtle.

  “Well, when did you figure it out?” Violet asked, annoyed.

  “First time I saw him, back in New York. When he jumped a mile when we came into the room.”

  Violet wasn't sure if Myrtle was telling the truth or was just trying to show how smart she was. Anyway, Violet had more pressing concerns. “But don't you think he might be a little bit smitten with my sister?”

  “Yes.” Myrtle frowned.

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “Doesn't your sister know how to send a fella to the rightabout if he gets too fresh?”

  “I guess so,” said Violet. One way or another, Chloe had certainly sent the Mr. R.'s to the rightabout.
>
  “Then I wouldn't worry about it,” said Myrtle.

  “But what about him being on the run from the police—we think?”

  Myrtle did that shrug thing with her eyes. Apparently she didn't consider being on the run from the police a major character flaw.

  “Well, he could be dangerous,” said Violet. “He could hurt us.”

  “He hasn't hurt us yet, has he?” said Myrtle. Violet must have conveyed by her expression that this wasn't a satisfactory answer, because Myrtle added, “There are lots of ways to get in trouble with the law without hurting anybody, you know.”

  Violet did not know this. “Anyway, I think maybe she already sent him to the rightabout, and now he wants to try to get her to change her mind.”

  Myrtle nodded. She must have come to the same conclusion. “Maybe she'll want to change her mind.”

  “I don't think so,” said Violet. “She doesn't want a— a gentleman friend. She sent these fellas back home in Susquehanna to the rightabout, and they were much better-looking than Mr. Martin.”

  “Looks aren't everything,” said Myrtle sagely.

  Violet was starting to get a prickly, uncomfortable feeling in the back of her neck. She turned around quickly. From the studied way that everyone was looking somewhere else, she was sure they had all been staring at her a second ago. “Am I not supposed to be in here?” said Violet.

  “I don't know,” said Myrtle. “Probably not.”

  Violet got up. Being out of place was unpleasant; it made your stomach hurt. She might as well go back and get her own dinner. “I'll see you later,” she said. She turned to say goodbye to Mrs. Merganser, but the old woman was sound asleep. She must be too old even to talk anyway, Violet thought.

  Just as she got back to the suffragists' car, the door at the other end of it snapped open and two men strode in. The men were dressed in black suits with starched collars that seemed to hold their chins up uncomfortably high. They marched down the car and stopped in the aisle next to Miss Dexter.