I Got to Keep Moving

by Bill Harris

  “Money on the wood,” she said. Her way of confirming that his evening in one of Mr. Fong’s cribs was over unless he wanted to force something, and if he did the consequences were his to bear—with the odds, as always, favoring the house.

  He reached with slow deliberation into his side pocket, trying to show he meant to incite no more punishable harm to the whores, management, or property. He fished out his last three quarters, leaving him a nickel and a dime, and laid them on the chair seat where she indicated with her nod.

  Mr. Fong’s policy was for his customers to leave his establishment with nothing but a smile, she said, referring to the fifteen cents.

  He wasn’t much for drinking, and as far as gambling, he wasn’t worth the change from a penny.

  The way he’d messed that up in here with Iris, she said, might signal his luck was pointing in a new direction.

  He declined. Too many limber wrist magicians with them dice to suit him. And that pig piss passed off as whisky wasn’t to his south Alabama taste. So, jellyroll was the prime attraction for him there, and look like he’d fucked that up, so he reckoned he’d hump on back to camp, if it was all the same to her.

  She told him he might want to see to putting some iodine on his hand, there being no telling where Iris’s mouth had been.

  As she stepped back to let him pass, the dark creases the lamplight etched into her face from the distance disappeared and he saw she was not much more than out of her teens, if that. Younger by years than Iris or him. In her moving back, the lantern light swept the hallway. Behind her he saw it was a boy child’d been doing the moving, maybe four, five years old. Head tilted to one side, cocked like a coonhound waiting on his master’s command. His face was only illuminated for a second; only long enough to glimpse what looked like burns and scar tissue across his closed eyes. Maybe it was just a trick of the wavering coal oil light.

  By way of farewell and explanation Oscar Ashby said, “I had a shitty day.”

  “Bout like mine,” she answered.

  The child moved out from behind her, but still in her shadow.

  “You feel bad,” the child said. Said it in a man’s voice, in a voice that sounded as if it was inside Oscar Ashby’s head, as if it was rising in a rush, rising.

  “What?”

  “You feel bad about what you did.”

  It was his own voice coming out of the child’s mouth. And he heard it above the sound of the rising in him that was about to break.

  “You need to say you sorry.”

  Oscar Ashby turned from the young woman. She couldn’t be more than twenty years old, he thought as he rushed off down the dark hall. Pass the tarp-covered doorways. To stagger, step by pine plank step, one hand on the knot-holed wall to steady himself against a non-drunken stagger, down into the room below, where he was called by that bugled blues being tooted by that nigger from the Great War in Europe; down, away from the young woman; down, away from that voice, away, before they witnessed the flood breaking in him.

  He made it to the door and out and skulked off outside to some shadowed pocket of silence, his back against the knotty wall, and let the slurred and stretched blue notes thunder out of that battered horn and wash down, wash down on him, down like mud-making clouds of rain.

  14

  The Hopper Hotel

  Ernestsville, Virginia, c. 1934

  It had all happened so unexpectedly fast. Giddy fast. And Rachel Ann was still in the center of it, spinning, as when she and her sister, Catherine Ann, had held each other’s hands and spun themselves around and around on the front lawn, leaning back, faces up to the sunny sky, spinning, a top of sisters, until they were so dizzy they stumbled around like drunk uncles after a cotillion and collapsed laughing like hyenas.

  The suddenness of the proposal, the rushed civil ceremony presided over by his first cousin, the justice of the peace of Acorn—people would think they “had” to get married—whispered Aunt Rose to Aunt Emily, and then moving away so suddenly—all because her beaux Whitmore Charlton Kimbrough, of the north Alabama Kimbroughs, had been promoted to go to Hartford, Connecticut to take up the new position of vice president of Kimbrough Properties and had to be there by Monday noon to sign some paper. So they were in a two-car caravan driving through the night, Rachel Ann in the backseat of the Madam X Cadillac Sedan next to Pearl, the dusky young gal of about Rachel Ann’s age. Pearl, Rachel Ann had learned just that afternoon, was to be the author of Rachel Ann’s night of deflowering.

  Southern Belles, blue-veined women of the south, were in their honored and privileged place by God’s dictate and the efforts of all good, true white men. That notion, like sweet tea, had been consumed by Rachel Ann all of her life. Everything that was done below the Mason-Dixon line was done for them. And she understood that her part in it was to be, first and foremost, appreciative. To let that appreciation glow through her every waking gesture, word, thought, and act was her recompense. Surely that was little to pay for the enormity of the gift that she of the blue veins had so lovingly and totally been given. Surely.

  And just as surely, and blasphemously, she was a hostage of her own power, her cherished virginity, and was therefore, in her blaspheming, prayerful that there was a way out of the crystal box she and her kind had been imprisoned in by southern white men’s need to be thought of as their women’s protectors. Those men, their men, said she and her kind—mothers, sisters, aunts, nieces, cousins, and brides—were treasures loved above all else, held higher than all other, to be guarded against the possibility of defilement with every fiber from the vile desires of any male other than their kind. So it was ultimately not about the women for themselves, that their men protected them, but because the women were the procreators, the bearers of the seeds of the next generation of men. It was not wild desire, licentious love, impious lust for the women that drove this protectiveness; it was vanity, conceit, and calculated, iron-fisted possessiveness, like the ownership of valued land or livestock.

  Rachel Ann had overheard some negro man say one time to another colored man of a colored woman passing on the square that, She was the kind of woman turn water to whiskey, turn tin to solid gold, and if she would just let him get a sniff he would bargain with the devil about his sinning soul.

  Rachel Ann had turned too late to see the woman the man was talking about. But secretly, that was the kind of woman Rachel Ann wanted to be. A new kind of southern white woman. Not trashy, but not either like the proud, devout white women like her mama and Aunt Emily, and her Aunt Rose and dear, sweet Aunt Alma. Sapless, superior ladies concerned with pure and proper and de-corum, looking down on everybody and everything from up on that top roost where her daddy and her Uncle Earl and Uncle Wallace had put them, and where spinster Aunt Alma got a boost and hand up from her sisters. Put there to get them away from the men so that they, the men, could go where they could quit being cavalier gentlemen, and do what men did in as much peace and freedom and privacy as they could enjoy without the presence of their burdensome cackling women, who were like clothes with cocklebur linings.

  Rachel Ann wanted to be the new white woman who showed her new husband (and the Yankees), a new non-maidenly southern woman who retained her mystery of eternal virginal-heroine-hood that they worshipped, and yet to be the other side of her—the dark pleasure, fire-desire.

  Rachel Ann contended that her one possibility, the one stone that would kill two birds, the escaping of her societal role and the gaining of individual recognition from her guardian benefactors, was the way of sass and all its possibilities, as practiced by the colored minxes that nurtured her and her mother and aunts and grandmothers back to their beginnings in the cradle. The outwardly cheerful, ostensibly devoted colored women who cleaned, cooked, and raised the children of the whites. Seemingly loving them.

  Setting out W.C. had said, in the way he said everything, without thought of the possibility of contradiction, “the boy will ride in the lead car with me for a while, so you and Miss Rachel Ann ca
n talk.” Driving the Madame X with Rachel Ann and Pearl was Willie Dink Crawfoot, W.C.’s chauffeur, the unpleasant-looking negro who secretly tried to listen, but knew not to let his eye linger too long in the rear view mirror as the two mix-matched women, their heads together, whispered like best school chums.

  Rachel Ann wondered if Pearl and Willie Dink could communicate, like night creatures, through unspoken colored telepathy. As she was being driven away from the only home she’d ever known toward the wilderness of the north, were they plotting for Willie Dink to suddenly swerve the big car down some cutoff, eluding the lead sedan being driven by her husband, and leave her, laid waste in a ditch, throat razor-cut from ear to ear, to roar off to the first big city and lose themselves in a black bottom forever?

  But as titillating as that idea was, even the thought of it was not half as exciting as the scandalous knowledge she was receiving from Pearl. Even with the faith of a true believer, there was no telling the nature of the reply to a prayer. Now Rachel Ann, through her carefully negotiated union with Mr. Whitmore Charlton Kimbrough, was the salvation of home and hearth and the preserver of her family’s social and economical place and dignity, and was being initiated into the secret world of women. Not women like her dear mother. Silent, secretive as a saint, as Catholics said, but bless her, for all her bearing and decorum, she was flighty as a hummingbird, and deaf, dumb, and blind as her daughters were on matters that mattered.

  That night in a hotel room in Ernestville, Rachel Ann would enter her honeymoon chamber. On that first stop of their two-car motorcade she would exchange her virginal blush for full womanhood. It was at the insistence of W. C. that she was, in the back seat of the Madame X, being tutored to enter not as a retiring southern flower but with the sass of the world of women such as Pearl.

  Rachel Ann and younger sister Catherine Ann, when they were little more than hairless newts, whispering, their heads together, like with Pearl, shared nervous giggles at their tales of white knights with unscabbered swords, handles encrusted with jewels captured by his forefathers from a faraway land peopled by the likes of the exotic Scheherazade-ian girl seated beside her, with the exotic scents of the lusty wenches who opened themselves like morning glories to seduce and please the men who were the masters of the civilized world.

  Rachel Ann, at W.C.’s request, had to be privy to the secrets of those feisty, brazen women, so he would be pleased and assured that he had gotten his money’s worth, if not more.

  What, Rachel Ann had long speculated, was the source of colored women’s sass? How were they are able to stand up to their men (and some of ours) and to make them accept it! Mama never made dear daddy whistle or sing to himself, or feel low down as a snake’s belly in a wagon rut, like the colored women could make their men do.

  It was their sass that allowed them to be un-ruled and unruly, and to not care about work or responsibility. Because of their sass—she meant what she saw in the freedom of their movements—they invited being looked at and were free to acknowledge or ignore those looks by their choice, unafraid of opinion, good or bad. Their men were attracted to them not for their family name, or what they had—for they had nothing but themselves, their bodies and their laughter, the toss of their heads, the shine in their eyes. It was the sassy, sap-full women that seduced men to endure what we demanded of them—men who never had enough, as far as she knew, to spoil them.

  She thought of them of a Saturday afternoon on the thoroughfare in scrap cloth head rags, knotted at the nape; dresses handed down from their employers; shiny, bare legs; or in store-bought frocks or worn dresses little more than Crocker sacks safety pinned together—but such garments seemed to transform their wearers’ attitudes. And especially in their starched Sunday whites, white stockings on slim legs and polished white shoes; still, in the churchyard, with enough sass to, as she had heard them joke, make the preacher lay his Bible down!

  The way they stood, hip thrust out, or one dusty bare foot upon the other, with hand or wrist on their waist, or wearing their hats angled in a way that if any white woman was to duplicate it she’d be called a common strumpet to her face.

  Even at common tasks, there is a sass about them in the ease of their motions: chopping cotton or churning; stirring clothes in a wash pot and hanging them on a line; at the stove or ironing board; flinging corn to chickens, a baby on their hip; or, stepping aside, slow as sorghum, and defiant, as she passed.

  It almost made Rachel Ann weep to think how much had been sacrificed to be better than them.

  Pearl did not seem the domestic type. She was of another breed. Of the ones who were somehow able to support themselves with minimal or no contact with whites, at least the level of whites with whom Rachel Ann associated. Women who wore their pride like dime store perfume dabbed in secret places, proud not of what was set aside for them, or given to them, but because of who they were in the world, however narrow that world might have been. In her eyes it made Pearl all the more exciting and qualified.

  She had not asked, let alone insisted, that Pearl fill in details of her background. Rachel Ann had heard only that she was a widow, she had a son blinded by an accident involving his father, and she had an encyclopedic knowledge of the mysteries of intimacy not even hinted at in Rachel Ann and her sister Catherine Ann’s hot-eyed readings of Sappho.

  1

  They had stopped for the night at a roadside inn in Ernestsville, Virginia.

  Miss—Missus Rachel Ann, the night-new bride, had followed Willie Dink, toting the second load of their luggage, into the hotel and up to the Kimbroughs’ room. Room 206 in the rear away from the highway side.

  Mr. Whitmore Charlton Kimbrough and Pearl Moon, as she called herself, still stood in the circles of light beside the gas pumps in front of the Hopper Hotel. Her hands clutched around the top of the purse as if it were the rail of a sinking ship.

  Three days ago Willie, who said he was Mister Kimbrough’s chauffeur, showed up at Mister Fong’s establishment saying he had come to fetch the Chinese man who ran the place. Mister Kimbrough wanted to speak with him. Pearl told the Negro, in his black suit, white shirt, and little black leather bow tie that Mister Fong was not well enough just then to see anyone, let alone be taken anywhere. Any messages to be given or rides taken were to be handled by her. She and the chauffeur went back and forth until she turned and walked away, leaving the room with him standing in it until she returned, putting on her coat and hat, telling a woman she called White Mary to watch her child for a bit: she was going for a ride, talk some business.

  Mr. Whitmore Charlton Kimbrough, who managed the company heading the levee project, had asked and Pearl responded that mostly what was required of the women in the place his company provided for his workers’ pleasure was that they be breathing and have a snatch. But yes, she added quickly, guessing at the intent of his conversation, yes, she could teach a young girl a thing or two. Thinking that he had spotted some young gal that he all but owned, and wanted her to be tutored in the rudiments that he had described. Her mistake was that the pupil he had in mind was to be his bride. She was the youngest daughter of the Sayres, another old Alabama family.

  He’d asked how long would it take Pearl to be ready to accompany them to Hartford?

  Long enough to collect her son and wake Mr. Fong up to say she quit.

  He’d motioned for her to get to it.

  And now there they were standing, at half past midnight, on the roadside in Ernest, Ohio, at the end of their first night’s trip away from Acorn. Him in the center of the dull yellow circle of light from the hotel fixture on the porch overhang, her on the shadowed edge of it, and he was asking how her—conversation—with Missus Rachel Ann had gone.

  Fine, she told him.

  Willie Dink, back from toting the suitcases into the hotel, stood at the edge of the porch at the top of the stairs, silhouetted against the lobby light. He was wiping at his forehead with a soiled white handkerchief.

  Mister Kimbrough stepped on and grou
nd his cigarette into the concrete, then moved up the two steps, stopping beside his chauffeur to say a few words too low for Pearl to hear. Dink nodded, looking toward Pearl. His boss then walked into and through the lobby without acknowledging the clerk behind the desk.

  Pearl moved into the dark off toward the left side of the hotel. After only a couple of steps forward, she opened her hand from her grip on the purse with the pistol in it. The boy, who emerged from the darkness behind her, extended his left hand and found hers. Without a word they fell into step with each other and moved down the passage between the hotel and the café toward the shack at the bottom of the hill near the railroad tracks.

  2

  And so it was in room 206 of the Hopper Hotel.

  Rachel Ann had seen, yes, her eyes were opened, and she saw, in an instant, the final instant (his, W.C.’s, eyes closed like fists, his loins and thing in her up to their hips, shuddering) the flashing of a thousand emotions across his face. And then his eyes half opened. They were dark and dumb as a cow’s, and in them in a flash was surprise. And joy. And fear. Joy that comes from the surprise of a hope fulfilled. And fear that came from the same source. As if it was not only his, her new husband’s, first time seeing her, but his first time seeing. And he had tried to say her name but only managed a thick-tongued, teeth clinched grunt.

  She did not wink or weep or acknowledge his astonishment, nor take it for love. She was stolid as a judge, but when he rolled away, fighting to find his breath, she turned out the lamp—which she had insisted remain on—to hide her insistent smiling. His body twitched like a dreaming dog’s as she wrapped herself around his back, cradled him as he slept. There was an exhausted whimpering in the pit of his throat as he in his stupor relived the throes of their initial post-nuptials meeting.

  It was all she had hoped and more. She could not imagine that war heroics, or religious conversion, or financial or political domination or any other power could possibly match what the colored girl with the blind child had blessed her with.