Crow

by Barbara Wright

  “We’ll take it,” Daddy said. He didn’t bargain, but offered full price.

  Daddy pulled out the stack of one-dollar bills and counted them, each one as crisp and flat as if Boo Nanny had ironed it.

  He got two newspaper deliverymen with a wagon to move the organ into our parlor, and we waited for Mama to come home from work. She chose this day, of all days, to be late. Daddy paced in the kitchen. He couldn’t settle down enough to read the paper as he usually did.

  Boo Nanny was fixing dinner when Mama came in, and we all fell silent. She looked at us suspiciously. Daddy asked her to get his jacket from the front porch, hoping she would notice the organ. She walked straight through the parlor and out the front door, and returned with the jacket.

  “What you be looking so sheepish for?” she asked Daddy.

  “Go back to the parlor. There’s something there for you,” he said.

  When she returned to the parlor, she let out a screech, as if she had just discovered a dead body. We crowded around her as she removed her hands from her mouth and traced the ivory keys, the pull stops, and the carved music stand with her fingertips.

  “Why, Jack Thomas, you take the cake,” she said.

  “Don’t be standing there with you mouth gaping open. Play us a hymn,” Boo Nanny said.

  And she did.

  At the beginning of the summer, Lewis and I swam naked in the Cape Fear River, until the town passed an ordinance against it. Some ladies on a riverboat excursion had seen a group of Negro boys skinny-dipping and complained. I knew if I got caught, there’d be a five-dollar fine and a serious licking from Daddy, who, as a member of the Board of Aldermen, had voted in favor of the ordinance.

  So instead, we went to a swimming hole I knew about. I made Lewis swear he wouldn’t tell anyone about the location, particularly not that stuck-up Johnny Dancy. The only other people who knew about the hole were four white boys around our age. If they got there first, we’d tie their clothes in knots so they couldn’t get them apart when they got out. If we were there first, they’d do the same thing to us. It was all in good fun. Though we never spoke, we had a friendly rivalry going on, and both sides seemed to enjoy it.

  Honeysuckle grew wild and sweet at the base of a huge oak tree that spread its branches over the swimming hole. Someone had taken a thick rope, the kind used to secure tugboats to the docks, and tied it to a branch. Boards nailed to the trunk formed a ladder to a platform. From there, we would swing out over the water, feet wrapped around the knot at the end of the rope, and then drop into the cool, clear water. Lewis and I spent many hours whooping and hollering, seeing who could swing the highest or make the biggest splash, or who could hold his breath underwater the longest.

  One day I saw, underneath the platform, a red cloth tied at four ends and left in the crook of the tree. On my stomach, I reached under the platform, retrieved the bundle, and unwrapped it. Inside was a large cone from a longleaf pine. The stiff brown petals had razor-sharp edges. On a lark, I took the pinecone and replaced it with a cocoon I found attached to a branch.

  Three days later, when we went to our swimming spot, the red cloth was still in the crook of the tree. Now it held a robin’s egg. The fragile sky-blue egg fit perfectly in my palm. I climbed down the ladder with one hand, cupping the treasure in my other hand. I returned to my pile of clothes and wrapped the egg in my shirt to protect it. Nearby I found a pretty rock and put it inside the cloth in the secret hiding place in the tree.

  From then on, each time I went to the swimming hole, I took along a treasure I had collected—a bird’s nest, an unusual seedpod, an insect carcass. I even gave up the conch egg case I had found on the beach with Boo Nanny. The golden series of linked disks, each the size of a threepenny stack, formed a paper-like chain that resembled a mermaid’s necklace. Inside some chambers were tiny conchs, small enough to require a magnifying glass to see. Other chambers had a nail-head-sized hole where the baby conchs had escaped, to grow into larger conchs on the ocean floor. I knew my friend would like the conch case as much as I did.

  For a couple of weeks, it went like that. I would leave little gifts and find, in return, a surprise. Once I left a pair of shoelaces that I had used to test a dye Boo Nanny made from the barberry bush. The laces came out bright orange instead of the rust brown she had expected, so she rejected the dye lot for her dress material. “I ain’t switching my fanny round the backyard looking like no pumpkin,” she said.

  The shoelaces disappeared from the hiding place in the crook of the tree, and in their stead, my secret friend left a pirate’s doubloon, made by placing a penny on a railroad track.

  One afternoon we happened upon the white boys swimming. Now there were only three. I broke the unspoken rule of our rivalry and approached them.

  “Where’s the other boy?” I asked the redhead who was treading water in the center of the hole. I thought of him as Barberry, after the bush that had turned my shoelaces orange. The color of his hair was unnatural, even for a white boy.

  “He died,” Barberry said. “It was his brother.” He nodded to the gangly boy whose pale skin looked blue underwater. I had nicknamed him Heron, because he reminded me of the blue heron with the long neck and skinny legs that lived in the marshes.

  I paused and let this sink in. I’d never thought of death as something that happened to white people.

  “What of?” I asked.

  “Smallpox,” Barberry said.

  I had heard about the epidemic. When the city tried to put a pesthouse around the corner from my house to quarantine the victims, the neighbors rioted and burned it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Why are you sorry? You didn’t even know him,” Heron said.

  “Okay, he ain’t sorry,” Lewis broke in. Then, asserting his authority, he said, “This is our swimming hole. Now beat it.”

  The white boys scrambled up the bank, gathered their clothes to their chests, and ran away through the brush, their bare bottoms shining like pale moons. We never saw them there again.

  Over the next few days, I kept checking the crook of the tree, hoping that someone would have taken the olive shell I left in the red kerchief and replaced it with a surprise. But no one ever did. I would never know if the secret sharer was the brother who died or one of the other boys. Either way, it made me sad.

  THREE

  At the end of May, a large tent went up on the corner of Red Cross and Sixth, with banners that announced:

  MILLIE-CHRISTINE:

  THE TWO-HEADED NIGHTINGALE.

  EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD.

  THE MOST REMARKABLE HUMAN BEING,

  NOW 47 YEARS OF AGE,

  EVER BORN TO LIVE.

  TWO DAYS ONLY.

  Crowds gathered to look at the colorful canvas drawings of the Negro Siamese twins with two heads, four arms, and one body. Lewis and I stood in front of the posters. It cost ten cents to view Millie-Christine, twenty-five cents for the recital.

  I had never heard of anything so bizarre, not even Boo Nanny’s ghouls and ogres and hideous beings with the head of a man and the body of a wildcat. But those creatures were make-believe. This was a living, breathing human being.

  “Is this for real? I can’t wait to see it,” Lewis said. “Johnny will want to go for sure.”

  “I do, too,” I said, acting as if he meant to include me.

  “Where are you going to get the money?”

  So what if my father wasn’t the collector of customs for the Port of Wilmington. I wasn’t going to be left out because of a measly dime. When I mentioned to Mama at supper that I wanted to see Millie-Christine, she said, “I want to go with you.”

  I was shocked. “Why would you want to see her?” I said.

  “Honey baby, they’s two people, just like you and me, ’cept they’s joined at the small of the back,” Mama said. “I be wanting to see them my whole life.”

  I couldn’t believe how much she knew about them. They were famous around these
parts, Mama said. Born into slavery in Columbus County, just west of Wilmington, the twins were bought and sold several times, then kidnapped and taken to England by the time they were three. After a trial in London, they were returned to the white family who last owned them. This family continued to manage their careers after they were freed from slavery. Trained in music and voice, the twins wrote poetry, sewed their own costumes, and spoke five languages.

  I had heard sailors on the wharf speaking different languages, but I couldn’t conceive of how much intelligence it would take to learn five languages. I was having trouble learning one to Daddy’s satisfaction.

  “I’m working on an article about the Carolina Twins for Friday’s paper,” Daddy offered.

  “Did you meet them?” Mama said, her eyes bright. “What was they like? Tell me every last thing. I want to hear it all.”

  “They haven’t arrived in town yet, but I interviewed people who knew them. When they were younger, they were the toast of Europe, and wealthy aristocrats arranged salons to hear them sing and recite poetry. They even gave a private recital for Queen Victoria. She was so taken with them that she gave them diamond hair clips.”

  “Day I spend my hard-earned cash money on the likes of colored freaks be the day you can shovel me under,” Boo Nanny said as she cleared the supper dishes.

  “Mama, you should be proud. Two people of our race, born in the county right next to us. Imagine, moving from slavery to the salons of Europe.”

  Boo Nanny snorted. “One of our own gots two heads and four feet, then white folk can’t get enough of them. The two-legged kind, they fine and dandy to do without.”

  “Mama, they ain’t freaks. They’re talented musicians. They took piano and voice lessons. I always wondered what it’d be like if I’d been trained. I can’t read a lick of music.”

  “We was possum poor when I was raisin’ you up. I ain’t had myself no extrees for the likes of lessons,” Boo Nanny said. The plates rattled against each other as she set them down with a jolt.

  “I know, Mama. I’m not complaining. I just wonder how much better I could be with lessons.”

  “Chile, you got the true gift inside you. You sing better’n those two. More natural-like. Them Carolina Twins is slicker than a bucket of boiled okra,” Boo Nanny said.

  “Sadie, I didn’t know you wanted to take music lessons,” Daddy said. “Maybe we can arrange something.” Mama was surprising all of us tonight.

  “I still says they’s freaks. Next thing you know, you’s gone tell me a talking mule is pure-t natural.”

  “Millie-Christine earned enough money in Europe to buy the very plantation over near Whiteville where they were born into slavery. I guess you could call that freakish. They gave the Big House to their parents as a gift, then built a fourteen-room Victorian house on part of the land and retired there,” Daddy said.

  “That be the God’s truth? Well, I never,” Boo Nanny said. “In that case, I wants to clap my own two eyes on them.”

  But when the night of the recital arrived, Boo Nanny claimed to be bone-tired and Daddy begged off, so it was just Mama and me.

  She dressed up in her finest dress of blue silk and white lace and looked as stylish as the ladies in the Sears & Roebuck catalog. Mama had a flair for fashion and always added something extra to the dresses she made—a sash, a ruffle, some trim—that made her stand out. She liked to be noticed, except when she went to work in a shapeless dress with a rag on her head.

  We got to the tent a little late and stood in the back with the other Negroes. From there, I could easily see over the seated crowd. The stage was lit by torches and held two upright pianos set at an angle, with a single bench forming the crossbar of the letter A. I could feel Mama’s excitement. She clutched my arm as the Carolina Twins came onto the stage to great applause. They wore white elbow-length kid gloves and a sleeveless gown of green silk. The dress had two waists with sashes but a single skirt, with a continuous line of ruffles around the bottom, ending halfway down the calf, shorter than what was considered modest for any but the youngest girls. Beneath the single skirt were two pairs of bronze high-top boots.

  The twins stood sideways, their shoulders almost touching. One was slightly larger than the other. In their hair, they wore sparkling barrettes. I wondered if these were the diamond hair clips Queen Victoria had given them. I had never before seen diamonds. Of course, neither had I seen someone who had met the Queen of England, nor someone with two heads.

  Seeing Millie-Christine in person, I felt a stab of disappointment. I was expecting something more grotesque. They looked so normal. These women could easily be my aunts, only they were better dressed. Had we been hoodwinked? Maybe they weren’t connected at all, and that single skirt was a hoax.

  But as they walked back to the pianos, the larger one leaned over to pick up a piece of sheet music that had fallen, and she lifted her sister’s feet completely off the floor.

  The audience fell silent as they played piano duets. There was no whispering or fidgeting or coughing. People gave the music their full attention.

  As the twins played, I stared at their backs, and my mind went to strange places as I tried to picture how they were connected. Did they have two bottoms or one? Did they use a double-seater privy? When one had a toothache, did the other? If you tickled the foot of one, would the other giggle? I didn’t even listen to the piano playing.

  I wondered what it must be like for her, or them—I still didn’t know how to think about this double person—to be stared at their whole lives. I couldn’t imagine anything worse. I tried my best not to be noticed at all times.

  As part of the program, the twins recited poems in French, German, and Italian, trading off verses. But my favorite was a poem they had written themselves:

  Two heads, four arms, four feet,

  All in one perfect body meet;

  I am most wonderfully made,

  All scientific men have said.

  I am happy, quite, because I’m good;

  I love my Savior and my God;

  I love all things that God has done,

  Whether I’m created two or one.

  By the time they began singing in close harmony, I had stopped thinking about their oddity and started enjoying the recital. They had beautiful voices. Millie, the smaller one, sang alto, and Christine sang soprano.

  I glanced over at Mama. Her lips slightly apart, her head leaning forward a little, she was completely engaged.

  By the middle of “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” Mama had tears rolling down her nose and dripping onto her chin. Mama was tough and never cried, not even when grease jumped from the fry pan to her arm and made the skin bubble up and peel back to reveal the pink underneath. It unsettled me to see her weeping.

  “Beautiful,” she whispered as the tent broke out into loud applause. “If only I could sing like that.” She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.

  The united twins ended the evening with a polka. I was reminded of the races at Sunday school picnics where you link arms with someone back to back and run to the finish line, one person leading with the right leg and the other with the left. Unlike those comical and awkward races, the Two-Headed Nightingale danced in perfect harmony, performing the steps in unison and in time to the music.

  The crowd rose to its feet when they finished. I had to stand on my tiptoes to see the twins curtsy, making a graceful sweep with their back arms while holding hands with their front two arms. Mama was the last one to stop clapping.

  Afterward, the Carolina Twins moved crablike down the center aisle in an expanding V, signing autographs on opposite sides. Most performers would have ignored the small group of Negroes in the back, but they made a special effort and warmly greeted the people of our race.

  When the attached ladies reached us, I thought Mama was going to faint, she was so nervous. To my surprise, she spoke up, her voice scratchy. “Your voices is so lovely. You touched my soul.”

  “Why, merci,”
one of the twins said.

  “That is so kind of you,” said the other, and took extra time to sign Mama’s program.

  When we got home, I looked at what she had written: “A soul with two thoughts. Two hearts that beat as one. With Millie Chrissie’s love.”

  Mama took the program and put it in a special box in the parlor. “This be a treasure always,” she said, and sat down to play the organ.

  Every May 30, the Negroes celebrated National Memorial Day at the federal cemetery off Market Street. White folks hated the place. They called it the Union cemetery. As far as they were concerned, it was full of Union traitors, carpetbaggers, coloreds, and Yankee lovers—a toss-up as to which was worse. White people celebrated Confederate Memorial Day on May 10 at Oakdale Cemetery,where their family members were buried. But for the black citizens of Wilmington, National Memorial Day was an important holiday.

  This year my daddy, as a member of the Board of Aldermen, was selected to be the keynote speaker. Johnny’s father may have been the most important Negro in Wilmington, and Lewis’s father the richest, but mine was the smartest. I was excited about hearing his speech.

  The afternoon of the celebration, I was at Lewis’s house messing around in the attic and the time slipped away. When I checked the clock, I saw I had only fifteen minutes before Daddy was scheduled to speak, and the cemetery was a couple of miles away. Lewis let me borrow his bike.

  I pedaled as fast as I could and arrived at the federal cemetery with time to spare. I left the bike by one of the identical white headstones that stretched out in long rows, rising and falling with the lay of the land.

  I made my way through the noisy crowd that filled the open field. People had spread out plates and food on quilts. Children in their Sunday best ate the last of the strawberry crop or sucked peppermint candy sticks that turned their lips red. Some prankish boys slipped firecrackers into the huge pit beneath the roasting pig and laughed when the adults jumped as the firecrackers popped off.