by LOTT, BRET
Molly was gone from the room, and I looked down at my plate, gold-rimmed with yellow flowers circled with cobalt ribbons, china as fine, I imagined, as when her daddy had given it to her and her new Yankee husband.
She said, “Beginning Monday the next, you will be attending a new school. The Mississippi Industrial School for Girls. It will be a place for you to grow up, to learn to become a lady of manners and heart.” She paused, gave a small squeeze of my hand. “A place where you can build upon your walk with the Almighty, and where you can learn how we are placed upon this earth and to what ends that placement will serve us, if we only serve Him first and best.”
I swallowed hard, did my best to let my hand go loose, but nothing happened. The muscles in my arm were tight, on fire. I hadn’t looked up at her yet, my eyes on a single cobalt ribbon and how it glided, danced about the perfect flowers. I said, “Does this have to do with teaching Cathe ral to read? ” not certain if she would know what I was talking about, but testing all the same.
She let go my hand, and suddenly my hand was cold, her flesh having warmed me somehow. I could see steam up from the plate of food before me, and I thought of Molly sampling the lima beans, her small laugh.
Missy Cook said, “I watch for you from upstairs simply because I feel it my God-given duty to keep an eye out for you, to watch for your welfare.” She brought her hands to her lap, her signal I should do the same for our blessing.
I held my hands together in my lap, tried to warm them up, but couldn’t, and I suddenly felt I was dying here, and just as quick this Mississippi Industrial School for Girls became some garden to me, an escape, lodging in a night that’d started with the death of my momma and daddy, the School one more minute closer to a dawn I hoped I would recognize when it came. Sometime.
“Our Father, ” Missy Cook started, and I bowed my head, her voice the high-pitched, pious whisper it always was. “Bless this food, as You have been so kind to bless this household and all its inhabitants. We thank Thee for the blessings of the future, the blessings of the present, and the blessings of the past that have made so abundant this table before us.”
That was where she usually stopped, and I was already lifting my head, ready to eat this abundance before it grew cold, before I’d be booted on my way to whatever next new life was to come. But Missy Cook’s eyes were still drawn tight and closed, her hands still in her lap, and for a moment I wondered whether she might be ready to burst into tongues herself.
What I did was wrong, I knew. But there was nothing for it. I simply laughed, not loud or on purpose, but a laugh that left me, the picture in me of Missy Cook’s eyes rolling back, words from another world leaving her, and that image was what made me give way to the freedom suddenly in my heart, I was on my way from this place, from fine china, the dead gray sky outside the window, from food blamed on a God who would keep the niggers back in the kitchen from reading.
I laughed for only an instant, but loud enough for Missy Cook to hear me, for her to crack open one eye, and I snapped my head down, held my hands tighter together.
She said, “And bless my granddaughter on her imminent journey, on her passage from child into adult, from ignorance into wisdom, from the abyss of great darkness into the gates of Heaven. Bless her, dear Lord, with the knowledge of Christ’s grace and love and tender mercy.”
She paused, breathe out in a heavy whisper, “Amen.”
I had only a moment to look up before her open palm came down upon my cheek. A blast of white pain seemed to split open my face, the shock of it enough to keep back tears, even to keep me from looking away from her own face, her teeth clenched, hand up and ready to slap me again.
“You chose a path when you were baptized, and that path is not one from which you can fall, ” she said. “Laughing in Christ’s face. For the wages of sin is death, saith the Lord. To laugh in Christ’s face is sin.”
Her hand was still up high, the fingers beginning now to shiver with what I figured must have been anticipation, more sin from me.
But I turned toward her, faced her. I could feel the welt rising in my cheek, the rush of blood there, but I looked at her, let her eyes enter me, let mine, as best I could, enter hers. I held her look for a few moments, then closed my eyes.
I wasn’t certain now how many Christs there were at work in this world, how many Gods, from Cathe ral’s and Molly’s to whatever god had driven my father and my mother toward and then away from each other, to the one that operated somehow in the woman before me, but I did the only thing I knew the Christ in me would have done, I gave her my other cheek, offered up the side of my face that was still smooth and white, untouched by the hand of her Christ in rebuke of me laughing.
I was frightened, but not of her hand, the coming blow. What filled me with fear was the sudden certainty of what I saw that gesture meant, it was a dare, a line drawn in the dirt. Christ knew that, knew the shape of that moment when the accused would stand innocent. And I wasn’t certain which was worse, me aligning myself with Christ, doing what He’d instructed, or the hate that seemed to guide me into daring her to strike me again. There were two sides to the gesture. Two sides to everything, I saw.
I held my eyes closed, waiting, waiting, but she only yelled, “Insolence, ” the thick and silent and cold air of the room shattered.
On Saturday morning a wagon came for me, driven by a white man in overalls and wearing a cap tipped to the left, almost covering one eye.
Next to him sat a white woman in a gray dress, around her shoulders a heavy black wool coat, a gray wool bonnet tied tight around her face.
She seemed not to have any lips at all, her mouth a hard slit, and I knew that this was the end of one life, the start of the next, Molly’s eyes as she stood on the old porch shiny, her hands in front of her, fingers laced. Cathe ral stood next to her, her face holding nothing, no smile, no frown, as she lifted one hand to me and waved.
I waved to her, me in the back of the wagon, in my lap the Bible Pastor had given me after my baptism, next to me a tired and beaten leather valise, inside it everything I needed, two dresses with petticoats, two pairs of shoes, three tablets of paper, three red pencils, and, wedged between sheets of the newest tablet, the photograph of my grandfather, Jacob Chandler. And somewhere above me, looking out a window down on us all, was Missy Cook.
The driver gave the reins a shake, and we started off.
“Ezekiel thirty-seven, ” Cathe ral called out, and brought her hand down. She stood with her arms at her sides, calling out the chapter I would have read to her this afternoon had I not been sent away from here by my grandmother.
“Ezekiel thirty-eight, ” I called back, the wagon now at the foot of the drive and pulling out into the street, where one last cold snap the night before had near-frozen the mud ruts. “Just you make sure you keep on with your reading, ” I nearly shouted, and I smiled, waved even harder, my words meant not only as encouragement to Cathe ral, but as a signal to Missy Cook, the same sort of signal a burning high-back rocker had meant a night so many years ago.
Cathe ral nodded. Molly hadn’t moved. Then the two were gone, the porch now hidden behind trees on the street, and I was alone again in the world.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, turned, looked up at the woman. She was smiling at me, said, “Now let’s just be quiet back there.”
I did my best to smile back at her, but the ruts in the road took over, and I bounced hard, the only cushion beneath me a wool blanket. The woman turned forward again, her gloved hands gripping the edge of the seat.
“Hold on, ” the driver said.
But I’d already let go, had my Bible open, was turning in it to Ezekiel 37, and I started reading, “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about, and, behold, there were very many in the open valley, and lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live
? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.”
I shut the book right then, closed my eyes. I knew this story by heart, knew about the dry bones coming up from the ground and forming an army for the whole house of Israel. I was out of that valley now, those dry bones, the savable ones, already up and walking, Cathe ral and her boyfriend, Nelson, and in a way Molly, too, her knowing all along I’d been teaching her daughter.
“You all right, child? ” the woman asked, and I opened my eyes. She wasn’t smiling, on her face concern, her eyebrows together.
I said, “No ma’am.” I paused, watched my old street and the trees and the other homes all falling away behind the wagon, places and things and people I counted on never seeing again. I said, “Just scared.”
She nodded. “You’ve every right to be, ” she said, and I knew she meant it, the way she’d nodded, kept her eyes right on mine. What was ahead was anybody’s guess, so I did the only thing I could do, I sat in the back of the wagon, started the long ride to the Mississippi Industrial School for Girls in Picayune, hours away. Things after that would come clear, I knew, and I settled in, held myself against the cold, against the banging wheels on frozen ground, against the lives I was leaving behind.
Late that day, me sleeping on and off, the roads never seeming any less bumpy than my old street, I climbed down from the wagon, finally, there in Picayune. The driver helped me, his hands cold in the evening air, clouds low and near-black above us all, the woman smiling down at me no different than before, as if there were plenty she knew about what would happen to me here. I followed her into the building, huge and ugly, yellow brick with windows no larger than shoeboxes. She led me up to the third floor to my room, inside it six beds all with iron headboards like bars from a jail cell door, walls the same ugly yellow brick as outside, quilts as thin as paper. The room had its own sink, a mirror, beneath the sink a bucket and mop and can of Bon Ami.
Within a week or so I had a best friend, one Cleopatra Sinclair, a tall girl with strawberry blond hair she kept in two ponytails, one on top of the other at the back of her head. She was from a town called Bobo, Mississippi, placed here because she’d thrown a brick through a storefront window in town two days after her father’d shot himself in the head in the outhouse behind her old home. Her mother’d died four years before, and the town fathers figured on her best being served by sending her down to Picayune. “Where I could find a useful and redemptive life, ” were the words she used when she told me the story of how she was sent here.
Cleopatra had brought with her the same brick she threw through that window, slept with it under her pillow every night. Another girl, Mavis Petrie, a short girl with black hair to her waist, legs like tree trunks, kept with her a mother-of-pearl inlaid brush and comb, gifts to her from her aunt, who’d sent her here for no other reason than that she’d caught her smoking rabbit tobacco out behind their wagon one evening. “It was the only thing wrong I ever done, ” Mavis said each night as she brought the brush through her hair a hundred times, “the only thing I ever done wrong, the only thing, ” though Cleopatra had it on good measure that the real reason she’d been sent here was because the aunt had found Mavis in bed with the uncle one Sunday morning, and that the brush and comb were in fact gifts from the uncle, him thankful for the good time she’d shown him. Of course I never questioned Cleopatra, never asked her where she’d gotten her information, but only stared at Mavis each night as she brushed her hair and muttered about what she’d done wrong, Cleopatra and I exchanging glances now and again, amazed at what she might know about men, what neither of us had any idea about.
And I’d secretly thrilled at the intimacy of our glances, Cleopatra’s and mine, and at how there were secrets we knew of others, and how we’d nod our heads at each other when some other girl was around, the both of us knowing precisely what we meant. I thrilled at that, because I’d never known such closeness, not even when I’d been reading to Cathe ral.
This was a friendship, the kind, I figured, maybe only sisters could know, and I was happy.
Another girl, this one about my height though a year younger, brought nothing with her, only showed up one day in late July, my first summer there, wearing only a pale blue dress stained with dirt and grease and who knew what all, her hair matted and filled with burrs, her fingernails bit to the quick, several of them bleeding. She’d been brought in by one of the hall mistresses, Mrs. Archibald, who’d simply said, “Ladies, this is Bessy Swansea, ” all the introduction she ever gave. She turned, left the room, at which point Bessy Swansea backed into a corner, slowly slid down the wall. She crouched there, elbows on her knees, hands open, palms down, sizing us all up, her eyes catching on each one of us a moment, then moving on to the next. Dil “Hey, ” Cleopatra said. She was Lying on her bed, just as the rest of us were, all of us at work on the summer course homework we had to finish before dinner, courses during the summer simple things like Proper Care of the Home and Farming Chores and Preparing Vegetables, the rest of the year was spent with the real courses, Latin, Geometry, Grammar.
But she said nothing, only stared at each of us in turn. Mavis, a finger already wrapped in a lock of hair, glanced from me to Cleopatra to Beaulah another girl in our room, famous for her nightmares every Wednesday night, her waking us all up like clockwork with loud screaming about horses and rifles then to the last girl in our room, Duchess, a bigbosomed girl with blond hair like broomstraw and brown eyes as dull as mud. We all waited.
Finally, Cleopatra rolled onto her tummy, turned her back to the new girl. She said, “It’s only hey, ” and let out a sigh, shook her head.
We all did the same, turned our backs on the new intruder, me the last, all of us waiting now for the dinner bell.
It was a week solid before Bessy finally spoke to any of us, and then it’d been to Mavis, and it’d been to ask if she could touch Mavis’ brush. By this time Bessy’d been soaped down enough to where the grime and burrs and all else had disappeared, leaving behind a girl prettier than any of us could’ve imagined the night she’d come and sat in the corner, though her nails were still bitten all to pieces, two or three on each hand bright red and sometimes fairly dripping blood. We all wore the same uniform, a gray cotton blouse and black cotton jumper with black leggings, but there’d been something in how the clothes wore on Bessy that made all of us look at her more, see her differently than the rest of us. Her skin was soft, begged you to touch it, and her hair, worn now in a single ponytail low on her neck, caught early morning light when we took the mandatory four times-around-the-school walk, all 165 of us in one big chain encircling the school grounds, Bessy in front of Cleopatra and me bringing up the rear. Her eyes were always on the ground before her, her arms crossed and held tight to her chest like this were dead winter, though we were still in July.
The night she first spoke, she’d only whispered to Mavis, “May I hold your brush? ” All of us turned from our homework. Mavis clutched the brush to her chest, all of us up off our beds now, wanting in on whatever was happening. “No! ” Mavis whispered, then reached quick to the comb that lay next to her, afraid, I figured, Bessy might take that up instead.
“You can’t, ” Mavis cried, “you can’t.”
My eyes were on Bessy. She opened her mouth, showed for the first time a line of perfect teeth, white and shining and straight. She leaned her head back, her mouth open wide, and let out a laugh that shot through all of us, made me blink and shiver at once, her ponytail quivering with that long laugh.
“You, ” Bessy said, and pointed a finger at Mavis, the tip blood-red, the nail sheered off. She pointed at each of us, one at a time. “All y’all, ” she said, smiling, perfect teeth, perfect skin, perfect hair.
“All y’all, you’re all nothing but scared, that’s all.” She paused, let out a chuckle, but nothing to compare with that laugh of a moment ago.
“You’re all just a gang of scared, mewly, snot-nosed burrhead babies, ” she said.
It was Cleopatra to
answer. She said, “And who the hell are you? ” Her hands were already in fists at her sides, ready for whatever this new girl could muster, her head cocked, her hair out of the ponytails and falling off her shoulders.
Cleopatra said, “Little Miss Pretty Fingers.”
Bessy lit into her with a shriek that brought girls from the two floors below heading for our room, the two of them falling backwards onto the floor with a heavy sound that seemed to shake the beds. Bessy was on Cleopatra’s chest, her knees holding her down, and she was pulling at Cleopatra’s hair, held two fistfuls of it, shook and shook and shook so that Cleopatra’s head seemed almost pulled off her neck. Neither of them made any sounds, though, Bessy’s shriek was gone, replaced by the echoes of girls running in the hall toward us, and with Duchess and Beaulah and Mavis, all three of them sobbing.
Then, in a move so quick I couldn’t even figure how it happened, Cleopatra was on top of Bessy, though Bessy still had hold of her hair, still shook. But Cleopatra’s hands were free now, no longer pinned down by Bessy’s knees, and Cleopatra started slapping Bessy’s face, one hand after the other, first the left then the right then the left again, each hit a solid strike, and I could see the welts already rising on Bessy’s skin, that perfect skin all welling up red. Still she shook Cleopatra’s head, and when I took my eyes off that beautiful skin Bessy’d once had, I saw on the back of Cleopatra’s head a bloody spot the size of a peach.
Girls flooded the room, all of them surging in and around and hollering, choking me off from what I’d finally realized had been on its way since Bessy’d come in here, and since Cleopatra’d said Hey.
They were fighting, trying to figure who’d be boss around here.
I didn’t move, let the girls who didn’t belong in the room take over and fill the room with more noise than the entire school’d heard since as long as I’d been there.
Finally Mrs. Archibald and Mrs. Winthrop, the other hall mistress, and Tory, the nigger janitor, made it to the doorway, pushed their way through the girls, no one moving out of the way on her own.