by LOTT, BRET
Above it all I could hear Mrs. Archibald, the older of the two, hair gone to gray, eyes heavy with wrinkles we called carpetbags. “Girls, ” she was hollering, “girls, girls, ” though no one was quieting down, in front of her and doing the most work through the crowd Mrs. Winthrop, silent, only holding on to girls and pushing them aside. Tory, a sad-faced nigger with red eyes that always looked like they were ready to bust out in tears, only pushed along behind Mrs. Archibald, eyes as much on the ground as they always were.
Mrs. Winthrop stopped, disappeared below the heads of all the girls, all of them suddenly gone quiet, as though they’d never even noticed her coming up.
Then she had a girl in each hand, held them by the collars of their blouses. Both of them were taking in quick, shallow breaths, hair down in their faces, the two of them so alike in how they breathe , how their hair fell down and across their eyes, mouths open, they could have been sisters. Both had bloody noses, both looked at each other, both did nothing, only held there by Mrs. Winthrop.
Mrs. Archibald stood before them now, looked first at Bessy, then at Cleopatra. Then she turned to Tory, who stood off a few feet, the girls finally having cleared space for all that was going on.
She said, “Tory, bring the belt.”
“Yes’m, ” Tory said, and bowed his head, turned and headed for the door, the girls he’d had to push through a moment before making clear a path for him. He was out in a second.
Girls were leaving almost as quick as they’d come in, all silent, all heads down and looking at the floor, some even with hands folded in front of them. In less than a minute the room was empty save for we six girls, and Mrs. Winthrop and Mrs. Archibald.
Tory came in, held the thick leather belt reserved for occasions just such as this, though I’d never seen it before, only heard tell of it in legends that went round the school. It shone with the gas light above us, glistened for having been oiled Tory only knew how many times. It was four or five inches wide, maybe a fingernail thick. And, I saw, it wasn’t a belt at all, but only a long piece of leather, fashioned just for this use, no buckles, no holes, nothing. Only leather.
Mrs. Winthrop let go the two girls, and without another word they all turned, headed out the door. Once there, Mrs. Winthrop, the last one out, turned, leaned into our room. The girls behind me were still crying, their sounds no different one from the next, just three girls crying.
She whispered, “Lights out, ” and reached with her hand to the gas key, twisted till the gas popped. She closed the door, then yelled, “Lights out, ” her voice as deep and heavy as any man’s.
In the darkness I could hear their footsteps down the hall, the slam shut behind them of the stairwell door. We all knew what was next, the sounds up and down the hall of everyone in the school crowding now to get to the windows. Though lights were out in every room, I knew there wasn’t a single girl in bed, the ones in the rooms across the hall from our side were sneaking out and into rooms on this side, though none were making their way into ours, this room cursed by what’d happened here.
The four of us stood at the window, heads almost touching, faces pressed up to the glass, and we waited, watched the dark down there.
Tory came out of the building carrying a lantern, the shadows dancing and moving all about him as he walked on the sidewalk below us, behind him first Mrs. Archibald, then the two girls, I couldn’t decide which was which, then Mrs. Winthrop.
No one spoke, either in our room or down there in the courtyard, but the moves they made were all perfect, as if they’d rehearsed it all, Tory stopped at the flagpole, set down the lantern, backed off a few feet, and stood with his hands at his sides, his head down. Next Mrs. Archibald went to the far side of the pole, followed by one of the girls. Mrs. Archibald stopped, the belt still in her hand. She turned around, and all I could see of her was her white face in the lantern light, her white hands holding the belt in front of her.
The girl with her turned around. It was Cleopatra, her hair tucked behind her ears now. She bent over, wrapped her arms around the flagpole, and I couldn’t see her face anymore.
Across from her stood Mrs. Winthrop, and then Bessy went to the flagpole, bent down and wrapped her arms around it, too. They were on opposite sides of the pole, arms touching, heads close enough to one another that they could have whispered to each other and neither Mrs. Winthrop nor Archibald’d ever know.
Mrs. Archibald folded the belt in half, held the ends with one hand.
With the other hand she reached to Cleopatra’s jumper, pulled it up over her hips. Then she stepped back, held the belt with both hands, reared back her arms, and brought the belt down hard on Cleopatra.
I could feel the sting inside the crack of sound the belt made through the summer night air, crisp and clean and cold. But then came the terrible surprise I’d had no way to prepare for, Cleopatra howled, let loose a sound from deep inside her that turned the crack of the belt into nothing, just punishment for a fight in a room. Her howl took out my breath, brought sweat to my forehead and neck and down the small of my back.
The sound stopped, and Mrs. Archibald stepped back, held the belt out to Tory. He took it, and went to Mrs. Winthrop, gave it to her.
This was how they were going to do it, I saw, one whipping after another, each girl given her turn, each hall mistress administering the whipping, Tory the middleman, his the task of handing the belt back and forth, back and forth.
Mrs. Winthrop lifted Bessy’s jumper over her hips, brought the belt back with two hands, just as Mrs. Archibald had, and for a moment I wondered if they hadn’t been given lessons in all this, some summer course in Proper Whipping of Delinquent Girls.
But before she brought the belt down and onto Bessy, she paused, looked up to the building, up at all of us girls hidden away in the dark windows of Lights Out. I knew she couldn’t see any of us for the dark, but still I flinched, pulled away an inch or so from the window, just as Mavis and Beaulah and Duchess did, just as every girl in the Mississippi Industrial School for Girls did, I was certain, and it came to me what was going on in all of this, they were doing the same thing to all of us as Missy Cook’d done when she’d burned our clothes, my dead momma’s words now floating up to me like ghosts themselves. This is for us, came my momma’s whispered words, You and me are supposed to be seeing this, supposed to be standing right here and watching it all.
Mrs. Winthrop turned back to Bessy and the task at hand, and brought down the belt.
I closed my eyes. The crack of leather split the night, and then came Bessy’s cry, one not at all different than Cleopatra’s, and I thought again of the two of them after the fight, and how they’d looked so like kin, sisters maybe a year apart.
I turned from the window, made my way through the dark. Before I got to the bed another crack came, another howl, Cleopatra again. I touched the iron foot board, felt the cold metal, heard the next crack, Bessy’s cry.
I undressed with my eyes closed, slipped over my head the sleeveless cotton nightshirt we all wore. Then I climbed into my bed, pulled the sheet up to my chin, turned my back to the window.
I wasn’t going to watch, wasn’t going to do precisely what they wanted me to do. They couldn’t make me see what they wanted, couldn’t control me that way. That was why I’d taught Cathe ral to read, why I’d kept close the stories my mother’d given me, why the photo of Jacob was still with me, jammed into my tablet and shoved beneath my mattress.
But I could still hear the crack of the belt, the howls, heard them go on and on, finally losing track of who was who crying out in the dark.
*
The next morning, there on her bed lay Cleopatra, her face toward me, eyes shut deep in sleep, her mouth open. She had on her nightshirt, her sheets bunched up around her feet, her hands tight together at her chest.
I looked to Bessy’s bed, saw her there, her face away from me, blanket and sheet pulled up tight to her neck. The blanket moved up and down with her slow breaths in and out.
Although I’d listened what seemed all night long for them to come in, I’d heard nothing, and for a moment I wondered if everything I’d seen last night had really happened.
Then the two of them rolled over in their sleep, and I saw the truth, Bessy rolled over toward me, and here came her face, the welts from last night given over to blue bruises, eyes swelled slits, her lips puffed up and near-black, cheeks not cheeks at all anymore, only fat skin bruised and bruised.
I looked at Cleopatra, already struggling in her sleep to roll over away from me, her eyes still closed, her mouth still open. She lifted her head an inch or so from the pillow, turned, and I saw the back of her head, a huge gauze bandage taped on to bare skin there. They’d shaved off her ponytails.
When they awoke, the world was different, Bessy and Cleopatra were suddenly best friends, the two of them never apart, though it took three or four weeks for Bessy’s face to come back to normal, and though there was a place on her left eyebrow where it’d split in two and that kept her forever touching a wetted finger there to try and get the hairs to fall together, Cleopatra’s hair was months in growing back, the square of shaved head hid as best she could by piling and pinning the top and sides back.
But I’d been given the role of follower, me the one behind on the morning walks round campus, Cleopatra and Bessy ahead of me and laughing and giggling along.
Cleopatra Sinclair was the only person could even come close to my calling a sister, and she’d been stolen away from me with the slap of fists, the mixing of their blood as they fought. There’d come out of their being whipped a new bond, something I knew I’d never formed yet with anyone, never would unless I surrendered to whatever passion it was the two of them set free in that fight. My days from then on were spent even more alone, me buried deep in the same kind of solitude I’d carried since my brother’d died, an unrecognizable solitude, as much a part of me as the color of my hair, the shape of my lips, my brother always and only the memory of a baby on a daddy’s knee, and of him sleeping away in a cradle, breathing in and breathing out. l Jr Wrl That was my only history of the love of a brother that vague picture in my head or the love of a sister the picture of Cleopatra there with Bessy Swansea. The two of them always walked ahead of me, me there with my arms crossed against my chest, my eyes to the ground, while the two of them set about making themselves their own sisters.
It was blood to forge that bond, I finally knew, my baby Annie here asleep next to me now, blood coursing through her as she breathe in and out herself, the light outside the window gone, night on us. It was blood that brought us all alive, as alive as the soft memory of my baby brother, his blood and mine what kept him alive in my head. Blood, too, as red as the blood on the hands of the doctor who’d held up my newest baby, asleep in the cradle next to me, and slapped her into this world.
Blood part me, part Leston flowing through the bodies of all our children. It was that blood that made us all whole, made us this family, the Hilburns, these six children, and my husband, and me.
Cathe ral came into the bedroom then, touched my shoulder in the dark, whispered, “Miss Jewel, wake up. Time for supper.”
“I’m awake, ” I whispered, and suddenly the world came crystal clear to me, everything around me and everything that’d ever happened to me solid and worth keeping.
“Cathe ral, ” I whispered, and she gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze.
“Twenty-two hours, ” I whispered. “And now God’s smiling.”
I thought I could see her smile in the dark. She whispered, “You put in the work, and now God given you a beautiful child.”
I nodded, whispered, “Six of them, ” touched Annie’s warm body next to me, but still on my heart the stone of James being gone.
She held her hand on my shoulder a moment longer before she stood, slowly moved to the door. “Yo’ supper be up in a minute. Meantime you be keeping it quiet like you been.”
“Six of them, ” I whispered loud enough for her to hear, and she stopped in the doorway. She looked back, one hand on the doorjamb.
I heard from downstairs Burton say, “First dibs on the legs, ” then Wilman whine, “Me first, ” and Leston, “Boys.”
“Smiling, ” she whispered.
Annie moved in her sleep, an arm onto my lap, and I touched her hair, smiled myself. l CHAPTER 8.
STILL BRENDA KAY SLEPT, ON THROUGH THE REST OF OCTOBER, AND then into November, me by that time thanking even more my God for the blessing of a child who took so little tending. And she was a blessing, certainly, four children all growing bigger, calling for more of me with each next morning, Cathe ral slowly disappearing from us, her help around the place falling away as it did after the birth of each new child. By early December, I was only seeing her every now and again, word of her and her boys and how they were all doing coming to me through Leston through Nelson, and there were days when I wondered if I might even see her again, this new sleepy child my last baby.
So that the blessing of Brenda Kay sleeping was only magnified, I had time for mending, time for tutoring the boys and Billie Jean with their homework, time for Annie, who’d taken to napping with me each afternoon, the three of us Brenda Kay, Annie, me a sort of girls’ club for sleep.
None of my other children’d slept through until at least five months, Wilman not until he was eleven months, and there were cold mornings now when I would wake and realize I’d forgotten about the baby in the cradle next to me. But then my breasts would start to filling, and I would roust Brenda Kay out, her eyes opening for a few minutes, eyes the closest to Leston’s green of any of the children, and she would start to feed. She was healthy, ate just as much as any of them had.
She was a little small, and those fingers curled into her hands seldom unfolded, but I counted all this a blessing. She was a different child was all, maybe my change of life baby, and I wondered how delicate her skin might be when she grew up, if she would be as beautiful as her namesake, have as many boys following her home as Leston told me his sister had.
By late December she was awake an hour or two a day, and on Christmas morning I dressed Brenda Kay up in the silliest thing I’d ever paid for, a red flannel outfit, more a sack with arms, around the collar and at the wrists puffs of white cotton, along with it came a little red flannel nightcap, a cotton puff at the end. Before I let anyone downstairs to see what Santa’d brought, I laid Brenda Kay on the bed, Leston already down in the front room and stoking the fire, the children stamping like horses, ready to run. But I took my time with Brenda Kay, this her first Christmas ever, and once I’d gotten her dolled up I couldn’t help but laugh at this little elf on my bed.
I picked her up, held her with her head at my shoulder, and opened the door.
“Go ahead, ” I said, and all four of them tore off down the stairs.
Leston was the only one dressed, him in his overalls and a red corduroy shirt. The tree was set up in the far corner, before the front window, on it the strings of popcorn we’d made the day after school got out, here and there ornaments we’d gotten over the years. Nothing like what I saw in the magazines, not in Saturday Evening Post or the ads in the Reader’s Digest or the occasional Life I’d pick up when we took the children into Purvis Saturday afternoons for the matinee. In all those magazines the trees were lost in too much glitter and light and tinsel.
But our tree, I knew, looked as trees ought, something clean and different in the house, a guest here, rooms filled more than ever with the smell of pine.
The children went at their presents, each lost for a while in them, Wilman and Burton both got shiny new pocket knives, Billie Jean a hairbrush and mirror, Annie a store-bought doll with two outfits. Next they took in to the stockings above the fireplace, Burton first to upend his on the floor, treasure spread before him, a pack of Beeman’s, chocolate candy coins, three new red pencils, a gum eraser, a tangerine.
Then Wilman dumped his, got instead of the Beemans a pack of Juicy Fruit, instead of the gum
eraser a ruler, and though I knew the differences in their gifts would start a fight, I didn’t care. Juicy Fruit was for my baby boy, Beeman’s for my little man.
And I thought of James, wondered if this morning somewhere south of the equator where, he’d written last week, it was dead summer, he were opening the package we’d sent him, a new razor and strop, a Whitman’s Sampler, and pictures of home drawn by the boys, Annie choosing instead to draw a picture of the three of us asleep of an afternoon, no difference in our sizes, just two stick bodies Lying on a stick bedframe, another stick body in a stick cradle next to it, all of it drawn with a green crayon. Billie Jean had written him a long letter, and I was proud of her for that, for taking four nights to write it.
I’d wanted to look over it before I sent it, but she’d already sealed it in an envelope, across the front the word PERSONAL written in her teenage curlicues. She’d smiled when she gave it to me, and though I knew Leston wouldn’t have approved what, he’d wonder, did a sister have to say to her brother the rest of the family couldn’t hear? I’d only nodded, tucked it in with the rest of the package.
I imagined him there in a barrack or whatever it was they lived in, and opening the box, getting all those presents, sharing the chocolates.
Maybe he thumbtacked the pictures against a wall near where he slept, or maybe folded them up, placed them in his shirt pocket, him touching those pictures two or three times a day, making certain we were there with him.
I was sitting in my rocker now, Brenda Kay still against my shoulder.
Billie Jean took her stocking from its nail, knelt-with it. “Momma, ” she said, “I’m too old for this here, ” but she wasn’t even looking at me, only dumped the stocking out near as fast as the boys had. In hers was a roll of cherry Lifesavers, a little note from me saying I’d resubscribed to Photoplay for the next year, and a small compact of corn-silk powder, a tangerine.