It was not because Siobhan did not want to dance again, although that was true. It was because of our accident. As accidents go, it happened quickly, not an hour after our final number.
I would not be stirred to think about dancing again for quite some time, for my newest number would be surviving the memories. How does one survive such memories, I often ask myself. But I am a girl prone to ask silly questions, as my stepmother Vesta often points out.
Chapter One
The summer I turned fifteen, I would have sworn the soil in our county whispered a day of reckoning was coming. I dreamed about it, how I could feel our house wheezing and coughing out the reckoning dirt, silt spilling out through the pores of the wood, invisible to everyone except me. A drumming sound like thunder drew soil from every point on the compass. I sat as a distant observer from a high, high perch, like a petal queen, golden petals encircling my head and feet. , I was seized with fear watching the tumult and the tide of particles rising up around my people. Yet, my feet reached so deep into the soil, roots sprouted out of the soles.
My eyes opened from such a dream not ten days past my fifteenth birthday. Instead of a dust cloud, a June day’s sunlight spilled in through my upstairs window.
Vesta was in a tizzy. She ran down the hallway calling out to me to get up before the day was swallowed up in sleep. “I got bridge club, Flannery.” Her voice trailed off down the stairwell. My stepmother had been working her way into the Pine Society’s Bridge Club since, well, since she had married my daddy.
Vesta, a woman who had poured herself into me, giving me advice on grooming, on presenting myself with proper decorum, what-have-you, was meek and mild, her graceful stature a picture of elegance in our cultured small town society. The summer I might best describe as the dirtiest season of our lives, Vesta was herself drawn into a conflict of locality. Of soil. Of boundaries.
As is often the case when the clock strikes one hour before war, the morning started out quietly enough. Ballroom music radiated from our living room. Vesta once talked of nothing else but famous dancers. On this June morning not a few days past my recently forgotten birthday she sat watching an old Gene Kelly film, her sewing in her lap. Her eyes stayed fastened on Gene Kelly as he slid toward the TV screen, arms outstretched as if he might scoop Vesta up and take her off into the sunset.
I trudged into the living room still wiping sleep from my eyes. “Anyone ever tell you that the sun doesn’t rise nearly as early in the summertime?”
She asked me to join her on the sofa. “Flannery, sweetie, I’m hemming your Daddy’s work trousers.” I had learned to sew by hand quickly, repairing dance hems on the spot for fellow step dancers before going onstage; or fast-looping a row of dangling sequins back onto my younger sister Siobhan’s hem before we padded onto stage.
Nearly a decade earlier, my daddy, Flynn Curry, had met Vesta Wiggins in my dance class in Pinehurst, a town considered to this day as the queen’s hive of golfing universe. She was the woman in charge of tailoring our costumes.
Vesta did have some beautiful sewing skills, but it was not something she wanted known in this new season of prospects. That was what she called the growing interests and opportunities in Pinehurst, anyway. Before she met Daddy, abandonment by her first husband had left her no other recourse except sewing for the rich and any other jobs she might acquire. She hurriedly held out the already-threaded extra needle while the sound of feet coming onto the porch drew her eye.
“Here, you do the other leg.” She got up to answer the door and pressed her sewing into my reluctant hands. I had other plans, but plopped back down to finish her alteration.
I accepted it as I often accepted her directives, outwardly submissive, although I made it clear I had invited company over. “Claudia’s coming over. Don’t forget,” I slid out the straight pin, tugging the folded pant leg and snapping out the fabric edge perfectly straight. The bank guards’ pants came in sizes too long for most of them. Daddy stopped complaining about the disparity in trousers’ lengths, though, when the bank layoffs started.
I sewed extra short stitches to keep the hem in place. If Daddy got laid off, wearing shabby trousers would not be the cause.
Vesta rearranged the vase of flowers near the door.
“Did you hear me?” I asked, repeating my plans to my distracted stepmother.
Vesta smiled in her reticent way without looking at me. She was keen on my friendship with Claudia Johnson. My friendship with Claudia dated back to first grade.
“The Johnsons are good people,” said Vesta, expressionless while she smoothed her tailored yellow dress. “Good associations open doors. Mark my words.”
Claudia’s daddy garnered an untold income. The Millers owned a modest estate behind Pinehurst Number Two, meaning that they lived on the ninth hole of the second golf course in Pinehurst.
Daddy always said, “You are who you love.” Vesta loved anybody who lived on a golf course.
Real estate developers had long lured gentlemen and lady golfers into the surrounding shady lanes to buy weekend and summer houses. Rumors circulated that movie stars and politicians migrated to Pinehurst for its healing powers. Annie Oakley once lived here, holding shooting exhibitions. Headier rumors circulated that quite a few Presidents once migrated to the local resorts for the healing powers of the aromatic pines. Beautiful Pinehurst, girdled by tall pines and gamboling roads leading tourists past sprawling green lawns and manor houses, offered pretty little pubs and eateries inviting guests to venture off the courses and horse tracks to take refuge from the baking sun under the bright café umbrellas.
Contrary to local culture, we Currys lived in nearby Bitterwood Park or “working Bitterwood” so said the locals, although our wealthy working class was made up of doctors and attorneys. It was a hamlet situated between Pinehurst and tree-shaded Vineland, an equally lovely town known for its fox hunting clubs and the annual Blessing of the Hounds. The Vineland hunters were a hale and chivalrous group whose little girls were off at their riding classes weekends, all but the Curry’s, whose daughters neither attended private equestrian events nor young ladies’ golf outings. The Curry girls were not found to cast about at such gatherings, that is, until my friendship with the Johnsons..
Before Daddy started seeing Vesta, our family had long hung on to a two-acre lot. Daddy had no sooner married her than she set down plans to build a house on our family lot. It was not the biggest house on the street, but it was big enough. She ordered the shutters painted a color “somewhere between the sky at dusk and late-blooming hydrangeas”. She fashioned a sign and hung it out front that said “Periwinkle House.” She said it gave our blue-shuttered house an identity, a sense of history. Daddy had to work two jobs to keep beautiful Vesta Wiggins in the manner to which she was accustomed.
Vesta opened the front door, smiling effusively. I heard a familiar voice, a moneyed neighbor woman named Effie Sandersen. She was the kind of neighbor who exchanged rose cuttings or friendship dough starter, neighborly. And informed. Vesta invited Mrs. Sandersen inside, but she declined. “I wanted you to know I saw a colored crossing through your side yard, sneaking around the back of your shed. You haven’t hired a new domestic, have you?”
Vesta could not afford domestics but would not have admitted as such. She stiffened when Effie voiced her complaint. I recognized the pain in her face. Vesta had no sooner moved us into her pretty new house on our family’s lot when she discovered our back yard bordered the property of the only black man to own property outside one of the five segregated townships encircling our community. Effie knew too. “I’m sorry, no,” was all she said to the neighbor lady.
“Thought not,” said Effie. “I guess you know he was sniffing around the post office, asking around about registering to vote.” She referred to neighborhood grocers and post office, Jimmy Banks Corner Grocery.
“I don’t see what I have to do with his issues,” said Vesta, turning red in the face.
“That’s why we keep our coloreds in th
eir own municipalities.” When Effie said it, I imagined the townspeople rounding up the black men and women who had been lured into the Sandhills on promises of resort jobs and herding them into their proper paddocks. That was the initial hope, actually, when the vision to create a golf community necessitated the need for good hired help. Effie continued, “But here, this one, well he thinks he’s sly, I’m sure. He can walk right through your lot and register to vote come Tuesday. Nothing stopping him,” she said, hesitating. “Except you, of course.”
I sighed, but kept my eyes on my stitching. Effie needed a good dosing of spring tonic, at least that was what Daddy said when she got on one of her campaigns.
“What do you expect of me? I can’t get Winston Grooms to do anything,” said Vesta. It was true that she had contacted Mayor Grooms, begging him to do something about the nuisance living behind us, bringing down the property value. But Daddy had little influence in the Sandhills, what with his only asset beneath us and tethered to the mortgage on Vesta’s new house. Truth was, before he met Vesta he never paid much attention to who lived near our family’s land. The land had lain dormant and undisturbed since before I was a bump in my mother’s belly.
“He can’t walk through your property any time he wants, can he? After all, how would it look, what with Mr. Curry being a bank officer and all?”
Vesta rose up to her full stature. “He most certainly cannot.” She thanked Mrs. Sandersen and closed the front door. I waited, holding my hands out to her, giving her back her sewing. “Why does she think Daddy’s a bank officer?”
Instead of answering me, she said, “Follow me.”
Daddy kept a big storage shed at the border of our property. Beyond his shed was an easement, a place where utility companies might access power equipment. It was a strip of land that mostly provided a place for Daddy to back into and drop off things he had picked up for Vesta’s projects, like her new gardens out back of the house. He kept the lawn mowed and fetched her gardening supplies while Vesta decorated the place with a rose garden and a shade garden right under a two hundred-year-old cherry tree rising over our house like a sage. Its long drooping branches hung like vines, breaking out in undulating whips of white flowers come spring.
I had noticed the black neighbor, a couple of kids hanging on his leg, walking through our easement and returning with Push-up pops and Fritos from the corner grocery. He disappeared, same as always, into the big sunflower forest he grew every summer, a garden Vesta despised for its lack of elegance.
When I hesitated she said, “Hurry.”
“Claudia’s already on her way here, Vesta.” I tried to beg my way out of whatever nonsense had gotten into her head.
“It won’t take long.” She insisted I follow her out to the shed. The shed was old and had stood on the property years before Periwinkle House was built. She unlocked the padlocks from the door and pushed inside, wading past some of Daddy’s tools and a push mower.
“It won’t do any good,” I said, keeping my voice down, for the sunflower man was nearly always out in his garden on days like today.
“I don’t know what you mean. Help me carry out these sawhorses.”
One of Daddy’s occasional jobs was painting the interiors of the big houses going up in the village and around the golf courses. He kept more than a dozen sawhorses for the jobs.
“The man can drive around and register to vote,” I said. “Why don’t you just tell Effie to take a powder?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been meaning to stop those Billings boys from crossing through our yard to hide and smoke behind our shed.” She yanked on one of the sawhorses, but then made a hissing sound, hitting her finger on a protruding screw.
“Daddy won’t want you dragging his painting equipment out in the elements,” I said.
“He won’t mind,” she said, “when I tell him why.”
I helped Vesta heave and shove until we dragged three sawhorses out onto the lawn. No sooner had I set down sawhorse number three than a splinter pierced the palm of my right hand. “Crap!”
“Language,” said Vesta. “Go inside and pour Mercurochrome over it. Then come back and help me. I’ve about run out of time.” A perfect line of dirt soiled the front of her new dress.
She fumed, backing away.
“I’ve got to shower,” I said, insisting she release me from her scheme. “You’d best go back inside and change or you’ll be late.”
She complained under her breath but I managed to slip away. I ran back inside and upstairs where I showered. I dressed in time to let Claudia in. She minced through the door, flipping her long blond hair and popping gum. She followed me upstairs. Once inside my upstairs bedroom, she said, “What is Vesta building?”
“I don’t think she’s building anything.” I often defended Vesta because she was at least a person who had stuck around, unlike my own mother.
She leaned onto my windowsill and craned her neck, watching Vesta drag a piece of sheet wood out of the shed.
I told Claudia about the Billings boys smoking by our shed, so she finally dropped it. Her nosiness got under my skin quite often.
Only a few yards from our back yard, the black man worked his way down a row of sunflowers. Occasionally a dandelion flew out of the massive forest of tall flowers. I liked watching him tend his flowers like they were his children. I pretended not to notice.
Fact was, I preferred what Vesta called the wrong kind even though she stayed on me, training me up in the way of associations, how to meet up with people who might advance our family’s standing. Vesta spelled out the right associations in clear details, a list “any second grader could follow.” Claudia was certainly on Vesta’s yes list.
Vesta had worked long and hard at delivering me from a state of resistance she said had embedded itself in my genetic make up. The truth sets some people free, I had heard. I hardly saw the use in defying my genetic make up. But showing yourself in 1962 could also get you blamed and I was already carrying about twenty-two fire buckets of blame, more than most fifteen-year-olds will ever carry ‘til kingdom come.
I pondered the quiet blankness that had fallen over us the past year. Now the early summer days of 1962 slowed to hours that did nothing but pass on by.
Downstairs the front door opened and slammed shut. Daddy was home.
“Want to play Chinese checkers?” I asked Claudia. The game lay on a stand beneath the window sill.
“I thought we were reading today.” She had brought along a novel from our school’s reading list. We had spent many a day reading in silence. I was too distracted, though.
“I’m leaving the towels for you to fold, Flannery,” Vesta called upstairs sounding tired and dispirited. She must have gotten worn out building her barricade. “They’re in the spare bedroom.” She used the spare room for her projects and chores. Her voice nearly squeaked from sheer force when she said, “Off to bridge.”
Of course, I knew the truth—that Vesta was not the same Vesta I had known these past ten years. Disappointment’s waters swept Vesta so deeply into its dark river she had even stopped complaining about our new house she said was now too small compared to the town’s old money families who lived all around us in houses three times the size of ours. Until Effie Sandersen’s visit, she had nearly stopped railing about the neighbor whose property bordered our back yard. It was not so much his sunflower forest she hated, although she often called the dense thicket of golden orbs tacky, as much as the fact that the black land owner refused to sell to the neighborhood project developers. The good blacks, those arriving through invitation, had cooperatively segregated themselves in the bordering communities like Lost City and Jackson Hamlet.
I picked up one opaque black marble and held it up to the sun coming through the window glass. No light could come through the black marble. That was how I imagined the sunflower man, refusing to let in the light the town fathers wanted to shed on his stubborn resolve.
The gently hill
y terrain of his land was perfect for a golf course, already outfitted with a beautiful pond that was nearly a lake. Vesta was madder than ever when she heard a golf course might have bordered our back lawn. She did not golf but might have wanted the bragging rights among her small gaggle of new bridge friends.
While the blacks were tidily kept out of white neighborhoods by literacy tests, bureaucratic property qualifications and such, the sunflower man acquired his twelve acres long before the developers ever sniffed out the land as prime suburbia. How and why he came to own it, though, was a mystery.
All kinds of rumors circulated about how he had come by the land. One story told of how a band of Nigras had killed the original landowner following the Civil War and taken it for their own, leaving the sunflower man as eventual heir. Every time a new story circulated, he was nearly a legend. If only he’d of been white. But truth was, no one knew exactly how long the sunflower man had lived on his twelve-acre spread, except to say that while moneyed whites were moving in around him, he stubbornly refused to recognize the opportunity before him to go and live equitably among his own kind.
We had lived several weeks in the new house with blue shutters on Cotton Street before Vesta spotted the big black neighbor in overalls kneeling in the tilled garden soil bordering our back yard. She had seen him before then. It was a slow realization that came to her one day—he was nobody’s hired help. That was when Vesta’s anger took on a campaign force; and that led her to the office of Winston Grooms, a local attorney in Aberdeen, and mayor. He advised her that ridding the neighborhood of nuisances like the sunflower man took what he called incentives. But, Daddy could not afford an attorney. Besides, Grooms was running for re-election and Daddy was a fishfly on his windshield.
Even though Vesta claimed she had allies in great proportion, Daddy was not one to take risks on a security guard’s income.
I did not share Vesta’s opinion of the sunflower garden as that of an eyesore. I secretly rooted for the sunflower man when Vesta had little success rallying the neighborhood, although she stood out in the yard complaining to whoever might listen. One day, though, she resolutely shut up about him when she noticed the neighbor woman from Singapore giving her a look in the middle of her rant. Vesta complained to Daddy, “Now I got people judging me for who lives behind me.” That was how she interpreted HuiLin’s grimace anyway.
Tiny Dancer Page 2