Before, Berdis had acted tall in the saddle—big throaty laughs and sass—but now something cooled in her. She hadn’t chosen her family so she couldn’t help it—eighteen years is a long time to go without loving anybody. Her eyes softened. “Well, you don’t have to be George Washington Carver to understand it,” she drawled womanly. “Don’t be so scared, girl. It’s only . . . well, shoot, Ivoe. What is it?”
Ivoe’s heart raced. Damn if she knew what to say, what to do to turn the world right side up again. The sweet, heavy scent of bricklebushes made her dizzy. Bird leaned in, licked the tip of her nose playfully. All manner of kissing went on as Berdis gently pushed her down. The touch of cool fingers spreading her legs, drawing her pleasure up tight, tight like the skin on a drum, forced her eyes shut. The light shower against dry leaves made her wonder when the rain began and how it missed them. She gripped the smooth shoulders as her pleasure intensified. Orange, green, purple mingled behind closed eyelids. She cried out, opened her eyes to a bush that quivered with caterpillars. One, alone on a branch, contracted and came a distance, leaving a silky trail. The rest of that long afternoon no impulse was denied. A touch from Bird and she was an ancient tree—hardened flesh peeled away by the persistent, nimble stroke of . . . love, a curious thing.
Ivoe lay on her stomach, feet crossed at the ankles, heels in the air, watching the orange ribbon of horizon turn purple, as Berdis traced the slope of her buttocks.
“I’m not studying on Adam, but you’re my rib, Ivoe. You made something different out of me.”
The voice, so soft, made Ivoe turn around to see Berdis’s eyes wet at the corners. She thought of their closeness, how brave she now felt, and laughed.
Berdis loved it when Ivoe laughed all deep down in herself. “What’s got you so tickled?”
“Momma always told me not to show no man all my teeth. She said you can’t smile at them too wide ’cause then they know they got you. She didn’t say nothing about showing my teeth to a woman.”
Berdis pulled Ivoe close enough to kiss. “I got you?” she said, too serious.
“Yeah. You got me.”
.
Two months of orange-colored skies and purple horizons had sped by. Yet in a moment like the present, Berdis wondered exactly who had whom. Ivoe was always too glad when a chance meeting put them on the path of that woman, walking in their direction now.
Though the teacher was obscured by a steel-gray felt hat, Ivoe had recognized her from afar. Ona Durden carried the added weight of dignity that comes with hard-won achievement. Her clothes were always of an interesting cut and texture, in bays and browns; colors becoming on few others were somehow chic on her. Ivoe felt at the nape of her neck where her hair had gone back.
On a good day, with the help of a pressing comb handled by one of the girls on her floor, Ivoe’s hair lay smooth and shiny, pulled back into one plait down the middle of her head; the style remained from Thursday evening until the start of the week. On Friday and the weekend Miss Durden saw her at her best. By Tuesday, her hair reverted to its natural state, as if to say five days was long enough to live a lie. Today, the fine, once-straightened hair had snapped back into a tight coil, the braid fuzzy and loose.
“Miss Williams, I was just thinking about you,” said Miss Durden, acknowledging Berdis with a nod as she reached out to touch Ivoe’s arm. “I have received the unfortunate news that my editor is not returning in the fall. Would you have any interest?”
A look of determination took shape around Ivoe’s mouth and her eyes flashed. “Yes.”
Watching the two riled Berdis, who was unaccustomed to spending time with a person she cared for the way she did Ivoe, and not fond of sharing. She hated the way Ivoe turned greedy for every little thing Miss Durden had to say. The fun had gone out of their togetherness, replaced by Ivoe’s writing for the Herald. This month it was something to do with a colored woman held at the county jail without food or water, an article that took a week to write. As editor it would be worse. As though she were looking right through Berdis, Miss Durden extended an invitation to discuss the editorial post over dinner.
.
A week before the end of her first year, Ivoe paid the conductor a quarter and walked to her seat, a package tucked under her arm. The small brown box had arrived in the nick of time that morning from Reynold’s Apothecary in Dallas, the only colored druggist in all of Texas. Naturally, Ivoe’s forehead was riddled with heat bumps along with the painful pimples marking her face like a calendar for the world to see she had her monthly. The whole week her abdomen ached, the cramping slowing her down, so she made no extra jaunts around campus except to the dining hall, where she had begged a few lemons off the large cook whose eyes slid from side to side when she spoke. “I’ll give ’em to you but watch yourself.” Ivoe knew “watch yourself” referred to the girls who believed old wives’ tales and sucked lemons ad nauseam to “dry up” the blood, increasing their fun with the boys down the road at the Agricultural and Mining School. The only thing she wanted to dry up were the pimples. She had followed May-Belle’s direction to wash her face with lemon juice, cover it with honey, and rinse with cool water. Miss Durden had been privy to her hair gone back, her skin riddled with bumps, her worst look ever. On Friday night, only her very best self would sit at the teacher’s table.
Berdis took the brown package and welcomed Ivoe inside her bedroom, where the chair from her desk was already pulled out, the desk itself prepared with a bucket of water, towel, comb, and brush. She tore open the package. All this trouble for Miss Durden, as if the teacher were the Queen of England. Chores at the house demanded her attention and there was the piece by Liszt she had purchased and had not played once.
Ivoe thumbed through the Colored American’s special issue on art and fashion and found the advertisement that had started it all. Berdis had stolen the issue from a Negro shop in downtown Austin. Their excited perusal saw them tearing through the pages like little girls, pausing only to read to each other (in high-toned ladies’ voices) the silliest advice. But the page-long advertisement that looked like a newspaper article had caught Ivoe’s attention. She studied the two distinct oval-framed female images. Above frame one, which held a woman whose profile most resembled her own, Ivoe noted the words Before Using. The model’s hair was a few inches long and wild like her own when not straightened with the hot comb or rolled with cotton at night. The woman in the second frame, with the words After Usage beneath, looked more like Berdis, whose hair fell to her shoulders.
Now, as Berdis poured Miss Lincoln’s Medicated Hair Tonic over Ivoe’s head, she read aloud from the same advertisement: “‘You owe it to yourself, as well as to others who are interested in you, to make yourself as attractive as possible . . . Positively nothing detracts so much from your appearance as short, matted curly hair.’” Without asking, Berdis added all of her Curl-I-Curl: A Cure for Curls tonic, rubbing vigorously as Ivoe chatted on about things she hoped to write about in the next issue of the Herald.
Ivoe’s scalp tingled and began to sting. The odor emanating from her head was stronger than anything she’d ever smelled. “You think it’s time to wash it out?” Gently, Berdis leaned her head back into the bucket, combing her fingers through the hair to rinse away the tonic. Berdis dried the hair with a towel, then removed. The short tresses had sizzled down to nothing. She lifted a finger to feel—an act more of inspection than compassion—the patches of woolly mats and pink stripes of tender scalp, now burned and bald.
.
Eight years of teaching at Willetson and Ona Durden had never invited a student to dinner, but she had greeted the idea to cook for Ivoe cheerfully. She was drawn to exchange ideas with her. Whether they knew it, Ivoe’s peers had her to thank, for even when a shortcut was possible, Ivoe compelled her to her most generous teaching. In Ivoe she found someone whose inquiring mind reminded her how much better life was when you returned somet
hing to it. In the last year, she had dusted off the little mimeograph machine once used to print the memos for the Texas Association of Colored Women’s Clubs and returned to the meetings that had often left her feeling hopeless about the race.
She opened the drawer in search of a music roll befitting the occasion. “Rosebud”—jaunty, springlike, perfect. The pianola began to play just as she remembered the flowers and dashed out to the yard for some of her rhodies to stand in a glass on the table. After removing her apron, she inspected the settings, excited by the empty dishes waiting to be filled with the food she prepared best and with joy.
Ona had the distinct impression that the green scarf Ivoe wore and the fumes tickling her nose during their embrace had something to do with dinner.
Ivoe was a bundle of nerves when she sat down at the table for two, constantly patting down the length of her skirt to smooth the wrinkles; touching her nape to check the scarf; pressing chin to chest to eye the front of her blouse for specks of dirt, dust, anything. She admired the crisp napkin folded on a plate adorned with a restful design of rose sprigs on a white porcelain background as Ona filled the glassware gleaming to perfection with water.
While cooking, Ona heard about Little Tunis and talked about Lincolnville, the Saint Augustine, Florida, enclave where she was raised by an aunt after her Seminole Negro father ran off to fight in the Texas-Indian wars. She had come to Austin from Jacksonville, a product of Edward Waters College, “a gift bestowed on colored Florida by the African Methodist Episcopal Church.”
Ivoe watched Miss Durden carry a small iron pot from the icebox, recalling a favorite saying of May-Belle’s: “An ole black pot can’t be beat when you craving something good to eat.” Miss Durden ladled a smooth brown sauce into a small bowl. The aroma was scrumptious. “This is how we do in Florida—pour some of that peanut sauce over the red rice and shrimp. Take more. There’s plenty.” Succored by the meal and Miss Durden’s calmness, Ivoe found it easy to talk about everything.
Miss Durden put her in the mind of Momma, who had a way of saying no more than she thought might be heard. Yet Miss Durden was savvy in the ways she hoped to become. Her conversation hinged on matters of real consequence. Her ideas were sensible and hopeful and moved the heart of her listener. The questions she asked Ivoe were the most thoughtful she’d known: What was she going to give? On the subject of friendship, she cheerfully discussed what she had learned or accomplished because of the help of others, praising the women who had “helped to make” her. What was Ivoe going to do with what she had? She spoke of living to work, not working to live, and knowing the difference. Working to gain prestige, or worse yet, money, was a sad life. Only work fueled by passion promised a life worth living.
“What work are you doing for the race?”
She had done nothing for the race. Only in the last year had she understood the importance of joining a cause, any cause to improve Negro life, Ivoe intoned, regrettably. Barred from the Anti-Saloon League because she was colored, when Miss Durden was her age she had picketed juke joints in Lincolnville after some women were so badly beaten by drunk husbands they could not stand up to cook for their children. Temperance remained a cause she believed in: “Colored people have not yet acquired enough to be so frivolous as to drink it away. The saloon is one man’s dream—the owner. And it is his goal to strip his brother’s last nickel from him . . . It is schooling—not juking—that’s going to help us.”
From hearing about the books Miss Durden read in the Hypatia Literary Society to her involvement with TACWC, whose current project was the establishment of a home for Austin’s delinquent colored boys, everything Miss Durden said and did sent Ivoe’s admiration soaring into inspiration.
As the teacher prepared the dessert plates, Ivoe took courage.
“My articles . . . what begs improvement?” She touched the edge of the sweet potato pie lightly with her fork; it yielded then proved soft all the way through. Toothsome. Momma would approve even though Miss Durden’s was sweeter and had a good deal more nutmeg and a smidgen of something that did not readily come to mind—root beer? Shaved pecans in the dough gave the crust flair in its speckled design. She could make a home in this pie.
“You’re coming along.” As usual, the teacher was sparing with compliments, having seen how they snuffed out potential greatness. “You know, a sentence is like a race. You can’t possibly win it unless you end as strong as you began. Good journalists understand that the last word is as important as the first.”
Ivoe dallied at the open front door where the air was sweet like honeysuckle, and Miss Durden drew her into a tight embrace, touching the knot of her scarf in a way that prompted Ivoe to look her in the eye.
“Father up in heaven. It’s what’s inside that makes you shine, girl.”
Excited to death by everything that evening—the meal, the editorial post, the faint scent of Floris White Rose perfume that lingered on her dress from the long good-bye—Ivoe climbed the steps to her room, three at a time.
Exiting the Austin train station, Ivoe was about to step off the curb when a curious scene unfolded.
Congress Avenue teemed with colored people moving in silent droves. Many held picket signs—SEGREGATION & NEGROES DO NOT MIX: TROLLEYS NEED A BETTER FIX! Two streetcars passed, both entirely free of colored passengers. A cardboard sign hanging from the rear of a packed conveyance read, FOR COLORED ONLY. The world-weary look on the faces of women burdened by heavy loads and the stern quality of the men toting large bundles signaled the obvious—Jim Crow had reared his ugly head, again.
The world beyond Willetson never enjoyed a concert between the races, but the ordinance requiring colored passengers to board using the back door and to sit in separate compartments on streetcars was a gratuitous insult. According to the driver who helped her into his dray, the boycott had lasted forty-two days. Among the riders conversation was of no consequence—cravings for dinner, the heat—then someone complained about increased travel time to work. A domestic shared that when her employer reprimanded her tardiness she had responded that she’d rather quit than ride a Jim Crow streetcar. She leaned over the aisle, placed both hands on Ivoe’s shoulder, and drew her head close to whisper that every woman she knew had threatened to boycott the men of the race if they dared to “Jim-Crow” on a trolley and Ivoe should do the same. One passenger thought Negroes ought to form their own transportation company—“completely separate from whites, owned and operated by us.” He reminded them that the white man’s conscience was not in his heart or mind but in his pocket, and it was there they must strike to the quick, again and again.
.
“Nothing like a robust welcome of southern hostility,” Miss Durden said, sliding a box across the table in Ivoe’s direction. “Old issues of the Houston Post with articles on their boycott, two years ago.” While Ivoe looked through the papers, Miss Durden recounted the events that led to Austin’s boycott. Protestors had faced violent intimidation from Austin police during the initial weeks of the protest. Three young colored women had been the first to test the new ordinance, unaware that conductors had been granted judicial power. Most drivers were not eager to confront a man, but with women they asserted themselves with brute force. One woman had been thrown from the trolley so hard her arm had broken on the fall. A colored delegation petitioned the city council and a meeting date was set, yet on the meeting day the council refused to hear the delegation. “Nevertheless, out of the humiliating disgrace of Jim Crow something exciting is stirring—rejection of second-class citizenship,” Miss Durden said.
Boycott articles from the Post made fine examples of tone, but Ivoe wanted more coverage of Austin to provide context for her articles. Where were copies of that summer’s Democratic Statesman? “The Houston Post and the Democratic Statesman are very different papers,” Miss Durden explained. “Arrests and court records are criteria for a Negro to appear in the latter.” The colored c
ommunity’s large but silent protest was not illegal and was therefore ignored. Not one of the local white dailies devoted ink to it. Whitecapping and the Black Codes and countless discriminatory tactics proved the white race spent extraordinary thought on the colored race, yet nowhere in Travis County’s press was there ever any mention of black life.
“If not the newspaper, where do we turn for information?” Ivoe asked. A question not even Ona Durden could answer. A failed boycott against the Nashville Street Car Association had inspired the launch of the city’s first colored newspaper, the Nashville Globe, Miss Durden said. “If we’re lucky, the same will happen here. They’re boycotting in Savannah, Georgia, right now for the same reason. I subscribed to the Savannah Tribune so we can follow its development.”
For Miss Durden, the outcome was not as significant as the protests themselves, which she credited with the changing definition of colored life in the South. But she was concerned about the workaday needs of her Wheatville neighbors, domestics, and laborers in Austin’s booming construction sites “more than a few miles away.” “Each and every protest is a wave that moves us beyond the stagnant waters of servitude and oppression toward the shores of self-respect.” Her stance and the position of the Willetson Herald was clear: Willetson women must be urged to walk with colored Austin.
.
FIGHTING “JIM-CROWISM” IN AUSTIN’S STREETCARS:
A HUMILIATING DISGRACE
By I. L. Williams
Beyond Willetson’s gates the color line, as ordained by the city council, was drawn on the streetcars for the first time on Wednesday morning, August 1. The innovation was not relished by the Negro population of Austin and resentment was demonstrated in a general boycott by the race of the streetcars, which commenced on Monday morning, August 6. Owing to the light travel by colored people, the traction company set apart only the last two seats of each car for Negroes. The presence of a Negro on the cars is a rarity, the boycott being for the present most complete. It is stated that at all the colored religious meetings word is passed to keep off the cars and the injunction is obeyed. Here and there a colored passenger is seen and every once in a while some colored man who declines to go into the reined-off portion stands on the rear platform. It is the position of this organ that Willetson women walk with the race. Save your self-respect and your money and boycott the streetcars. See Miss Ona Durden in the printing workshop for schedules of dray service.
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