Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  “Once a fiddler was late leaving Caldwell. It was way past dark when he finally reached Little Tunis because he had to carry his baby brother with him. They daddy had died so the fiddler was in charge of his baby brother and his momma too.”

  “That ain’t the way the story go.”

  “So, the fiddler and his baby brother were going along.”

  “They got a au-to-mo-bile?” Junebug wanted to know.

  Pinky slurped on his thumb and grunted, “Naw, they walking.”

  “You gonna let Auntie tell this story or not?”

  The twins nodded.

  “The fiddler and his brother are marching along when the fiddler’s stomach starts grumbling like thunder right before a twister touch down. He figured his brother was hungry too but he didn’t want to stop because he was worried about reaching Little Tunis, where he was getting paid to play for a dance. Since his daddy died he had more than himself to look after. He had three mouths to feed.”

  Lemon twisted in her chair, trying not to catch the misbaha beads hanging from her hip where she’d worn them the last five years, praying in a steadfast manner that some nightrider hadn’t snatched Ennis up and turned him loose where he didn’t belong just to collect a dollar or two. It was so easy to steal a colored man, erase his past and darken all the days of his future. She tried not to hear the story Irabelle was telling. Ennis had made it out of Texas. It had taken him a while to gain people’s trust is all—a colored man traveling by himself, no wife, no children—and at his age. Sure as she was sitting there, he was somewhere working hard, preparing a place for them. Who was Irabelle to think otherwise?

  Lemon let out a long, tired sigh. “If you gonna tell the story, tell it right. That ain’t how it go.”

  “Who’s telling this?” Irabelle snapped.

  The wooden bowl of sliced potatoes smacked the floor when Lemon sprang to her feet. “I’m awfully tired of your sassing.”

  Irabelle’s sudden rise upset the table. Veins bulged along her neck. “And I’m tired of you acting like he left on account of what happened to me. Maybe he ain’t no different than these other men that leave when they want to.”

  Lemon kicked the bowl from her path and flew into Irabelle with a hard shove.

  “Momma!” Ivoe lunged after her but missed and fell.

  May-Belle called on Allah. Roena’s voice was frail: “Y’all, don’t do this—”

  “Get her off me!”

  Lemon’s fists were like hammers. Each blow against Irabelle carried the pain she’d felt since her man left. Not even the wailing of her grandsons stopped her.

  At one point, Irabelle thought it would be okay if she never turned nineteen.

  When they finally pulled the women apart, Lemon stood across the room breathing hard. She took off a slipper and hurled it against the wall before dropping her head in a weepy groan. She spoke in a low, shaky voice: “I won’t stand here and say he ain’t wrong for staying gone so long. Instead of being angry with him, worry about him . . . I don’t know, maybe that’ll bring him home.” She wiped her tears with her shoulder. “Now, I don’t never want to hear no more talk about Papa’s leaving. He did his level best by this family. His level best.”

  Timothy closed the door.

  “Momma, that roof on the henhouse fixing to fall in. I’ll fix it for a little change,” he said, and winked. “Somebody dropped this in the yard. Ivoe, it’s for you.” He put the envelope on the table, careful-like, not flung, and sat a bag of coal on the floor. He looked at Ivoe, rock still with watery eyes. He looked across the kitchen where Irabelle was balled up in the corner and noticed the trouble on his wife’s face. “What’s going on?”

  Terrified by Bicey’s rage, the twins ran to their father. Each one grabbed a hand, eyeing his grandmother with a little fear.

  Ivoe took her time opening the envelope, certain that like all the others this too would end in rejection. Her eyes scanned the letter. Her lips parted and her voice shook as she read aloud, “‘Your experience and specimens were the most satisfactory sent.’” Her eyes rested on the words fact-checker. In the same paragraph a date was given for when she should show up for work. She tried to hand the letter to her mother, who turned her back. She crouched beside Irabelle, placed the letter before her eyes, and spoke in a whisper everyone could hear. “Soon as you finish up school, come join me.”

  “Where you going?” Roena said.

  “Kansas City” curled off her tongue with pride. “Kansas City here I come!” Ivoe shouted, doing a bunny hop that made the twins laugh.

  “When they want you?” Timbo said.

  “In three weeks.”

  “We going too?” Junebug said.

  A week later, Lemon thought about her grandson’s question. Ssth. To live with three grown children and her grandsons under one roof—how? She missed Ennis beyond hurt. Might’ve been short on money but plenty peace abided. She and Ennis never stood for fussing and fighting. “Leave that ugliness outdoors,” Ennis used to say whenever the children meddled with each other. “We keep peace indoors.” Not every word that passed back and forth between them was all the time pleasant. How could it be with a man thinking one way like he do, a woman thinking another, but together they had kept peace indoors for thirty-one years. She laid her head down on the table Ennis built. For a few days she had not taken food or water between sunup and sundown. Fasting would strengthen her prayer request—forgiveness and traveling mercies. The visit to the county clerk had been short. A man shuffled loose pages of an unbound ledger where the value of their land and house had been blotted out, next to it a far diminished sum penciled in. After the sell, there was enough money for five one-way tickets and a little something left to help them start again. She ran her hand over the bloodstain in the center of the table and thought of Irabelle. The outside world had come in.

  .

  The last call issued from the station speaker as Timothy helped his wife aboard the train. “I got more years than all of y’all put together and know full well how to see to myself,” May-Belle said when Roena’s aunt Fanny and Zilpha Stokes promised to look after her. Bunk thumped his tail against her leg like he agreed, then sprang back as Ivoe grabbed May-Belle, tears rushing from her eyes. Irabelle joined their embrace, their soft farewells swelling to a hurt jumble of thanksgiving and promises. After her daughters climbed aboard, Lemon and May-Belle stood in silence holding hands. Bunk moved under the swaying bridge of their arms, wagging his tail.

  “No, Bunk. You can’t come with us. You got to stay right here and see after May-Belle. You got to do a good job too ’cause she’s all the grown-up love I got.”

  “Ain’t so,” May-Belle said. “Your children got love and they not afraid to work. Let them help when you needs it. Let them help.”

  The conductor’s final whistle blew. Lemon released her aunt’s hands and drew her in close. She rested her face in the curve of her neck, inhaling deeply the scent of pennyroyal oil. Finally, she squatted to talk to Bunk. She cradled his face between her hands, pressed her lips into the soft depression of smooth fur between his eyes. “I left something special for you in the garden, you rascal.” Bunk rose on his hind legs and whimpered. Quickly, Lemon turned, grabbed her valise, and disappeared up the steps.

  In the train car a fat woman told two well-dressed boys, who were eating their sandwiches and tossing the crusts on the floor between their stubby legs, to “Stop kicking and be still.” She toed a bag at her feet from which a long stick protruded at a jaunty angle and the boys sat still. Across the aisle from the Williamses a man in a straw hat, dungarees, and a wrinkled jacket drummed his fingers on the backside of the guitar across his lap. At the third stop he began to play and sing in a gravelly tone:

  Going to Kansas City

  Sorry that I can’t take you

  Going to Kansas City

  Sorry that I can’t
take you

  ’Cause ain’t nothing on Vine Street

  That a monkey-woman can do.

  Lemon watched the blues man, who seemed to favor the strum of sad strings over the happy ones. As she listened, she realized questions could burden a heart as much as the wrong answer. How did she wind up on a train without her husband? She looked out the train window beyond the reflections of her family, slouched and bent in peaceful sleep. Didn’t have no business leaving behind everything she knew. Like the little furniture they owned, cut from trees by James and made into a little something by Ennis. The wood was a record. Held the big and the small: Timbo’s sweat after his first real day of labor and all that he wasted on those devilish dice, the ink from Ivoe’s fingertips, Irabelle’s blood. Didn’t have no business leaving Texas. Her soul and the soil were one, tilled together. She had marked fifty-five years in the Brazos Bottoms, land that knew her better than the people she loved. What did she know about the city? She had borrowed somebody else’s trouble and left hers behind is all. A storm was brewing and nothing about the future she saw in her mind’s eye could chase the clouds away. Somewhere out in the velvet black night was her star, brighter than any of those twinkling up the sky. If she called him, maybe he’d light the way.

  Ennis. Ennis. Ennis.

  PART II

  Wisps of fog hung over Kansas City’s Union Station as the Sunshine Express blew a noisy tuft of steam, rousing Ivoe from a dream. She was more excited than anybody had a right to be. Three days until her life as a fact-checker began at the Kansas City Palladium. Tomorrow, after unpacking, she would find Twelfth and Wyandotte and plan her route to the newspaper office. Momma pulled on her shoes. They had been traveling for two days and Junebug and Pinky were fast asleep. Timothy woke them gently. Irabelle and Roena gathered the toys that had amused the ten-year-old twins on the journey. Ivoe was the first in the aisle, slipping into her coat. A gentleman in a derby hat with a bright green feather held the door open as they entered the station’s grand hall, where a chandelier shone bright like her hope. Lord only knew what stories awaited her in the city.

  A gloomy Sunday in Kansas City could put New Year’s Eve in Little Tunis to shame. Telephone and trolley wires crisscrossed a sky teeming with tall buildings; electric streetcars rumbled along, causing the ground to shake beneath their feet. A colored boy with a face of joyful mischief dodged the grasp of a white man. Horns honked. From every corner someone shouted the sale of wares. A man holding a crying toddler haggled with the owner of a vegetable cart. A woman in a faded green coat got out of a taxi. And someone gave a terrific whistle. The city in motion! Ivoe clutched the map in her hand. “Come on, y’all. The house is close. Let’s save the carfare and walk.”

  Where a left turn was necessary, Ivoe turned them right into a street of dreary flats that eventually spilled into Whittier Lane. The Williamses stopped to gawk at the half-naked women sitting in windows knitting, reading, or staring blankly ahead until a taxi drew near. In unison, the women commenced tapping their windows with coins until the men from the taxi approached. Sporting women would never get Timothy’s money, but a sign above a storefront where men shook dice right where the whole world could see caught his eye. A game or two would square the debt back in Texas. The church on the corner was an easy marker for the Spinning Wheel—money, cigarettes, whiskey, and God only knew what else was in there. At the corner of West Twelfth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, the air turned a putrid odor—rotten food and dried blood. Ivoe consulted the map again. They were back on course.

  “These big houses for just one family?” Roena said.

  “Look more like castles from a picture book,” Irabelle chimed. One day she’d live in a house just like that one—with a man as handsome as the one who made eyes at her each time he walked down the train aisle, all the way from Texas. In one hand the porter had two bottles for the twins, in the other a bottle for her. She memorized the numbers on the napkin wrapped around her cola.

  In the part of Mulberry Street that had once been beautiful stood a maisonette whose odd symmetry and melancholic feel seemed out of place amid the apartment houses. Measly shrubs, tall as Lemon, looked like they never did see a leaf. Even in spring she didn’t count on them shutting the house off from the street like they were supposed to. She bore her heel into the ground then raised it to fleck off and feel the soil. No count. She touched a tree of sickly brown leaves and snags of wool and thought, Somebody went off and left you. We a good match. A narrow path delivered them to the Queen Anne, whose numbers matched the address in Lemon’s hand. Lemon ignored the mural in the foyer (touched only by Ivoe because the patina reminded her of the art at Willetson) and led her family through a dark hall. On the fourth floor, she opened the door to a kitchen much smaller than the one back home, but they were paid up till spring.

  Five of the hardest years without Ennis and I did the best that I could do, Lemon thought, as she opened a box. The carving done by her husband was laid across the dishes, its bark gnarled and rough. The smooth side of the oak showed his tree-woman, the top half a likeness of Lemon, the bottom half all roots. Lemon turned to Ivoe unwrapping a plate that had belonged to Big Momma Iraj and exhaled.

  Lemon crossed the room and cracked the window, frowning at the stench. “What you say they call this part of town?”

  “West Bottoms.”

  “You mean we moved from the Bottoms to the Bottoms? Y’all have to help me with this one. What kind of sense that make?”

  Roena chuckled.

  “You don’t want us to be rent-poor—broke after paying the landlord—do you? We can always move once we’ve started working and saved a little,” Ivoe said, sweeping aside her mother’s logic to make room for the city’s opportunities.

  “What plant you know thrive changing pots all the time?” Lemon took Momma Iraj’s plate from Ivoe’s hands and put it in the center of the table. They hadn’t unpacked half the boxes yet and that child was talking about moving again. That’s how city folk lived. How many steps had she climbed? Forty? Fifty? On the trip up she had lost count. “Give me that pie.” Ivoe pulled the leftover sweet potato pie from a shopping bag and thought of Ona. “Been a while since we could leave a pie on the table. Wonder how my Bunk doing.” Lemon looked out the window. “You say peoples like living this way? Peoples call this home? These iddy-biddy rooms and a couple of windows?”

  “We had the same amount of space in Little Tunis.”

  “Ivoe Leila Williams, don’t you know nothing about where you come from? Indoors you might’ve lived in just a few rooms, but outdoors you had nearly an acre, girl. And all of it was yours. When you could hardly stand yourself or had your fill of one of us, you could march right out the door and where you be at? Home. You could sit yourself down, lean against a tree, and your behind was on top of your very own piece of ground, leaning against your very own tree. Home, girl, where the work you do in the garden you don’t mind doing since any seed you sow gonna yield what’s rightfully yours. And even if you don’t feel like the room is yours, the tree is yours, or the ground is yours, when hand bring to mouth that thing you growed and you gets yourself a taste, you think one thing: Home.”

  Ivoe thought, between a garden and her career, it was more important that the latter grow. And there was no chance of that in Little Tunis.

  A trolley ride and a short walk delivered Ivoe to the Kansas City Palladium. Inside the lobby, she frowned and plucked at her stockings, flecked with gray mud, some of which dotted the hem of the hunter-green gabardine dress handed down by Miss Susan years ago. She followed directions to a room at the end of the corridor and settled in for the inevitable wait that seemed to accompany her race and gender. This link seemed as true in the city as it was in rural Texas; she had witnessed in a number of establishments how well-dressed colored men received attention, or at the very least a greeting, sooner than a colored woman.

  An hour had passed when a man
came out and asked what she wanted, as if neither he nor anyone he knew expected her. Learning that his paper had hired her as the new fact-checker, he welcomed her inside his office, where another man, older, more distinguished looking, rose to greet her. Awkward silence hung in the air followed by a series of questions. Why had she signed her correspondence with initials? Was she often in the habit of trickery? Had she written or received considerable help with “On the Safety of Colored Girls and Women”? What kind of paper was the Enterprise to publish the writings of a Negro woman? Did she have any idea what work at a city newspaper required? This work demanded long hours, they said. The acuity and mastery of the English language, rules of grammar, were better suited to men whose wives tended to domestic chores while they focused on the page, they said. “Why, I bet you pressed the dress you’re wearing,” the older gentleman said through a wry smile, as if ironing precluded one from the verification of information. When it was clear she had lost the job at birth, she tried to secure another post at the paper. She apologized for withholding her gender and reminded them of her introduction letter, which had detailed her experience setting type and working multiple presses. Men filled these positions best, they said. “Faster work, fewer accidents.” She might consider other jobs, more suitable to a colored woman’s abilities.