Black or white, she was a nice little girl, Dinah was, polite and sharp as a tack. Also, Bessy thought guiltily, she was probably a very hungry little girl by now. She would have got up out of her chair and fixed her something to eat, except that her feet, her poor, aching feet, just wouldn't take her into that kitchen.
'Fay, honey?'
Fay's eyebrows lifted to their utmost extent, questioningly.
'Would you fix up Dinah a bite to eat and pour her a glass of milk, if there is some?'
'All by myself? What should I make?'
'Just a couple of sandwiches—and some potato chips, if you and Clara have left any.'
'I know how to make peanut butter sandwiches, or jelly sandwiches, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or cheese sandwiches, or cheese and jelly sandwiches, or ...'
'That'll do just fine, honey. You just go and fix them up and tell Dinah when they're ready.'
Bessy shook her head, as she watched Fay prance into the kitchen. If she weren't so damned soft-hearted she'd have thrown out the both of them years ago. They sure as hell didn't pay their way. That Clara was as ugly as sin, and as if that weren't enough, she hated men and always found a way to let them know it. Which didn't bring in many repeating customers to Green Pastures Funeral Home—except for the few men who wanted to be hated.
Fay didn't have many steady customers either, despite that she was the prettiest piece that Bessy had ever had working for her. The trouble with Fay was that after doing her business, she'd ask for a piece of bubble gum or do some fool thing that would let her John know he'd been making it with a five-year-old. Which most Johns don't really like.
Two dead cats—that's what Bessy had on her hands. She would never have kept Green Pastures going if it hadn't been for the mortgages and an occasional windful from someone who needed a quiet rooming house till he could find a boat to go away on. This business with Alice ...
Damn it, she had to remember to think of her as Dinah! This business with Dinah was the first piece of really big luck that had come Bessy's way since World War II, when she'd made her pile. Now, if only her luck stayed good. Three days —that's all she asked. Three days, and then the kid would be back in Baltimore and Bessy could move off to parts unknown, taking her bundle with her. She didn't expect to see Norfolk again till she was ready to be buried in Nansemond County.
Three days. Nothing could happen in three days. But, sweet Jesus, wouldn't there be the devil to pay if they caught her on this? A white kid kept prisoner in a coloured cathouse. There'd be a lynch party quicker than you could say Jackie Robinson. She chuckled, picturing old Farron Stroud, looking mean and trying to figure out some way to string her up. There wasn't a tree in Virginia big enough to string Elizabeth McKay up from.
But it wasn't really so funny when you stop to think. Because they would do for her, and for Fay and Clara too, and probably burn Green Pastures down afterwards, the sons of bitches. And then, even if there was a body left over to be buried, there'd be no money for a funeral, or for that pink marble stone, or for the plot. If she had the money, it would be different. Then she could go thumb her nose at the likes of Farron Stroud. Hell, she could even go around in one of those Civil Rights protests and sing about Freedom!
'Fay!' she called out.
'What is it! I'm terribly busy making these sandwiches.'
'Oh, it ain't nothing.' She wanted to ask for another glass, but she had to remember to cut down for these next three days. She'd promised, and in any case it was a good idea to go easy. She upended the glass and sucked at an ice cube to punish her tongue for still insisting on wanting another after she'd told it no.
Alice came in, wrapped in a towel, her black curls dripping water. 'Could I have some pyjamas, please?' she asked.
'Honey, ain't nothing here would fit you. You'll just have to sleep raw, or get along with that towel. Here, let me pin it up over your shoulder.'
Fay came out of the kitchen with a tray of sandwiches.
'Lord, Fay, what kind of stomach you think this child has got! How many sandwiches did you fix?'
Fay's eyes clouded from the effort of explaining: 'But I asked you what to make, peanut butter or jelly or peanut butter and jelly or...'
'All right, all right. You and Dinah go into the kitchen then and have your supper...'
'Breakfast,' Alice corrected, for it was quite six o'clock now, and the sun was creeping into the living-room through every crevice of the closed blinds.
'Your breakfast then, and wash the dishes when you're done.'
'I get first choice,' Fay insisted as she took Alice into the kitchen. 'I get the peanut butter sandwich. You can have the peanut butter and cheese, if you like.'
'No thank you,' said Alice politely.
It was a song in a foreign language, and the plaintive little voice would crack every time it tried to squeeze extra grace notes into the refrain. French?
Yes, French.
Bessy remembered—though she would have liked better to forget—the Creole girl. A pretty little piece, and always singing too. What had her name been? Something out of the way. She wondered what ever had become of her after that night back in '50. Some girls kept in touch, but not what's-her-name. Couldn't much blame her for that. She had a better reason than Bessy to want not to remember. A hell of a thing to happen, and her only having come to Green Pastures a month before or so.
Bessy let her eyes close almost shut so that she could see the room not as it was now but as it had been then, in its moment of glory. Modern? Bessy had felt like a real pioneer when she'd fixed the place up like that. No velvet drapes and coloured glass for her. Those orange lamps she'd had on the end tables—what had ever become of them? Were they up in the attic? Or had they been busted in some sailors' brawl? And now just one poor end table left—and it was missing one wrought-iron leg And the rug: when she'd bought that the salesman had said it wasn't no trouble at all to keep a one hundred per cent nylon rug snowy white. Well, she'd have liked to have shown it to him now! It was so dark that you almost couldn't tell the stains apart from the rest of it.
Modern? Oh, it had been very modern—fifteen years ago. But the one piece of furniture in this room she could trust to last the week out was the rocker she was sitting in—and she'd taken that out of her mother's house, the time her mother had died. There was no telling how old it was. It seemed to Bessy she'd seen it around since she was a little girl no older than ...
Dinah. The smooth gold oak showed through in patches where the varnish had rubbed off, but it looked none the worse for that. She wished she could have said as much for herself.
On the other hand, you take the very newest thing in the room—take that phonograph sitting on the three-legged end-table. The Creole girl had bought that the first week she'd worked at Bessy's, a tiny 45 record player with a thick red spindle and a stubby little arm that clicked and moved for all the world like a kitten's paw digging its claws into the records. All the records there used to be around the house—Blue Moon, Tenderly, Garden in the Rain, Tell Me Why, The Little White Cloud That Cried—all lost, all gone, all scattered to the winds or broken, and the phonograph broken too. Yes, you could take it—and throw it in the garbage!
Time, time, time! How it came sneaking up on a person! How it would trick a person into believing nothing would ever change, that life would always go on the same ... until there you were standing at the very edge of the grave and looking down into it and trying to pretend it wasn't yours but somebody else's...
'Where do I sleep?' asked Alice, who had finished wiping the dishes.
'Can she sleep with me, Bessy, please?'
'No, babydoll—you know Clara wouldn't like that one little bit. Dinah here is going to sleep in Bessy's room.' Bessy heaved herself to her feet—and realised for the first time that she hadn't taken off her hat yet. She was tired.
Herding her little prisoner before her, she climbed the stairs with a sigh for each arduous step. Though it was quite bright outside now
, Bessy's room was in semi-darkness. From under her own ruptured double bed she pulled out a trundle bed on squealing casters. She debated changing the sheets—they were anything but fresh—but Alice settled the matter by tumbling into it like she'd been chopped off at her ankles and pushed over. Those pills were still on the job.
Bessy undressed self-consciously, not quite sure that the child wasn't just playing possum, and got into a comfy nightgown—such a relief!—locked the door, pinned the key beneath her arm, and switched off the overhead light. She made absolutely sure that the girl was sound asleep (tickling the soles of her brown little feet), and then she knelt beside her bed and folded her hands.
'Lord?'
Chapter 9
Surely there is nothing more dreadful than the darkness of a strange house—or, more dreadful yet, a funeral parlour; surely there is nothing more dangerous than to tiptoe right beneath the nose of the snoring giant; surely there is nothing quite so adventurous, once one is a little over the shock, as being kidnapped. Of course, in the strict sense Bessy's bedroom might not have qualified as dark, despite all that the curtains and the blinds could do; nor was it, as much as Alice might have liked, strange (imagine, though, if the walls had been stone! Imagine portraits of the ancestors; imagine a curse; imagine bloodstains on the tapestry, or, for that matter, imagine the tapestry!), nor yet a funeral parlour—any more. Bessy, however, came as close as one could fairly ask of a person to being a giant, and Alice was tiptoeing almost beneath her nose, and she was, beyond a quibble, kidnapped, which was, after all, the essential thing.
She raised a slat of the blind and peeked out...
... and there was nothing to see! Water—muddy brown water, much more than Alice could have swum across. Pressing herself against the window pane and looking straight down she could see tufts of marshy-looking grass. There must, she decided, be a better way to escape than climbing down from this window.
The door to the hall was locked, she had heard Bessy lock it, but there were two other doors that she hadn't locked. The first proved to be a closet, smelling of lilies-of-the-valley and mouldy shoes. The second opened on to a dreadfully messy bathroom—on the other side of which there was another door. Alice closed the door to Bessy's room behind her, and now the darkness was dark, since the bathroom was windowless and the transoms above the doors were shut tight. She moved barefoot across the chilly tiles with delicious stealth and felt for the knob of the other door. It opened ... and there, near enough to reach out and touch, was Fay, asleep! What a strange house it was where everyone went to bed in the morning!
Sleeping in a twin bed across the room was Clara, also (and very audibly) asleep. And the door from their bedroom to the hall was ajar. She would escape!
Down the hall, down the stairs, then quickly across the living-room to the front door: ah, but of course that was locked. It should be a simple matter, then, to climb out of a window— but there was no way to open the living-room's big picture window, and the smaller window on the farther wall proved just as intractable, for the latch was sealed tight with layers and layers, years and years, of white enamel. The kitchen window was small and too high for Alice to reach without the help of a stepladder. But there were still all those other rooms along the hallway; one of them, surely ...
But better than that there was another doorway at the end of the downstairs hallway, a back door, and Bessy hadn't thought to lock it.
From the ledge of the door to the ground was a sheer drop of three or four feet into marsh grass and mud of an uncertain consistency. Alice hated to get dirty, but people had dared worse fates: Jean Valjean, for instance, had escaped from that terrible police inspector by wading through the Paris sewers, compared to which a little mud...
That's quicksand, you know,' came a voice from behind her. It was Clara, wearing a filmy nightgown and smiling in an ugly way—though perhaps that was the only way she knew to smile. 'You jump down into that crap, and it'll be the last we'll see of you. You'll just be swallowed up, gobbled.' She made a sound indicative of this process.
'But if it were quicksand, the whole house would sink!' Alice protested.
'Well, you just go ahead and jump into it, if you don't believe me. Why do you think nobody bothers to lock that door? 'Cause no burglar's going to come in that way.'
'Then it's a dumb place to build a house.'
'The house was here before the quicksand. The quicksand came when the tidewater started backing up, and the tidewater started backing up when they built that big tunnel under the bay. And as a matter of fact, the house is sinking, but it just takes longer for a house to go down than for a person. You're a pretty little girl, did you know that? What'd you say your name was?'
'Oh no, I'm ugly,' Alice said with conviction. She wanted to add: 'And I'm not really black at all,' but she was afraid that would seem unkind, or even prejudiced, to Clara, who was so very black.
'Well, that makes two of us,' Clara said agreeably. 'But cheer up, kid—looks ain't everything.' She seemed in a much better temper now than she had only minutes before. 'How you come to be staying here?' she asked. 'Are you some relation of Bessy's?'
Alice lowered her eyes. Maybe Clara didn't know ... Was it possible that she would be willing, then, to help her escape?
'How old did you say you was? Twelve? You look older'n that to me.' Clara rumped Alice's black curls in an almost affectionate way.
'Did Bessy tell you that I'm...'
'Mm-hmm? What's that, gingerbread?'
'... kidnapped? '
Obviously, Bessy had not told her, for her eyes became just that degree more protuberant than they had been.
'Yes, I'm kidnapped. Bessy and two other men kidnapped me, and I'm being held for ransom. I live in Baltimore, and my real name is Alice Raleigh. Dinah was my name when I was sick.'
'Sounds like you ain't got over it.'
'Oh, I'm quite well now, thanks to...' Alice's eyes clouded over, but only for a moment. 'But that's all over now, and in any case it's of no interest to you. You will help me to escape, won't you? You can boost me up to the kitchen window, I can't reach it myself, and Bessy need never know ... need she?'
'How much ransom?'
'I don't know about that part. A lot, I suppose. I'm rather rich, you see, and I'm not ... a Negro. Though of course there's nothing to be ashamed of. Being one, I mean.'
'You sure look black, honey,' Clara commented sceptically.
'It's because she made me take pills. I hope she has pills that will turn me white again.'
'I've been hoping that all my life, kid.'
'It's true. Look at my eyes, my eyes are blue.'
Clara looked into Alice's eyes, smiling that mean smile of hers. Alice felt herself blushing and wondered if it were noticeable. Did coloured people blush?
'Will you help me, Clara? If you do help me, I'm sure my uncle will give you a reward.'
Clara's eyelids tightened about her large eyes. 'You're sure of that, huh?'
'Oh, positive. After all, it will save him paying the ransom.' 'Well, I ain't so sure. I'm a lot surer of getting some of that ransom, now that I know what's going on. How much do you think it'll be? How much has your uncle got?'
'Then you won't help me?'
'I'll help you upstairs. That's where I'll help you. You must git yourself some sleep on that bed Bessy made up for you. And be quiet, understand. I don't want you waking her up.'
Clara locked the door between Bessy's bedroom and the bathroom. There was no escaping now, so Alice went quietly and quickly to sleep. She dreamt of a great snowball fight on a vast field of ice between the polar bears and the penguins. Every time that Dinah (for that is who she was in her dream) threw a snowball, big fat white hairy Mrs. Buckler would catch it and fry it and eat it, which became very frustrating in time, though it was not, exactly a nightmare.
The hardest part of being kidnapped, for a person of any intelligence, is the boredom, for kidnappers, however thorough their preparations may be in o
ther areas, do not as a rule make provision for the entertainment of the kidnapee. There was nothing for Alice to do; there was nothing for Alice to read; there was nothing for Alice to think. Bessy had allowed her the run of the house, after securing her promise that she wouldn't try to get away (and warning her, once more, of the quicksand below the back door) or talk to anybody else that came in the house. She had to promise to go in to the bathroom or the kitchen, whichever was nearest, whenever the doorbell rang, and to stay there until the visitor had either gone away or up the stairs. It wasn't much of a bargain, since aside from the giant bathtub there were few interesting features to the house, one bedroom being very much like another, but at least it was better than being confined in Bessy's hot bedroom day and night, drenched in the cloying odour of her cologne.
She read through Just-So Stories once more, but she was a fast reader and finished it in under two hours. Bessy had tried to find her something about the house to read, but there wasn't anything, not a thing.
Clara, late in the afternoon, offered to play checkers with her. Alice asked if she wouldn't really rather play chess, and Clara used some of her filthiest language.
Bessy said, 'You watch that, Clara, or I'm going to have to wash your mouth out with soap.'
Clara said, 'Up yours!' Bessy just chuckled.
Clara proved to be a very poor checkers player. She never planned her moves ahead, and Alice trounced her three times running. They never did find all the checkers, after that.
There was no television set, but there was a staticky old radio. From nine till eleven on Sunday night, Alice sat with Bessy in the kitchen listening to the Top Forty and memorising the words of the songs. Or she would draw pictures with a ballpoint pen on Bessy's stationery (which smelled, like almost everything that belonged to Bessy, of lilies-of-the-valley), but she never had learned how to do good likenesses, and a ballpoint wasn't much good for anything else. For self-expression in the manner of Miss Braggs, she needed crayons or finger paints.
Black Alice Page 9