Forever Friends

by Lynne Hinton

  “Well, what all did you do?” Margaret asked.

  “Everything we planned.”

  The women passed along the photographs, making comments about the sights, the beauty of the area, and the serene looks on the faces of their friend and her husband.

  “We shopped, of course.” She got up and brought in a cloth bag with souvenirs in it. She began handing out gifts. “Mostly wood carvings, some soapstone figures, a few textile pieces.”

  She handed Charlotte a statue, a large brown-and gold-faced woman connected to a base with five rings of bright colors painted around the bottom of the sculpture.

  Charlotte held it and ran her fingers across it. The stone was smooth and heavy, the colors deep and vibrant. She faced Jessie, her expression a question mark.

  “I bought it because she reminded me of you.”

  The other women studied the object in their pastor’s hands.

  “Big headed?” Beatrice asked as a joke.

  Charlotte smiled.

  “No,” Jessie answered. “Strong with large eyes.”

  The minister studied the gift.

  “You see more than you let on.”

  Charlotte kept her face down as she remembered her recent discussion with Peggy DuVaughn. The woman had not mentioned anything about Lamont or the people at church, but Charlotte had been able to tell that she had felt the animosity toward her grandson. Charlotte had wanted to apologize for the church members’ behavior, but she hadn’t known how. So they had muddled on in conversation without purpose or comfort.

  “What’s this?” Beatrice asked.

  “It’s a scarf,” Jessie answered as she walked behind her friend and tied the piece of brightly colored fabric around her head. Beatrice sat up, able to see herself in the window behind the sofa. She turned her head from side to side, admiring herself. “I look like a queen!” she responded.

  “Exactly,” said Jessie.

  Margaret pulled out tiny black elephants from a small paper bag. There were twelve of them, some larger than the others. She placed them on the table in front of her.

  “It’s a calendar,” Jessie said to Margaret. She knelt down in front of her and placed the elephants in a straight line. “You keep them turned to the front until the month passes, then you turn them this way, one elephant for every month.” And she began facing the elephants toward the wall. “I figured you have the deepest appreciation of time of all of us.”

  Margaret smiled and continued spinning the elephants so that they were all facing forward.

  Louise was the last one to unwrap her gift. It was a small basket made from long, thick blades of yellow grass. A small woven lid rested on top.

  “It’s a replica of the ones the African women carry on their heads.” Jessie took her seat. “You’ve always amazed me with what you keep balanced in here and in here.” She pointed to her chest and her head.

  Louise turned the basket over in her hands. The strands of yellow and green grass were perfectly woven inside each other, a melding of strength and beauty. “Thank you,” she said.

  There was a moment of silence as the women admired the gifts Jessie had brought them, each of them satisfied that she had handpicked the pieces, each of them enjoying the thought that their personalities had been considered and honored in their friend’s purchases.

  Charlotte put down her statue and picked up the pictures she had been examining and then turned to Jessie. She decided to ask the question. “Did you ever figure out what worried you so much, what caused your premonition?”

  Jessie reached for a cookie, took a few bites, and then picked up her tea and drank the last of what she had poured for herself. She stared into the empty cup, trying to find the words to explain what she had asked herself almost daily for the month before they traveled.

  She thought of how she felt when she left, burdened and fearful, how she almost canceled the trip, how James had constantly given her reassurances, but how they had not been enough to satisfy her.

  “Yes,” she answered Charlotte. “I finally figured it out.” She dusted her lap, dropping small pieces of cookie onto the floor.

  “At first, I thought it was going to have something to do with the two of us, that we’d be in a wreck or something.” She eased back in her chair, remembering how frightened she had been on the plane. “And then it became clear that it was something here, something at home.”

  Margaret faced away from her friend and placed the elephants in a longer line, turning some toward the wall, pretending months had passed, wondering what Lana had decided.

  Jessie answered Charlotte. “When we landed in Nairobi, as soon as we stepped off the plane and the hot, wet wind blew into us, the dust from the patch of land near the airport settling upon my lips and eyelids, I was okay. My spirit settled, my mind was focused, and my heart soared.” She dropped her hands beside her. “I knew when we arrived and I placed my feet upon the brown earth that something old was new, that it was the beginning of something I had wanted for a very long time. That it was a new day, a bright, clean new day.”

  Charlotte kept her eyes on Jessie, remembering how Joyce would talk about starting over.

  “It’s strange, I know, but I had a sense that ultimately whatever was going to happen was going to happen whether I was here or not, that I couldn’t control the fates of those I love. And that sometimes the best way to get clear, the best way to find peace, is to pay attention to your own longings, listen to your own pulse.”

  Charlotte turned away.

  “I know that Lana and Wallace are having trouble,” Jessie said matter-of-factly. She faced Margaret, who lowered her eyes. “I know that marriage is tenuous at best.”

  Beatrice thought of Dick and the secret they now shared together.

  “I know that good health is a blessing and not a guarantee.”

  Margaret nodded without lifting her head.

  “That love, like grief, can never be measured.” She eyed Louise, who slid her fingers around the top of her basket and smiled.

  “And that a woman’s got to make her own way, figure out her own ideas, find her own measure of mercy.”

  Charlotte thought of the members of her church and the cold, empty place in her spirit.

  “And then, clear head or premonition, a woman’s got to go find things out for herself.”

  Jessie glanced around at the women who made her strong.

  “But that’s not really the truth,” she said. “None of those things were really what had me troubled.”

  Charlotte set her eyes on Jessie, waiting for more.

  “I didn’t want to go to Africa because I was afraid that I would come home and blame you because of what my ancestors suffered.”

  The other women were bewildered, unprepared for what Jessie was saying.

  “I was afraid that the tiny but indestructible part of me that has bowed down to white folks all of my life, the part that was born in the wombs of their slaves, the part that has seen my parents whipped by them and my children cower to them, I was afraid that tiny cell of bitterness, traced through the bloodline of my people, would divide and multiply inside me, and that nothing that I have with you, nothing that I share with you, not my feelings of love or loyalty or friendship or history, would be enough to keep it from clouding up my memories and filling up my heart.”

  She took a breath and went on.

  “I was afraid that when I stepped off of the plane, the soles of my feet touching the soil of Africa, and landed on the place where we were born and knew as our home, the place we were stolen from, captured like animals and shipped here, I was afraid it would cause the feelings I had minimized and prayed over and held down for as long as I can remember to rise up, gather in my throat, and suffocate me.”

  There was a pause.

  “That’s why I was afraid.”

  The other women did not know how to respond. There was an uncomfortable silence as they struggled with an issue so strong and powerful that it threatened their
friendship, an issue they could not dismantle, dissolve, or make disappear. They were suddenly painfully aware of the color of their skin, the thing that separated them.

  Margaret turned the elephants around, all facing the front, a year unexpected. Beatrice gently put her cup and saucer back on the table, having kept it balanced on her knee for most of the conversation. Louise opened the top of the basket and found inside a pale pink stone resting on the bottom, rose quartz, she knew, the heart stone.

  Charlotte put the stack of photographs on the floor beside her chair. She leaned toward Jessie, her white face drained and afraid. She asked, “And?” It was just that word, offered as a question, innocent but pleading.

  “And, it didn’t happen,” she answered.

  Charlotte sat back.

  “I felt that the place had forgiven you.” She continued. “I thought the ground would cry out like it did when Cain killed Abel, that it would demand your blood, your children’s blood, my vow to despise you. But it didn’t.” She paused. “It sang.”

  Louise pulled out the small quartz stone and held it in the palm of her hand, noticing its lightness, its smooth pink shell. The other women watched as she rolled it between her fingers, thinking how it looked like the flat pads on the paws of a cat, the inside lip of a flower, the edge of the sky farthest from the setting sun, a blushing of clouds, surprised that a small thing could claim such color.

  Louise passed the stone to Margaret, who held it closely to her eyes, noticing all its angles and textures. She then dropped it in Beatrice’s hands, who rolled it across both sides of her face and gently touched it with the tip of her tongue, tasting the saltiness of sweat and the soil of Africa; then she passed it on to Charlotte.

  The pastor held the rock in her hands, sliding it along the center of her palms, feeling its gloss and polish, and doubted that the earth was capable of such a difficult thing as forgiveness, an act that seemed to escape the hearts of most people.

  She thought of the injustices people had done to the land, the mutilated rain forests and razed mountains, the torn ozone layer and the acid-lined clouds, the oil spills in the ocean and the shrinking deserts. She fingered the small stone and then gave it to Jessie.

  “You really think it has the power to do that?” Charlotte asked. “That dust and springs of water and old trees can do such a thing?” She seemed unconvinced. “That the land can forgive savagery and the hands that chained and hanged and killed its children? Do you really think the earth has that much power or even the right to offer mercy to an enemy?”

  Jessie took the stone and thought deeply before she answered. She considered what the young minister was asking, the depth of her question, the simplicity of what she had offered them. She too studied the small, pink stone, a rock mined from the quarries that were dug into the necks of brilliant hills, ravines cut into the valleys and severed from the forests.

  She considered the hands of greedy engineers, the burdened backs of the workers, and the lined pockets of government officials, all collaborating to destroy the land and scar the earth just so one small pink rock might be uncovered and sold.

  “I don’t know if it has the right to give my mercy, my ancestors’ forgiveness.” She handed the quartz to Louise. “But it did it anyway.”

  She stood up to go into the kitchen and refill the teapot. The women waited.

  “The grass and the shrub, the woodland and the savanna, the strands of wheat and the tender buds of cotton, the coffee beans and the desert scrub, they all had peace.” She picked up the pot of tea and headed out of the room.

  The four women slowly began flipping through the photographs and studying each other’s gifts, contemplating the notion of forgiveness and whether their friend was as changed as she professed.

  “And the land gave this peace to you?” Louise asked as Jessie returned to the room with a new pot of tea.

  “Yes,” Jessie replied. “The land, Africa, the ground of my people, the dirt that they brought buried beneath their fingernails and woven in their hair braids, the dirt they rubbed across their bodies as they were being roped and exiled, the dirt they had hidden in tiny leather bags that they wore around their necks along with the cold chains, this land, this earth, gave me peace.”

  She poured herself another cup of tea and held up the pot, an offer for anyone else who might want more.

  Charlotte raised her cup and Jessie moved toward her.

  “Well, I wish I had it,” the preacher confessed as the older woman poured the tea in her cup. “I wish I could go somewhere and find that kind of peace. I wish my soul felt that unpolluted.” She reached for the pitcher of milk.

  Margaret handed it to her. “I don’t know that you always have to travel to get it,” she said to Charlotte. She thought of the recent peace she was only beginning to experience, the relief and the new ease with which she now faced life. “And it’s not always about forgiveness,” she added. “Sometimes it’s about healing.”

  “Sometimes it comes,” said Beatrice. “When you finally get the thing you never thought you’d get, when somebody trusts you.” Beatrice turned toward Louise, who was facing her with a look of warmth and satisfaction.

  “What do you think, Lou?” It was Jessie who asked.

  “It came with acceptance for me, not from anybody else but from me, who I am, who I’ll never be.” Louise held out her cup to Jessie for more tea.

  “I think peace comes when everything in a body and mind and soul is lined up, when the elements in a person’s soul are sorted and undisputed,” Beatrice added.

  “And that takes what everybody’s mentioned—trust, forgiveness, healing, acceptance.” Margaret spoke to Charlotte. “And time.”

  “You’re talking to a bunch of old women, Charlotte. It took us our whole lives to get where we are.” Jessie poured the tea in Louise’s cup and sat down next to her.

  “You’re young,” Louise added. “A person doesn’t find all her answers in the beginning.” She thought of her own experiences, her own bereavement, her losses, her disappointments. “Sometimes it takes a while to figure out exactly what a heart needs to get uncluttered, and then it takes even longer to figure out how to make it happen.”

  “A lifetime,” Beatrice said as she raised her cup.

  Charlotte leaned against her seat and closed her eyes. She paid attention but was displeased with the suggestion. She wasn’t interested in waiting thirty years to find peace.

  Beatrice was sorting through the photographs, trying to figure out which stack of pictures went to Margaret and which stack went to the pastor, confused by the double direction of the photograph line, when the front door opened and Lana walked in. The women looked up.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said as if she had broken up a meeting.

  “It’s all right, honey,” Jessie replied. “We’re just going through my pictures, hearing my stories.” She did not speak of the suitcase her granddaughter-in-law tried to hide behind her legs.

  The other women nodded their greetings.

  “Here,” Louise said to Beatrice as she leaned across the table and took the photographs from her friend, “give them to me.” And Beatrice handed her both stacks.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” Jessie asked Lana.

  “No, ma’am. Is Hope asleep?” She headed toward the bedroom.

  “Yes. James put her down before he left for town.” She studied the young woman, trying to understand if she was returning from somewhere she had been or if she was on her way to somewhere else.

  “Did you have your exercise class?” she asked, remembering her weeknight schedule.

  Lana nodded her head and walked out of the room. Margaret lifted her eyes up to Jessie. The two of them shared a look of concern, and Margaret got up from her seat and followed Lana to her bedroom. Louise continued flipping through the pictures.

  “You okay?” Margaret asked the young woman as they stood in the hall.

  Lana opened the door to the baby’s room and peeked
in. Hope was asleep. Her mother quietly closed the door. She faced Margaret and then walked to the rear of the house to the bedroom she and Wallace shared. The older woman followed.

  “I wrote the letter almost two weeks ago,” she said as she threw the suitcase on the bed and handed Margaret the unopened letter that was sitting on the dresser. “Got money out of the account, even bought an airline ticket.”

  Margaret shut the bedroom door.

  “Tampa,” she added. “I was going to Tampa.”

  Margaret leaned against the wall. She had no response.

  “I picked today because Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins were home and I knew they would give Wallace a lot of support, help him with Hope and everything.” She sat on the bed, knowing that the older woman was waiting for an explanation.

  “I was standing at the boarding gate.” She kicked off a shoe. “I was chosen to be screened by security.” She paused, remembering how they asked her to step aside, how nervous she had been. “Of course they didn’t find anything; and trust me, they looked.” She said this with great animation.

  Margaret smiled.

  “But after they handed me back my suitcase, after I had seen all my stuff taken out and handled by these strangers, after everything was replaced, I don’t know.” She pulled off her other shoe. “I started thinking about all the things I forgot to pack.” She tugged at her socks.

  “I didn’t have sunscreen or tampons. I forgot my yellow sundress and that cute pair of sandals I bought at the end of summer last year.” She pulled her long hair back and twisted it around her hand. “I just didn’t have any of the right stuff,” she concluded.

  Then she looked down at her watch. “I’d be there now, had I gone. I drove around some before I came back.”

  There was a pause.

  “Why did you come home?” the older woman asked. “You could have bought the things you needed when you got to Florida.”

  Lana turned around on the bed and examined her suitcase. “Tampa’s already eighty degrees. I checked the weather before I left.” She unzipped her bag and pulled out one of Hope’s stuffed toys.

  She twisted around to face Margaret. She thought before she spoke. “I don’t know, Mrs. Peele. It just didn’t seem like the right time to be gone, is all. I guess somehow thinking about flying into that heat made me long for a little more winter.”