A Most Precious Pearl

by Piper Huguley

  When they had gotten to Mr. Thomas’s car, however, she made a turn intending to walk. “You should get in.”

  “I can’t.”

  “It’s an open air car, Mags. I’ll take the main roads.”

  “I don’t care. You’ll only be here for a few more weeks. I have to have a care for my reputation since I live here.”

  Mr. Thomas gave a puff though his lips. “You mean after you help Ruby, you are going to come back here?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  He stood over her. “There’s more for you in the world than this. Much more. Let me explain.” He opened the door. “Get in.”

  She bit her lip. Her legs did hurt and it was an open air car. “I’ll sit in the back.”

  “And I chauffer you? Yes ma’am then.”

  “I’m not the one who grins in front of Paul Winslow,” Mags informed him in a haughty tone.

  He got into the car and spoke in a slow, haunting voice. “‘We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.’ Dunbar. I would think that you would know that.”

  “I don’t have the education that you do.”

  “If it were up to me, you would.”

  His words stuck in her mind even as she tried to push them away. Go farther, and have more possibilities in her life? She had never thought of what she could do or be much beyond Winslow. She gazed ahead, taken in by possibilities.

  No one said anything to them as they pulled up in front of the Bledsoe farm. Asa helped her out of the back seat of the car and noticed that she ruefully rubbed her backside as she climbed the stairs to go into the house. It was a much rougher ride in the back than in the front, so she got what she deserved. But when he looked at her lusciously rounded lips, he had to admit…

  He wanted to know what she tasted like.

  She would taste nothing like Aline, his dead fiancée. That was one reason why he was so intrigued. He needed to know how different, but this woman wasn’t just anybody. There was a lot at stake, and he couldn’t just play with Mags in the same way that he had engaged in his wartime romance with Aline.

  So much about the war and the sickness surrounded them and gave his romance with Aline such a temporary feel. He felt utterly reckless about proposing to her because it did not seem real that a French girl would marry a Negro. It was almost a dare to see if she would do it. But she did say yes. She loved him totally, he could tell with her pleading blue eyes. She also easily acquiesced to whatever, whenever he wanted. He had not been a gentleman, so he indulged himself like a child because of the horrors that surrounded them. Therefore, their entire relationship had been like play to him. Unreal. The only time that illusion had been shattered was when she died in less than twenty-four hours after she had been taken with that horrific Spanish flu. The same influenza that caused people to turn all shades of blue and purple and to drown in their own bodily fluids. Life became real.

  Everything about Mags, though, was hard, firm and real. She was the sister of one of his mother’s church friends. Treating her like that would mean he would hear, relentlessly from his mother. Besides with half of his leg gone, he was not a whole man. He had feelings and knew he could perform as a man, still could father children if he wanted to, but the thought of being in a room with a woman and her seeing him take his leg off at night, or of her having to feel his half leg, made him break out in a cold sweat.

  Too real.

  So, while he had noticed her, he could keep everything in a certain perspective.

  Except that she was smart and had great potential. That was the only problem with Margaret. If she developed her gifts of intelligence, what could she be? If he kept in that perspective, as a kindly educative benefactor, he could survive her. Maybe not to return to the womb of his mother’s house, but maybe to be somewhere by himself and be of help to society in some other way.

  She had made such an effort to avoid him this week. She still probably resented him because he had taken her job and she was still nursing the hurt. It couldn’t have been easy, but she did everything that he asked, helping him as he needed, almost like another support system. With her bright, keen mind, she did so much to make his burdens easier, lighter, and with her, even the leg did not hurt in the same way.

  Yes, she was dangerous.

  So, as he ate his pork chops and delicious green beans she had fixed, he was resolved to get about the business of finding out what needed to be found out for the NAACP investigation. When John opened his papers that evening, he was grim. “There were many more lynchings here last month. Now the papers are catching up with what we know.”

  “And that bombing at the beginning of the week in D.C. sir. Don’t forget that.”

  “That was white people.”

  “I know. But they’ll start thinking that Negroes had something to do with it. Mark my words.”

  John shook his head. “I don’t like any of it.”

  “This is why Ruby sent me down here to take note of what is going on. There are organizations, like the NAACP that want to help.”

  “I always thought that was trouble when she was going around down here, trying to start up a branch.”

  “Does it still exist?”

  “No. It pretty much dissolved when she left,” Mags said as she cleared the table. “We need more investigations here.”

  “Being in the mill allows me to see much of what is going on here, but I still need to know more. I thought about going over into the next county where the lynching happened at the start of May and getting some more statements. Will you come with me Margaret?” He had to shout out to the kitchen, but knew that when she appeared in the doorway she had heard him.

  “What do you want me to come for?”

  “If we go into Calhoun County with a picnic basket, we can appear as a courting couple going on a picnic. The perfect excuse.”

  Asa didn’t know how John would react, but he chuckled. “That’s mighty clever.”

  Mags’s eyebrows raised up. Clearly, she was still unsure about it. She turned to her mother. “Mama?”

  “You just about twenty-one. You can do as you please.”

  She was looking for someone to disapprove and he almost wanted to root for her. What about her reputation? Didn’t anyone care? He knew, this is what is was to be a younger child, no one cared as much.

  She turned to face him, wiping her hands on her apron. “If one of my sisters wants to come, then I’ll go.”

  “I don’t want to go around collecting statements,” Nettie said. “I have a sewing circle tomorrow.”

  “I’m organizing for the Negro library,” Em said.

  “I’ll go,” Delie said. Asa saw that Mags looked at her youngest sister gratefully, but there was a stronger look in the offing. Lona. “I mean, I would go, but I’m going to be busy.”

  “Well, that settles it,” Lona said. “I know you’ll make sure to have a lovely picnic tomorrow.”

  John shook his paper. “You be careful. This fellow, H.B. Bryant is telling about some things that make me nervous.”

  “I know H.B. Sir, sometimes some of his information is false.”

  John shook the paper again. “This here is the newspaper. It tell the truth.”

  “That would be wonderful if it did what it was supposed to do. Most of the time. But I was in journalism a bit before the war, and some of these reporters don’t look at the police blotters as completely as they should. I just would advise to read with a little caution.”

  “Hmm. You use to write some of this? Which paper?”

  “Yes sir. The Pittsburgh Courier.”

  “We ever read some of your stuff?”

  “Probably. I wrote a number of columns, more than the straightforward reporting pieces.”

  John wrinkled his forehead. “I read all of these pa
pers front and back and I don’t recall your name.”

  “My pseudonym—my writing name—was my real name. A.T. Caldwell.”

  Mags came into the room from the kitchen wielding a wooden spoon. “You’re A.T. Caldwell? Not Asa?”

  Asa shrugged his shoulders. “Of course I’m Asa. Asa Thomas Caldwell. I just cut off my last name. I didn’t want the association.”

  John sat back smoothing the paper in his hands. “That was smart. I recall some of those columns. You had a lot to say about Negro progress. Some folks down here, like Winslow, wouldn’t like it.”

  Asa nodded. “I know. That’s way I didn’t want to advertise who I was.”

  “I’ll be. We used to love to read your work aloud around here. Ruby was always quoting you, A.T. Caldwell says this or that. Why ain’t you writing that anymore?” John asked.

  “I went over to correspond for the war. When I came back, I was different.”

  “Seems like we needing someone like you now more than ever.”

  “Thank you. It has been hard to get into the reporting mode again, but I’m willing to give it a try as long as I have my assistant with me.”

  Mags pointed with her wooden spoon. “You all want me to go off into the car on a picnic with a lying man?”

  Lona kept on working on her piecework. “What lie? He use part of his name here, change it up for his writing. When someone is writing something that could get them into some trouble, it seems like the right thing to do.”

  “No one can see it’s dishonest?” Mags slammed her wooden spoon down on the table in the resulting quiet to her question. She untied her apron strings and went out onto the big porch into the night air.

  And the way she asked the question made it seem so. He needed to explain to her. When looking around at the shocked faces of her family, he realized some of them were surprised at her reaction, so he pushed himself up on his cane and went out to see her on the porch. No one tried to stop him.

  She stood in the summer air, her arms wrapped around herself. “I want to say goodnight before I take my leave of you.”

  “Goodnight,” Mags informed him.

  He stood next to her. “Do you really want to stay home tomorrow? You don’t want to come with me on my investigations?”

  “You’re something, do you know that?”

  “I’ve been told that before, yes.”

  “How come you never said that you were A.T. Caldwell?”

  “I didn’t think it mattered that much.” Asa shrugged. “I wrote some of those pieces so many years ago, it seems to be from a different person. Before the war.”

  “Yes, it was because of those things that you spoke of in those pieces that you went to war.” She stepped away from him. “We were devastated when those pieces stopped coming. They meant so much, you provided so many viewpoints to us, so much hope. And then they stopped. Why?”

  “I went to the war.”

  “And? You were still supposed to write from the war.”

  “I was injured,” Asa said very shortly himself, not wanting to revisit this territory, not with her. Not now.

  “And then?”

  “I had nothing else to say.”

  “Is that why you are here now? To find something to say?” Mags turned and faced him.

  He squared off with her. “Partly,” he said and stopped. “Ruby thought I might be helpful in shedding light on things that were happening here. As usual, she was right. There are a lot of terrible things happening in Georgia that should not be happening.”

  “Will it help you to write again?”

  Asa lowered his head. “I don’t know about that.”

  She stepped up to him and touched him on his arm. “It must. You have to find a way to speak again.”

  Asa couldn’t help himself. He touched the back of her arm and traced his hand up to her shoulder, letting it rest there, just a little way away from her soft cheek. “Maybe you can help me with that, Pearl.”

  “I don’t think you should call me that.” She trembled a bit.

  “Why not? Pearls are gems. They are rare and precious. And they are beautiful.”

  “Oh,” was all she said.

  Then he touched her cheek and found that it was much softer than he had thought possible or dreamed of. “Just like you,” he said, in case she did not understand.

  “I don’t like teasing.”

  “I’m not teasing you. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Ruby did not send you down here to tell me pretty words in the dusk of summer,” Mags informed him, took his hand off of her shoulder and returned it to his own personal space.

  Asa chuckled. “See, stalwart as always. No, she didn’t. She wants me to help her efforts for the NAACP.”

  “And?”

  “And you, if you will let me.”

  “Help me, what?”

  “You. Get your education. Help you to improve yourself. Get you out of here.”

  “And if I don’t want to leave?”

  “Why wouldn’t you want to leave here?”

  “It’s my home,” she said haltingly.

  “That attitude is what is keeping our people down.”

  “I have work to accomplish here.”

  “Helping your mother?”

  “That. And other things.”

  He leaned down and frowned. “That sounds mysterious. Dangerous stuff.”

  “What do you have to say about it? You’re here to collect material for the NAACP. For your reporting. Then you can move on about your business.”

  “What would you say if I told you that I care?”

  “I wouldn’t believe it,” Mags said flatly.

  Asa leaned over and whispered in her ear. Her spicy scent lingered in his nose and curled up on his tongue. “I care, Pearl.”

  She stood back from him. “Then stay out of my way.”

  Asa could feel her heart beating through the thin cotton of her white shirtwaist. “What if I told you that I think it is God’s desire that you have the proper protection? For your dangerous work. Your real work?”

  “To bring down Paul Winslow?”

  He righted himself and looked at her jewel eyes. “That is dangerous.”

  “I don’t care. I want him to suffer.”

  “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.”

  “What if I’m his instrument?” Mags said. “A young Negro woman?”

  “What would you do?”

  “I’ve been puzzling it out. I don’t know yet.”

  “It could be that your objective and mine are the same. Let’s go around tomorrow and find out.” He reached down and stroked the back of her hand with the pad of his thumb.

  “I’m willing to do that,” Mags acquiesced, and snatched her hand away. “But you’ve got to stop telling me about my looks and things. I don’t want to get confused.”

  “What’s confusing you?”

  “You. You’re confusing me and I don’t like it. I need to be clear headed about what I am doing.”

  “I find nothing wrong with spending time with a beautiful young woman who thinks as I do.”

  “I don’t like playing games.”

  “Maybe I can show you some fun in life while I am on assignment. What’s the harm in that?”

  “Paul Winslow is no game.”

  “No. He’s not.” He took all jocularity out of his voice. “We can accomplish what we need, and then, Margaret, you have to promise that you’ll let me take you from here back to Pittsburgh.”

  “We’ll see,” she said and stepped away from him.

  Asa went toward his car, did the difficult work of cranking it to start it up. He shouted out above the din of the car. “I’ll be here in the morning where we can think about our next steps.”

  “We haven’t star
ted yet!” she shouted out after him.

  Don’t be too sure of that. He waved at her puzzled face as he pulled off into the road. She believed in him and that was the very first step. To everything.

  Chapter Six

  Mags woke up with the sun the next day—no Saturday off for her. Lona told her to kill one of the older roosters for the picnic. She set about frying up the chicken and cooling the meat. She made a double-batch of biscuits, opened marinated peaches and cold green bean salad. She didn’t want the family to feel as if she were hogging one of the precious chickens for their picnic, so she fried just part of the chicken to take but boiled and sliced down the breasts for a cold chicken salad for lunch for the family. All while she was doing this, she made the grits and peach jam with biscuits for breakfast, frying some ham slices for side meat.

  She amazed people at how she was able to get so much done within a short amount of time, but with any task she could envision what needed to be done and could line up the steps in such a way that made the path to completing the task clear. The way she thought about tasks was what made Paul Winslow notice her efficiency.

  She still had plenty of time to take off her house dress and replace it with her second best, a spotless white dress with a high collar and long-sleeves topped with frilly cuffs. The whine and cough of Mr. Thomas’s car sounded outside just as she put her pearls in her ears. She piled her hair up on top of her head and came out into the front room, donning a big apron to serve breakfast.

  “You look very nice daughter.” John nodded approvingly.

  Delie giggled. “You going to be with him all day?”

  A shadow darkened the door. “I hope so. We should be back in time for dinner.” Mr. Thomas smiled and Delie kept giggling.

  Lona gestured to the big front table and their visitor came and to his seat. She folded her napkin. “I’ll have something nice and ready for you all when you get back.”