But the Blacksmith was. He got a colored lawyer Fannie knew to look at the papers, and once everything was in place, the deed changed hands quickly without ever changing faces. Since the Blacksmith paid him more than a fair amount, he did not question the part of the agreement that made him vacate in thirty days. He and his wife were gonna move to Montgomery to be with her family since his kin were all dead.
They never knew that the land they once called theirs became a small, all colored community. Or that property near Tuskegee that his uncle had won in a card game after Bira’s father was killed was to be the home to that man’s granddaughter.
Most of the Blacksmith’s other land was acquired from colored men who couldn’t make it farming or whose desire was to move north or go into business. Some sold because they said they were too good to live as their fathers did on a farm. Although he found the latter lazy men who didn’t understand their destinies, he respected them for one reason: their parents told them never to sell to a white man and they hadn’t. For that he always gave them a more than fair price when they sold to him. When all else failed they sought the Blacksmith, a man who didn’t drink or gamble and who always had money because he worked hard six days a week.
Some of the land he purchased he didn’t change. He allowed the owners to become tenant farmers, then he took a few acres and developed them into an area where little one or two room houses were rented to railroad workers, maids, butlers, anybody who didn’t have the money, not yet most of them told him-to buy their own place. They just didn’t want to live in back of someone’s kitchen.
When the money came in he would buy some more land, and divide it the same way. By the time Jewel was born he owned more than a thousand acres in and outside of Atlanta. Land that most of the white people didn’t want, lots that the white people couldn’t get.
This land he was standing on had once belonged to a proud black family. The father had died young, and the mother had sold him the land but asked him to let her stay on until the children were grown. She had worked for some rich white folks cooking cleaning and almost every night she got to come home. To her own home.
The house was no shotgun deal with one room for everybody. There were a few bedrooms, an airy parlor and a wide porch. The father had a dream, just like the Blacksmith’s, but maybe not as ambitious. He had built this house himself. It was sturdy and in need of new plumbing and a paint job, but by the time Minnelsa and the Piano Man returned with June’s baby, the house would be ready for them.
The woman’s children were now all grown and she had moved to Chicago with a man she met. The house was now free, the land being farmed by someone the Blacksmith hired years ago. Replenished with lots of new things-nice china, crystal glasses, the best furniture and rugs, this would be his daughter’s new home.
Inside the Blacksmith checked the floor boards to see if any of them needed to be replaced. All the furniture was gone except for an old wash stand. He fingered it. Too old to salvage, it needed to be thrown out.
That made him think more of Bira and all the things that he had bought her.
He got the first set of dishes, blue and white with a hunting scene in the middle, from a man that had been given the box they arrived in and told to throw them out. The rich, white woman’s husband had been caught cheating by his wife. She had wanted new china for a long while - Spode china from London - and he had bought home this set from New York along with candy and flowers to beg forgiveness.
She threw them all out along with him. A colored man that cleaned for them found the treasures and brought them to Brown.
“What would I look like throwing this good looking stuff out, eh, Brown?” They both investigated the wooden crate. “Spose I could keep it. But I ain’t got no wife, so what I need fancy china for? Just something more to take care of and clean. Since they brand new and ain’t never been touched I ‘spose I could sell them.”
The Blacksmith looked at him. “Now be smart. I know you ain’t gonna sell them to white folks. . .”
“Hell no!” the man said and covered the box with its lid and a heavy horse-hair blanket. “They wouldn’t buy. They’d have me hauled in and say I stole all of this.”
Brown went back to work on preparing the seat on the wagon. He wanted those dishes for Bira but he wanted them at a fair price.
And what was fair? He had never priced anything like this. What should he give the man?
“How much you think this stuff is worth?” he asked, then added: “If you’re gonna sell to a colored family you can’t set your price too high.”
The man nodded in agreement. “Brown, you got a point. I ain’t got no idea how much something like this would run. I might as well have thrown them in the Chattahoochee River like she told me.”
The man didn’t speak for a while but Brown was calculating. Samuel Wasselman was coming over that afternoon to have some work done on his carriage. He was the local pawn broker and would know how much to charge. “Why don’t you leave them with me? I’ll find out how much they’re worth and give you a fair deal. Maybe in trade. Your wagon needs a lot of work.”
A handshake signed the deal and the Blacksmith hid the box in the shop away from prying eyes.
Wasselman was a tiny man, barely bigger than Bira, with a head for money and the good sense for business. He didn’t deny people his services because of their color. He went into the colored community, that way there was never any problem with the whites who were always in his pawn shop. The Blacksmith found him to be a strange white man because unlike most of his color, he never talked about his being white.
He talked only about him being Jewish. If you asked him, he would tell you he was Jewish. And when he talked about God, man and religion, he wasn’t Baptist, he wasn’t Methodist or Catholic. He was Jewish.
In church the Blacksmith had been taught: Jews killed Jesus. Wasselman said he wasn’t sure who killed Christ but it wasn’t the Jews. Then he added after much thought and a little deliberation: “It was the world.”
Brown figured this was something that somebody who descended from Christ killers would say. But then again he also understood the little man’s point. “God said the Jews were his chosen people,” Wasselman told him once as the Blacksmith repaired his wagon. “Why would we kill his only son?”
So when Wasselman saw the dishes he told the Blacksmith: “Brand new, nice china. Make your wife a fine present.” He told him how much to offer the man. Then he added: “Dishes like that deserve crystal drinking goblets on the table next to them and the best silver.”
The Blacksmith had looked at the little man. “Where am I supposed to get stuff like that? They’re not going to let me go downtown to their shops and purchase what I want no matter how much money I got.”
Wasselman shrugged. “Truth be told, they don’t want me in their shops either. But I can get them for you. I can get you anything you want.”
The Blacksmith listened to the little man. “China like this, on a table in London would be set with crystal goblets and silver serving pieces.”
And so it had started. Wasselman would order the pieces from his cousin Ira in New York and have them shipped to his store. Then he would bring them to the Blacksmith, his best customer, he told him.
When Ira got catalogs from England, fancy books with pictures of the things one could buy, he would send them on to his cousin in the South for this mysterious customer. Wasselman never told him about the Blacksmith, and Wasselman never tried to get others interested in buying these things from him. His prices would have been cheaper than the stores, but, like he told his friend the Blacksmith, they didn’t want him in there either.
It saddened him when Wasselman stopped coming around because he had bought a car. Once he drove over to the Blacksmith’s shop and told him: “You got to catch up with the times. Soon everybody is going to have one of these.” He rubbed the side of his flashy black automobile like he was a pimp trying to sell a woman.
Two nights later they fou
nd the car near the Chattahoochee River, the words “Kill all the Jews” painted on the side of it and Wasselman nowhere to be found. Ira, he was told, came to Atlanta to close down the business but he never found the rich southern gentleman who purchased over a period of fifteen years, enough china, silver and porcelain to fill a mansion.
Inside the house that would be his daughter’s, the Blacksmith imagined a fine oak table with a lace table cloth from Ireland and a set of dishes that only the best money could buy. Bira would see to that, see to the nice things. She had loved looking at the catalogs with him, but when Wasselman had died, she had stopped. He had then hidden the catalogs in his study, afraid someone would find out about the probably dead Wasselman’s kindness.
But standing in this house, this room, he rubbed his hard hands together and said to the walls: “This is what I worked for. To show the world I can do it. This is why I only wanted the best for my daughters.”
* * *
At the wedding the Blacksmith had been the best dressed man and a sight to see. The suit had been custom made in a short period of time but it fit his physic perfectly. With four other daughters, someone whispered, it wasn’t going to go to waste. His steps, much practiced with each daughter, seemed easy reminders of the hammer hitting the anvil although you never heard his feet touch the floor. The big man was as light as a feather.
He was the same as he danced with his wife and all his daughters at the reception at the Mason’s hall.
The wedding had been something to behold but the preparations for it were even more exciting. “William and Bira Brown cordially invite you to the marriage of their daughter” the invitations read. Five hundred of them printed up in record time. Most of them hand delivered to the best colored families in Atlanta, the heads of the schools and colleges where the daughters taught and the preachers of the best known churches.
Within a few days of the delivery of the invites, the RSVPs and presents started rolling in. Not once, it seemed to Peter, did anybody miss June and her unfortunate child. His unfortunate child. She had been packed away to Alabama the neighbors and friends were told, to take care of her ailing Aunt Ella, a woman close to dying. She wouldn’t be up for the wedding. Someone in the family had to go and June was the youngest, why not? It was expected, it was the way things were done.
Never having been in polite southern colored society, Peter was surprised that no one questioned the fact that June was not in the wedding. People did strange things in the south, he thought. He, on the other hand, was doing the strangest thing of all.
What if he had told his father-in-law-to-be that the baby June carried was his and he wanted to marry her? He should have, he knew, but he had never wanted to marry June. Their ages were as far apart as their lives. Life felt more comfortable with Minnelsa. She caused no problems, no ripples in the stream of his or her father’s life. She easily accepted the burden of raising June’s bastard child as her own and living away from her family in Alabama. For this alone he could have loved her. But he realized that there was more to love about her as she teased him with fabrics from her trousseau and with questions about the wedding night. She was innocent in a way that her younger sister, a sister young enough to be her daughter, could never be.
As the groom, he was left out of the wedding preparations. He didn’t mind, he had no family and few friends that were being invited anyway. Everybody seemed to know everybody else. He picked a best man from one of his fellow professors and left the groomsmen to the Blacksmith daughters’ suggestions.
They were like little girls involved with the plans. “A winter wedding is a big challenge,” Fawn explained to him one evening at the table. The wedding was their entire conversation. At first the family seemed so lost without June and Willie, they turned to him now to fill the void. He felt he could never fill their shoes. “Everything has to be done indoors that was going to happen outdoors in the summer.”
“You have to have winter fabrics,” Rosa commented. “I mean Miss Delsey made it a point when she said all brides should wear white and lace, but it has to be a winter color of white. And the lace. . .”
“You have to have a reception. Where can we have a reception inside for five hundred people? My goodness, the food! Who will fix the food?” Jewel wondered.
They chirped like canaries and the Piano Man thought how pretty, like little birds, they all seemed. All of them lovely and perfect in hair and body, in disposition and intelligence. He could have met any one of them at a juke joint and wanted her. As he looked at them he understood how men could easily desire the Blacksmith’s daughters. He could close his eyes and hear their bird like voices, in their perfectly pitched ladylike tones. He could smell their essence, always washed and clean smelling of aromas that only money could buy. If he touched their skins he would find fingernails never bitten, arms and hands softened by oils and Mother Nature. Not a bump or bruise. The gods seemed to protect these almost too-perfect creatures. He could have loved any one of them the way he loved Minnelsa.
But he could never want any of them the way he wanted June.
Her passion still amazed him. As it got closer to his wedding day, what the Blacksmith and his family took as cold feet was really the Piano Man’s interest in what had happened to the most passionate woman-child he had ever known.
In the back of his mind he always remembered that it was June who had seduced him. Perhaps that was why he didn’t feel guilty about her fate. The way she had handled him, he was sure she was not a virgin. When she had told him he was the first he didn’t believe her. In the back of his mind he just knew she must have had others and had just wanted him.
But he had wanted her. He tried to remove her from his mind by spending the time at the home of his intended, not holding her hand as the preparations for the wedding took place, but by sitting at the piano playing elegant classical music that reminded him of his bride to be.
It was the blues, the get down and dirty rhythm he had once played in honky tonks and saloons, that reminded him of June. Of the way her body moved and her voice eased out of her. So he decided not to go back to Miss Emma’s. He would play no more music like that to be free of her.
The wedding was held at the family church. Jewel was Maid of Honor, the other two sisters bridesmaids. The building was packed with well-dressed guests in the February early spring-like weather. The sisters wore gowns of lilac (since it was not really winter and not really spring). Their lavender bouquets expensively shipped from some floral hot house. Their long hair pinned up under tiny crocheted caps. Their dainty hands covered with matching gloves.
When he saw Minnelsa at the end of the aisle he couldn’t believe it. She looked younger and more eager than a school girl in her off-white dress and long white veil. She was a statuesque beauty walking on the arm of her larger-than-life father. And the Blacksmith, everybody would later say, was the most handsome man at the wedding next to the groom.
* * *
When the Blacksmith felt all eyes on him he tried not to be nervous, not to sweat. Not to darken the starched white collar and nice suit. This was going to be one of the most glorious moments in his life, a triumph like no other. June was away from prying eyes having her bastard child and his eldest daughter, an obedient loving daughter, was walking down the aisle on his arm marrying the man he knew was perfect for her because he, the all knowing Blacksmith, had picked him.
He waltzed to music picked out by the groom, the Piano Man’s one contribution to his own wedding. The Blacksmith danced as if he had been in the best saloons of Europe. His daughters were proud for it was a family effort to get him to do this. Embarrassed, because he had never danced before, he had said: “There’s no need of me dancing at your wedding Minnelsa. You’ll dance with your new husband.”
But Minnelsa wouldn’t hear it. “It’s only proper that the father dance at least one dance with his daughter. It’s part of giving me away, Papa. Besides, don’t you want to dance with mama?”
He had to
agree to tradition since he made such a big deal of it. When he saw the look of anticipation in Bira’s eyes he looked to his future son-in-law. “If you’ll play the music, I’ll learn the dance.”
He had learned so easily no one could look at him now and realize that he was counting each move and each step. With Bira he was charming and elegant. With his daughters you could feel the love in the air and see the pride on his face. His family was the best attired and best looking in the room.
The Mason Hall was filled with good food and music but there were a few who gossiped that the Blacksmith had taken things too far. Only those whose names appeared on the guest list were allowed into the festivities. This was to be the biggest thing that colored Atlanta had seen in years. The invitations read “formal attire” and at the door were two young men of questionable sexual preferences who had the dubious task, and they seemed to enjoy it, of deciding what was appropriate attire.
Most of the people they let in, for they were dressed in their Sunday best and even the Blacksmith knew that most people could not afford formal attire. Two young women dressed in flashy gowns and sporting too much make up were turned away. When they argued that they were dressed for a party one of the young men went into a lecture on the difference between a party and a formal wedding reception and physically turned them back to the street.
One man tried to slip in with his work shoes on claiming good shoes hurt his feet.
“The Blacksmith, sir, has explained this concern about his own dress shoes but he wore them. Not his work boots. They are not proper attire for his daughter’s wedding.” When the man suggested that he could enter in his stocking feet they sent him packing.
The cake was almost as tall as Minnelsa and the food was served by the ton. To those who had their ear to the gossip wheel, the word was that Bira insisted that they consult with someone, a lady who came all the way from New York, on what was the proper way to do the whole wedding and what to serve. There was punch, but to the delight of those who had never been to such functions there was real food, most of which they had never tasted before. Many of the guests felt this was an added treat. That the Piano Man’s European and epicurean tastes had helped to design the menu for the wedding feast. It was not a dinner, just something to snack on and most of the people had tasted leftovers from white folks’ kitchens. This food was unusual. And it was good.
The Wilful Daughter Page 19