But it was not as easy as that. I knew what Mumma would have said. “You cannot trust a white man. Tread carefully, Nymphadora, and make sure that your way is true. Think not only once, but twice before you act and speak.” But I didn’t. It’s shameful to admit here, I cannot even write it down without my hand springing to my face and covering it in my shame, while the other one writes the humiliating truth out plain. I was lonely. I was so very, very lonely. And though I knew it was dangerous to think of Dr. Gardner as a friend—“Does he think of you that way?” I could hear Mumma jeer—I couldn’t help it.
I’d gone two years in Spring City surrounded by Stars but without one single friend. The Stars of Spring City are not ironical. They do not appreciate sarcasm. When I say something I mean to be clever, they think I’m being snide. I overheard Nadine tell some little acolyte whom I made cry with an offhand remark, “Don’t mind Nymphadora being nasty to you. She’s just smelling herself.” They believe wit is a symptom of bitterness. They don’t laugh like Dr. Gardner.
I have never seen Julia Toneybee-Leroy in person, only a very grainy photograph of her in the Courtland County Mercury, which was less a newspaper and more a kind of oversized yearbook for the various wealthy white New York and Boston families with estates in Courtland County. The paper published her picture a few years ago, after she left on safari. A print had been sent back from the ocean liner in Boston, showing Julia Toneybee-Leroy stern and small on the deck of the ship. In the photo, it was hard to get a sense of her actual face. All I could tell was that she was slight and thin and dressed in white. Everyone said she was beautiful, but this didn’t really mean anything. She was rich enough to be called beautiful no matter what she looked like. I knew I couldn’t tip my hand with Dr. Gardner and ask him outright to describe her, so I settled instead on imagining her. In my mind, she had a short pert nose and a very wide mouth and small beady eyes framed with thick black lashes. She resembled a more attractive, hairless, white version of one of her apes. She wore a flouncy pink hat, like the one I’d seen in the newspaper photo, but her dress was too big and her neck swam out of the collar. I decided her voice must be high and shrill, used to making only demands. And despite all this, in my perverse imaginings, I thought Dr. Gardner was wildly in love with her.
Our next sitting was marred by Dr. Gardner’s irritation. He put on a show of posing and reposing me. “First here,” then “Here.” He did this for forty minutes, had me get up and resettle myself against the floorboards like some mangy old dog, until the flesh at the backs of my thighs was wrinkled from the slats pressing into it every which way. At the end of it all, I was so annoyed, so exhausted, I would agree to almost anything. Which I think had been his plan all along.
“I think I’ve got it,” he said finally. “If you’ll do it.”
“Just tell me.”
The pose he wanted was this: my feet planted wide apart on the floor, so my knees fell open, so he could see all of me.
When he asked me to do it, he said please again. He called me Miss Jericho. And he looked me full in the face, very friendly and professional. He smiled. He asked me to pose like that and I said yes because I was tired, because I wanted to get out of the room and back to my own, because I was deadly lonely and he was the closest I had to a friend, because I wanted to prove I was more daring than an heiress who could order apes from Africa for her own amusement.
I did what he asked. I posed like that. And don’t you know, don’t you know, he was kinder to me than ever. He kept up a running list of questions. “You’ve never told me, Miss Jericho,” he asked, “how your family came to Spring City.”
“We were born here like everyone else.”
“It’s strange there are Negroes here. I mean, all the way out here. You don’t think there would be.”
“We’re everywhere, when you think about it.”
“It doesn’t seem so.”
“Well, I know there are Stars of the Morning in every state of the Union, so we have to be everywhere. We’re probably everywhere in the world.” We are not supposed to speak our group’s name to any man who is not a Saturnite and certainly not a white man.
He laughed at this, enchanted. “What is a Star of the Morning? It sounds very poetic.”
And so I told him about the Stars. Not everything, I still had some pride. I explained that we were a women’s help organization.
“But we are a secret.” I was drunk with his interest. “We even have secret names.”
“You have a secret name?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I couldn’t possibly tell you that.”
“What do you mean? Aren’t we friends?”
And I couldn’t help it, I grinned straight into his face at that and he grinned back. I almost forgot how I was posing. “I still can’t tell you.”
“Was your mother a Star, too?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what was her secret name?”
“She didn’t have one.”
But Dr. Gardner was still caught up in the novelty of it. “Oh, please, Miss Jericho, please oh please tell me your name.”
“No.”
“How about when the drawings are done? I’ll give you one if you tell me your name.”
“Why would I want a nude drawing of myself? It’s indecent.”
“No, it isn’t.” Dr. Gardner was hurt. “I explained. It’s a great monument. You’ll want it as a souvenir.”
“Not a good enough prize to get me to tell you my name.”
He said nothing and I was scared I had offended him. My knees made an odd, creaking sound as I kept them bent. Finally I said, “Nymphadora.”
“What?”
“My name is Nymphadora.”
He smiled at this. “Don’t you scrimp on my gift now,” I said, pretending to sulk. “I expect a full copy of the drawing when you’re done.”
“Of course,” he said.
THAT NIGHT, I dreamed I was in the Toneybee Institute for Great Ape Research. I wore a white lace nightgown and I walked up and down the halls and all around me was the cologne of Dr. Gardner—animals and pencil shavings and blood. In the dream, I walked until my feet were sore and then I found a resting place, a window seat with a view of all the forests in Courtland County and Spring City. As my eyes shut I felt a sharp pain in my chest and my eyes flew open and over me stood Dr. Gardner himself with a long silver knife. He was stabbing me in the heart.
And this is how I knew, when I woke up, that I was in love with Dr. Terrence Gardner.
I had never been in love before. I’d flirted with a few boys from town when I was a very young girl, but none of that had ever stuck. I’d joked to Mumma that I was just a cold fish, not meant for this world, singular and odd, and I had thought it true.
The prospect of being in love made me giddy. I was now a lover and I tried to convince myself that the dream was really a good omen. That my spirit was so twisted and broken by my parents’ demise, I had managed to turn what was a wonderful blessing into a nightmare. It did not matter anymore if I was odd or restless or perhaps disturbed: I now loved and, I allowed myself to hope, was maybe loved in return.
As the day went on, the dream didn’t leave me. It became more vivid, stronger, so that at times I became actually quite afraid that Dr. Gardner was about to leap from behind a bush or fence with a dagger to finish the job. But I told myself, in a kind of frenzy, that this fear, too, was a good omen. That it was just the stutters of a shy and bashful heart and further proof of my love for Terrence Gardner and his very real affection for me.
That night was our Star of the Morning meeting.
After we went through our rites and called our names, we came to our order of business and Nadine Morton told me, “You’ve got to talk to that white doctor again, Sister Nymphadora.”
I felt a pang of guilt. “What do you mean?” I feigned ignorance, felt only panic.
“Sister Methuselah, tell her what you told me.�
�
Methuselah, better known as Jane Hall, came to the front of the room to stand beside Nadine. Jane Hall was new to the Stars: her mother was not a Star, had been one of those loose women my mother warned me about. But Jane was a hard worker, sober as a judge. She didn’t go in for drink like the rest of her family, so we’d invited her to join. She had a husband, Graverly. He wasn’t from Spring City, he came from down south. He’d come here for a summer—serving one of the rich families and he’d fallen in love with Jane, a laundress, and stayed. Neither of them had any money. Graverly was always without a job. He would travel around the county, looking for work, leaving poor Jane alone for weeks at a time. Jane was smaller than I, and younger, and much prettier, with big clear eyes and full, round lips that pursed like a baby doll’s when her mouth was closed. But she was scared of me because she remembered the power my mother had. She stood up at the front of the room now and avoided my eyes.
She began, “You all know the trouble my Graverly’s been having finding work? You all know how hard that is?”
The Stars murmured agreement.
“Well,” she said, “he told me he got offered some work up at the Toneybee. He said Dr. Gardner’s been dropping by the barber shop—”
This was a shock. I did not like to imagine Dr. Gardner wandering Spring City without telling me.
“He came by the shop and he offered all the men there work. He said it would be easy. Graverly said he told them it would all be work of the mind. And Graverly thought this sounded good enough. He didn’t see anything wrong with that. But the other men, they said they wouldn’t go because what was this work the doctor was talking about? They said it didn’t sound right. They said they didn’t want to go to no monkey house. But you know my Graverly. He needed work. He’s a good man, he just needs work—”
“Get to the point, Sister Methuselah,” Nadine prompted. “Just say to them what you said to me.”
“So he went there. He went to the institute. And he thought the work would maybe be, you know, cleaning up or something like that. Something janitor-like. Maybe pick up after the monkeys—he was fine with that, Graverly’s not too proud for that if it’s honest work—”
“Methuselah,” Nadine chided.
Sister Methuselah turned her pretty little head to Nadine, like an obedient child. She nodded. She said, “Well, the point is, my Graverly, he just wants honest work. So Sister Nymphadora, you’ve got to talk to that doctor again and tell him if he’s going to offer work it’s got to be honest.”
“Wait,” I spoke slowly, “please, Sister, explain what you mean.”
“That doctor doesn’t have honest work. Instead, he asks Graverly up there for tea, in this room with only two chairs and one big mirror in it. And while they’re drinking it, Graverly says he gets to feeling all sort of funny, all sort of light-headed, see? Almost like he’s been drinking, but he knows he hasn’t touched a drop, has only drunk Dr. Gardner’s tea. And then when he’s feeling good and woozy, Dr. Gardner brings out some little cardboard cards, some little cards with all these queer pictures on them, and he holds them up and he asks my Graverly questions. He’ll hold up a picture of two different shapes and he’ll say, ‘Which one is disease?’ Or he’ll hold up a picture of different colored squares and he’ll say ‘Where does sin lie?’ ” And at first, Graverly, he thought it was easy work. He thought he was getting away with it. But, oh, Sister Nymphadora, it’s just getting queerer and queerer.
“It’s making Graverly uneasy, and he thinks maybe the doctor is unbalanced. And he doesn’t know what he’s doing with all these answers, the doctor is just writing them down in a book. And at the end of it that doctor, he shakes his hand and says, ‘Good work,’ and tells Graverly to come back again. He asks for Graverly again and again. And Graverly is afraid, because each time he goes back the tea gets stronger and each time he drinks it he gets lighter-headed and the questions, they get queerer and queerer. The last time, that doctor, he showed him two boxes, a red one and a white one, and he said ‘Which one is the soul? Which one is the mind of god? Which one is beginning and which is end?’ and my Graverly, he tells me, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. And he couldn’t even answer, his mouth had gone dry and he says his head was swimming and then, and then . . .” Sister Methuselah brought a slim, chapped hand to her pretty little mouth. “My Graverly, he swears, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, he saw through the mirror, another man, in a lab coat like Dr. Gardner and a big monkey. And the monkey was looking at the same pictures as he! And after that, he said his head hurt worse and worse and his gut, it began to feel like it would burst, and he begged Dr. Gardner to let him leave and he came back home to me and told me all about it. And he thinks, well, you know my Graverly is not a godly man, but he thinks, he’s pretty sure, that what that doctor is up to up there is un-Christian.”
Sister Methuselah stopped to take a breath. She looked around at all us Stars, who were listening to her, transfixed. “Graverly thinks it’s unnatural,” she added, taking a weak triumph at the rightness of that word.
All fifteen of us Stars were quiet for a bit, taking in her story.
“Well, thank you, Sister Methuselah.” Nadine looked pointedly at me. “Graverly’s not the only one. You all know I work up at the institute. For the last two months, I’ve seen buses, the doctor has been renting school buses, and he brings up young colored men. I think they’re from Boston. They have to be. The bus comes very early in the morning, before light, and then it takes the men back at night. It’s never the same ones. New men every time. Don’t speak a word, come in and out like ghosts, every last one of them haunted. It’s like they’ve died inside when he’s done with them. The few I’ve seen, they don’t even know enough not to meet my eye and hide it. They just stare straight ahead at me, like he’s taken something out of them. Like he’s taken something out of their heads.
“And you see,” she said, abruptly turning to me, “that’s why you must ask him to stop. You got him to stop drawing us. He obviously can listen to reason. What he’s doing is evil, but he’s maybe a logical man. We wouldn’t be Stars if we didn’t try to ask him to stop. It’s our duty.”
The wood bench was hard and ragged and cold underneath my seat. I could hear it creak. I nodded. My mouth had gone completely dry.
“Sister Nymphadora, you know him. You can get at him, even though he’s peculiar. You need to get him to stop this nonsense.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m hardly the right person. Why don’t you write to the Negro League in Boston or—”
“He won’t listen to them. And once you get them involved, you get that girl involved, too. Julia Toneybee-Leroy is a little girl but she’s rich and she’s powerful. She has enough money to shut up any league she likes. As soon as you get any of that political nonsense involved, it may as well be over. They’ll pay it no mind and do what they like.
“But if it’s just between us . . .” Nadine tried hard to make her voice sweet. “Just between people who know each other . . .” She was careful not to use the word friends. In Nadine’s mind, in the minds of all the other Stars, to call a man like Dr. Gardner a “friend” was a perversion of the word. “It doesn’t have to become about politics or race men at all,” she continued. “He’ll stop listening if you bring that up. He’ll listen to you, he’s listened before. You need to come with me on my next shift. I’ll let Dr. Gardner know you are coming to speak to him. You need to ask him what all this means and get him to stop.”
“Tell him,” Sister Methuselah said suddenly, shrilly emboldened by the success of her story, “tell him there’s not enough money in the world for us to sell our souls to him. Tell him we’re good Christian people here. Tell him we can’t be bought.”
“All right.” The words were bitter in my mouth, because I very obviously could be bought, was already bought, for a few foreign cookies and kind words. “All right, Methuselah, I will try.”
Charlotte
“They’re
all racists.”
“Who?” Adia asked.
I had caught her before she went into school. It didn’t take much to get her to skip. We’d snuck back into her house while Marie was out teaching her morning class, and now we sat huddled together underneath the blankets in her room.
“The Toneybee Institute.” I slid the book toward her. “It says it right there.”
Adia flipped the pages and slid it back to me. “You’re gonna tell me what’s in it, or you’re just gonna sit here and watch me read it?”
“The lady who wrote this book. She came here and talked to the lady who made up that institute, the Toneybee Institute. She interviewed her.” I tapped the cover. “Miss Toneybee-Leroy. And she found out about it. They used to do experiments. In the 1930s. This doctor, Dr. Gardner, he did experiments on black people and chimps, and they did this one horrible, disgusting thing with this woman, this black woman who lived around here, and one of the chimps—”
“What happened?” Adia said, confused.
“It’s in the book,” I said again. “It’s there.”
“Are there, like, pictures if I don’t want to read the whole thing?”
I showed her the inset of photos: a black-and-white shot of the outside of the Toneybee; a hazy reproduction of Julia Toneybee-Leroy’s oil portrait; and then a few old pictures of what must have been Miss Toneybee-Leroy again, young and in a blouse and a pleated skirt and a cloche on her head, with a chimp riding her hip. The chimp wore an identical outfit, right down to the skirt and the hat.
“Those don’t look so bad,” Adia said faintly.
“Just wait.”
She turned the page.
“This is it?’
I nodded, gravely.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman Page 14