Ann Petry

by Ann Petry

  They could keep right on hurting, she thought grimly, because no matter what she had to go through, no matter how much money it cost, she wasn’t going to let Jones put her out. She swayed back and forth as the bus lurched, trying to wipe out the thought of the pain in her feet by determinedly repeating, “And I ain’t a-goin’ to be put out.”

  It was nice of Mrs. Hedges to tell her where to find a root doctor, she thought. Yet now that she was actually on her way to consult him, she felt a little guilty. The preacher at the church she went to would certainly disapprove, because in his eyes her dealing with a root doctor was as good as saying that the powers of darkness were stronger than the powers of the church. Though she went to church infrequently, because she usually had to work on Sundays, the thought of the preacher disturbed her. But he didn’t need to know anything about her going, she decided. Besides, even the preacher must know there were some things the church couldn’t handle, had no resources for handling. And this was one of them—a situation where prayer couldn’t possibly help.

  She climbed awkwardly out of the bus at 140th Street, putting her weight on her feet gingerly to cushion them against the quick stab of pain any sudden, careless movement would bring. Before she was quite off the steps, she was already looking for the root doctor’s sign, so that she collided with the passengers waiting to get on. Someone stepped on her feet and instantly hot fingers of pain clawed at her bunions, reached up her legs and thighs, making her draw her breath in sharply.

  Then she saw the sign and she forgot about the pain. It was right near the corner as Mrs. Hedges had said—a big sign that winked and blinked off and on in the dark so that she thought the words “David, the Prophet” were like a warm, friendly hand beckoning to her to come in out of the cold. She looked at it so long her eyes started to blink open and shut just like the sign. So he really was a prophet. She had thought perhaps Mrs. Hedges had made up that part about his being a prophet. That was fine, for he would be able to tell her what the future looked like for her.

  It wasn’t a very big place she discovered when she got right in front of it, though it did have a large window that was sparkling clean. She stopped to look at the objects displayed in the window. Some of them were familiar, but most of them she had never seen before and could only conjecture about the way in which they were used. There were colored candles, incense burners, strangely twisted roots, fine powders in small boxes, dream books, lucky-number books, medallions, small figures of monkeys and elephants, a number of rabbits’ feet, monkey’s fur, and candlesticks of all sizes and shapes. The window also contained a great many statues of the Madonna. They were illuminated with red lights, and there were so many of the statues and thus so many of the lights that they sent a rose-colored glow out onto the sidewalk.

  She tried to see what the shop looked like inside, but the curtain at the window and another at the door effectively blocked her gaze. Remembering Mrs. Hedges’ warning, she took part of the bills from her pocketbook, and opening her coat pushed them deep inside her dress. Then she opened the door.

  The air inside was heavy with the smell of incense and she saw that it came from an incense burner on the counter that ran along one side of the small shop. Her first confused impression was that the place was full of people, but a second, careful look revealed five or six women seated on the chairs that lined the long wall opposite the counter. Three women were standing in front of the counter and she walked toward it keenly disappointed that the Prophet wasn’t right there behind the counter instead of the young girl who was waiting on the customers. The girl looked up at her approach and said, “Yes?” very quietly.

  Min noticed that the girl’s eyes were almond-shaped and then she looked down at the counter. There was a thick book on one side of it. The rest of the top was covered with trays that held brilliantly colored glistening powders—bright orange, green, purple, yellow, scarlet. She stared at them fascinated, noting how finely ground they were, wondering what they were used for and which one the Prophet would recommend to her. She forgot about the girl behind the counter.

  “Yes?” the girl repeated.

  Min held on to the counter at a loss for words, suddenly frightened at having actually come to the place. Her fright confused her so that for a moment she couldn’t remember why she had come. Jones. It had to do with Jones and she let go the counter. “I come to see the Prophet David,” she said in her sing-song voice, the words coming out half-muffled so that she sounded as though she were whispering.

  “Won’t you sit down?” The girl nodded toward the line of chairs across the room. “Those ladies are waiting to see him, too. He takes everybody in turn.”

  Min sat down next to a light-complexioned woman whose face was covered with freckles, and glancing at the woman she thought, It’s better to have a dark skin; lots of times these light-skinned women have freckles all over them till they look like they’ve been marked by the Devil’s fingertips. The woman kept turning her pocketbook over and over between her hands with a nervous gesture that finally had the eyes of all the women near her following the constant restless motion of her hands. She had a big awkwardly wrapped package on her lap and in order to keep turning the pocketbook between her hands she had to reach over and around the package.

  Wonder why she doesn’t set the package on a chair instead of holding it, Min thought. And tried to conjecture what was in it—whatever it was bulged here and there, and she couldn’t think of anything that would look quite like that after it was wrapped up, so she stopped thinking about it. She moved impatiently in the straight-backed chair, thinking that sitting like this just waiting was enough to drive anybody crazy. The thought that had frightened her when she was standing at the counter returned suddenly. How had she dared to come here?

  It was the first defiant gesture she had ever made. Up to now she had always accepted whatever happened to her without making any effort to avoid a situation or to change one. During the years she had spent doing part-time domestic work she had never raised any objections to the actions of cruelly indifferent employers. She had permitted herself to be saddled with whole family washes when the agency that had sent her on the job had specified just “personal pieces.” When the madam added sheets, towels, pillowcases, shirts, bedspreads, curtains—she simply allowed herself to be buried under the great mounds of dirty clothes and it took days to work her way out from under them, getting no extra pay for the extra time involved.

  On other jobs the care of innumerable children had been added when the original agreement was for her to do the cooking and a little cleaning. The little cleaning would increase and increase until it included washing windows and walls and waxing floors. Some of her madams had been openly contemptuous women who laughed at her to her face even as they piled on more work; acting as though she were a deaf, dumb, blind thing completely devoid of understanding, but able to work, work, work. Years and years like that.

  Never once had she protested. Never once, she thought with pride, had she left a job, no matter how much work there was or how badly the people treated her. As long as they paid her, she stayed on in spite of their reneging on her days off, in spite of having to work on Sundays so she couldn’t get to church, though when she first started work it was always with the understanding she wouldn’t be in on Sundays. Day after day she’d go back until the people moved away or got somebody else. She was never the one to make the change.

  It was the same thing with the various husbands she had had. They had taken her money and abused her and given her nothing in return, but she was never the one who left.

  And here she was sitting waiting to see the Prophet David—committing an open act of defiance for the first time in her life. And thinking about it that way, she was frightened by her own audacity. For in coming here like this, in trying to prevent Jones from putting her out, she was actually making an effort to change a situation. No. It was better to think of it as being an effort to kee
p a situation the way it had been before. That is, she was trying to stay there in his house because there she was free from the yoke of that one word: rent. That word that meant padlocked doors with foul-mouthed landladies standing in front of them or sealed keyholes with marshals waving long white papers in their hands. Then she thought if Jones ever found out she had come here, he would try to kill her because he was dead set on having that young Mrs. Johnson.

  As she waited, she became aware that the women standing at the counter were spending a long time going through the thick book that was placed so handily right on top of the counter. They turned the pages and talked to the girl behind the counter before they finally put in an order.

  When they told her what they wanted, their voices had a firm sound with an underlying note of triumph. “Fifteen cents worth of 492.” The girl would take it down from the shelf in back of her or scoop it up from a tray on the counter and then weigh the fine powders on the scales. “Fifty cents of 215”; or, “I guess a dime’s worth of 319 will fix it.”

  Listening to them, Min was filled with envy. She watched them turn away from the counter with the small packages safely tucked away in pocketbooks or thrust deeply into their coat pockets, and she saw such a glow of satisfaction on their faces that she thought if she only knew what to get she’d buy it the same way and go on home without waiting for the Prophet. But she wouldn’t know how to use any of the powders after she got them. Some, she knew, were for sprinkling around the house, some for putting in coffee or tea, others were intended to be burnt in incense burners like those in the shop window, but she didn’t know one from the other. There wouldn’t be any point in her looking through the thick pages of the book on the counter, because the very sight of so much print would only bewilder her.

  Then she forgot about the book, because a woman emerged from behind the white curtains that hung at the back of the store. All the women sitting on the chairs moved slightly at the sight of the man who followed the woman from behind the curtains. He was tall and he wore a white turban on his head. The whiteness of the turban accentuated the darkness of his skin. He beckoned toward the row of chairs and the woman sitting nearest the back of the shop got up and disappeared behind the curtains with him. The curtains fell back in place with a graceful movement.

  Like the others, Min moved in her chair when she saw him—shifting her feet, leaning forward away from the chair and then leaning back against it. That musta been the Prophet, she thought. Though she listened intently, she could hear no sound from behind the curtains. No murmur of conversation. Nothing. The quiet in back of the curtains disturbed her so that she wished uneasily she hadn’t come. Then, remembering that she was dead set on not being put out, dead set on keeping Jones away from young Mrs. Johnson, she folded her hands over her pocketbook, content to wait her turn; determined to finish this action she had begun.

  But her tranquillity was disturbed by the freckled woman who sat next to her. The woman kept turning her pocketbook over and over, first one side then the other, until the constant restless motion was unbearable.

  In desperation Min turned toward the woman. “You been here before?” she asked, and saw with relief that the pocketbook stayed still in the woman’s lap.

  “Sure,” the woman said. “I come about once a week.”

  “Oh”—Min tried to conceal her chagrin, tried to keep it from showing in her face. “I thought if you come once he could fix whatever was wrong on the one trip.” She couldn’t come every week. It was out of the question, for she never went anywhere at night, and Jones would get suspicious and probably act nastier than ever if she started going out regularly when she’d never done it before.

  “Depends on what it is,” the woman said. “Some things ain’t easy. I ain’t got a easy case. Prophet’s helped a lot, but it ain’t all fixed yet.”

  “No?” Min hoped if she acted interested but not too interested the woman would tell her about it. Then she could get some idea about her and Jones—whether she’d have to pay weekly visits to the Prophet or whether this one time would be enough.

  “No,” the woman lowered her voice slightly. “You see Zeke, that’s my husband, has got a way of not styin’ in bed nights. He just disappears. Goes to bed like anybody else and then all of a sudden he’s gone. I’ve stayed awake all night and I ain’t never seen him go. Next day he’s there for breakfast and don’t know nothing about not being in bed all night. Says he don’t know where he’s been or nothing.”

  Min frowned as she listened to her. Sounded to her like the woman’s husband was fooling her. Probably with some other woman. “Prophet don’t know how to fix it?” she asked and waited impatiently for the answer, beginning to doubt the Prophet’s power, beginning even to question his honesty, for it looked like to her anybody ought to be able to see the woman’s husband was fooling her.

  “Oh, yes, he don’t disappear quite so often. Prophet’s cut him down a lot,” the woman said eagerly. “But he say Zeke ain’t co-operatin’.” She indicated the bulky package on her lap. “Prophet’s goin’ to sprinkle his shoes tonight. He put off doing it, but he says ain’t nothing else to do now seein’s Zeke ain’t co-operatin’.”

  Min wanted to ask more questions, but at that moment the Prophet appeared from behind the curtain and beckoned to the woman. She watched her walk toward the white curtains, thinking that perhaps Mrs. Hedges had been right not to put any faith in root doctors, for surely that woman with the freckles didn’t need to come here every week. She was glad she had talked to her, though, for if after the first few minutes of talking to the Prophet she decided he was just stringing her along like he was obviously doing with this woman, why, she wouldn’t give him any money—she would just leave and look up another root doctor that was honest.

  Sprinkling the shoes evidently didn’t take very long, Min thought, for when she looked up again the freckled woman was coming out from behind the curtains. Her face was lit up by such a luminous, radiant smile that Min couldn’t help but stare at her, thinking, Well, whatever else he might be able to do the Prophet deserved some credit for making that fidgety woman look so happy. The Prophet beckoned toward the row of chairs.

  “It’s your turn,” said the fat woman sitting next to her.

  Min walked toward the curtains in the back, and the nearer she got to them, the more she wished that she hadn’t come or that while she was sitting waiting outside she had got up and gone home. Her heart started jumping so that she began to breathe heavily. Then the curtains swished together behind her and she was standing in a small room. The Prophet was already sitting behind a desk looking at her.

  “Will you close the door, please?” he said.

  She turned to close it, thinking, That’s why there wasn’t any sound outside. Because there was a solid wall in back of the curtains, a wall that went right up to the ceiling and effectively separated the room from the shop. With the door shut no sound could get outside.

  After she sat down across from him, she found she couldn’t bring herself to look right at him so she looked at his turban. It was like Mrs. Hedges and that bandanna she wore all the time, you couldn’t tell what kind or color of hair headgears like that concealed. And staring at the Prophet’s turban she got the sudden jolting thought that perhaps Mrs. Hedges wore that bandanna all the time because she was bald. There must be some reason why nobody who lived in the house had ever seen her without it.

  “You’re in trouble?” asked the Prophet David.

  This was worse than when she had tried to get started on telling Mrs. Hedges about it. She shrank into the chair, wondering why she had thought she could tell a strange man about Jones and Mis’ Johnson and herself. The more she thought about it, the more bewildered she became until finally, in the confusion of her thinking, her eyes shifted from his turban and she was looking directly at him.

  “Tell me about it,” he urged. And when she didn’t say anything he added,
“Is it your husband?”

  “Yes,” she said eagerly, and then stopped speaking. Her husband. Jones wasn’t her husband any more than any of those others she had lived with in between. She hadn’t seen her husband in twenty-five years. She had stayed with the others because a woman by herself didn’t stand much chance; and because it was too lonely living by herself in a rented room. With a man attached to her she could have an apartment—a real home.

  “Tell me about it,” the Prophet said again.

  If he’s a prophet he ought to know without my telling him, she thought resentfully. Then the resentment left her because his eyes were deep-set and they didn’t contain the derisive look she was accustomed to seeing in people’s eyes. He sat looking at her and his manner was so calm and so patient that without further thinking about it she started talking. It was suddenly quite easy to tell him about how she’d never really had anything before and about Jones and young Mis’ Johnson.

  “And I ain’t a-goin’ to be put out,” she ended defiantly. Then she added, “Leastways that’s why I come to you. So you could give me something to fix it so I won’t be put out.”

  “Which is more important? Your not being put out or Jones forgetting about the young lady?”

  Min looked at him, thinking hard. “Both,” she said finally. “Because if he loses his taste for young Mis’ Johnson, he ain’t goin’ to put me out.”

  “One depends on the other. Is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Most of these things do.” The Prophet folded the tips of his fingers against the palms of his hands and stared at them.

  Min following the direction of his eyes saw that his hands were long, the fingers flexible. The skin on his hands was as smooth as that on his face. Once or twice he looked at her intently and then went back to studying his hands.