The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

by Jacqueline Kelly

  I knew full well that the next few weeks were going to be an agony of waiting and that leaving myself unoccupied would make things much, much worse. I resolved to dive into a frenzy of specimen collecting, science, schoolwork—work of any kind—to make the time go faster.

  What I did not foresee was that the work would be housework.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE SHORT HOE

  Nature . . . cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being.

  I CONTINUED TO HOVER over the Plant with Granddaddy. To my great relief, it thrived under our tender care, first stretching for the light and then trailing along the windowsill. Granddaddy called it the Proband. He told me that’s what you called the first of a kind. Every day I took it outside for a few minutes to expose it to the bees for pollination. I was vigilant in my duties and shooed away all grasshoppers and other plant eaters that dared to venture too close.

  I turned my attention to other experiments of my own devising, anything to keep me away from Christmas socks. The cotton harvest was looming, so I considered the issue of the short hoe, which still raged through our part of the world. Granddaddy had taught me that the best way to learn about something was to undergo the experience or perform the experiment yourself, and he had given Father the opportunity to study the short hoe as a youngster, making him spend a day toiling with it. In my new campaign of activity to hasten time, I took one of the long hoes from the tool shed (we had no short ones on the property). I figured that if I held it halfway down, it would be the same thing as working with the short one. I walked out to our closest row of cotton, a good fifty yards from the back porch. Mother said that a proper lady always had a lawn and a garden; women who were not proper ladies had cotton planted right up to their windowsills.

  The bolls were swelling on the plants, performing their miraculous transformation from hard green pods into fluffy white spheres. Cash money, coming right out of the ground.

  I swung my hoe.

  Oh, it was hard work, let me tell you. And the weather wasn’t even that hot. And I didn’t have to do it hour after hour for my daily bread. And I wasn’t an old person with rheumatism like I’d seen some in the fields. All these things were going through my head when I heard a shriek like a screech owl coming from the house. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “What are you doing?” Viola charged at me from the back porch. I had never in my life seen her so upset.

  “I’m chopping cotton, what does it look like?”

  “Lord a’mighty, you get inside! At once! Before anybody sees. Jesus help me.” She grabbed the hoe from my hand and shoved me toward the house, hard. “What’s the matter with you?” she hissed. “Have you completely lost your senses? Playing like you a Negro.”

  “I wanted to see what it’s like, that’s all. Granddaddy told me about—”

  “I don’t want to hear about that old man. That old man losing his mind, and now you losing yours.” She muttered and prodded me all the way back to the house, “Little girl chopping cotton. White girl chopping cotton. Tate girl chopping cotton. Lord help me.”

  We made it to the safety of the kitchen with her looking around in alarm and griping at me the whole way.

  “Gimme that pinafore,” she said, snatching it off me. “You go get a new one right now. Your mama take a fit, she see you. Don’t you tell anybody. I mean it.”

  “Why not? Why are you so mad? I was only trying it out.”

  “Jesus God, give me strength.”

  “Don’t be so mad at me, Viola.”

  “I got to sit down for a minute.”

  “Here,” I said, “I’ll get you a glass of lemonade.”

  She sat at the kitchen table and fanned herself with a cardboard fan while I went to the pantry, where I spotted a stone crock of hard cider. I hesitated and then drew her some of that instead. She looked like she needed it.

  “This will make you feel better,” I said.

  She drank it right down and stared off into space, fanning away. I brought her another glass, and she sighed. It seemed like lots of people I’d been around lately were either drinking or sighing.

  “Callie,” she said at last, “somebody coulda seen you, girl.”

  “So?”

  “Your mama got plans for you, you know that? Just last week she says she wants you to come out. And now this. No, sir. Can’t have no debutante chopping cotton.”

  “Me, come out? What for?”

  “’Cause you a Tate girl. Your daddy owns cotton. Your daddy owns the gin.”

  “Granddaddy still owns it, I think.”

  “You know what I mean, Miss Smarty,” she said. “Don’t you want to be a debutante?”

  “I’m not sure what-all it means, but if it means being like that drip that Harry brought home that time, then no.”

  “That was a drippy lady, for sure. But that ain’t what it means. It means lots of fancy parties and lots of the young gentlemen coming around. It means having lots of beaux.”

  “What do I want with lots of beaux?”

  “You say that now. But later on.”

  “No, really, Viola, what’s the point?”

  “It would please your mama, that’s the point.”

  “Oh.”

  “Miss Selfish,” she said.

  “I am not selfish,” I retorted.

  She went on, “Make you a young lady of society. Instead of a scarecrow.”

  I ignored this last ungracious remark and thought for a minute. “Did Mother come out?”

  “They put her name down for it. But she never did.”

  “Why not?”

  Viola looked at me. “You should ask her.”

  “The War?” I said, puzzled. Viola nodded.

  “But it was over by then. Mother must have been . . .” I counted on my fingers.

  “There was no money left, that’s all,” said Viola. “And then her daddy die of typhus, and that was the end of that.”

  “So I have to come out? Because she missed her turn?”

  “I’m telling you, you got to ask her yourself. Go get cleaned up. You a mess. I got to rest my heart—it’s beating like a kitten. Lord help me.”

  I left her fanning herself.

  My mother had got one girl out of seven tries at it. I guess I wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind, a dainty daughter to help her bail against the rising tide of the rough-and-tumble boyish energy that always threatened to engulf the house. It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d been hoping for an ally and then didn’t get one. So I didn’t like to talk patterns and recipes and pour tea in the parlor. Did that make me selfish? Did it make me odd? Worst of all, did it make me a disappointment? I could probably live with being thought selfish or odd. But a disappointment—that was another matter, a harder matter. I tried not to think about this, but it tailed me about the house all afternoon like a bothersome, bad-smelling dog demanding attention.

  I sat in my room and looked out at the trees and paid the matter some mind, turning it this way and that. I hadn’t intended to be this way. Could I be blamed for my nature? Could the leopard change her spots? And, if so, what were my spots? It all seemed so muddled. I came up with no conclusions, but I did get a middling headache. Maybe I needed some Lydia Pinkham’s like Mother. Maybe I was more like her than I thought.

  Would coming out as a debutante be so bad? Maybe I wouldn’t mind it so much. Eventually. Meanwhile, I would have to find out more about it.

  Granddaddy had taught me that the important questions could not be answered without the best scholarship you could lay your hands on, along with plenty of time to weigh and measure the alternatives. I had another six or seven years to think about it. That might be enough time. I didn’t know anyone who could tell me about such things except Mother, but if I asked her, wouldn’t that just get her hopes up, hopes that might have to be dashed later on? My head ached, and my neck started to itch.

  Hives again.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I
found Mother outside examining the rows in the kitchen garden, a wide straw hat shading her face and a pair of white cotton gloves on her hands, following her own dictum that a lady always hid her hands and face from the sun. I approached her cautiously in case Viola had told her of my apparently shameful public experiment, but there was no special alarm in her eyes. No more than usual.

  “Where’s your bonnet?” Mother called out. “Go inside and get it.”

  I ran back inside for it. There was no point in starting this conversation off on the wrong foot. I grabbed it from the peg inside the back door and went out again.

  “That’s better,” she said. “Are you coming to help me with the flowers?”

  “I wanted to ask you something,” I said. “Viola told me . . . Viola told me you were supposed to come out when you were a girl but that you didn’t get to. Is that true?”

  A shadow of something—surprise, annoyance, regret maybe—passed over her face. She stooped and clipped a Cherokee rose. “Yes. That’s true.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The War ruined us. It ruined many families. People were starving. Making one’s debut would have been . . . unseemly.”

  “But you met Father anyway.”

  She smiled. “I did. I was one of the lucky ones. Your aunt Aggie wasn’t so lucky.”

  My mother’s sister Agatha lived unmarried and alone in Harwood in a house that smelled of cats and mildew.

  “So you didn’t need to be a debutante,” I said, pulling a stray weed.

  “No, I guess I didn’t. But lots of girls still do.” She looked at me.

  I couldn’t avoid the question any longer, so I squared up to it. “Do I have to come out?”

  “You’re the only daughter, Calpurnia.”

  I didn’t want to be rude and point out that she hadn’t answered the question. “Well, what does it mean? Exactly?”

  Mother’s eyes lit up. “It means that a girl from a good family has become a young lady and is ready to be introduced into Society. That she is ready to take her appointed place. That she can be introduced to young men from good families. It means cotillions and entertainments and a new gown for each one.”

  “How long does it last?” I said.

  “A year.”

  “A whole year?” I didn’t much care for the sound of that. “And then what happens?”

  She looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  “You said it lasts for a year, and then what?”

  “Well, usually the young lady has found a husband by that time.”

  “So it’s a lot of fancy parties to marry off girls.”

  Mother clucked. “Goodness, I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  Why not? I thought. There was no disguising it.

  “Mother?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “So . . . do I have to come out?” Her face fell. I quickly added, “Do you want me to come out?”

  She studied me. “Callie, I think there’s lots of time to think about it. But yes, I would be glad if you had the opportunity I missed. Many young girls would be glad of the chance.”

  “What does Father think? It sounds expensive, a new gown and all every time.”

  She looked disapproving. “One doesn’t speak of money like that. It isn’t done. Your father is an excellent provider. I am sure he would be proud to present you.”

  “Hmm.” So there lay the matter. For now.

  Later it occurred to me that I could ask Granddaddy his thoughts about it. But then I realized I didn’t need to. I could just imagine his opinion on the matter.

  CHAPTER 15

  A SEA OF COTTON

  Linnaeus has calculated that if an annual plant produced only two seeds . . . and their seedlings next year produced two, and so on, then in twenty years there would be a million plants.

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, my father met with the other major landholders at the Moose Lodge and declared the cotton harvest date, by far the most important event in our entire county.

  An army of colored workers from three counties around descended on our acreage and picked from first light until complete dark, men and women and children, stopping only at midday for a meal and a short Bible reading by a preacher, one of their number.

  Viola recruited three of the women to help her cook in the old stone kitchen in back of the house. Such a prodigious quantity of grits and fatback and beans and biscuits and syrup flowed out of there, all loaded into the buckboard in giant hampers and driven out to the fields, along with a barrel of fresh water and a huge pail of coffee. Mother temporarily moved into the kitchen to feed us. She also kept busy nursing the pickers’ cuts and blisters and other injuries deemed too small to be sent to Dr. Walker.

  Harry drove the wagon back and forth to the store for cornmeal, sugar, flour, and other supplies. Sam Houston and Lamar scurried with messages from the scale house to the tally board and were sometimes rewarded with a penny, which translated into ten pieces of candy or a new pencil at the general store. Being a tally messenger was a highly coveted position.

  Father labored late at the gin and came home long after we’d all gone to bed. The only one exempt from duty of any kind was Granddaddy. He had built up the ginning enterprise himself and overseen it through this seasonal spasm of mad activity for thirty years; he no longer had the slightest interest or obligation. He retired to his laboratory or else he headed off in the morning with his satchel over his shoulder.

  The gin ran night and day. The blacksmith and the carpenter labored without sleep to keep the machines going and the cotton flowing, high-mounded wagons of it coming in and huge shedding bales of it going out, bound for Austin, Galveston, New Orleans. The bales were so heavy and piled so high that they were a real menace. Packing and balancing them was an art and, every year, scores of men across the South were crushed and killed by unstable loads.

  In our house, we could hear the great leather belts of the machinery whirring and slapping rhythmically a quarter mile away. After the first couple of nights, you got used to it all over again, and although I’d never heard the waves of the ocean, the machinery noise in the distance made me feel I was falling asleep to the lapping of the surf, at least as I imagined it. But instead of water, prodigious waves of cotton lapped around our house.

  Our school shut down for ten days. Many of my classmates came from families who couldn’t afford to hire help, so everyone, children included, picked until they collapsed. I was conscripted into kitchen duty with Mother. One morning I sifted a whole sack of flour, and the next day my hands were too sore to grip my pencil and write in my Notebook. I made a point of complaining so bitterly about this that I was reassigned.

  My next job was to keep an eye on the two dozen or so babies who played in the yard between the house and the outside kitchen while their mothers worked the fields, and to make sure they didn’t get pecked by the busy, officious hens who were aggrieved by this invasion of their normal habitat. I was not happy with this unpaid duty, either, especially when I had to watch Sam Houston and Lamar prance off to the gin and come home with money. After a whole day of wrangling the babies and thinking disgruntled thoughts about those pennies, I launched a new campaign at dinner that night.

  “Why do I have to mind the babies?” I asked Father.

  “Because you’re the girl,” said Lamar offhandedly.

  I ignored him. “Why do I have to mind the babies? Why can’t I run messages? Why can’t I earn money?”

  “Because you’re the girl,” said Lamar, alarmed, scenting possible danger.

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Girls don’t get paid,” scoffed Lamar. “Girls can’t even vote. They don’t get paid. Girls stay home.”

  “Maybe you better tell that to the Fentress Normal School,” I said, proud of my retort. “They pay Miss Harbottle, don’t they?” I said.

  “That’s different,” huffed Lamar.

  “How is it different?”

  “It ju
st is.”

  “Exactly how, Lamar?”

  I harped on this so loud and long that my exhausted father, in desperate need of peace, said, “All right, Callie. I’ll pay you a nickel.”

  I shut up in triumphant silence. Lamar looked relieved to keep his post as tally boy. Then my three younger brothers set up their own grizzling chorus about how unfair it was that they didn’t get paid for anything. It took a sharp “Enough of this!” from Mother to make them quite down. They glowered in sulky silence through the rest of dinner while I made light and pleasant chitchat as I’d been taught ladies do, discussing the weather and inquiring about everyone’s day. Granddaddy looked amused; Mother looked as if she had a sick headache but gamely held up her end of the conversation.

  The next day, I sat on the back steps and kept a close eye on my twenty-nine tiny charges. Now that I was being paid, now that I was a professional, I took my duties seriously. I counted heads over and over. The babies were mostly toddlers who played happily in the dust, but every now and then one would haul himself to his feet and stagger off in pursuit of a passing dog or cat, squealing with pleasure, and have to be dragged back, protesting. There was also the problem of them putting the odd item they found in the dust into their mouths; I saved the lives of a couple of beetles and a disoriented night crawler that way. I wanted to read a book, but I couldn’t look away for a second. For such small, unsteady organisms, the babies sure could get away from you fast. And the hens were a bother, darting from the periphery into the thick of things, setting up a great hysterical hoo-hah. I chucked pebbles at them to drive them back.

  Sul Ross came by as I was taking potshots at the hens. I guess he thought I was having fun. I was not. I was peeved and about to chase him off when I noticed he was looking on with interest, like maybe he wanted to join in. I looked at him from the corner of my eye and thought fast.

  “This sure is a lot of fun,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll bet it is. I always get yelled at when I do that.”