Tom hesitated a moment, and looked out at his own fields, which he imagined were just as dried up as the boy’s must have been. Then, bringing himself back for Lizzie’s sake, he went on, “So, the Devil says, ‘Then give me some eggs.’ And a bit more fearful, the ol’ boy says, ‘Oh, Mistah Devil, sir, I got no eggs neither. The hen ain’t laid none.’ ”
“Just like Turkey, huh, Pa?”
“Hold on there, girl. The Devil’s not through yet. ‘So, fetch me a bucket of milk,’ he says. Once again the ol’ boy thinks he’s really gointa make the Devil mad this time. ‘There ain’t no milk. The cow died.’ Now the Devil is turnin’ redder and redder and the air floatin’ round him is gettin’ hotter and hotter. ‘Awright, just get me a bale of cotton.’ When the boy heard that he knew he was in trouble. ‘Boll weevil already done took dat. As a matter of fact, Mistah Devil, sir, I cain’t think of nothin’ I got that you want.’ ”
“Oh no,” Lizzie whispered.
“Yep, the ol’ boy knows he’s in trouble now. And all the time he’s shiverin’, he’s justa thinkin’, ‘I got somethin’ more better for your taste. Light and airy and not too fillin’ and as close as you can get.’ ‘And what could that be?’ the Devil asks. ‘My Shadow!’ ” And quickly tying Amarillo to his gate, off Tom ran toward the house, guffawing and slapping his thighs, Lizzie right behind him.
When he reached the front porch, Tom surveyed his land sadly. Crop comin’ in look poorly and sparse. He shook his head, thinking all he could give the bankers was his ol’ black shadow, too. But when Lizzie jumped into his arms, Tom hauled her torso up toward the skies, saying, “The moral of that story is don’t be sleepin’ on the job. You never know who’s watchin’. And if you get in trouble, don’t be lookin’ for nobody to bail you out, neither. Keep on a-steppin’ and don’t never look back.”
Giggling, Lizzie wiggled from Tom’s arms and ran into the house. Alone, Tom leaned against the porch railing, jumped back with a huge splinter in his palm. “Damn, place needs paint. Needs new porch steps for sho’, and now the railing, too. Things just fallin’ apart every time I look around. I’m afraid to look at the chimney.”
The morning rays of sun left stark, isolated black cutouts of his home stretching across the fields. The day would be ablaze with heat, letting swirls of red dust burn up his face if he wasn’t careful out in the fields. Tom raised his arm to wipe his brow, surprised his sleeve was sweat-soaked immediately.
The slap of the sagging screen door let everyone in the kitchen know what Tom would not say aloud. The day was goin’ to be as hard and fruitless as the last few months had been. Eudora’d been up all the night wrestling with the trimming of a tea gown for one of her best clients. She was tired from that, and tired of Tom’s resentment squashing every attempt she made to keep her home free of rancor and silences.
“Why don’t you shut the door like a normal person just closes the door, Tom Winrow?”
“I didn’t shut the door, Eudora, I slammed it. Do you hear me?”
“You need to stop botherin’ me, for Christ’s sake! What?!”
“I ain’t botherin’ you. You been workin’ on that damned dress all night, is what!”
“Somebody’s gotta bring some money in here—”
“Don’t start, Eudora—”
“Here’s something for you to eat this mornin’, Tom,” Bette interrupted with a very tender tone. “It’s so early in the Lord’s day to be fussin’ ’bout what’s in His hands.”
“Yes, ma’am, you’re right there. I can’t make rain. And my looking at a seedling sho’ don’t make it grow.”
“That’s right,” Bette reassured him. She knew Tom was fraught with the demons of the Devil, drink, women, that crazy music and gamblin’, all addin’ up to a stormy man whose tongue or fist might strike out like a lightnin’ bolt at any moment. No tellin’ when. No tellin’ who. Best to be gentle with a wild thing.
Tom swished his eggs and grits ’round his plate, thinkin’ ’bout when he and Eudora’d first married and joy wasn’t feigned or forced, when Ma Bette’s fingers were truly limber and her skin smooth as a youngster’s. Now Ma Bette was afflicted with the arthritis, her knuckles sore too much of the time, her mind wandering unexpectedly when he was trying to tell her, since he couldn’t tell his wife or child, he was trying to tell the one somebody who’d listen without scowlin’ at him that the crops were ruined, the bank note due, he owed too much at Haggerty’s general store. Only Ma Bette’d hear him out, though she secretly made offerings to some spirits for the rains to come and didn’t mention Eudora’s belief that only God could help them, that there wasn’t anythin’ he, Tom, could do to wrest them from losing everythin’.
“You know, Tom, I’m workin’ with some mighty powerful forces to approach the Lord. Ask him for some rains to come on here. Not some showers or sprinkles here and there, but a full rain, what makes things grow and clears the spirit for blessings. That’s what I’ma doin’, Tom Winrow, cain’t fault me there, now.”
“No, Ma Bette, I sho’ ’nough cain’t.”
“We got to work on all fronts, you see. Can’t put all your eggs in one basket . . . Come over here, chile, let me do somethin’ with that head of yours.” Ma Bette suddenly focused on Lizzie, who was finishing off her grits slowly, trying to put off this very moment.
“Naw, Nana. Nobody cares ’bout my hair ’ceptin’ you. My hair is fine just the way it is. Look, I combed it yesterday—”
“Girl, get your lil behind over here before I haveta come get you.”
Lizzie was beginning to squirm and resist, even though her grandma hadn’t even moved. “Ain’t no company comin’ today, Nana,” she said, so emphatically that her hand pushed her plate of grits smashing to the floor, which set Tom to laughing, Bette to cussin’, and Eudora to a frenzy.
“Would you all hush up, please! How do you expect me to do anything at all with this carryin’ on ’round me. Look, I’ve even pricked my finger tryin’ to just live ’round you all! Now hush up, I say. I don’t wanta hear another sound from a soul. And I mean that, too.”
Almost furtively, Bette shook her finger at Lizzie to come sit down and have her head looked after. Lizzie looked at the mess of grits on the floor with the shattered heavy pottery covered in them like that’s what she should tend to. Bette just cut her eyes at Lizzie once, and the grits became a matter to be dealt with later, some other time, just not now.
Once she got Lizzie situated on the floor ’tween her legs, Bette started goin’ on ’bout the War of Secession—well, not exactly the War, but the bounty and the beauty of the land before the Northerners terrorized everyone livin’ and everythin’ growin’ till wasn’t nothin’ left worth lookin’ at. Just a beat-down people on a beat-down earth. Things were just so different since then. Since freedom came. She spoke in that particularly genteel voice she took on when she thought about the times before freedom, and Tom’s throat grew tight. The veins in his forearms stood out like each one of them remembered the pickin’ and the hoein’ for some white man somewhere who could tell him when to eat, when to sleep, whom he could sleep with, where he could go on his own two feet, and so many things swirled in his head and his body till he just burst.
“Ma Bette, are you really goin’ outta your head? Don’t you remember nothin’ at all?”
“Boy, set down. Talkin’ to me in such a way! I remember plenty . . . I been here longer than you could spit at. Now set your self down and let me tell you how it was . . .”
“I don’t need you to tell me what bein’ a slave was like. I know all I wanta know about that. We didn’t have nothin’, not even our own selves. We were just like a hog or a horse or a mule, somethin’ to be used till it dropped dead! Stop your lyin’ to my daughter. Stop lyin’ to yourself. We didn’t own anythin’. We was owned.”
Startled, Lizzie asked, “Pa, what’d you mean? We didn’t have the farm or nothin’?”
Bette answered for him. “Depends on how you look at it, darlin�
��, and where you were lookin’ from.” She grimaced at Tom.
“Don’t contradict me in my own house, ol’ woman. Lizzie, no, we couldn’t even have owned this piece of farm.”
Bette was so mad now she started pulling Lizzie’s hair like it really was cotton. “Ow!” Lizzie screamed, and then howled.
“Shut up, all of ya!” Eudora suddenly stood, yelling at the top of her lungs. “Shut up. Sit down. Leave it be. Do you hear? Leave it be! I’ve got to finish this dress, or we won’t even have food on the table.”
“Well, ain’t that somethin’,” spat Tom, “Now we won’t have food on the table if you don’t work your fingers to the bone all night for us. Stop lyin’. Your ‘sacrifices’ have nothin’ more to do with us than those letters you sneak off to Elma so she could make believe she’s not a po’ niggah farmer’s daughter. Down there tryin’ to be somethin’ she ain’t. Why, I don’t even see half the money I make, and I know you don’t tell me nothin’ of the truth ’bout what you send to Nashville, to the dirt farmer’s daughter in dresses too fine for a body who can just barely afford to be where she’s at. Why cain’t you be satisfied with what we got, huh?”
“I want more for my daughters than this!” Eudora spoke with such force and bitterness that her words even pierced Tom’s rage. There wasn’t really any need to go through this again. The walls of the house probably ached with the weight of the repeated accusations and upbraidings. At least once every two days Tom and Eudora would have at it. To the unfamiliar, only their daughter Elma’s aspirations came between them, but the mortar and wood of the Winrow place, the windowsills, the carefully laid floor, and the door knew the trouble was that Eudora was who she was and what she dreamed, and Tom the same. And nowhere in a Carolinian dawn, any Low Country space or time, did the dreams of Eudora and Tom intersect. Actually their understandings of being alive and colored were in fierce combat, and the battles were always ugly, if not bloody.
“You want! You want anythin’ you ain’t got that you think those rich cousins of yours may have . . .” Tom began his retreat from this implacable woman, this wife he didn’t really touch when he thought he was touching her, Eudora, whose body wasn’t actual, even when he lay with her. Tom withdrew till his spine was curled like the valves of the cornet he wished he had in his hands, at his mouth, so he could say what he meant and be understood. Nothin’ he said in the words he exchanged with Eudora made sense like the sounds he could get to come out of that cornet. But Tom knew better than to get his horn now, while Eudora was on one of her Elma sieges. No music he could play could penetrate, harmonize, or resemble anything but noise in the face of Eudora’s devotion to Elma. It had always been that way.
“I can’t make out who this chile takes after,” Bette mused softly, edging the rancor from the kitchen. Maybe it flew out the door as she finally, gently finished braiding Lizzie’s hair. Nevertheless, Bette was still confounded by the color of her great-grandchild’s skin, so ruddy, so red and opaque. “Cain’t figure out how this happened,” she mumbled very seriously, patting the child on her shoulder to let her know she was finished. Lizzie jumped up to run outdoors when Bette really got nervous for her. “Child, you too marhiney to be in the sun for long. Shouldn’t be in the sun at all, if you ask me. And you need to clean up that plate!” But Lizzie was gone.
Bette had done her best, but Eudora was on her feet now walking toward Tom with deliberate, measured steps that punctuated her words like a pop of high hat on a set of traps: “Tom, Elma is a beautiful girl, and she can marry into somethin’. I don’t ask you for the shirt off your damned black back to help better the lives of my children, and you know that. I’m so glad Lizzie isn’t in here right now. Do you begrudge the support cousin Diggs has offered for both of them to get good schooling, refine their manners, and be somebody of substance in this world? Is that it? If you can’t give it to them, you’d rather they just have nothin’? Well, Elma’s at Fisk University and Lizzie’s gointa go, do you understand me? Why, hell, even Francina can’t say that about her own self.”
Tom’s veins got to pulsing again, and his leg moved compulsively to some unheard blues beat; he just got into the swing of it. He threw words at Eudora like he’d been signaled to take a solo at the height of a hot tune.
“What you be sayin’ to me, Eudora? If no damned crackuh blood flowed through your high-toned blue veins, huh? Would you be talkin’ to me ’bout the hoein’ or the bank note, Miss Mayfield? What would fall out your mouth if you had no ties to those grave-diggin’ nigguhs? Diggs so much better ’n Winrow? That fam’ly ain’t got so much to be puffed up about, far as I can see. Blanche ain’t seen a smile cross her face in fifteen years. Francina so scared of livin’, she make a real old maid look like the life of the party. And let’s not forget the dear ole cousin Roswell, evuh the gentleman, ain’t figured out perfumed handkerchiefs is for ladies. That fluff break a sweat, he’d fall out.”
“He at least takes care of his family. They don’t want for anything at all.”
“There you go again with that word, ‘want.’ ”
At that moment, Lizzie came skipping in with Turkey. “What do you want, Pa?”
“He wants you and that gall-darned hen to go to your room immediately. We’re having grown-up talk here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” and Lizzie scampered away, looking up to Bette and Tom for some clue as to what she might have said or done to warrant all this serious grown-up talk. But she could not read their faces. They didn’t even seem to see her.
“No, Eudora,” Bette said, “you didn’t have to snap at the chile like that. She can hear ’bout her own kin. All they do is get rich sellin’ the colored burial insurance, waits till they die, and lead them straight to the dead folks’ beauty parlor so they can fancy em up for the worms to get em. Too bad he can’t do something for em while they’re alive.”
Eudora rolled her eyes at her mother and Tom, who she thought had turned his back to her, but Tom had turned to look at his land. Tears he fought with the music in his head took control for a second, and a growling sound jumped out of his mouth suddenly.
“Bless you,” Bette chirped.
“Lizzie, get down here or you’ll be late to school. And that’s something I won’t have.” Eudora angrily gathered her things, reciting this litany to the walls. Lizzie was nowhere to be seen. “Where’s that child anyway?”
“Here I am, Mama,” Lizzie perkily announced.
“Oh my, you haven’t done a thing I asked.”
“Lizzie, your mama is in a bad humor this mornin’. She’s all high strung today cause your sister Elma is comin’ home. Ain’t that right, Eudora?” Tom attempted to sweeten the air between the mother and daughter before it soured beyond countenance. He knew when Eudora looked at Lizzie, gangly and free of spirit as she was, yellow as she was, she saw his features, his eyes, his absolute connection to her through this little girl till the day they died. He knew that fact. The fact of their closeness once, the innocent Lizzie, was enough to ruin Eudora’s day. He’d bet money on it.
Luckily Lizzie was too busy running out the door with a piece of bread and a piece of cheese to be concerned with her parents’ goings-on. In a minute, all Tom could see and hear of his daughter was Lizzie’s wild red hair and her holler “Look, Mama, I’m eatin’ and walkin’ at the same time. We don’t be late, I promise.”
Eudora sighed in exasperation, adjusting her hat. “I’m going to go on now, Tom, but you’re right, Elma is coming home tomorrow and I do want us to make her feel welcome. All of us. That’s the least her family could do, you know. Oh, I almost forgot. Don’t forget to pick up that fabric shipment at Mr. Haggerty’s for me and those things I ordered for Elma’s dinner. And stop for Lizzie ’fore the day is out, all right?”
“Well, I don’t know, I’m thinkin’ ’bout movin’ on to Oklahoma this afternoon. Good prime lands out there, dirt cheap, and enough of us to have whole towns of colored. That’s what I might be doin’ this afternoon—”
Tom shouted after them, “Don’t forget, I may be goin’ to Oklahoma!”
Lizzie shouted back, “I wanta go to Oklahoma with you, Pa!”
Eudora hurried to catch her daughter before more of Tom’s foolish ideas got into her head. But Tom kept right on, “If we didn’t spend so much, we could hire a hand and maybe make the land pay off.”
Just as she reached Lizzie, the child yelled back at her father, “Ho, Pa, let’s go to Oklahoma. Oklahoma, I say. That’s my choice, Pa.”
With Lizzie yelling all this nonsense, Eudora jerked the girl’s shoulder a bit too hard. Lizzie gritted her teeth and shut her mouth, but her mind was on her pa, the land, Oklahoma, and her big sister Elma comin’ home. Having Elma around made her mama happy, sweet. Good reason for Elma to get home real soon. Bring the laughter from her mother that she could not.
Not much passed between daughter and mother as they rushed past tall curved bamboo, Japanese wisteria that left lavender pollen dotting their hair, and dogwoods that were so whimsical even Eudora wanted to stop and enjoy them. But she did not. No, even climbing silver moons lacing grand old buildings with the kind of detail Eudora was proud of in her own designs couldn’t sway Lizzie’s mama. Eudora was going to get her child to that school before her cousin Francina could run back to Charleston with tales of how Lizzie was not only a troublemaker but had a leaning toward truancy as well, unheard of in the family before. The “before” was what stuck in Eudora’s throat. Before they came from the islands, before they worked their way out of Little Mexico, before she married the likes of Tom Winrow. Yet Lizzie and Eudora managed to be late for the commencing of the day at the colored school, fondly referred to as the “True Freedom School” in whispers among their own kind. And Francina was waiting for them in the doorway as if she knew who’d denied themselves the luxury of fallen camellias and azaleas teasing the breadth of rainbows just so they could avoid this moment.
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