After the wedding, they tried to play together occasionally, but with each one lying in wait for the other’s insult, the efforts ended in quarrel. Then tears, May’s hand gripping; words hissed lest Grandpa Cosey hear you mocking his bride.
There was a heap of blame to spread. He was the Big Man who, with no one to stop him, could get away with it and anything else he wanted. Then there was her mother, who chose to send her away rather than confront him. Put her in a faraway school and discouraged summer vacations at home. For her own good, she said, arranging church camps and summers with classmates. Once May enrolled her as a counselor in a settlement house for Negro girls who had run away rather than be mistreated at home. Never mind Christmas packages in the mail, expensive, wrong-size shoes in September; in spite of envelopes fat with lies and money, the rejection was obvious. L, too, was to blame; she was the only peacemaker around, whether glaring or shaking her head, but she would take no one’s side. The real betrayal, however, lay at the feet of the friend who grinned happily as she was led down the hall to darkness, liquor smell, and old-man business. So who had to go? Who had to leave her bedroom, her playhouse, the sea? The only innocent one in the place, that’s who. Even when she returned, a sixteen-year-old, poised and ready to take her place in the family, they threw her away, because by then Heed had become grown-up-nasty. Mean enough to set her on fire.
Christine went to her room and sat down in the worn recliner she preferred to the scratchy sofa. The perspiration was ebbing; the dizziness receding. The melancholy persisted. I must have been the one who dreamed up this world, she thought. No nice person could have.
It should have been different. She meant it to be different. On the train, heading home from Maple Valley, she had carefully planned her attitude, her behavior. Everything would come off nicely, since her return began with a celebration celebrating everything: her birthday, graduation, the new house. She was determined to be civil to Heed, in control, but nicely so, the way they were taught to behave at Maple Valley. How or why she got lured into showing off about grammar, she couldn’t recall. What she most remembered was her grandfather spanking Heed, and the flood of pleasure that came when he took his granddaughter’s side against his wife’s, for a change, taking steps to show the kind of behavior he prized. Christine’s delight was deep and rampant as the three of them—the real Coseys—left together, drove off in the big automobile, the unworthy one nowhere to be seen.
When she and May returned, smoke was billowing from her bedroom window. Racing screaming into the house and up the stairs, they found L smothering the blackened sheets with a twenty-pound sack of sugar, caramelizing evil.
Again, it was Christine, not Heed, who had to leave. Grandfather Cosey had left the hotel party abruptly to go nobody knew where. Afraid and angry, mother and daughter stayed awake seething until 3 a.m., when he came back, barefoot as a yard dog, holding his shoes in his hand. Instead of locating Heed to throw her back where she came from, he laughed.
“She’s going to kill us,” May hissed.
“The bed was empty,” he said, still chuckling.
“Tonight it was! What about tomorrow?”
“I’ll speak to her.”
“Speak? Speak? Bill, please!” May was begging.
“Calm down, May. I said I’d take care of it.” He moved as though the conversation was over and he needed rest. May touched his elbow.
“What about Christine? She can’t live here like this. It’s dangerous.”
“It won’t happen again,” he said, hitting the word “won’t.”
“She’s dangerous, Bill. You know she is.”
He looked at May then, for what seemed an age, and nodded. “You may be right.” Then, touching his mustache, “Is there somewhere she can go for a week or two?”
“Heed?”
“No,” he said, surprised at the suggestion, then frowning. “Christine.”
“But Heed started the fire. She’s the guilty one. Why should Christine leave?”
“I’m not married to Christine. I married Heed. Besides, it will only be for a little while. Till things get settled around here.”
Just like that, Christine is to be packed off, sent away to the house of a classmate. For a week or two. A “vacation,” they will tell people, whether anyone believed it or not. Christine will call and May will get on the line, make arrangements.
Standing there in a movie star’s gown, rhinestones glittering its top, Christine made up her own mind. He never once looked at her. He had laughed. His cheap little bitch-wife had tried to kill her—sort of—and might succeed one day would he laugh then too would he look finally at the charred flesh of his own flesh and settle that also as though it were a guest’s bounced check or a no-show musician or a quarrel with a salesman who had shortchanged an order of Scotch whiskey? Later, for a visit with a classmate. Later, crazies. Put on your shoes, old man, and look at me good now, because you will never see me again.
You are always thinking about death, I told her. No, she said. Death is always thinking about me. She didn’t know squat about it. She thought death was going to heaven or hell. It never occurred to her it might be just more of the same. You could do anything you wanted except you’re doing it all by yourself. But that was May’s way of explaining why she hoarded and buried, and preserved and stole. Death was trying to pry open the door, and she needed all her cunning to stave him off. Her daughter was the loose hinge, a weakness that could lead to the loss of everything. Christine had to be defended not only from what had come in and snatched her father but from the live death of poverty, the Negro kind May was familiar with. Unhoused, begging; their Christian faith demanding never-ending gratitude for a plate of hominy. Other than disapproving white folk, nothing scared her more. She gave herself every opportunity to recount how Mr. Cosey came from a long line of quiet, prosperous slaves and thrifty freedmen—each generation adding to the inheritance left by the previous one. Independent contractors, she called them. Cobblers, seamstresses, carpenters, ironmongers, blacksmiths, unpaid laborers, and craftsmen who refined their skills, narrowed and pointed them for rich folks who would gift and tip them. The carpenters made fine pianos; the ironmongers served a local college laboratory. One, a blacksmith, took his craft to a horse farm where he made himself first reliable, then indispensable, then profitable. In that position his claim to wages instead of shelter was accepted. Little by little, the story went, they gathered and held on to what they earned for offspring they told and taught to do better. But they kept low, no bragging, no sass—just curry and keep close relationships with the whites who mattered. That was the street-sweet story, anyway—the one that belonged to somebody else that she and Mr. Cosey took for themselves. He knew better, but May believed it and that’s why little Heed with a man’s undershirt for a dress looked to her like the end of all that—a bottlefly let in through the door, already buzzing at the food table and, if it settled on Christine, bound to smear her with the garbage it was born in. She had put up with the girls’ friendship until Mr. Cosey messed with it. Then she had to figure something out fast. If Heed and Christine had ideas about being friends and behaving like sisters just because a reckless old reprobate had a whim, May put a stop to them. If she couldn’t swat the bottlefly, she could tear its wings, Raid-spray the air so it couldn’t breathe—or turn her daughter into an ally.
Pity. They were just little girls. In a year they would be bleeding—hard. Skin clear and death-defying. They had no business in that business.
The day Mr. Cosey told us who he was marrying was the opening day of May’s personal December 7. In an eye blink she went from defense to war. And as any honest veteran can tell you, war is good for the lonely; an outright comfort to the daft. She wasn’t always like that. When I first saw her in 1929 standing next to Billy Boy she looked just like what she was: the last daughter of an itinerant preacher who had to accept clothes from any congregation he could attract. A pretty, undercherished girl in an overmended coat. The
little scrap of fur collar, the lettuce-green dress and black-and-white pumps put you right away in mind of a rummage sale. And while I was wondering where Mr. Cosey’s son found her, she raised Billy Boy’s hand to her mouth and kissed it. The way her eyes ate everything, traveling up and around the hotel lobby, I thought she would behave like a guest expecting to be waited on. I was dead wrong about that. She put off unpacking her cardboard suitcase; just changed out of that hand-me-down dress and started in. “Let’s,” she said in a soft, sweet voice. “Let’s polish this. Let’s move that, clean under here, wipe there . . .” How could we help but smile? Her meringue voice, her ladylike manners. Mr. Cosey most of all, seeing his son had chosen a wife certain to be a plus.
She moved Billy Boy from waiting tables to tending bar and then booking performers, which left Mr. Cosey free to think about money and play. Even pregnancy didn’t slow her down. May was the first mother I saw who weaned her baby at three months. When Billy Boy died in ’35, he went so fast we didn’t have time to tend him. Christine crawled under my bed, and when I found her there, I let her sleep with me. She was never a crying child, so listening to her whimpering in her sleep was a comfort to me, since May looked on Billy Boy’s death as more of an insult than a tragedy. Dry-eyed as a turtle, she left Christine to me to raise. Mr. Cosey sank low so it was left to May and me to keep things up and going. For the next seven years she put all her energy into the hotel’s business. Seven years of her hard work were rewarded with “I’m taking a wife. You know her. Christine’s little friend.” Rewarded by watching her father-in-law marry her twelve-year-old daughter’s playmate and put that playmate ahead of everything, including herself, her daughter, and all she had worked for. Not only that. She was supposed to teach and train the playmate to take charge of us. Most people married young back then (the sooner a girl was taken over by a man, the better), but eleven? It was worrisome for sure, but there was more to it than age. May’s new mother-in-law was not just a child, she was a Johnson. In no wild dream could she have invented a family that scared her more. The fool on German Syrup labels. The savage on Czar’s Baking Powder. The brain-dead on Alden’s Fruit Vinegar, Korn Kinks Cereal, J. J. Coates Thread, and the flyblown babies on Sanford’s Ginger. That’s who she saw when she looked at the Johnsons. She might be braiding her hair in the bedroom, patting cool water on her temples in the kitchen, wherever she was her talk was the same: shiftlessness was not a habit, it was a trait; ignorance was destiny; dirt lingered on by choice. She shuddered when she said that, being the daughter of a preacher, she really tried to dredge up Christian charity, but failed whenever she looked at a Johnson. Or heard about them. Listen to their names, she said. Overblown names people give to mules and fishing boats. Bride. Welcome Morning. Princess Starlight. Righteous Spirit. Solitude. Heed the Night. Add to that the main calamity—the unapologetic shiftlessness of the parents, Wilbur and Surrey, who thought sitting in a rowboat with a string was work. Having lost two children to the seabed, they used their grief first like a begging cup, then as a tax levied on their neighbors. So why not let their youngest girl marry a fifty-two-year-old man for who knew how much money changed hands. If he gave them a two-dollar bill, May said, a dollar and fifty cents refund was due. But we all knew Mr. Cosey never bought anything cheap—or if he did, it came to have value in time. Like a child who would soon grow up and bear other children. Which brings me to the other thing bothering May. The Johnsons were not just poor and trifling, their girls were thought to be mighty quick in the skirt-raising department. So what must have attracted Mr. Cosey to Heed in the first place could infect her own daughter. Before May had even begun instruction about menstruation, or thought of sheltering Christine from unsuitable boys, her home was throbbing with girl flesh made sexy, an atmosphere that Christine might soak up faster than a fruitcake soaks up rum. And all because Mr. Cosey wanted children.
Well, that’s what he told his friends and maybe himself. But not me. He never told that to me because I had worked for him since I was fourteen and knew the truth. He liked her. Besides, like a lot of folk did when war plants desegregated, his sporting woman left town. That was the truth, but not all of it. I remember him telling me a tale about some child who fell down in horse manure running after a posse and how the white folks laughed. So cruel, the crowd enjoying themselves at murder. He repeated it every time he needed an example of heartless whites, so I supposed the point was he laughed too and apologized for it by marrying Heed. Just like he avoided Christine because she had his father’s gray eyes, he picked Heed to make old Dark groan. I’ve come to believe every family has a Dark and needs one. All over the world, traitors help progress. It’s like being exposed to tuberculosis. After it fills the cemetery, it strengthens whoever survives; helps them know the difference between a strong mind and a healthy one; between the righteous and the right—which is, after all, progress. The problem for those left alive is what to do about revenge—how to escape the sweetness of its rot. So you can see why families make the best enemies. They have time and convenience to honey-butter the wickedness they prefer. Shortsighted, though. What good does it do to keep a favorite hate going when the very person you’ve poisoned your life with is the one (maybe the only one) able or willing to carry you to the bathroom when you can’t get there on your own? I sat at the foot of May’s bed or on top of her dresser sometimes and watched Heed soap her bottom, mash badly cooked food to just the right consistency. She cut May’s toenails and wiped white flakes from her eyelids. The girl May lived to mistreat was the one she depended on to hold her head over the slop jar. Nagging her every second, but doing it: airing, cleaning, spooning, rubbing, turning her over to the cooler side of the bed on nights hot enough to make you cry. And there’s not much sense in wasting time and life trying to put a woman in the asylum just to end up chipping ice for her to suck on. Where’s the gain in setting fire to the nest you live in if you have to live in the ashes for fifty years? I saw what Mr. Cosey did to Heed at the birthday dinner. My heart reached out to her and I let him know it. While he fumbled for something in his pocket and May and Christine were waiting in the car, I tapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t you never lay a hand on her again no matter what. Do, and I’m long gone.” He looked at me with Billy Boy’s eyes and said, “I made a mistake, L. A big mistake.” “Tell her,” I said. All I got was a sigh for an answer, and if I hadn’t been so agitated I would have known right then who he was sighing over.
I never did learn what really happened at the dance, but my mother didn’t knit me. Soon as they left I knew Heed was up to something. She telephoned one of the hotel waiters; told him to come get her. About an hour or so after she left I heard a truck drive up and a door slam. Then high heels running across the hall. Not five minutes passed when I smelled smoke. I had the sense to climb up there with a pail of water and had to run back and forth from the bathroom sink to fill it, but water’s no use with mattress fire. You think it’s out, but deep in there it’s waiting, biding its time till you turn your back. Then it eats the whole place up. I hauled the biggest sack of sugar I could find up there. When May and Christine got back the bed was quiet, like syrup.
Heed never admitted or denied the fire and I used to wonder why, if she was mad at him, she took it out on Christine instead. I don’t wonder anymore. And I don’t wonder why his mood stayed pleasant when he heard what Heed had done. May, naturally, was unforgiving and, twenty-eight years later, still loved the sight of her enemy forced to feed her. More satisfying than if her daughter had been her nurse—which she was eventually.
Heed snarled, as you would expect, at Christine’s break-in, but she was happy to shift May onto her. And just in case Christine looked at the job, changed her mind, and left, Heed took to her bed and let her hands fold. At first I thought May would be relieved by her daughter’s return, even though Christine was a big disappointment to her. Their quarrels were name-calling contests separated by years of nothing. So I was surprised at May’s reaction. She was afrai
d. Not sure if her daughter could be trusted with a pillow. But Christine jumped right in with beautiful cooking and plants to fill the room, both of which, if truth be told, hurried the sick woman along. Christine played prodigal girl for a year or so, then, on one of the prettiest dawns, May died. Smiling.
I don’t know what the smile was about. Nothing she aimed for had gone her way—except for the hatchet she threw between Heed and Christine when they were little girls. That stuck. Cleaved the ground they stood on. So when Christine leaned in to wipe crumbs from her mother’s chin, May saw a familiar look in her daughter’s eyes. Like before, they whispered about Heed, refreshed themselves with old stories of how she tried to trick them into believing she could write; the chop that fell to the floor because she couldn’t manage the knife; how her coddling of Mr. Cosey failed to limit him to her sheets; the hat she chose for his funeral. Mother and daughter became friends at last. Decades of bitterness, sealed in quarrels over Malcolm X, Reverend King, Selma, Newark, Chicago, Detroit, and Watts were gone. Dead the question of what was best for the race, because Heed answered it for them. She was the throwback they both had fought. Neither won, but they agreed on the target, so I guess that’s why May smiled into that lovely dawn.