After mulling over what the girl had told her, Christine had retreated to her apartment—two rooms and a bath annexed to the kitchen, servant’s quarters where L used to stay. Unlike the memory-and-junk-jammed rest of the house, the uncluttered quiet there was soothing. Except for pots of plants rescued from violent weather, the apartment looked much the same as it had some fifty years ago when she hid there under L’s bed. Misting begonia leaves, Christine found herself unable to decide on a new line of action, so she decided to consult her lawyer. She waited until Romen was due and Junior out of sight on the third floor. Earlier, at breakfast, dressed in clothes Heed must have loaned her (a red suit not seen in public since the Korean War), Junior had looked like a Sunday migrant. Except for the boots, last night’s leather was gone, as was the street-life smell she had brought into the house. When Christine saw Romen puttering around in the sunshine, inspecting ice damage done to the shrubs, she called him to help her with the garage door still stuck in ice, then told him to wash the car. When he was done, she drove off, picking up speed as quickly as she could to get to Gwendolyn East before the lawyer’s office closed.
Christine’s entanglements with the law were varied enough to convince her that Gwendolyn was not to be trusted. The lawyer may know the courts but she didn’t know anything about police—the help or the damage they could do long before you saw a lawyer. The police who had led her away from the mutilated Cadillac were, like Chief Buddy Silk, gentle, respectful, as though her violence was not merely understandable but justified. They handled her like a woman who had assaulted a child molester rather than a car. Her hands were cuffed in front, not behind her back—and loosely. As she sat in the patrol car, the sergeant offered her a lit cigarette and removed a shard of headlight glass from her hair. Neither officer pinched her nipples or suggested what a blow job could do for racial justice. The one time she had been in a killing frame of mind with a hammer instead of a switchblade in her hand, they treated her like a white woman. During four previous arrests—for incendiary acts, inciting mayhem, obstructing traffic, and resisting arrest—she had nothing lethal in her hand and was treated like sewage.
Come to think of it, every serious affair she’d had led straight to jail. First Ernie Holder, whom she married at seventeen, got them both arrested at an illegal social club. Then Fruit, whose pamphlets she passed out and with whom she had lived the longest, got her thirty days, no suspension, for inciting mayhem. Other affairs had overflowed and ended in dramas the law had precise names for: cursing meant assaulting an officer; yanking your arms when cuffed meant resisting arrest; throwing a cigarette too close to a police car meant conspiracy to commit arson; running across the street to get out of the way of mounted police meant obstructing traffic. Finally Dr. Rio. A Cadillac. A hammer. A gentle, almost reluctant arrest. After an hour’s wait, no charges pressed, no write-up or interview, they gave her back the shopping bag and let her go.
Go where? she wondered, slinking down the street. She had been manhandled out of her (his) apartment after a two-minute supervised reprieve to get her purse. No clothing can leave the premises, they said, but she was allowed to take some underwear and her cosmetics bag, which, unknown to the lawyer-paid thugs, included a spoon and twelve diamond rings. Aside from the rings she would die rather than pawn, she had a recently canceled MasterCard and seven dollars plus change. She was as lonely as a twelve-year-old watching waves suck away her sand castle. None of her close friends would risk Dr. Rio’s displeasure; the not so close ones were chuckling over her fall. So she walked to Manila’s and persuaded her to take her in. For just a few days. For free. It was a risky, even impudent request, since Manila did not run a whorehouse, as certain sanctimonious people described her home. She simply rented rooms to needy women. The forlorn, the abandoned, those in transit. That these women had regular visitors or remained in transit for years was not Manila’s concern.
Christine had all of these requisites in 1947. The bus driver who directed her to 187 Second Street, “right near the glass factory, look for a pink door,” either misunderstood or understood completely. She had asked him if he knew of a rooming house and he had given her Manila’s address. Despite the difference between her white gloves, little beanie hat, quiet pearls, and a flawless Peter Pan collar and the costumes of Manila’s girls, her desperation was equal to theirs. When she stepped out of the taxi it was nine-thirty in the morning. The house seemed ideal. Quiet. Neat. Manila smiled at the four suitcases and said, “Come on in.” She explained the rates, the house rules, and the policy on visitors. It was lunchtime before Christine figured out that the visitors were clientele.
She was surprised by how faint her shock was. Her plan was to find secretarial work or, even better, some high-paying postwar work in a factory. Fresh from an overdue sixteenth-birthday party and graduation from Maple Valley, she had landed in a place her mother would have called “a stinking brothel” (as in “Is he going to turn this place into a . . .”). Christine had laughed. Nervously. This is Celestial territory, she thought, remembering a scar-faced woman on the beach. The girls sauntered through the dining room to the living room where Christine sat and, scanning her clothes, spoke among themselves but not to her. It reminded her of her reception at Maple Valley: the cool but thorough examination; the tentative, smoothly hostile questions. When a few of Manila’s girls did engage her—“Where you from? Cute hat. Sharp shoes too, where’d you get ’em? Pretty hair”—the similarity increased. The youngest ones talked about their looks, their boyfriends; the older ones gave bitter advice about both. As in Maple Valley, everyone had a role and a matron ruled the stage. She hadn’t escaped from anything. Maple Valley, Cosey’s Hotel, Manila’s whorehouse—all three floated in sexual tension and resentment; all three insisted on confinement; in all three status was money. And all were organized around the pressing needs of men. Christine’s second escape, initiated by a home life turned dangerous, was fed by a dream of privacy, of independence. She wanted to make the rules, choose her friends, earn and control her own money. For those reasons alone she believed she would never have stayed at Manila’s, but she will never know because, being a colored girl in the 1940s with an education that suited her for nothing but wifehood, it was easy as pie for Ernie Holder to claim her that very night. So long, independence; so long, privacy. He took her out of there into an organization with the least privacy, the most rules, and the fewest choices: the biggest, totally male entity in the world.
Pfc. Ernest Holder had come to Manila’s looking to buy some fun and found instead a beautiful girl in a navy suit and pearls reading Life magazine on a sofa. Christine accepted his invitation to dinner. By dessert they had plans. Desire so instant it felt like fate. As couplehood goes, it had its moments. As marriage goes, it was ridiculous.
Christine parked and pulled down the visor’s mirror to see if she was presentable. It was a move she was not accustomed to, but one she made because of an encounter on her first visit to Gwendolyn East’s office. About to enter the building, she had felt a tap on her shoulder. A woman in a baseball cap and tracksuit grinned up at her.
“Ain’t you Christine Cosey?”
“I am.”
“I thought that was you. I used to work at Cosey’s. Way, way back.”
“Is that so?”
“I remember you. Best legs on the beach. My, you used to be so cute. Your skin, your pretty hair. I see you still got those eyes, though. Lord, you was one foxy thing. You don’t mind me saying that, do you?”
“Of course not,” said Christine. “Ugly women know everything about beauty. They have to.”
She didn’t look back to see if the woman spit or laughed. Yet on each subsequent visit to the lawyer’s office, she couldn’t stop herself from checking the mirror. The “pretty hair” needed a cut and a style—any style. The skin was still unlined, but “those eyes,” looking out, never inward, seemed to belong to somebody else.
Gwendolyn East was not pleased. The whole point of an offic
e was scheduled appointments. Christine’s entrance had been like a break-in.
“We have to move,” said Christine, pulling the chair closer to the desk. “Something’s going on.”
“I beg your pardon?” Gwendolyn asked.
“This will business. She has to be stopped.”
Gwendolyn decided that encouraging this rough client was not worth the so far nonforthcoming settlement fee. “Listen, Christine. I support you, you know that, and a judge might also. But you are living there, rent free, no expenses. The fact is, it could be said that Mrs. Cosey is taking care of you when she is under no obligation to do so. And the benefit of being awarded the property is, in a way, already yours in a manner of speaking. Better, maybe.”
“What are you saying? She could put me out on the street any day if she wants to.”
“I know,” Gwendolyn replied, “but in twenty years she hasn’t. What do you make of that?”
“Slavery is what I make of it.”
“Come on, Christine.” Gwendolyn frowned. “You’re not in a rest home or on welfare . . .”
“Welfare? Welfare!” Christine whispered the word at first, then shouted it. “Look. If she dies who gets the house?”
“Whomever she designates.”
“Like a brother or a nephew or a cousin or a hospital, right?”
“Whomever.”
“Not necessarily to me, right?”
“Only if she wills it.”
“No point in killing her then?”
“Christine. You are too funny.”
“You listen to me. She’s just now hired somebody. A girl. A young girl. She doesn’t need me anymore.”
“Well.” Gwendolyn was thoughtful. “Do you think she would agree to a kind of lease agreement? Something that guarantees you a place there for life and support at some level in return for . . . services?”
Christine threw her head back and scanned the ceiling as though searching for a new language to make herself understood. What to say to this lawyer woman shouldn’t be all that hard. After all, Miss East had Up Beach history, was the granddaughter of a cannery girl who suffered a stroke. Slowly she tapped her middle finger on the lawyer’s desk to stress certain words. “I am the last, the only, blood relative of William Cosey. For free I have taken care of his house and his widow for twenty years. I have cooked, cleaned, washed her underwear, laundered her sheets, done the shopping . . .”
“I know.”
“You don’t know! You don’t! She is replacing me.”
“Wait now.”
“She is! That’s been her whole life, don’t you get it? Replacing me, getting rid of me. I’m always last; all the time the one being told to go, get out.”
“Christine, please.”
“This is my place. I had my sixteenth-birthday party in that house. When I was away at school it was my address. It’s where I belong and nobody is going to wave some liquor-splashed menu at me and put me out of it!”
“But you were away from the property for years . . .”
“Fuck you! If you don’t know the difference between property and a home you need to be kicked in the face, you stupid, you dumb, you cannery trash! You’re fired!”
Once there was a little girl with white bows on each of her four plaits. She had a bedroom all to herself beneath the attic in a big hotel. Forget-me-nots dotted the wallpaper. Sometimes she let her brand-new friend stay over and they laughed till they hiccuped under the sheets.
Then one day the little girl’s mother came to tell her she would have to leave her bedroom and sleep in a smaller room on another floor. When she asked her mother why, she was told it was for her own protection. There were things she shouldn’t see or hear or know about.
The little girl ran away. For hours she walked a road smelling of oranges until a man with a big round hat and a badge found her and took her home. There she fought to reclaim her bedroom. Her mother relented, but turned the key in the lock to keep her in the bedroom at night. Soon after, she was sent away, far away, from things not to be seen, heard, or known about.
Except for the man wearing a round hat, and a badge, no one saw her cry. No one ever has. Even now her “still got those” eyes were dry. But they were also, for the first time, seeing the treacherous world her mother knew. She had hated her mother for expelling her from her bedroom and, when Chief Buddy brought her back, smacking her face so hard Christine’s chin hit her shoulder. The slap sent her into hiding under L’s bed for two days, so they sent her away to Maple Valley School, where she languished for years and where a mother like May was an embarrassment. Maple Valley teachers were alarmed by acting-out Negroes, but they flinched openly when they read May’s incoherent letters to the Atlanta Daily World about white “honor” and misguided “freedom rides.” Christine was happy to confine their relationship to letters she could hide or destroy. Other than a little gossip about famous guests, there was nothing in them of interest to a thirteen-year-old trying to be popular, and as the years passed she didn’t even understand them. Christine could laugh at her own ignorance now, but then it was as though May wrote in code: CORE is sitting-in in Chicago (who was she, this Cora?), Mussolini resigned (resigned to what?), Detroit on fire. Did Hitler kill Roosevelt or did Roosevelt kill Hitler—anyway they both died in the same month. Most of the letters, however, were about Heed’s doings. Plots, intrigue. Now she finally understood her mother. The world May knew was always crumbling; her place in it never secure. A poor, hungry preacher’s child, May saw her life as depending on colored people who rocked boats only at sea. Events begun in 1942 with her father-in-law’s second marriage heaped up quickly throughout the war and long after until, disoriented by her struggle against a certain element in her house and beyond it, she became comic. Yet her instincts, thought Christine, if not her methods, were correct. Her world had been invaded, occupied, turned into scum. Without vigilance and constant protection it slid away from you, left your heart fluttering, temples throbbing, racing down a road that had lost its citrus.
Everyone decided her mother was insane and speculated as to why: widowhood, overwork, no sex, SNCC. It was none of that. Clarity was May’s problem. By 1971, when Christine came home for Cosey’s funeral, her mother’s clarity had been accumulating for years. It had gone from the mild acuteness they called kleptomania to outright brilliance. She covered her bedroom windows with plywood painted red for danger. She lit lookout fires on the beach. Raised havoc with Boss Silk when he refused her purchase of a gun. The sheriff’s father, Chief Silk, would have let her, but his son had a different view of Negroes with guns, even though they both wanted to shoot the same people. Now Christine realized that May’s understanding of the situation was profound. She had been right in 1971 to sneer at Christine’s fake military jacket, Che-style beret, black leotard, miniskirt. Sharp as a tiger’s tooth, May instantly recognized the real deal, as was clear from her own attire. People laughed. So what? The army helmet May had taken to wearing was an authentic position and a powerful statement. Even at the funeral, having been encouraged by L to substitute a black scarf, she still carried it under her arm because, contrary to what Christine thought then, it was true that at any minute protection might be needed in the enemy-occupied zone she, and now Christine, lived in. In that zone, readiness was all. Again, Christine felt the sheer bitterness of the past two decades tramping up and down the stairs carrying meals she was too proud to ruin, wading through layers of competing perfumes, trying not to shiver before the “come on” eyes in the painting over that grotesque bed, collecting soiled clothes, washing out the tub, pulling hairs from the drain—if this wasn’t hell, it was the lobby.
Heed had long wanted to have May put away, but L’s judgment, more restraining than Cosey’s, stopped her. When the menu was read for the “will” it was taken to be, and “Billy Boy’s wife” was awarded the hotel, Heed shot straight up out of the chair.
“To a nutcase? He leaves our business to a nutcase?”
It got ugly
and stayed that way until the lawyer slapped the table, assuring Heed that no one would (could?) stop her from running the hotel. She was needed, and besides her husband had bequeathed her the house, the cash. At which point May, adjusting her helmet, had said, “I beg your damn pardon?”
The argument that followed was a refined version of the ones that had been seething among the women since the beginning: each had been displaced by another; each had a unique claim on Cosey’s affection; each had either “saved” him from some disaster or relieved him of an impending one. The only difference about this preburial quarrel was L, whose normal silence seemed glacial then because there was no expression on her face, no listening, no empathy—nothing. Taking advantage of L’s apparent indifference, Heed shouted that unstable people should not be allowed to inherit property because they needed “perfessionate” care. Only the arrival of the undertaker, announcing the need for immediate departure to the church, kept Christine’s hand from becoming a fist. Temporarily, anyway, because later, at the grave site, seeing Heed’s false tears, her exaggerated shuddering shoulders; watching townsfolk treat her as the sole mourner, and the two real Cosey women as unwelcome visitors; angry that her attempt to place the diamonds on Cosey’s fingers had been thwarted—Christine exploded. Reaching into her pocket, she leapt toward Heed with a raised arm which L, having suddenly come to life, bent behind her back. “I’ll tell,” she whispered to one, the other, or to no one in particular. Heed, having thrust her face into Christine’s as soon as it was safe, backed off. Nothing L said ever was idle. There were many details of her sorry life that Christine did not want exposed. Dislike she could handle, even ridicule. But not pity. Panicked, she closed the knife and settled for an icy glare. But Heed—why had she obeyed so fast? What was she afraid of? May, however, understood what was needed and immediately took her daughter’s side. Stepping forward into that feline heat, she removed Heed’s Gone with the Wind hat and tossed it into the air. Perfect. A giggle from somebody opened a space in which Heed chased her hat and Christine cooled.