Dora tried to take stock of everything. A garland of pond lilies tied with blue satin ribbon graced the serving table. Dresses of silk, brocade, satin, velvet, moire, and tulle. She noticed also that, although the men were of many different hues, the women were not. Excluding the servants, as invisible as she was at the Bonneaus, she was the darkest. Diamonds! Pearls, fresh flowers, someone else has flowers. Blue surrah lace overdress. Cloak $15. Saque hat $3. She now thought the houndstooth plaid of the waistcoat she had thought so smart was too casual for the occasion, and the flowers a transparent attempt to draw attention to herself. Ridicullous. From the corner of her eye, she caught two women, their eyes laughing, their hands cupped over their mouths. She saw one pointing to her shoes. My cowrie shoes from the Miss. Her feet were pointed east and west. Country Lowland Geechee. Beads of sweat dotted her nose, bluebells and hyacinth dancing just above.
Roswell approached, his cheeks already rosy from the flask of brandy he used to wash down the bon-bons. “Let’s see. Blanche and Juliet were sisters. That would make us cousins, I suppose. No such thing as a stepcousin. My stepmother’s niece. Blanche does hate for me to call her that. Mother. If I said Mama, she would probably asphyxiate.”
“You may just continue to call me a relation if that suits you better.”
“In actuality, we are not related at all really. You are cousin to Francina and the boy. There’s no blood between us.”
Whiskey, chocolate, and bile. “My, it’s close.” She waved her handkerchief. “Might I have some punch?”
She watched Roswell toddle off, then began moving in a direction away from him. The less said about her relations the better. And who is your mother again? Where are your people from? She dreaded the questions. She wanted just to start fresh. Why can’t life be what you make of it yourself? Who cares where you come from? “What is it you’re doin’ for yourself?” she blurted aloud.
“Makin’ it, but could do a might bettuh.” Sullivan, the railroad porter, appeared at her side.
Her eyes widened. “Mr. Sullivan, I did not expect to see you here.”
“Indeed. Nor I you, Miss Dora,” he said wryly. She knew Sullivan only as one of Winrow’s gambling buddies. “I had understood that Win was taking you to the Callendar’s minstrel show.”
“He has spoken of me?”
“Not out of turn. He has great admiration for you.” Sullivan would relish the next time he saw Win.
“What brings you to the Brown Society?”
“Railroad gets around,” he smiled. “And you?”
Roswell returned with a small crystal cup of punch. Dora introduced the two men, wishing they would both go away. The handle was so petite, the punch spilt from the cup the moment Dora brought it to her lips. Her fingers in her newly macramed gloves felt like ten bound beings. She rested the cup in her palm and turned to Sullivan. “I made the christening frock for Mrs. Marivale’s baby. As I am a professional woman, she thought the discussion of a woman writer would interest me.”
“Indeed.”
His terseness infuriated her. “A colored woman author, you must admit that is something.”
“Yes, but did you see her hair?” Roswell chuckled.
If she could have fit her fingers around the handle, Dora would have thrown the cup in his face. The both of em! One of the maids detected her distress and appeared with a serving tray. “M’am, may I take that for you?” The two women had often ridden Tom Winrow’s livery together. “I believe Miss Marivale lookin’ fuh yuh.” She winked and directed Dora toward the next room.
The idea of a woman on her own, writing, going all across the country, exposing the horrors of which no one else would speak—the audacity, the courage thrilled her, yet here she was, panic-stricken at walking across a room, at even speaking.
“Race interests before party interests.”
“But we are down to two state senators alone.”
“A Negro is hanged who stole a box of cigars and a bottle of whiskey? A white man stole six thousand dollars and is pardoned? You aren’t still thinking that we can achieve anything through government, are you?” She was fascinated by the conversation—as much of it as she could follow. The sisters had taught her, “One must speak up to have one’s thoughts considered,” but the conversation was so heady, the people so confident in their thoughts, their speech unflawed to her ears. She hesitated at each turn. Literacy, poll tax? Eight-box ballot? Colored, Afro-American, Negro?
“You do not identify with the poor members of the race when you benefit from their earnings to sustain your own.”
“Their experience is so far removed, it’s like . . . it’s like a picture on the wall.”
Pictures don’t talk, people do. What they need, what they want, and none of yuh doin’ much talking to em, much less askin’. People got mouths. People got ideas. She was beginning to feel that this venture was a terrible mistake. Could be tappin’ my foot to a good music show, and here I am walkin’ round, dressed up like a dummy, feet flappin’ on the parquet floor. Winrow was right. The Charlestonian colored aristocracy continued to live in a world of their own. The way they earned their money—the barbers, caterers, morticians, lawyers, and the few government positions that remained available to them—protected them against the change in times. It would be two more years before Homer Plessy would discover that their country regarded them just as unequal and unentitled as regular black folk. Sheltered from the rapidity and severity of the descent into Jim Crow that the laundrywomen, dock workers, street cleaners, and maids knew only too well, they were living on the vapors of history, just as much as the Bonneaus.
They were decent enough. Teacher in the freedmen’s school, tailor, small shopkeeper, pastor in a stone-hewn church, steamboat operator. Like Roswell, they served their people in necessary ways. Like his brothers, they still had intimate ties with their white tidewater families, their fortunes as interwoven as their bloodlines. Freeborn forebears—tradesmen, craftsmen, artisans, and lots of mistresses, concubines—were as dependent upon the slaving South as the slaveholders. Fear of the black slaves’ freedom had more than once put theirs in jeopardy. Dora, with her foot in each world, belonged to neither.
Another guest watched her as she moved. He had been wandering around the party—a colored de Tocqueville, observing the provincials. He noticed her immediately—so different from the others, so beautiful. “Mademoiselle, vous êtes une fleur, vient en vie.”
Dora did not know how to react. The only person she knew who spoke French was Madame Pilar, and that friendship was hardly one to which she wanted to call attention. “Beg pardon?”
“The way you are standing. In Paris, I would take you for a ballerina.”
Ballerina . . . what that mean?
Mrs. Marivale floated in behind her. “Ah, I see you have met our other islander, Monsieur Dessalines. Eudora Mayfield, monsieur, is niece to my good friend Blanche Diggs. Comes to us from St. Simon’s.”
Dora May! “It’s a small island just off the coast,” Dora explained.
“Monsieur Dessalines is from Hayti,” Mrs. Marivale said conspiratorially, “where the late Mr. Marivale served as ambassador in the years when our people had their few moments of glory.”
“Like yours, mine is a small island, too.” His eyes flirted with her, caressed her as he kissed her glove. The sensation raced up her arm, ricocheted through her body, and exited out her toes. She barely heard his words.
“An island which astonished the world by winning its own freedom,” Mrs. Marivale added, as she put her slender veined hand on his shoulder.
“Yes, and we have paid a price for that arrogance.”
“You are faring better than the colored are here, Monsieur Dessalines. From eleven congressmen, we are down to two. Dessalines and my nephew became acquainted in Paris, Dora.”
“Mr. Dessalines.”
“Please call me Yves. As in temptation.”
In the nick of time, Blanche approached with Roswell Sr., forever l
ate to social affairs. Blanche squeezed Dora’s hand in a show of filial affection and placed her cheek on the young woman’s face and made an audible kiss to the air. “Forgive our tardiness, my dear. Roswell had three services today.”
Miranda Marivale descended the stairs, holding her newborn. Blanche, with her flaxen locks, golden skin, and a practiced grace, scooped the infant in her arms and cooed, “I must see this Miss Wells. I heard Senator Bruce of Mississippi pursued her and she turned him down.”
“Don’t believe it for a minute. Pursued, yes,” her husband corrected, “but not in that manner. He has absolutely castigated her in the press. We must ask her about that.”
“Miss Wells could not join us as planned,” Mrs. Marivale interjected in a near whisper. “She is in seclusion. There is a death threat on her head across the South for publishing her book. We will have to settle for the autographed copies Mr. Sullivan was kind enough to smuggle in.”
Dora wandered again into the vestibule to examine Miss Wells’s new book for herself. Copies were stacked on the mantel and one was open for display. She leafed through it and found the inset photograph of the author. Dora stared at the image. The crown of African hair which Roswell had so derided, her broad, sculpted features, the solid, dark proud eyes fixed on some faraway future or past, reminded Dora of the one picture she had of her mother, Juliet.
She flipped to an interior page and began reading. “. . . neck . . . Death came . . . for fully ten minutes after he was strung up the chest . . . convulsive movements of the limbs . . . threw his body into a fire and watched as it burned . . . heart and liver cut into pieces . . . bones crushed for souvenirs, 25 cents, piece of cooked liver for ten. A noted senator bought a slice of the heart.” In Charleston, she had been shielded from the severity of the South’s retrenching terror. The coastal lowlands, still majority black, were being defeated by the legislature, not by lynchings. Dora dropped the book on the mantel and covered her face with her hands. She pushed her hat back off her brow. The lace collar she had knitted herself suddenly was tight around her neck, the floral pattern on the walls she had so admired now nauseated. She stepped quickly to the wide front porch to breathe in some air and sunlight. She could not move her fingers. She felt heat, smelled flesh, heard screams.
Dessalines caught her by the waist and eased her to a porch chair. The confident tenor melody of his voice brought her back. “It is quite gruesome what one human being can do to another.”
“I had not a notion. All these stories. All these people killed!”
His eyes narrowed and his gaze turned inward. “That is nothing.”
“How can you say that? How can you possibly say such a thing?”
“I am from Hayti.” His laugh was incredulous. “The depths of depravity that I have witnessed, the generations of stories I was told all of my young life, my nation’s bloody and furious hundred years’ war for freedom allows me.” He wanted to sound worldly, to impress these colored Americans, who, twenty years out of slavery, fretted that liberty was still elusive, but when he turned to her, the ardor in her eyes, the flush of her cheeks, the passion in her lips, her honesty as unnerving as her beauty, he was speechless. His confident, Continental visage dissolved. He wanted to kiss her.
“Oh, there you are, Dora!” Mrs. Marivale had finally found her nephew and was dragging him beside her, their short arms intertwined. “I wanted you two to meet. You’re both artistic.”
Mrs. Marivale’s nephew lifted the stem of his sherry glass with his whole fist. “Aunt Constance tells me you have a good head for business.”
Dessallines clicked his heels and faded away.
Dora had purchased her first book. Now she had three. The Bible, a hand-me-down dictionary. And now Miss Wells. First one of my own. The world it seemed was much bigger than a peach. Miss Wells had demonstrated capabilities that made Dora feel her own ambition meager and selfish. The small children who gathered round her window. Perhaps she could give them some rudimentary instruction and start that sewing school. Fights on the railroad and over the erasure of colored people’s rights. People dying too often. Flare-ups of violence. What was she to do about this? And what of Aunt Sibby, the generation that had borne the yoke of enslavement, who would tend them? Miss Wells’s book had opened her eyes to the threat of random violence besieging her people at every turn. There were too many problems to contemplate, too many people to help when she could barely make a way for herself.
The next day Dora arrived home from Yum Lee’s with her weekly piecework order. “Got somethin’ for yuh,” Bette announced and pointed to a long balsa wood box on the table. Since getting her first pair of shoes from Sears Roebuck, Dora always liked boxes. She opened it quickly and unwrapped the white tissue. A shimmer of sun caught the fabric inside, a bolt of Andalusian lace, linen and silk gossamer threads spun by butterflies!
“It came all the way from New Orleans, and before that Paris, France. Know where that is, gal?”
“Yes, I know where that is. I have seen it on a globe, Mah Bette. How did you get this?”
“I didn’t get it. You got it. Read the card, Miss Smart Nose.”
“ ‘For someone as delicate and graceful as this lace, with hopes that I might see you soon.’ ”
Dora unwound the bolt of fabric and wrapped a piece round her waist. Mah Bette squinted at the card. “Yives . . .”
“It’s Eve, Mah Bette, Eve Dessalines,” Dora corrected as she swayed, modeling the fabric to herself, holding it to the light.
“Name sounds like a woman.” Winrow, who had entered for his lesson, put his hat on the table as if, having shellacked it, he was entitled to do so. Sullivan had told him all about the book party. “You missed a great show at Callendar’s, Miss Dora. Bert King got a new act, put a whole cup an’ saucer in he mouf. They played up a might of they hit tune. Me and Miss Lizzie sat in wid em. It was a good time.”
“I’m accustomed to someone knockin’, Mr. Winrow.”
“Doah was open,” he said, standing at it.
Bette threw her white braid over her shoulder and placed her hands on her hips and wiggled a bit girlishly as she retired to her sleeping area behind the curtain. “He sure don’t look like no woman.”
Predictably alarmed, Dora followed. Always knows somethin’. “How you know, Mah Bette? You seen him?” she whispered.
“Fuh sho,” Bette answered quietly. “He bring me some things for my business from time to time. He be captain of a great ship. He seen you talkin with your ole Mah Bette and inquired about you. I told him where we lived and I promised to bring you this package.” She folded her arms across her chest and giggled. “I give him a charm to keep him fuh yuh.”
“No you dint!” Dora hissed. “I know you dint do that!”
“He don’t know what it fuh. He a sea captain, own his own boat. Dot what I talkin’ bout. Got people workin’ for him. His business takes him to Haiti, Savannah City, Cuba, New Orleans, even New York. A true gentleman.” Bette moved closer. “Winrow’s nice enough for when you first got here, for you to get to thinking somethin’ of yourself, but that was all that I intended.”
“Well, I’ll not accept such a gift. This will have to go back. I’ll have to tell him thankee, but he’ll have to take it back.”
“Tell him yourself,” Bette replied, pulling back the curtain.
There at the door was Yves Dessalines. Both he and Tom stood at the entryway. Two pole cats.
Mah Bette was delighted. Here was a man more to her liking than that mule driver musician who fancied her grandgal. Though not one to make her true feelings known, Bette readily acted upon them. Every gal need to have suitors. “Mr. Dessalines, a pleasure to see you again!”
Dora rewrapped the material and approached him. “I cannot accept this.”
“But je ne comprends pas. I understood you were open for business.”
“Hey, wait a minute!” Win interjected, thinking his girl insulted.
“You are a dressmaker, non? Best
in Charleston, I am told. I brought the lace for you to make me a dress. A dress for my affianced, my bride-to-be.”
“Oh, oh . . . oh. Forgive me.” How stupid!
A quartet of voices followed.
“You have money for this?”
“Win, I can handle my own affairs.”
“Why yes, of course. I will leave this as deposit. Spare no expense.”
“I cannot begin work on the dress today.”
“Of course, I do not mean to intrude.”
“Siddown, stay fuh dinnuh.”
“I cannot, Maum Elizabette, but thank you. I must get back to my ship. I have already intruded upon you for too long. I will return tomorrow to discuss the design, if I may.”
“Why yes, of course.”
“What time?” Win intruded.
“Is this gentleman someone to you?”
“He is my neighbor and friend. Forgive me. Mr. Winrow, Thomas, Mister . . . Monsieur Dessalines.”
“Yves.”
“I heard.”
“Yes, what time?”
“Round two o’clock?”
“I reckon that will be fine.”
“À deux heures, bien.” Dessalines clicked his heels and bowed, then crisply nodded to Winrow, the challenge clearly on.
Dessalines. His lips were broad, soft, and unlined, always in a faint smile. Chestnut skin, hair of raven ringlets close to the scalp, he had the eyes of a ladies’ man, and smelled of scented water used for linens. His body was robust and lean like a swimmer.