None of Tildie’s former bridesmaids was speaking to her. “Oh for Chrissakes, why didn’t you take bettuh care of him, Cole? He looked terrible, his face all blanched and scratched up. You bastard. What happened? He said he didn’t remember a thing. What’d you do?”
To make amends, Cole brought home a new batch of Robber Baron sons looking for social connections, and Tildie soon tired of her anger. She turned the debacle of the prior summer into entertaining chatter. “No more dinner parties,” Matilda chirped in her best bawdy voice. “Last summer’s was absolutely awful. The bunny died. The servants took sick. My guests hated each other. The guest of honor was two hours late and turned around at the threshold cuz my maid was his relation.”
They had rented the sloop and were eating fresh clams on the deck. “All because Cole wanted to show them a good time.” Cole seduced the new recruits with his songs of the South. “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah, Someone’s in the kitchen I kno-o-o-ow . . . The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice, gentlemen, but, you ain’t tasted nothin’ till you had yourself a sweet Geechee peach, ripe for the pluckin’, ready to pop out its skin.”
Yves Dessalines veered the boat on a sharp angle. It keeled to the side. The pleasure passengers toppled onto each other, almost falling overboard. Yves hollered, “Storm’s comin’,” and despite their protests and threats, he headed back for the harbor.
Back in Charleston, Yves rode straightaway to the Winrow farm. There he found Dora, her apron wide around her bulging stomach. “Mr. Dessalines . . . so nice to see you . . . I finished the dress . . . would you like to see it?” He slammed his hand on the porch in aggravation. “I took young Master McKinley on a boat ride. Your boyfriend’s got a loose tongue.”
She flew at him, a fury of unleashed ferocity. Her teeth bared, screaming and growling deep in her throat, she overturned tables, benches, the cooking pot. He caught her by the wrists. Her clawed fingers balled into fists and drew blood from her palms as she struck him and struck him again in the chest, then sank to her knees, sobbing in great rolling heaves. “Please, go away. Go.” Her hands shook and she stammered, “It don’t matter what you do. We’re all the same. No better than dirt . . .”
Yves instantly moved toward her. “Why didn’t you come to me?”
“Where was you? Do not speak of it again, to me or anyone. You must promise me that.”
“Something must be done.”
“Nothin’ to be done, but go on. It is forgotten.”
“When are you due?”
“In three months or so.”
“May I call again?”
“I do not believe that would be ’propriate.”
He began to reply. She placed two fingers on his lips. He turned them over and kissed them slowly, then walked away, his boot heels digging in the ground. When he had gone a few yards, he pirouetted and, looking toward her, bowed like a gentleman. “Perhaps I will have another dress made, or a fine waistcoat, madame.” Later in Charleston, he passed Tom Winrow unloading his buckboard across the boulevard. Dessalines doffed his cap to the victor.
Dora distracted herself from Dessalines’ visit by preparing a good meal for her husband—okra and rice with sweet corn and shrimp. Win came in with his weekly earnings and talk from the town. “One of them Bonneau servants, that stuck-up colored coachman, come in. You wanna hear somethin’ funny?” he asked as she heaped the stew from the okra pot over a steaming pile of rice. “Talk from the servants outside the stoah was somethin’. Word is, that cousin at the Bonneaus’ what keep company with the colored over to Pilar’s sometime, someone caught him on the wharf and toah his ass up. They say he got cut up wid a razor, got his hands stomped on.” Dora covered her mouth and started to gag. Tom caught her and eased her onto the kitchen chair, placing the plate on the table untended. “If havin’ a baby is gonna change you like this, we ain’t havin’ no more.”
“Win, I need to sit down. I cain’t be no longer on my feet these days.” She started to tell him but the words would not leave her body.
“Sure, baby, sure. I serves you fuh a change. I sorry, Dora, just talkin’ plain is all. That’s one rich crackuh won’t be camptown racin’ for a while. Police out lookin’ for the person what did it.” He rinsed his hands in the bucket on the counter and sat down to eat. “They pickin’ up niggahs for vagrancy just waitin’ fuh a fare.” Winrow reached over the table and hugged her. “But you not gonna have to work for white folks no more, you hear me? From now on, you my wife.”
He is so proud. She wished she could be like Mah Bette and hear voices in the thunder, spirits in the wind. She went into the forest, with her Sears Roebuck shoebox, and sat on a blanket of fallen leaves. She opened the box lid and fingered the locks of hair. Withdrawing the picture of Juliet with her newborn in her arms, Dora pleaded with God.
Mah Bette came upon her. The old woman counseled, “He a good man, you should tell him.”
It was a difficult birth. Panic made Dora sick with fever. The women kept turns on the watch. Blanche, Aunt Sibby, Mah Bette, Pilar. In the candor of the ritual, they traded stories.
“Married to a soldjah, I wus. Lousiana when he found me,” Pilar recounted, her legs splayed before her. “Had another wife by then. Next one I marry, come say ‘Stay home, cut de grass.’ I say, ‘Let it grow up under yuh, I leavin’.’ ”
“Those sistuhs—Miss Stubbins and Miss Highgate. Shakers and Movers of the World!” Mah Bette went on, “The brown gal, Miss Highgate. Said she was runnin’ off to Kansas. She say when she really messin’ with that Union Jack Bureau man’s son—one that wrote poetry. Humph. Runnin’ off to hide her shame she was. Din’t git fuh.”
Blanche filled in some of the missing pieces of Dora’s birth. “Your aunt Elma brought me to Charleston, told me, ‘I’ll come back for you,’ but she never did. Suitcase full of dreams we had. Elma went on over to white. Never saw her again. Mrs. Diggs took me in, treated me kindly. When she passed, seemed natural for me to take her place.”
Late into the night when the others had tired of their vigil, Mah Bette would tell her stories, curling through the spires of smoke from her corncob pipe. “Man come bring you, sayin’ a woman instructed him to bring you here. How was I to believe this was my daughter’s chile, when never seen he nor you before. You ain’t had no harr, no harr at all. An’ you was toasty. I could tell by your ears, you was gonna be golden brown like a fresh autumn leaf. Cryin’, eyes close tight, little fists flailing about and me an old woman. ‘What I’ma do wid dis,’ I say. He say, ‘That yo bidness, cuz I done finished wid mine.’ I went to look you over and seen the note. Ax the man could he read it and tell me what it say. Just then you stop crying and open up your eyes. Just then I know, before he even say, ‘Eudora means happiness.’ You was a pretty lil ol’ baby, but no harr at all. When all my babies had a whole mess of harr right out the womb. How was I to believe this was my daughter’s chile. Never seen no Mayfield sleep so. Eyes just as shut. I got to look you over. Sabina say tap you on your toes. Then you open your eyes and I know.”
Bette talked to Dora, squeezing her hand. “We got nothin’ but to choose life. Find the honor in it. Make it so. Will it so. You a fighter, Eudora May—in life there is hope. In life—choose not to give up. New day mean a new day’s battle begun. This child is the child of your womb, and if she is born of this hell all the more power to deliver us from it. To the seventh generation.”
The old midwife Sibby motioned that it was time. “Git uh ax n put up unnuh duh straw tick, ease em blood flow.” She worked quickly, coaxing the reluctant newborn. “Think you fallin’. Not know where. Dat’s arright. Aunt Sibby gon cotcha.” The child came out the color of pound cake, hair straight and black as a crow. “Juss like the China doll I seen at Yum Lee.” The old woman grinned as she held the baby for the women to see.
“Like Elma come back.” Blanche sighed.
Winrow hovered at the door. Mah Bette beckoned him forward. “She may be a might bright fuh yuh, Winro
w, but she a fine gal. Right smart.” Winrow took the tiny infant in his arms and sat down on the porch. Bette sat down beside him. “Mayfield blood is strong. Chirren come out lookin’ any which way.”
Before Elma Thomasine was even weaned, Dora was back at work. She went back to Miss O’Malley. Offered to work on consignment again. Her posture of pride became a rigid rectitude, an upturned chin which she could not move. Winrow also returned to his routine, struggling with the farm by day and hittin’ it at Pilar’s at night and on the weekends. They argued about it furiously on Saturday and attended the small Azula Street church together on Sunday. Dora preferred it to Emmanuel, where the wealthy colored attended. To be seen was not her goal. While others sunk further into dependency and borrowed lands, lent in shares, their combined income met the payments on Win’s land.
Win came home from Pilar’s drunk again, singing a tune bout romancin’ some woman. Three-year-old Elma ran from the porch and greeted him, a clothesline rope tied around her waist, she halted and pranced like a puppy when the rope went taut. Frowning, Winrow unloosed the tie and looked around. “Where yo’ mama?”
“She at service. Gettin’ Revival!”
“Where yo’ granmama?”
“She inna woods. Told me tuh stay put.”
“How’s my girl?” He smiled and tossed Elma into the air. She erupted with laughter. He tossed her higher, teasing her, asking, “Do you know where your daddy at?” Tossing her up, shouting, “Where could he be, I wonduh? . . . Can you find him in the dark?” Catching her, he smiled, “Here I is!”
Dora came from service and saw Win playing roughly with their child. “Stop it, this instant! Put her down!” Winrow gently set his daughter down and approached his wife. She turned her head away from the smell of liquor on his breath. “Got somethin’ fuh yuh. Postman give it to me at the stoah.” He pulled from his pocket a letter from Dessalines. It was torn in half. “You betrayed me with that high-tone nigga, come in here have the nerve to turn yo’ nose to me?” He pulled out three more and threw them on the ground.
“Where did you get those? Going through my things!”
“I got ’em in my house. In my goddam house! You think I gonna be a fool an’ let you keep this up on me? Huh?”
“Those letters three years old. Never opened.”
“If they so old, why you keep ’em? Where this one from, Paris? Where this one from, Havana? I cain’t read ’em, you tell me!” He hurled the letters at her chest. “Why you keep ’em, huh? An what’s this one? Keep it cuz you in love with him. Keep ’em cuz of this bastard yelluh chile!”
“Don’t you call her that! Don’t you call her that!” They fought. Little Elma began to cry, trying to get between them.
“You betrayed me, made a mockery of me. Tricked me into marryin’ yuh after that no-count nigga thew you off!”
“Is that what you think? How stupid!”
“What’d you say? What you call me?!”
Dora began to laugh. Before he could catch himself, the back of his hand had struck her face. “Damn, woman!”
A single tear rolled down her cheek. “It is fit to punish me, but please, please don’t hurt Elma. Please.”
She took her daughter in her arms and carried the child inside. When she had calmed the girl to sleep, she returned to Winrow, who sat on the porch step, his world shattered. She leaned against the post. “I was too proud. I shoulda seen it. Shoulda knowed.” She told him of the dress and the walk and the tree with no bark. “I shoulda knowed, shoulda knowed when I seen it. So busy makin’ my future, I couldn’t see it.”
“Oh Dora, sweet Dora.” He took her in his arms and carried her to bed.
She wanted to show him love, wanted to comfort, to close her eyes and feel whole, but his hands were rough. When he entered her she was aware again of her separateness, the chafing of his skin against hers as he moved inside her, reminding her again and again of the ruptures in her flesh—the heat of his breath on her neck—sweat of his body dripping on her face—not like the sea but thick and sour. “Look at me, Dora. Tell me you love me. Tell me you love me. Look at me, Dora.” But she could not, would not open her eyes until he was spent, the chaotic rhythms of his heart knocking in spasms of longing and anger.
Just like a baby, wants his milk. A smile brushed her lips and she raised her delicate fingers to stroke the knobby waves of his hair, but before she could soothe him, he had turned away and rolled off her body, his back to her side. The sweat left on her chest and breasts turned cold. She marveled at her hand, still raised from the elbow, her fingers dancing in the shard of light cast from the amber moon, hanging low in the twilight.
Her tray of charms covered with a checkered napkin, Mah Bette attempted again to pinch Lizzie May’s nose, but the screaming infant, Dora’s second child, wasn’t having it. Before the old woman knew it, the baby had scrambled around in her arms and was nudging her in the mouth with her tiny feet, screaming for the whole neighborhood to hear. Bette turned little Lizzie over and roughly jostled the girl on her knees. “All right, Miss Nosey, time fuh some sleep.” Yum Lee looked on from the counter and called behind him for Dora to go to her newborn. Bette clucked her teeth at him. “I know how to do this. Had children, grandchildren, now greats.” She bounced the child hard with slight irritation as the screams subsided. A sailor approached and handed her a package. She slung Lizzie to her shoulder and went to where Dora was working in the back.
Little Elma sat on the stoop by the door, fanning herself with her hands and jiggling her knees. Outside the shop she could hear Deke, now a husky youth, leading his troupe of beggar children, dancing and doing their hambone routines. “All Righty! Join the band! HUNH! All Righty! Join the band! Come round and Join the band! HUNH! Bo Bobo, Bo Bo Bobo! BAM! Bo Bobo, Bo Bo Bobo! BAM! Join the band! HUNH!” She could hear the coins jiggle when white passersby tossed them into his old stovepipe hat. Elma tapped her foot to the rhythms and hummed along. “Elma, come way from there,” Dora cautioned without looking up from her needlework.
Bette patted the head of her first great-grand and handed the package to Dora. It bore the familiar mark of Yves Dessalines. Eudora turned the letter around in her hands and headed for the pier. When she got to the water’s edge, her dry, wide eyes the purple haze of sunset, she released the unopened letter to the sea. In a gentle call and response, the surf just grazed the tips of her shoes, in the echo of the waves, a faint dulcimer lullaby, “What kinda name for muh child is best? Eudora, I b’lieve, for happiness.”
Dora ran her fingers through her upswept hair and leaned against a weathered pylon jutting up from the sand. She thought of Tom. Funny, he used to be the one who sweat. Now, here I sit, a faucet in plaid. Sweatin’ and cryin’ alike. Get on back to work. The past is the past. The future, make somethin’ of that. She rose and headed back to her sewing station. Heavy heart, cloaked in sorrow, eyes downturned, she began again at the task before her. She would make a life for the girls. Respectable girls. Women of dignity, class, and ambition. Whatever her life had wrought, she had two fine daughters, her Elma and her Liz. They would have the life that she was promised.
9
Elma opened her window wide, embracing the gentle breeze that calmed her excitement. Lettin’ some air in might reduce the lightness in her head, help steady her for the evening: the Fisk Jubilee Singers concert! As she gazed out at the green lawns, everything seemed to smile back at her—the grass, the leaves, the dots of clouds—beautiful in full anticipation of this evening.
And how long Elma had waited for this day, too! She hugged herself with both arms just thinking about it. From the country to Charleston and now here she stood, a Jubilee singer. Blushing mightily she felt so proud. The feeling started deep inside and grew a bit, to a broad smile that laughed and laughed, the giggling ringing out like the peal of church bells, announcing, “Here I am, here I come, I am making my debut and taking on this stage as if it belonged to only me, just like Black Patti! I am singing, singing, singing
!”
The image of Black Patti prompted Elma to go search out her photographs. She rummaged through her hope chest, pushing aside the baptism gown and worn baby socks, respectfully displacing her first Bible and her old colored school primer. There it was. The lace-covered book of daguerreotypes and photographs lay on the bottom of the chest. Taking it out gently, Elma held the book between both hands as if praying. Her Mama had crocheted the lace covering. She opened the book and a rush of memories came flooding forth. The photographs weren’t glued in place, and Elma traced each one with her fingers before lifting one up to study closer.
That’s when Mama and Pa took me to see Sissieretta Jones, “Black Patti” to everybody else. Why, Ma Bette put the ticket stub right next to the picture of me with Black Patti. What a proud day that was! I wish I could remember what she sang. All I know is the notes from her body were like the wind blowing in major chords on a damp Charleston night. Not that I really lived in Charleston to know, but I imagine if the country, well, the farm, was never silent, always singing, then the city must have been like a choir of colored angels all the day long. Sounds making music out of every turn of a corner, wink of an eye, mule passing, kicking, the white folks’ banter, and the glower of the stevedores, even the silly rhymes of the fruit sellers all mixed in with the melody of frangipani and magnolia, sweat and fast-beating niggah hearts wondering if, or what, was wrong now.
A single sound from Sissieretta Jones just bout lifted Elma off her feet that night. Her voice could rumble like an angry ocean or soar sweetly as a drifting cloud. Elma imagined herself singing with Black Patti, their voices dancing like the gulls just hovering over the crest of each wave only to rush toward the clouds again, leaving her to wonder what the next beautiful arc would feel like.