“She seem all right.”
“Thank God.”
“Osceola? Ossie?” She squinted at the sun’s glare, her voice cracked and dry as strangers lifted her up.
Members of the search committee in their white armbands eased her from the cramped hiding space. Slowly the remains of the night’s carnage came into view. “Osceola!”
“They taken him to yoah cousin’s. Mr. Diggs takin’ care of him now. There’s no comfort in the world I can give you, child, but you got to think of yoah baby, Osceola’s baby.”
The boys from Orange Street Asylum carried their instruments at their sides. Miss Francina, Roswell Diggs, all the people who had mocked and shunned him marched in silence. The pattern swept across the country. Tulsa, East St. Louis, Pittsburgh. Red Summer they called it. For all the colored blood runnin’ in the streets. Charleston, the first, was a small affair. Only four dead. Mitch buried his friend and boarded a steamer for New York—Europe and Osceola, his father and his son, his brother and his friend, both slain.
Lizzie did not attend Ossie’s funeral. She went instead to the woods ringing her childhood home. Her body swollen with life, she dug a hole and filled it with a soft bed of pine needles and spring grass. As she worked, she sang a strange meandering melody the birds seemed to know, their song blending with hers in counterpoint. She sang to her love a song of memories and laughter. She sang to her friend, she did. Sang to Osceola that day—a melody she made up as she went along. She dropped her arms and let her palms face front as a dirge rose from her womb to her tongue and through her lips, an aria of sorrow, a cryin’ song for her beloved. The wisteria-draped trees as witness, she dropped to her knees from the weight of her heart. As the first wave of labor washed over her, she squatted over the earthen cradle and delivered of her loins a new life.
She looked at the baby a long time, considering whether she would let it live. The child’s screams were so loud, her fit so furious, she won her mother over. Lizzie cut the umbilical with a razor, then tucked it back inside her braid. She bathed them both in the creek, then strapped the newborn to her breast and walked back toward the city, the harbor, the sea.
Eudora wiped her hands of dishwater and joined Mah Bette on the porch. In the evening light the old woman’s skin still glowed. Dora squatted on her haunches and stretched her arms forward to ease her back, then brought her laced fingers back to her chest in prayer, silently shaking them at her God.
Bette let the breeze caress her face. “She be fine. She uh Seeker.”
16
At first when faced with the funerals, the two diminutive caskets set in the middle of the room, Elma found comfort in the collection of old women mourners from her church. With their rambling talk offering remedies for her condition, they seemed by their own longevity to hold death back. “Liver, ginger, and some tonic, baby,” one elder counseled. “Don’t bind ’em to you till they passed the sixth year,” added another. “Take that baby boy of yours outside. He’ll do jus’ fine. You will have your family yet,” the last solo voice added, accompanied by the choir, “Uhn hmm, yes, that’s right.” Yet . . . there my daughters lay. Stiff curls, powdered skin, painted lips, Elma mused sadly, China dolls. The ritual circle of Bethel A.M.E. women with their wrinkled, down-turned eyes, so consoling when she thought she could not face the day, reminded her of Mah Bette. Old women, Elma thought, dismissing her sorrow as something that would dissolve like sugar in a hot cup of tea.
“No m’am, thank you. I cannot eat another one, Miss Tavineer.” Elma feigned a smile, eschewing the last of her downstairs neighbor’s crystal plate of cinnamon rolls. The weekly prayer circle that had tried to ease Elma through her children’s illness and death was now reduced to one, Miss Tavineer, who lived on the second floor of the four-story Tenderloin walk-up Elma called home. Because the older woman often watched her surviving son, Jesse, while Elma ran her daily errands, she patiently suffered the woman’s company and talentless baking. “Seems the whole congregation, all the good colored folk movin’ on to Harlem,” Miss Tavineer muttered, then heaved a sigh. “Now even the church itself.”
“Yes, they’re making fine progress. It’s hard to believe the groundbreaking was only last spring,” Elma replied. “Raymond tells me they’ve already started on the chapel interior.” She added with a tight-lipped Cheshire smile, “He designed it, you know.”
“It was hard enough getting down to 15th Street,” Miss Tavineer grumbled and shifted in her seat. “I don’t know how I’ll make it to 135th. I don’t know how you manage, raisin’ a child with such troubles on your own in a city as difficult as this. Jesse’s gettin’ so heavy, I cain’t hardly cart him up and down those steps. Maybe you should take the boy and go on back home, least for the rest of the winter.”
Elma stood, indicating that the conversation was done, and saw her neighbor to the door. “You needn’t cart him, Miss Tavineer. I will drop him off and come to fetch him myself as need be, if you can still oblige lookin’ after him from time to time. I’m sure Raymond and I will soon be able to provide some compensation for your trouble.”
In her weekly letter to Lizzie, Elma reiterated the conversation, emboldening her speech. “No sirree! I told her. We’ll not be goin’ back south for a while, or anytime.” Elma resented the old woman’s intrusive advice. Of course she recognized that the crowded mid-Manhattan streets were difficult with Jesse, but she wasn’t about to let anyone else tell her what was best for him. Least of all, some nosy old lady got neither chick nor child. “Though I have lost Benna and Gabby,” she continued in her letter, “many others have suffered greater. Fortunately, our Jesse has come through,” she wished, prayed, lied. This place is loud and cold, gray most every day. “New York!” she went on. “The streets are so colorful. Different languages and smells. People are always taking me for something else, asking Do you speak English? Every day you are greeted with the unexpected. Yesterday, at the bakery, I caught a Chinese man staring at me from the street. I counted to ten like Yum Lee taught us as children—yut, gni, som, se, ng, luk, chut, bak, gow, sup—his eyes went round like silver dollars!” Elma rubbed her own eyes, feathered with lines of worry, and closed the note with borrowed optimism, “As Raymond says, here is where the nation is being built! This is our home.” She sealed the letter and bundled herself up to head out for her morning chores.
She left Jesse with Miss Tavineer, making sure that the “fresh diapers, a change of clothes in case he soils himself, and something for him to nibble on, mashed the way he likes it,” were noted. She decided to get her neighbor some peppermints to make amends for her shortness earlier and descended the narrow stairs to the street.
Asa Jolly and his wife were just opening up for business. Ray’s old partner owned the building and ran a galley-style saloon on the ground floor. “Asa, Lille,” Elma greeted her nominal landlord with a nod through the plate glass window. Asa waved as he taped a handmade sign to the glass, “Last Stop for Your Last Drop!”
“Thank the Lord Raymond’s done with that life,” she thought to herself, “soon to be done with Hell’s Kitchen altogether!”
She stuck her hands into her muff and headed into the crowded 52nd Street thoroughfare, enveloped by the cacophonous patois of Irish, Russian, Polish, Italian, Yiddish, Southern Negro, and the quick, nasal, percussive speech of Tenderloin natives. She navigated the troughs of ice and sludge, slippery cobblestone, horse shit, and trolley tracks, a hopscotch across the street. Automobile fumes, ash, garbage, sweat, and dreams intermingled, the neighborhood loud and dissonant with impatience.
Routine was her salvation. First, the groceries and produce, then she picked up Raymond’s laundry. “A luxury at ten cents a week, Raymond Minor, but a professional man needs to look the part,” she spoke to the shirt, making sure that the cuff and collars were board stiff and white like he liked them. The visit to the kosher poultry house she saved for last. “Where yah been?” Mr. Ingerman always greeted her. “How’s those beautiful little girls??
?? he used to add, asking after Gabby and Benna. Elma was thinner and paler and her eyes bespoke the grief she still carried, but she was a stunning woman, a beauty of indeterminate origin. The butcher still flirted with her unabashedly, the normalcy of his banter an awkward gesture of consolation. He always assured her that the hen that she picked was his fattest and the price he quoted was always “a good price, only for you. Okay you turn now,” he announced, amused at her discomfort with the slaughter. Though she had seen her mother and great-grandmother handle the task scores of times, Elma hated the screeching wild rustle of wings, the fierce hysterical pinpoint eyes. She always averted her own as the jocular butcher snatched the hen, wrung its neck, and doused the still-trembling carcass in scalding water. “Plucked clean, only for you, Mrs. Minor.”
“Just enough time to fricassee,” she swallowed and replied, finally opening her eyes to the butcher’s quizzical look. “That’s French, Mr. Ingerman.” She invented a story a ways off from her colored past. “A family recipe for stewed chicken.”
The butcher looked aghast. “Stew! You gonna put this beautiful bird into a pot and turn it into a soup?”
She smiled and held the grocery bag aloft and allowed the delicate aromas to escape. “A rich savory sauce, Mr. Ingerman, with winter vegetables, clove, marjoram, and thyme. The meat just falls off the bone,” she teased. “It’s a feast in a pot. My husband’s favorite.”
The butcher leaned over the counter, mesmerized. “He is a lucky man, your husband, to have a beautiful wife and one who cares what he likes.”
Returning to her building, Elma retrieved her son from Miss Tavineer’s and made her way up the four flights of steep wooden steps with the shopping bag cushioned by the muff in one hand, the laundry under her arm, and Jesse slung on the opposite hip. Her body bent from the weight, she shifted the motionless toddler, hoisting him so that his chin rested more cleanly on her shoulder. “I can see what Miss Tavineer meant, Mr. Minor. You’re gettin’ to be quite a bundle, but we almost there, we almost there . . . A little bit higher, a little bit higher . . .” she began to sing, “I hear music in the air, just above my head, Oh, oh, oh, I hear music in the air, just above my head.” With the creaks in the steps as her chorus, she crooned the familiar spiritual, modulating to a new key with each successive flight. “Each step a bit closer . . . to heaven . . .” She paused at the final stair landing. “Least we got sky, hunh, baby? We still got sky.”
Ridges of frost glazed the windows, the world beyond a pale gray haze. The three-room, top-floor flat at 473 West 52nd Street seemed cavernous in its silence. Her fingers still tingling from the frost, Elma bustled quickly through the living room to the narrow kitchen and propped Jesse up in the corner of his crib so that she could see him while she busied herself preparing dinner.
The skin of the bird had blanched, a few belligerent feathers still wet and limp, the severed neck clotted with blood. She pulled out the innards, then set the bird atop a cutting board and with great efficiency severed the legs and wings at the joints, then cleaved away the rib, back, and breast bones. She dropped the parts into a bubbling broth of onions, spices, rice, and peas. Leaving the dish to simmer, she pushed Jesse’s crib away from the window and opened it wide to take in the afternoon wash of hand-scrubbed laundry among the scalloped rows of clotheslines that ribboned the back alley. The wind bit at her fingers. The clothesline wheel squealed and whined an eerie mechanical protest as Elma drew in the stiff dry clothes, frozen to the touch.
She surveyed the rows of empty, frost-sealed windows. In the fluid community of immigrant women around her, who had the cleanest wash had once been a fierce competition, but she had lost more of her neighbors across the alley, women whose chiding boastful laughter and waves she had grown to anticipate and enjoy. She heard Kitty had gotten a job as a secretary and Mrs. Marrano now worked in the garment district. Little Demetrice, who had occasionally babysat for Gabby and Benna, was now a salesgirl at Gimbels. They could buy things, go to the nickelodeon or café. Even Jolly’s wife worked at the tavern. But Raymond wouldn’t allow her, wouldn’t think of it. How could she anyway? Money for the household but none of my own. Ten cents for collars and cuffs. Her hands cracked and tingled as she folded and sorted the clothes. Her knuckles looked weathered and gnarled. My beautiful hands just like Mama’s now. Red with flecks of skin peeling away, her hands used to glide across a piano. The melody of a sonata she used to play drifted into her mind, reminiscent of her year at Fisk, her year of promise—when she soloed with the Jubilee Singers, her crisp wool skirt, taken in at the waist, white ruffled blouse with a broad straw hat ribboned in the colors of the school, marching in line with the other girls, her long braid whipping behind her.
Beyond the occasional, ephemeral image, she had lost any sensation of that confident student. She had seen in Jolly’s newspaper that one of her old choir mates from college had moved to New York. She thought for a moment to make contact, but What would I say, what would I wear? Instinctively, Elma adjusted an errant lock that had fallen into her eye. Mrs. Marrano, already selling clothes boosted off the racks from her new job in the garment district, had shown her a pink satin dress with a ruffle collar about four inches wide around and cloth-covered buttons down the front. The scalloped skirt had framed her body like a flower, revealing a hint of ankle. How beautiful it would have looked with the garnet earrings, Ray’s present to her on their wedding day. She had stifled her urge to possess it and disdained the purchase. That pink was too youthful, the collar too low, the price too high, and the dress was probably stolen. Besides, who would wear pink in New York? She reddened at the confused rush of desire, guilt, anger. Educated for grace, trained to do nothing. Shouldn’t even be thinking of myself. “Jesse? You awake?”
She checked on her silent child and patted his stomach, “Always hungry, that’s one thing,” then doggedly continued about her tasks. “I know you hear me over there playin’ possum. Don’t pretend you don’t. You can fool someone else, but not me, Jesse Minor, not your mother,” she called over her shoulder. As she sifted flour, she softly sang to him, “I hear music in the air/ Just above my head/ Oh-oh-oh, I hear music in the air/ Just above my head . . .” While the rumbling subterranean trains rattled the windowpanes, Elma pounded the lump of sugar into a fine powder, and ground the spice for the cobbler. Buoyed by the upbeat rhythm of the spiritual, the harmonies that accompanied her in her mind, she sat down to pare the apples, consuming the bruised parts and skin, preserving the clean white slices in lemon juice. Humming to herself, she rocked side to side in her seat, the motion mirroring an internal tension of defiance and surrender.
Raymond had told her that he wanted to build things—that he was putting himself through school by working the show circuit, but she came to understand that he actually liked that life on the road, the street life: Common people. Common had been such a bad word back in Charleston. As a girl in Charleston she had been forbidden to play with the children in the street, and even go near Miss Pilar’s. Now here she was a grown woman with a husband and a child still livin’ above a saloon. “Just till we get settled,” Raymond had said, years ago. Hell’s Kitchen. For the damned. She hated it when these thoughts invaded her. She would dispel them with a flash of lightning from her crown of raven hair. Vow don’t say maybe. Vow say forever. She had burdened him, she decided. Babies dyin’, me laid up for weeks, now Jesse. Distracted, she nicked her thumb. Instinctively, she drew the small pool of blood to her lips. The dank green smell of the hospital corridor for the colored wafted through her memory. A rat had nearly run over her foot the last visit. A whole crew of them zigzagged across the sidewalk in a devil’s reel, a feral taunt. This was their home, too. The indifferent attendant sat her next to a pair of bent shoulders coughing up blood, then four hours later gave her a cream for Jesse’s mottled skin and sent her home, pity and disgust in her eyes, not for the boy, but for Elma. “Colored. What a shame.”
The dinner tasks completed, she heated the water for Jes
se’s bath and sat down to scour the daily newspaper borrowed from Mr. Jolly, looking for any advice or news on childcare. The information was so conflicting. One article had said babies needed rest and quiet, another that they needed exercise. “Children grow best when breastfed,” this one said, but her milk had dried from worry. “When weaning, you may want to mix the milk with barley. Milk from Holstein cows is preferred to that of Jersey cows.” Elma laughed once in her belly and folded the paper. None of this spoke to her concern. Could her son even hear her? Surviving scarlet fever right behind the influenza, her one remaining child now was over two and did not speak, walk, or smile. The fever had left him with no voice although he used to stand on his tiptoes at the window, announcing, “Daddy come home.”
While his bath water cooled, Elma walked her son around the corners of the living room, crooning to him softly, avoiding the center where the caskets had sat.
“There’s a very pretty moon tonight,
And I never saw a prettier sight,
Than the girl upon my arm,
I am smitten by her charm,
And the very pretty moon tonight . . .”
She danced the two-step with her tiny partner, holding his diapered bottom as Raymond had held her waist, her cheek on the slope of his neck, his free hand bracing her back. She conjured the Raymond she fell in love with, their meeting and courtship, the rush of sensations in her body as he swirled her around and around, his liquid voice bearing love’s nectar to her lips. The child slumped in her arms, his breathing heavy.
Elma cradled her son’s head and lowered him into a tin tub beside the kitchen sink. Dimpled rolls of fat spilled over the sides of the basin, and his feet slouched limply on the counter. If not in mind, he was certainly growing in body. She changed him into his bedclothes by the stove, then, having warmed his sheets with a hot water bottle, placed him under the covers of the oversized cradle Raymond had made at her insistence. She gazed at her son for a moment, hoping for some sign of recognition, then turned to check the table setting and reheat the dinner. The hour was late, but her courage would not be dampened. Elma Winrow Minor was a warrior. “Where’s your chutzpah?” she demanded, appropriating the neighborhood Yiddish phrase. She would use the lace cloth and the silverware Mah Bette had given her from the remains of Sweet Tamarind, the utensils, if unmatched, at least two to each side. Tonight is a celebration. Deliverance is at hand!