“I know I’m right. We’re in the Lord’s hands now, son. You cain’t do a thing bout that.”
3
The Diggs carriage pulled up to 32 Rose Tree Lane. Eudora knew because Tobias announced it. “Thirty-two Rose Tree Lane, Mr. Roswell, sir.”
And with a false sense of pleasure, Roswell Jr. smiled at his traveling companions for what seemed to be a mighty long time. Saying nothing, simply staring into space, Roswell Jr. apparently didn’t hear Tobias ask if they were at the correct address. Eudora pulled at Betty’s sleeve, telegraphing with each urgent tug. Somebody must say or do something. The carriage can’t simply stop in the middle of the street. The whole of the street being the middle of the street, the lane hardly a street at all, more a thoroughfare for street peddlers, fancy women, men too beautiful and black to be husband material, children who sprouted from the cobblestones like wild mushrooms. How could there be an address here? There was no room for an address, a home. The narrow streets were crowded and dense, oozing heat like a sugar refinery.
The people of Lil Mexico were simmering with the spirit of get or get got, now’s the time or never; the people of Mexico challenged a half-dozen rainbows, their raiment and languages scampering the horizon so bright, laced with Africa, Cuba, Georgia, and sweat, not telling exactly the origins of nobody, but revealing the bounty of the gods at every turn, even when the Devil was at work. It was true that Geechee women walked, if you could call that switch with an accent to each buttock a walk, with razors in the sides of their mouths, the gaiety and fervor of their speech mystifying. The singular definition of the men’s muscles among the throngs of masons and day laborers bustling bout the Diggs carriage was humbling. Wasn’t that these Charlestonians were blatantly different from the villagers Betty and Eudora had known all their lives, was the fact that they valued their beauty. Out on the islands white folk were just an oddity, nobody to revere and obey with awe. Here in Charleston, their foibles, passions, flaws, and meanness were too familiar to sustain an image of majesty. In the presence of the irrational, the people of Mexico found it necessary to hoist themselves into a realm of deeper color, denser implacability, more convoluted conventions and habits than the whites could keep track of. This way everyone was sure who everybody was, except of course in the borderline case of families brought high or low by bloodlines out of their control like the Mayfields and the Diggses.
Yet it was clear that Roswell Jr. knew his way around and about the folks of Mexico quite well. Any number of Magdalenes and Carmens flaunted themselves before him as he helped Eudora and Miss Betty out of the coach. Tobias seemed more ill-at-ease than young Diggs, who called everyone by their first name and asked and knew everyone’s trade, or at least what was publicly accepted as their profession.
Literally putting his best foot forward, Roswell Jr. guided his charges up the none too stable stairs of the fairly dingy second-story flat at 32 Rose Tree Lane as if he were guiding two temperamental fillies back from a close quarter-mile race. Betty kept moving his hand off her arm. “You cain’t hide me from nothin’ I ain’t seen before.”
Eudora, trying not to let on how nervous she was, corrected, “Haven’t seen, not ain’t seen, Nana.”
“Well, I seen it all then! How you feel bout that?”
Roswell nodded to Tobias to go back to the carriage. He had everything in hand now.
“You know, if you’d like, I can take it upon myself to place you two in a neighborhood more, huh, suited to your liking . . .” Roswell didn’t look at the pale splintering wallpaper, nor the peculiarly warped window frames. He was unconsciously dusting his shoes, which had distributed a sediment of reddish gray that he found fascinating.
“I like it here just fine. Needs a bit a fixin’, a lot of cleanin’, is all. Right, Eudora?”
Eudora’s disappointment showed in her body, no longer spry and eager, but in the process of erasing itself, falling into her own shadow. “If you’ll excuse us now, cousin Roswell, we’ve a lot of work to do here, if I’m ever to become the most talked-about dressmaker in Charleston. Which I do intend to be. Oh, look at that, Roswell . . .” She ran to the largest window, and using the palm of her hand and her skirt, she wiped the pane. The sunset sky relaxed wantonly before their eyes. “Oh, no, we won’t be moving from here for a while. You must thank your father sincerely for affording us these lodgings and such an exciting little area. Inspiration everywhere I turn! Right, Nana?”
“Oh, Lawd, yes, plenty of that.”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s true, but I could find you—”
“That’s quite all right, Roswell. You must take me seriously when I speak. I’m not some Geechee gal with nothin’ but Gullah and chicken feathers fallin’ from me. You have been more than gracious, in fact exceedingly so. And I, uh, both Nana and I, appreciate your thoughtfulness. But the Diggses didn’t invite us to Charleston. As far as I can tell, my mother’s own sister never gave us a thought. Believe me, I am takin’ to my heart all that you, who aren’t even blood, least not my blood, have done. But we are not thinkin’, in the least, of burdenin’ you and yours with our problems. We really do thank you very much.”
Although her voice began to crack, Eudora’s eyes glistened with determination. Roswell wanted to hold her, out of tenderness and respect, but the ferocity of her vision left him only time to bid them a short farewell.
Once they were alone, Eudora’s face wrestled with a cascade of tears she let flow freely. With her fingers she drew emblems for her line of clothes in the dust on the windows, emblems just like the magazines from the Continent, emblems just like the ones Betty made in front of the small house back home to keep evil spirits away.
Betty didn’t feel a need to tend after Eudora right that moment. She was too busy hanging dried sage and eucalyptus in the corners of their quarters. “Won’t no haints be comfortable up in here with us, I can say that.” Eudora said not a thing. The only sounds from the Mayfield women’s lodgings were the swish of brooms, the rustle of the sea.
Eudora’d fallen into dream early and deep, but Betty’d kept on with the business of ridding the flat of unknown, possible errant spirits and restless souls. She sprinkled fresh spring water in every corner, left thick cigar smoke in the backs of closets, used a potion of her protection cleanser to do the floor, and left white flowers with something of her mother’s or her aunt’s behind every door. Just as she was beginning to tire, her gnarled arms aching, Betty heard, no she didn’t hear, her body felt the rhythm of the streets. She got to twitchin’ and hummin’ until she had no desire to resist anymore. All her spells an magic’d been placed before midnight. She was free to join the celebrations that come with the black of night, the call of those whose true work was to make music out of nothing but the gusts of their small bedeviled lives.
Before she knew it men white enough to be her pa, others black enough to be her grands before that, mingling with no thought about the implications of their bonding ritual, were singing beneath her very windows. Betty stuck her head from the window and listened carefully as they haphazardly introduced themselves. The fellow sporting a black patch over his left eye was Rufus; Big Mingo wore a spotted red and white stevedore shirt and Lil Mingus a black and white one; Black Tad was tattooed from wrist to elbow; and Beau Jim was all his name proclaimed, bronze bones set like a statue you see in a picture. Deke, the scruffy young bootblack, tagged along, a brush in his hand, cleats on his shoes. Their singing reminded her of the islands, and she couldn’t help but join in. The strings tinkled the breeze and egged on those who thought they’d heard it all.
Then her voice rang out with a crystal soprano taunting the wind and the surf to curve or twist her melodies. She didn’t know anybody, but she knew everybody. She’d never heard the song, but she could sing it:
“When it rain five days an de skies turned dark as night,
When it rain five days an de skies turned dark as night,
Then trouble taken place in the lowland that night,
/> I woke up this morning, cain’t even get outa mah doah,
I woke up this morning, cain’t even get outa mah doah,
Make a po gal wonder where she e’re gon go,
O-o-o-oom, I cain’t move no mo,
O-o-o-oom, I cain’t move no mo,
There ain no place fo dis po ol gal to go.”
Betty lost sight of Rufus, Big Mingo, Lil Mingo, Black Tad, Beau Jim, and Lil Deke, who had wandered on as she fingered her banjo, remembering the first time she’d held one, grabbed one from somebody. She was fighting off a heavy lostness, a wounded heart that came nowhere near the hellation she’d brought down on herself.
Before the banjo, her master and lover, Julius Mayfield, spent hours of flamingo golden dusks with her and their girls, Blanche and Elma, on the veranda of the house he had built just for her and her girls. “This house is like the ones I’ve seen in New Orleans, Betty. See, this wrought-iron design allows the breezes to cool you in the terrible summer heat, but these shutters, straight from France, close in the winter to warm you.” Julius kept the black fiddlers up into the night playing waltzes and polkas. The hidden lovers danced through the night until Julius would notice the children, huddled on a maroon and gold chaise lounge, heads on each other’s laps, legs akimbo in their lace stockings, shoes still a mystery to all but Fancy, the hunting hound Julius bade protect this, his other, family.
Other nights, her children safely tucked away on beds facing the rising sun, Betty fled to join the others like her yearning for a union with the wind and the drum, the fiddle and the bosom, stroking the night breezes in the tumult of a juba. Calves and arms flying, eagerly rushing to the spirits that they might ride to the other side, be strengthened and ride again. In the midst of this, Betty’s arms flung by her torso every fourth beat, her back undulating until her heels almost touched her head. She knew a freedom beyond emancipation, or the Gates of Heaven. Somehow, a heat other than that of her own sweat and breath overtook her body. Not that she lost her step with the others dancing, or that the magnolia-accented night was any less dusky.
Then two other arms, two other legs caught her shadow in motion and would not release her, shade or soul. In some manner Betty’s never been able to recall, only to revisit by touch and smell, she wound up in the pulsing veins, she‘d say, the seed blue black, of the fresh one, she called him. Salt air still seeping from his skin. Just arrived here from Guine, she’d say. All she callt him was the fresh one or the Guine man, as if you’d recognize him from the wistful smile on her face. A face that blossomed as her womb began to grow the size of yellow watermelon, a fresh one from Guine, she’d think, patting her tummy.
Julius Mayfield caressed the bulging belly of his favored negress as well, imagining another one of his beautiful girls. At delivery time, come all the singing and clapping and whispering of the women, and the men, music off to itself, Betty carried a deep bronze child to the cradle by her bed with her master, Julius, who nearly crushed the child’s skull when he threw the cradle over with his booted foot. “Takin’ up with darkies, after all I’ve given you, black bitch!” His wrath willing Betty’s frail body against the walls, under his feet, caught by his closed fist. Bloodied and not believing, Betty guided her two girls with her outstretched hands, the infant screaming in eerie harmony with her sister’s cries for a return to peace. Instinctively Betty swept the baby into a sling over her back. Betty’s back, bloodied now by Julius’s whip and blows, served as a cushion for the infant trying to find her mother’s breast. The sweetness of blood, thicker than that of mother’s milk, came at a higher price as well. Betty stilled her pace for a moment, catching each blow as if on purpose. Julius’s anger grew more furious as she refused to run from him.
Then suddenly, without Betty uttering a word, he fell weeping to his knees. “Oh, my darlin’, I . . . I . . .” and he groped the air as if reaching for her. Betty did not move. Julius moved toward her still on his knees, dropping the whip and softening his hands that had beaten Betty like falling boulders. She did not look at him, but ran her hands through his hair when his body grew close to hers. She felt more tears welling up in her eyes. Julius Mayfield continued to cry, but could not bring himself to apologize. She heard a whimpering that was none of her children. She stepped outside to be soothed by the evening. Oaks and moss hung over her like death. The whimpering kept on. She walked toward the pens. Not even Fancy, his favorite hound, had escaped Julius Mayfield that night.
Lijah-Lah, then a young man, along with Pretty and Sabina, the weavers, helped her round the quarters, to an empty shack where she could raise all her children like any of the others on Sweet Tamarind. In a way, Betty was relieved. Now she could be an ordinary laundress, with ordinary pickanninies who looked like whoever anybody wanted to think they looked like. There were no china plates or silks from Calais, but Betty found an old beat-up banjo in the corner of her new home. She tuned it best she knew how, so it fit her feelings, she’d say. She played alone while her children slept, the laundress hands drawing beauty from those strings; at least that had not been taken from her command. Into the night, the sleeping families of the quarters were serenaded by Betty’s melancholy tunes. Those too restless to sleep were comforted by them. Betty couldn’t really hear what she played. She felt the strings vibrate ’neath her fingers and knew how rich her song, how sad sometimes, made Fancy howl.
When it rain five days an de skies turned dark as night,
When it rain five days an de skies turned dark as night,
Then trouble taken place in the lowland that night.
Betty perked up from her sorrowful thoughts. Her new singing friends had meandered back her way. This time she was determined to shake the misery off her. She opened the window wide and sang as though she were one of the men, a coterie by the wharfs she felt in her soul. She grabbed her banjo and tickled the strings as if she’d always been a member of this band of seaside crooners. Lil Mingo waved for her to come on down and join them. It didn’t take Betty but a second to get down to the street, banjo, tambourine, and all. Rufus picked up his fiddle. And Black Tad had garnered himself an accordion, albeit a small one. Three little urchins had found their way to the center of the group and were busy doing a jig when Betty pulled up her skirts and joined them for a while. When she felt herself tuckered out she threw her tambourine to Lil Deke, who could slap the daylights out of it. Smiles graced all the faces of this motley band as they wandered the streets and alleys of Mexico. Beau Jim turned out to have a voice like an Irish tenor and shared the upper registers with Betty, who was having a grand time her first night in Charleston. The islands seemed to loosen their hold on her now. The quiet too much, too early. This new life of night music and dance was much more to her liking. No memories, no regrets, only joy, music, her daughters, and the sea.
Betty’s fingers weren’t nearly so spry now, nor lovely to look upon, but she held her own with the jackleg band by the wharf, that banjo still letting go of what she could not say or didn’t know she wanted to say. “Keepin’ up with livin’! Music is just another way of keepin’ up with livin’. Cain’t find nothin’ wrong with that. Go on now, Lil Deke. Show me a thing or two. That’s right! Let it go. Let all that’s in ya come right on out. That’s a way! That’s a way. I say, come on, boys. Don’t let the child scare us, now!”
4
Eudora means happiness. But it was sorrow that clung to her heart. As Dora examined her new home, she felt it, the sorrow—an extra pump, a shade, a haint of longing. Smatterings of dialogue crowded out her thoughts. Waxpaper. Grease stains. Why we come here? Snatches of phrases melded with fragmented images of her new lodgings. Daughter of Mah Bette’s black chil’. Dust. Duster. Mustee. Runaway. Her head bowed, she examined the room’s loose uneven floorboards. A soot-drenched mouse ran along the corners of the tight close room. Things had not gone as planned. Dora stomped her foot. The startled intruder shot straight in the air and flew through the crack from which it came. “What done you expect? A recepti
on?” Her face flushed, tinting its copper hue a rich red sienna. Instantly aware of her own deepened color, she bristled at the pervasiveness of the Codes—the legacy of slavery that judged her by the proximity to whiteness in fractions of sixty-fourths, the habitual practice, designed to increase the bounty of human livestock, now the source of standards to rank respectability. “Associate goodness wid good hair, proper wid property. Just cus I don’t own nothin’ don’t mean I don’t have nothin’. Or won’t still!”
Blanche was her mother Juliet’s sister, nearest in birth. Eudora had hoped, thought, she might find something of Juliet in her aunt’s face, a smile, a smell. Instead, the porcelain mask was beautiful, smiling, and cold. “Your uncle I’m sure has found you a nice place in town. Roswell Jr. will show you.”
Blanche’s saccharine words now slashed across her cheek like a spring willow switch shorn of leaves. Nice? Fuh who? Gray dust coated the pine wood slats posing as walls; a few mismatched dishes sat atop a single crooked shelf. Beneath the propped-up boards posing for a table—a warped wooden bucket for slop and a rusty tin tub not big enough for a squat. Dora’s full broad lips compressed into a thin straight line of rage. “Treatin’ me like a common lowland lowlife. Seen bettuh in a sharecrop tabby shack. How could I be so stupid as tuh ’spect a welcome from my so-called fam’ly?” Words from her aunt and uncle’s overheard chatter ricocheted in her brain. “Showed up in a basket. Mayn’t even be a Mayfield. You wouldn’t take her for one, ’cept for those eyes. True beauties, true Mayfields they are, for sure.”
“True Mayfields. As if it t’were sumpin to be proud of. If that be true, I glad I not one!” The broken Gullah patois Dora had tried so hard to dispel rattled in her brain. Mah Bette . . . tink cus she dark-eyed and tawny, she warn’t his chile. She wanna believe that he love her, that him kindly, good and noble Massah Mayfield. That him only sell off she mama cuz she wild and not cuz he—“Him husbin to me eben when I slave,” she say. When he try to mess wid she own daughters, you tink she’d see den? Twice-over shamed, she no want to. That why Juliet—that why they all gone from her. Then here I come, the shame lookin’ em right in the eyes. Eyes dey call beauties. Got dey nerve. Call em true. Those eyes, equally a source of wonder and derision, glowered at their current circumstance. Two half-moons of tears collected but refused to fall. “Place lookin’ like this?” The cramped two-room flat closed in about her. Memory burned through her back, a taut steel strap of muscles. Mah Bette’s oft-whispered stories, curling through the spires of smoke from a cob pipe, crackled in her ears, but Dora refused to hear them. “No! We make a new life. These eyes, they doan look back.”