“Yes, I’d appreciate that.” She watched the girl struggling with the absurdly long wagon train and had to stifle an impulse to help negotiate the carts toward the front of the building. But then, store managers were obligated to maintain a certain professional decorum.
Later that night, Tawana told her husband, Ellis, about the Brandenberg Gazette reporter and her odd encounter with Eudora in the ShopRite Supermarket parking lot. “If she’s so bright, how come the woman’s bagging groceries?”
Déjà vu. Tawana had asked herself the very same question. By taking an entry level position and showing no inclination to improve her circumstances at the supermarket, Eudora Grossberg had effectively turned the American dream upside down. The girl was hardworking and honest; she got along well with coworkers and scrupulously avoided the endless petty gossip and intrigues endemic to such businesses.
A low profile oddball, Eudora never flaunted her eccentricities. She brought her lunch plus a piece of fruit to work in a brown paper bag and drank coffee from a thermos rather than indulge herself with a café mocha cappuccino or any of the Green Mountain deluxe blends they sold by the cup at the deli counter. The girl seemed intent on earning the least amount of money possible while subsisting on a pauper’s salary. Was it a masochistic act of penance? Denial and self-flagellation worked well for medieval nuns and half-naked religious zealots contemplating their navels in Himalayan caves, but at the ShopRite Supermarket such austerity was neither fashionable nor chic.
Tawana knew friends from college who were active in social causes. The class valedictorian ran off and joined the Peace Corps where he served in Kenya for a year and a half doing God-knows-what. Then he returned from the Dark Continent, enrolled in law school and later earned a fortune as a six-figure ambulance chaser in the medical malpractice racket. The last time they met at an alumnus function, there was no more talk about hybrid, high-yield grains or crop irrigation systems in underdeveloped, third world countries. The social activist had morphed into an insatiable braggart with an equally revolting ego to match.
“That lovely poem Dora recited from memory,... there were well over a dozen stanzas.”
“Impressive!” Her husband chuckled. “So how are you doing with your writing?”
“What writing?” Tawana rolled her eyes. “I got an outline that’s little more than a mishmash of fragmented ideas. Three pages that go absolutely nowhere.” The woman had gotten the notion into her head that she would write a book. Something with an ethnic flavor—spunky black woman climbs the corporate ladder to claim her niche in the American business community. Horatio Alger with an Afro-American, chick-lit twist.
Think wonders, shit blunders.
A great idea in principle, her manuscript never emerged from the embryonic drawing board. For all her determination, Tawana Saunders couldn’t finesse the project off the ground. Chalk it up to writer’s block, brain freeze, anticipatory fright—she began the literary undertaking eight months earlier and had absolutely nothing to show for it except a new computer with all the fancy bells and whistles.
In the den she sat down at the computer and Googled Robert Hayden. Yes, there it was—the sublime, precious pearl-of-a-poem Eudora shared with her in the frigid parking lot.
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on
in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather
made banked fires blaze.
No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold, splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Tawana read the poem through a second time and then a third. Yes, it was a masterpiece—a cri de coeur as poignant and resonant as any full length novel. A simple and unadorned poem written by an unassuming black man over half a century ago! No flowery rhetoric or purple prose. Just a sixteen line barrage of innate wisdom.
“That lovely poem Eudora Grossberg recited—I just found it on the internet.” Tawana was lying in bed next to her husband in the dark. “The imagery was so beautiful it took my breath away.”
“That’s nice.” Ellis had been fading off to sleep. “Don’t forget to pick up the application for Saint Xavier’s.”
“I’ve some free time in the morning. I can do it then.” Twenty years earlier, Tawana had attended Saint Xavier's parochial school. Now her daughter would follow suit. The local high school had a decent reputation but the parochial school offered one of the finest graphic art programs in the state. And they never molly coddled the students, because their parents could afford the tuition and ninety-three per cent of the senior class went on to college.
“Here’s the crazy thing,” Tawana drew the conversation back to her original remarks. “A casual reader would never imagine an Afro-American had written the poem.”
“Your point?”
“Hayden came from the ghetto. His parents fought constantly throughout his childhood.”
“How do you know all this?”
“After locating the poem, I researched his bio on the internet.”
Throughout his childhood, Robert Hayden’s home was filled with the ‘chronic angers’ and violence he hinted at in his poems. Nearsighted and short of stature, he was ostracized by his peers at school and suffered debilitating bouts of depression.
“From an sordid life he fashioned exquisite poetry.” In the street a dog barked setting off a cacophony of yips and yaps as far as several streets away. There were other thoughts that Tawana Saunders meant to share with her husband, but a snuffling sound followed by the man’s steady breathing indicated Ellis had drifted off to sleep.
What did I know, what did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?
What did it take to write a sentence half that beautiful? Perhaps she would consult Eudora Grossberg, who dressed like a bag lady and chased down runaway shopping carts in the ShopRite Supermarket parking lot. Yes, she must make a mental note to do just that. No, better to get up out of bed right this very minute and scribble a brief reminder—something, anything to jog her memory so that in the morning when she was rushing about getting her daughter’s breakfast together, feeding the dog, washing the early morning dishes … Before she could put a period to the sentence, Tawana Saunders had slid off the shelf of consciousness and joined her husband in sleep.
In the morning, Tawana reviewed work schedules for the coming week. Myra Dobbins from the dairy department was going out on maternity leave, and one of the meat cutters slashed a finger to the bone the previous Wednesday trimming a pot roast. When Eudora Grossberg took coffee break at ten forty-five, the store manager slipped the girl a small manila folder. “Some recent writing. Mostly character sketches and dialogue.”
Eudora took the folder and laid it on the table next to her food. “Give me a day or two.”
“One question.” The store manager smoothed the front of her dress with the flat of her hands. “You are obviously an articulate, intelligent woman. There are conservatively a dozen positions here at the market you’d qualify for, if you wanted to earn a bit more money.”
“If I didn’t know any better,” Eudora replied unscrewing the cap on her thermos, “I might imagine you playing Henry Higgins to my Liza Doolittle.” There was no trace of anger or resentment in her tone. The My Fair Lady quip was self-mocking.
Tawana chuckled and shook her head. “Touché. I was totally out of place.”
“No offense taken.”
Tawana sat down on the chair next to her. “I hunted down the Hayden poe
m on the internet.”
Eudora crooked her head to one side and winked at the store manager, a conspiratorial gesture. “Doesn’t get much better than that.”
“No it doesn’t, does it?”
At the Brandenberg Courthouse, Tawana watched her handbag drift into the X-ray machine then stepped through the metal detector and confiscated it on the far side. She waited on a badly scarred, wooden bench on the third floor until a bailiff emerged and called, “ShopRite Supermarket versus Reginald Owens!”
In the courtroom, the bailiff took Tawana aside. “You the ShopRite manager?” Tawana nodded. “Sit over there.” He indicated a bench at the extreme opposite end of the room from where the defendant was sitting with his mother. All the macho swagger and cockiness were gone now. Reginald Owens didn’t look nearly as brazen and self-assured as he did the afternoon of the theft.
“A black kid in the meat department is ripping off steaks,” Ned Scolby spoke in a faltering voice. A high school junior who worked part time after school and on weekends, the boy was trembling and ready to burst into tears from one minute to the next. Ned was so upset he probably didn’t even realized what he said or that the store manager was herself dark-skinned.
Tawana grabbed the boy by the wrist. “Go tell Gail Crowley to call 911 and have the police waiting outside in an unmarked car when the thief emerges.”
Now a flood of tears were cascading pell-mell down the young boy’s face. Ned made a motion to rush off but the store manager clung to his shirtsleeve. “Dry your eyes first,” Tawana spoke in a steely, matter of fact tone, “then wait behind the counter at customer service until everything is settled.”
Tawana headed off in the direction of the meat department. En route, she grabbed a pricing gun off a half-open carton of Caress toilet paper. Like a vulture, Reginald Owens was still in the meat department, hovering over a refrigerated display full of select cuts. Well-built and muscular, the youth’s midriff bulged like a distended kangaroo’s pouch. He hadn’t seen the store manager yet. Tawana grabbed a box of oatmeal cookies off a shelf and began mashing blank pricing stickers onto the plastic. Five minutes passed. Reginald zipped up the front of his thick winter coat and sauntered toward the front of the market. As he passed Tawana, the youth flashed an insolent, mean-spirited grin.
The shameless idiot doesn’t have a clue! He thinks he’s untouchable, a real smooth operator! At the front of the store, the boy stopped to chat with a portly negro woman, who was waiting in the checkout line along with three younger siblings. At that moment, Tawana Saunders felt an intense self-loathing, an unquenchable hatred for her own kind. How had the guileless Ned Scolby so aptly put it? A black kid in the meat department is ripping off steaks.
Stripping the language bare, Ned gave voice to the unthinkable. The previous month the perpetrator had been a fourteen year-old Caucasian, a bleary-eyed, latchkey brat from one of the inner city subsidized housing projects. And a month earlier, an unwed Latina on AFDC. Driven by poverty, stupidity and enlightened self-interest, they came at you from multiple directions, in all ethnic varieties, sexes, shapes and colors.
In the parking lot, two plain clothes detectives nabbed Reginald Owens as he was unlocking a metallic blue Cavalier sedan. They handcuffed him and threw the youth in the back of an unmarked police car but not before relieving him of his stash of stolen meats. A small crowd gathered, watching from a discrete distance. What must they be thinking? A black kid in the meat department…
The fourteen year old boy who was caught in a similar bind in October became so unhinged when the police collared him, that he wet his pants. The urine ran all down the front of his dungarees reaching to the cuff. That was a good thing. At least, at some primitive level, the under-aged crook grasped the severity of his predicament. Reginald Owens was too thick-skinned. When the cops pulled him aside, he affected the hollow-eyed indifference of a hardened felon.
Tawana Saunders spoke briefly with the police officers before they took Reginald Owens away then went inside. “Where’s Ned?”
“Pricing vegetables,” Gail replied.
Tawana found the boy sorting through a carton of packaged baby carrots. She gave him a big hug and didn’t care what anybody thought. “You did fine today.”
The boy lowered his eyes, which were still blotchy and red. “When somebody steals they create chaos and turn everything we work for here at the market upside-down. That’s not a good thing.” She took a bag of carrots and stared vacantly at the vegetable. “Are you OK now?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry I got upset.”
She handed him the bag. “Like I said, you did the right thing and I’m proud of you.”
Judge Florence Mahoney, a severe looking, middle-aged woman with her hair tied up in a bun, turned to face the teenage boy. “Last time you were in my court, Mr. Owens, what did I tell you?” Reginald Owens muttered something unintelligible. “Speak up!”
“Don’t rightly recall.” The boy squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. “Can’t remember that far back.”
“Really?” the judge’s shot back, “That’s awfully strange, since you were in this same court room less than three months ago for a similar offense.” She leaned forward in her seat and jabbed the air with a maroon fingernail. “Don’t play me for a damn fool. What did I tell you back then, Mr. Owens?” Again the youth made a guttural sound under his breath. “I can’t hear you.”
“Said you never wanted to see me back in court.”
The judge read through the charges out loud in a booming voice. The boy was apprehended with three packages of porterhouse steaks and two choice-cut filet mignons. Occurring the week before Thanksgiving, the incident was his sixth offense in less than three years. “You celebrated a birthday recently?”
“September fifth. Turned seventeen.”
“Which was over a month before your most recent offense,” the judge noted. “So, Mr. Owen, technically you’re not a minor anymore.” The judge began writing furtively on a court document. “I’m remanding you to the custody of the courts. You will be taken from this room at this time and transferred to the Cedar Junction facility where you can sit and contemplate the error of your ways for the next three months.” She threw the paperwork aside. “Bailiff, take this man downstairs for processing. Case closed!”
As the judge rose to leave the court, a fat woman next to the defendant’s table burst into inconsolable tears and had to be physically restrained by one of the officers. The bailiff placed Reginald Owens in handcuffs and lead him toward a door in the rear of the room.
Another court official sidled up next to Tawana and was gesturing toward Reginald Owens’ family. “Wait until they leave.” She watched the distraught family hugging and consoling each other, drying tears, muttering in bitter, defiant tones. What was it the arresting officer said at the Brandenberg Police Station later in the afternoon following the shoplifting incident? The Owens clan was ‘bad actors’. The father was currently in prison for forging stolen checks, a sister had been arraigned on multiple occasions for prostitution and the matriarch of the family—the obese woman who was sneering at Tawana from across the room—boasted a prior conviction for welfare fraud.
From the court, Tawana drove five miles down the road to Saint Xavier High School, where she went directly to the administrative offices. “I need a student application.”
A large brass crucifix along with a portrait of Bishop O’Malley in a scarlet robe hung on the wall next to the clock. The receptionist handed her a folder from a stack on the top of the desk. “Admissions department will be scheduling freshman interviews the first week in February.”
“Yes, I’m familiar with the process.”
An elderly nun, her wrinkled face shrouded in a gray habit drifted down the corridor. Sister Mercy taught Tawana’s faith class the entire four years she had attended. A sweet, God-crazed woman, who never doubted the inherent goodness of mankind, Sister Mercy could probably even find something favorable to say about R
eginald Owens, which was more than Tawana could boast about her own slightly tainted view of the human condition.
“Daughter or son?”
Tawana turned back to the receptionist. “My daughter. She’s over at the middle school now.”
The receptionist smiled affably. “Be sure to list any community service and parish activity. They take all that into account.”
“Yes, I certainly will.”
Tawana went back out into the hallway. A bell rang and a swarm of uniformed children exploded from open doorways, rushing off to class. She felt a soothing tug of nostalgia. Twenty years earlier Tawana Saunders—her maiden name was Smithers back then—had raced idealistically about the same corridors dressed in her tartan plaid skirt, starched white blouse and shamrock green sweater. It was the singular most idyllic period of her life. Back then, there was a sum total of fourteen black student scattered among twelve hundred. Sixteen the year she graduated. No one treated them any different. They were all a part of the close-knit Saint Xavier family.
Studious kids didn't worry about fitting in. It was cool to be smart. Bullies and bigots were in short supply. Saint Xavier groomed Tawana Saunders for business college, gave her the confidence to compete and succeed in the white world. Now she wanted the same level playing field for her own daughter.
A group of students loaded down with musical instruments hurried past. “What’s going on?” Tawana asked.
“Marching band,” a petite brunette with a slide trombone that looked as long as she was tall replied.
“There was no marching band when I went here.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Somewhere in the nineteen eighties give or take a few decades.”
Where’s Eudora?” Tawana asked early Monday morning.
“Called out sick,” Gail said. “She’s got that twenty-four hour bug that’s going around. Poor kid! Couldn’t stop coughing and sneezing in the message she left on the answering machine.” She leaned over the counter. “Did you read that article about her in the Sunday paper?”