Nor did Queen help her own circumstances. Totally unschooled in the ways of
the world, she had lived her life within the sheltered confines of a single
plantation, with a few occasional forays into Florence under the protective
arm of her Massa. She might have done better if she had accepted society's
leveling of her, a nigra ex-slave, but she arrived in Decatur with a
dangerous self-deception. Denied her heritage, she foolishly believed that
she could be what she thought she was, the white daughter of a respected
family, with nothing but her own conviction and the color of her skin to
support that role. Wary of the black world, she tried to insinuate herself
into the white, and while passing acquaintances such as Mrs. Porteous were
tolerant of her, sterner judges, such as potential employers, took a
harsher view.
The first few nights had awakened her to reality. She booked into a cheap
hostelry, only to discover that her fellow guests, mostly male, were always
rowdy and often drunk, and the few females were of careless morality. Her
supply of money, which she had thought more than adequate, dwindled to
almost nothing with puzzling and frustrating speed. Having no idea of the
value of money, for she had never had to handle it, she spent foolishly on
food, made some small loans to other women in the hotel who disappeared
without repayment, and was considered an easy touch by the unscrupulous.
She was robbed of some dollars by a couple of mendacious soldiers. They
stopped her because she was pretty, and searched her purse claiming to be
looking for concealed weapons, but when they gave it back there was less
money in it than before.
She could not find a job. There were few to be had, and fewer still for
someone who was neither black nor white. She would happily have become the
most menial skivvy, but no one wanted a white girl to do that, and she
applied for a job as a shopgirl, but her speech pattern, which was erratic,
gave her away, and her deceit made people wary. She looked for lodgings, to
reduce her living expenses, but she would not move into a black household,
and white landladies regarded her with suspicion. She soon discovered, from
the more blatant guests at her cheap hotel, that she had one commodity of
QUEEN 587
value, but the concept of selling what she had never given away free was
repulsive to her, and she would not do that. Despair is the mortal enemy of
innocence, but while Queen quickly fell into a period of self-pity, she was
determined to survive, and that determination became the only weapon in her
depleted armory.
But it was a formidable one. Kicked out of her hotel because she could not
afford to pay and would not accommodate the landlord in her bed, she found
herself a tiny cupboard below some stairs in an abandoned warehouse, and
made herself a squalid home. The warehouse was an unofficial dormitory for
scores of transient ex-slaves, all going to or coming from somewhere, and
all of whom dwelt in the barren land that freedom, despite its promise of
riches, had given them. When Queen first found the new home, she walked
through silent waves of derision and dislike from her fellow tenants, but
penury made her brave. She chose the cupboard because it was the only
private space available, and the door had a bolt on it, on the inside, so
she could feel safe. She spent some of her last few cents buying a rusty
padlock from a secondhand stall to put on the outside of the door. A hefty
kick would have smashed the lock, but it made Queen feel more secure, and
ensured her tenancy when she was out. She learned to lie with ease and to
steal with caution. In the pell-mell nighttime world of the main street, a
muffin man, hawking his wares from an open stall, was her unwitting
supplier of dinner.
It had first happened a couple of days after she left the hotel. She was
hungry, she hadn't had a decent meal in days, her shoes were worn thin, and
her clothes were starting to look shiny and threadbare. She was scared to
go into the white soup kitchen and had been rejected from the black. She
wandered the street and envied even the lowliest of her fellow citizens.
She stared in the window of a provisions store, the display of food making
her mouth water, and hated the ringing tones of the muffin man, announcing
his wares from his cart.
"Muffins! Get your fine muffins here!"
Two hungry black boys took him at his word, and one distracted the vendor's
attention with shouts of injury, while his companion filched a handful of
muffins. But the thief was spotted, and a hue and cry began. The boys tried
to run, but
588 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
were collared by some soldiers. In the commotion, Queen, furtive as a tiny
sparrow, slipped forward, grabbed two muffins and hid them in her pocket.
Heart racing, she turned away, and bumped into a white man who was watching
the fuss. Terrified, thinking she had been caught, Queen began an em-
barrassed explanation, but the man simply smiled at her prettiness, tipped
his hat to her, and apologized for not looking where he was going. Queen
ran.
Convinced that her guilt must be blazoned upon her for the world to see,
she turned into the nearest alley, and stood in the dark for a moment,
breathing heavily, astonished by her own audacity, and appalled that she
had broken a sacred commandment. The pangs of hunger relieved her
conscience, and she wolfed into one of the muffins there in the alley, and
saved the other for her breakfast.
As she settled in her uncomfortable cupboard that night, she considered her
circumstances. She would not go back. She would not return to The Forks of
Cypress and have Miss Lizzie gloat over her. She could not go on because
there was nowhere to go, and anywhere else might be worse than where she
was. And since things couldn't possibly get any worse here, they must get
better. All she had to do was survive, and since survival required food,
and the muffins were not sufficient on which to live, she had to go to the
soup kitchen. Her experience with the white man in the street had revived
her faith in the color of her skin, but the soup kitchen was a daunting
prospect, for other than a criminal life, it was her last hope.
Soup kitchens had been set up in many Southern cities and towns, by
churches and charitable institutions, to help feed the many who had been
made destitute by the war. Despite the equality of the races announced from
Washington, they were ruthlessly segregated. Even the most benevolent
charity took the view that distressed white gentlewomen would be even more
distressed to eat at the same table as blacks, and many of the ex-slaves
down on their luck would have been embarrassed to reveal their new poverty
in front of their former Massas. The less charitable would not tolerate
integration at any level. Queen, who had once been a slave, had gone to a
black soup lin
e, but men had jeered her, told her to get her white tail out
of there and get to her own kind. Queen had
QUEEN 589
been too proud to tell them the truth. Wary of whites because of tier
experience with Henderson and his cohorts, she was as cautious of blacks,
because of the men in the forest who had rejected her.
Now hunger gave her courage. She went to the Presbyterian Church Hall, and
joined a small line of poor whites waiting to be fed. Her nerves quivering,
she advanced to the head of the line, and a kindly white woman of her own
age was nice to her, and gave her a big bowl of thin stew and some
biscuits. Queen kept her head down and scuttled to a comer, where she
sipped the delicious broth, which nourished her spirit like manna from
heaven.
She went every day at lunchtime, for food was served only then, and existed
on that and the occasional muffins that she stole at night. She spoke to no
one, and responded to any questions from the kindly white woman with as few
words as possible. She would sit alone in her favorite comer, eat her food
as quickly as possible, and leave as soon as she could.
On one occasion, her spirit almost failed her. A young woman was in line,
just in front of her, and Queen could tell that she was mulatta. A church
warden had spotted her too. The mulatta, like Queen, kept her head down,
and her eyes to the floor, but the church warden came to her and, gently
but firmly, told her to go to her own people. The whites in the line hissed
their angry agreement. The mulatta begged, and protested that no one would
feed her, she had been rejected from the black soup kitchen, as Queen had
been. The warden was moved by her desperate plight, allowed her to eat a
bowl of soup outside, but told her never to come back again.
It unnerved Queen. She accepted her own bowl of soup and went quickly to
her corner, trying to took inconspicuous. After a few minutes she saw that
the white woman who served the food was walking toward her. Queen wondered
if she should leave now, rather than face the shame of eviction, but the
woman had always been kind, and without this daily sustenance, Queen did
not know how she would survive.
The woman sat beside her and watched Queen eat. She said nothing for a
while, which disturbed Queen more, and soup spilled from her spoon.
"It's tough, isn't it?" said the white woman in a whisper.
590 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
"Looking white." And then she added a word that the slave women sometimes
used when addressing each other.
"Sister."
Queen was petrified. "Ma'am, I swear-" she began, but the white woman
interrupted her.
"It's all right, I understand," she said. She looked around, but no one was
near enough to hear them if she spoke quietly.
"Same as you," she said, and smiled. "High yalla, they call it. Dirty white
would be better."
It was a trap, Queen was sure. The woman couldn't possibly be mulatta-her
features were fine, her skin was flawlessly white, and her hair was soft
and wavy. She looked very much like Queen.
"You funnin' me?" Queen asked angrily. The woman, to convince Queen,
slipped easily into slave idiom.
"Yo' think I's gwine sit in a room full a whites an' tell yo' I's colored
when I ain't?"
It was hardly reassuring to Queen. "Then what you doin' here," she
demanded.
The woman laughed. "Chile," she said, "this here's run by the church.
Volunteering a few hours of my time each day gives me something that money
can't ever buy. It makes me respectable. "
She had an enchanting tone of self-knowledge and selfmockery, and Queen
relaxed enough to smile. Still she was careful. The trap could be
elaborate.
"I'm Alice," the woman told her, "and I was born lucky. I could choose. And
who'd choose to be black? Black's hard. Being white is so much easier."
They talked for a few moments, and Alice suggested that Queen help with the
washing-up. Queen donned an apron and worked with a will, but still she
kept her head down, and avoided speaking to anyone but Alice. They helped
the warden lock up, and he smiled at Queen, and thanked her, and gradually
Queen started to believe that Alice was not a threat to her.
As they walked down the street on the summer day, another change began in
Queen. Men smiled and tipped their hats to the lovely, confident Alice, and
some to Queen, and Queen made a conscious effort to hold her shoulders back
and her
QUEEN 591
head up, when for the last few weeks she had walked with a stoop, because
that made her feel less conspicuous.
They went to Alice's apartment, a spacious room with a fireplace and
sitting area, and a big brass bed in one comer. The drapes were burgundy
velvet, the carpet heavily patterned, the chairs elaborate and thickly
padded. To a clear eye it might have looked a little tacky and worn, but to
Queen it looked sumptuous.
"I picked up most of it for a song," Alice said, throwing her bonnet on the
fine mahogany table. "You'd be amazed what the old mansions are selling
these days, just to get some cash. "
"It's beautiful," Queen said, sinking into the most comfortable chair she
had ever sat in. "Is you rich?"
"No," Alice said, and laughed, and knew that the truth must come out sooner
or later. "But I have some-generous admirers. "
Queen sat up straight. The general immorality of the world outside The
Forks was still astonishing to her, and repugnant.
"is yo' a whore?" she asked. Her vocabulary had increased in Decatur.
Alice looked at her, somewhat sternly.
"If you want to pass as white," she said, "you must watch your speech.
Nothing gives you away faster than slave talk."
Queen, who was still worried about Alice's profession, was defensive. Her
many frustrations came flooding to the surface, in anger and self-pity.
"I don't want to 'pass' as white," she said, all trace of dialect gone. "I
am white. And I don't want to be black, even though that's what I am.
Little Miss In Between, that's me. One of God's mistakes."
She bit her lip and turned away, because Alice had been kind to her. She
got up to leave, thinking she must have offended, but Alice came to her,
took her face in her hands, looked into her eyes, and smiled that
confident, self-mocking smile.
"Yo' ain't a mistake, chile," she said, in thick dialect. Her hands moved
to Queen's straggly, dirty hair, and her eyes twinkled.
"But yo' smell," she said. "Yo' smell baaaaaad!"
592 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
Queen could not resist the warmth and generosity of Alice's personality,
and she smiled, and hiccuped because she thought she was going to cry, and
Alice laughed, and held her for a moment, and told her it was time for a
bath.
They went down to the pump and got buckets of water, which they heated on br />
the stove in the outhouse laundry. Alice pulled out an old zinc bathtub,
filled it with water, and Queen stripped, a little shy about her nakedness
in front of this woman who might be a whore, but who laughed about every-
thing. Queen slid into the tepid water, looked at her feet which were
filthy, and was appalled at how slovenly she had become. Alice set to work
with soap and a cloth, chattering about slave dialect and proper speech,
but Queen hardly heard her. The sudsy water, the sense of being clean
again, the presence of another human being who seemed to care about her,
and the relief of having a possible friend who understood her peculiar
circumstances were all that mattered to her. She even ceased to worry about
Alice's possible profession.
Alice was not a whore in the sense that Queen understood the word, although
she had some admirers who were generous to her in return for her favors. She
preferred to think of herself as a "demimondaine," although society might
have had a less tolerant name for it. She had been raised to it, for her
mother had been a maid in a fancy house in Atlanta, before the war. Her
pappy was a white Massa who had raped her mother and, on discovering the
pregnancy, had sold his slave away. Her mammy was bought by the house, and
cared for by the whores during her pregnancy. When Alice was born, she was
everyone's darling, and some of the regular clients would dandle her on
their knees and give her little presents, and whisper into her infant ears
that they would look after her when she was a big girl. Her mammy was
eternally grateful to the ladies for their charity, loved them and took care
of them, worried about them, comforted them when they cried and nursed them
if they got sick. She lived in the dependency in back of the house, with the
other slaves, and Alice had grown up in that special half world of easy
virtue and rewarding vice. Of consistent tolerance for class, race, and
creed, and rigid rules of behavior. Of generous benevolence by hypocritical
pillars of
QUEEN 593
male society, which was all tinged with the potential for violence that is
inherent within a prostitute's life.
Many expected that Alice would grow up into the profession, and handsome
offers were made for her virginity in her early teens, but her mammy
counseled strenuously against it.
"Take care a what you got," she told Alice. "It's all a girl has got. Don't
let it get wore out. "
Still, she was a slave, and the time came when she had to do her Missy, the
madam's, bidding. Happily, enchanted by her nubile body, the man had broken
her into the adult world without too much pain. Her mammy protested
vigorously, and so Alice, her deflowering having reduced her value, became
a part-time whore, allowed to partake in the activities of the house if she
wanted to, not if she didn't. Eventually, she fell in love with a handsome
young man, and he, besotted with her, swore that he was going to marry her
and take her away from all this. After a six-month affair of mutual bliss
and reciprocal planning, he stopped coming to the whorehouse and Alice
never saw him again. It broke her heart, and she became less generous in
her attitudes toward men, and never again believed what they promised. She
developed a small but regular clientele of older, wealthy men, who were
less likely to make rash promises, and were generous with their presents.
The war came, and the siege of Atlanta by General Sherman changed Alice's
life. When the triumphant Union troops swept into the city, the whorehouse
was a natural arena for the drunken, rampaging soldiers. All the
prostitutes were raped, and when the madam protested, she was beaten so
badly she was scarred for life. Alice, cowering in the dependency with her
mammy, was found by three soldiers, and when her mammy tried to stop the
ravishing of her daughter, they killed her, and raped Alice anyway. The