Enraged, humiliated, and dejected, Dora flew toward what she presumed was the back of the store. Not knowing which way to go or whom she now dared to ask, she spun in a slow circle of bewilderment, fighting with her tears, holding on to her hat. The screech of a chicken hawk, its talons bared to attack, dropped her to her knees. Still shielding her face and hair with her palms, she realized she was not in the woods or gathering eggs in the henhouse. The sound was not a hawk, but the grate of metal curtain rings. Dora had stumbled into the women’s changing rooms. “You, gal, is you the fittuh?”
Not good for a young colored gal to be goin’ about by herself in the city. Some of dese young’uns could be my son, waggin’ they tongues out the sides of they mouths at me. Those would not do. Out among the peddlers and street singers, Mah Bette had been sizing up young men she considered appropriate matches for her Dora. Bette thought her granddaughter not bad to look at, but shy of knowin’ it or showin’ it. Not good for a young woman to stay single too long, be too ambitious. My grandgal need a protector. Bette quickly dismissed the smart-lipped, arrogant ones, yellow or brown made no mind to her. Then as she was making her way down the avenue, she saw uh upright, Dogon-Guine man for sho. Got a buckboard, no ring on he finger, and respectable from the way folks call out. That was the one. Fuh now.
Betty waved her hand ever so feebly in the air toward him and smiled meekly. She still had Oshun’s power to draw the light of a man’s eye with her own. “Good mornin’, Mauma, surely there’s somethin’ I can do fuh you this beautiful, blessed day to match the sunshine of your smile.” His dark chocolate skin flushed maroon when he smiled, revealing a perfect set of evenly spaced, strong white teeth.
Healthy, good bones, strong blood, ambitious. Eyelashes so thick a gal could sit on em. Betty could think of a few things he could do, but she voiced only one. “My granddaughter done slipped out of my sight. Went fuh a walk she say, got no idea where. Surely you musta seen her. No young man in his right mind coulda missed her. She a restless sort. We just got ch’here and now she done run off. I seen her goin’ thataway.”
“Toward the harbor most likely. S’where I’m headed. You wanna ride alongside, we’ll find her.” He jumped down and, extending his hand, helped her climb aboard the seat behind his. She liked him even more. “Right this way, Miz . . .”
“Mayfield,” Mah Bette answered proudly.
“Look out now, I got royalty in my carriage! Make way, I got a Mayfield ridin’! There be a statue, a park, even a street named Mayfield, but this the first time I met a person by that name.” Everyone in the Carolinas knew the name Mayfield, one of the oldest planter families in the state, but if this young man had a mind to treat her like royalty, she had no intention of dispelling the notion. She had been as much a wife as a wife could be to Julius Mayfield. That is how she understood herself. Mistress of the house, more than the white woman who called herself such. Julius Mayfield had chosen her, loved her, taken her and taken her back again. Wasn’t cuz of no land or property—was a man made her his own.
“You so gracious, Mr. Winrow.”
“How you know my name?”
“This old lady know a few things. I been watchin’ you ’fore I spoke. I like how you do. It’s hard these days to come across a nice gentleman of color like yourself, Mr. Winrow.”
“Mister, I like the way that sound, but please call me Win, Mauma. Everyone do.” Mah Bette became excited for Dora. She was anxious that her young charge show some interest in cohabiting. Not dry up like those old Sesesh biddies, or choose wrongly like my girls. This one got some prospects. Strong bloodline, his. Oh yes, but humble. Still, wish he had a horse ’stead of a mule.
When the buckboard turned onto Calhoun Street, Bette leaned over Win’s shoulder and pointed to her granddaughter. When the wagon pulled up alongside her, Dora couldn’t even see it. “Oh, chile, you sho nuf got too much on your hands this day. What is all this? Did you steal somethin’?”
Her arms ladened with uneven bolts of material, hat skewed to one side, one lock of hair sticking out like a spear, sweat streaming down the sides of her face, Dora had a mind to spit out something she would regret, so she held her tongue along with her parcels and temper. In reality, she was grateful to see her grandmother appear with a rescuer in tow. She could never figure how Bette always knew, how she would just mysteriously show up when she was needed. At that moment, Dora didn’t much care. She was relieved to unburden herself and to reclaim her wardrobe and hair from disorder. What she did not like was the liveryman her grandmother had so obviously procured for her review. “No, no, gal. Sit up front wid me. Let yo Nana hab room to rest huh legs.” Callin’ me a gal, axin’ me to sit up front like I’m ’posed to be wid he. She ain’t my Nana, she Mah Bette. Miss Bette to you!
Dora soon realized that the driver had asked her to sit up front not to be forward but so he could collect other passengers along the route. Laundresses, day maids, doormen, and waiters on their way back to the Neckbone piled into the back of the buckboard. The pain in her head listed from side to side each time the wagon halted. The bootblack who had accosted her ran beside the wagon in his bare feet, his hardscrabble shoes flying by their laces over his shoulder. The fruit-monger who had sold her a peach hopped aboard. The world at your fingertips. First month of freedom. She pulled the peach from her purse. It had browned and bruised from her travails. She pulled back the skin and listlessly sucked on the warm sweet pulp.
An ancient indigo woman hailed the driver, her hand outstretched in supplication. Dora watched her approach the wagon with an off-balanced gait, syncopated stress on the right foot, the other one dragging beside, short quick glances over her shoulder, a tick of the jaw. “Whoa! Aunt Sibby! How you doin’ tuhday, Aunt Sibby?” He jumped from the carriage and turned to Dora in one move. “Scuse me, m’am, but you got to ride to the back now. Aunt Sibby always git up front when she be ridin’, much obliged.”
The old woman smiled without parting her lips. Her wide, wizened eyes meeting Dora’s gaze. Water-filled eyes, yellowed from too much memory. Where you been, what you leff, Aunt Sibby? Bent bowed legs and shoulders hunched over. Jubilee come too late. Not goin’ to be like that. I’m tryin’ to move forward. Life is in front of me, not behind. Dora slid to the driver’s side and stepped down as the man steadied the old woman, whose high youthful voice surprised her, “Ebenin, Win, how’s my luck today?”
“It’s always good, Aunt Sibby, when you wid me. Got to be.” With firm forearms, Win lifted up the petite woman and gingerly placed her on the seat. Before Win could assist her, Dora squeezed a spot in the back of the wagon next to the bootblack, who was swinging his dusty feet over the sideboard. The boy doffed his bowler hat. Holding tightly to her purse, Dora rode primly alongside, her feet involuntarily dangling next to his. He looked hungrily at her half-eaten peach. She gave it to him. He devoured it in one mouthful, his cheek bulging, then smiled at her with the pit between his teeth. Aunt Sibby. Sabina . . .
Sabina called her an old soul, “Kin see it in she eyes. Done set she mine fo she got dere. Doan lea’ much room fo change it.” And Pretty, smiling through her purple gums in a speech impossible for all but the intimate to understand, “Cose, dat may mean she mayin git whenrother ony dream.”
Almost every day coming to or from the Normal School, Dora circumnavigated the graying columns of wisteria to stop by the Weavers. Aunt Sabina and her daughter Pretty, the oldest family at Tamarind, had been given the name Weaver by the Union census takers. “I’m a weaver,” Aunt Sabina had said, and what she did became who she was. In the hierarchy of Tamarind artisans, their weatherworn shack, the weaving house, was the middle ground between manor and field. It became a favorite place for Dora. She felt safe and welcome in the weaving house. The posts missing from the banister, leaning against the side of the house, clapboard shutters askew, the crooked chimney, all felt familiar.
The old women took more kindly to Dora than other former captives of Tamarind. ’Most everyone
had a grudging respect for her grandmother, for Mah Bette’s ability to read dreams and, on occasion, fix one’s future. “She have a gift,” they would say. “Only God choose upon whom it be bestowed.” They didn’t care much for the grandchild, though. “Left behind colored offspring.” When Dora passed through what was still the quarters she sensed, in unspoken glances and stares, the curious knowledge of her family’s past. Reminder of times ebbody sooner forget. Sometimes, though, Sabina’s recollections as a young girl told her things.
Sabina had been a girl when the gin came to the islands. “That djinn, it the Devil. It come out the groun’, spittin fire, make men crazy. Wid power. An yoah Great Gran’mama, that ol silly gal Monday, say, Maas say this here thin’ gonna change the world. Maas say this here maa-chine gonna do alla work of a hunnerd slave. Maas say dis and Maas say dat. Maas say dis here thin’ make my job easy as pie although I spec it ain’t no pie Maas hisself be eatin. Maas say this here djinn gonna let him plow out de norf pasture and do the souf pasture and eben buy up dat swamp lan’. He eben sent dat ol lazy no-count brothuh uh his to Miss’sippi see bout mo lan’. Maas say, No mo rice! No mo indigo! No mo stompin’ in dat swamp neck deep or stirrin’ dem pots till yo han turn blue. From now on, eb’ting gon be diff’ent.”
Overnight, it seemed, the arcane Sea Island culture, the grand barons of the South with their archipelago of great estates that unfurled along the ocean’s edge, had been overthrown. Julius Mayfield, who through the partial humanity of his slaves constitutionally had the voting power of seven hundred men, now found he had to share that power with backwoods up-country hooligans, second sons, indentured servants, trappers and rogues, who ventured west by the throngs, seeking and making their fortunes in the formerly Choctaw-Creek territories of Mississippi and Alabama. The small cadre of men who had for years controlled the destiny of their state and most of the nation found themselves outdone by an invention, drummed up by a Yankee, no less! Some say stolen from a slave. Within ten years, the undulating, fulvous fields of rice and the steaming kettles of indigo, the scarlet blossoms of long-haired cotton, so bright as to seem silver, all gave way to acre after acre of the tight, speckled, scruffy breed, shorthair. The cotton that would be the new king was the scrappy kind. Wild like a weed, the new upland cotton could be culled in sand or delta or dirt. Prematurely sensing the approaching death of a ruling class, speculators appeared like buzzards. What was one to do with an overabundance of labor and a shrinking market demand for one’s product? What was one to do when there was simultaneously a demand for slave labor in the territories, a demand which could not be met, because the international trade had been outlawed?
To supplement his cash crop losses, Julius Mayfield, master of Sweet Tamarind, looked to his livestock to restore his profit and began experimenting with breeding. “Massa come roun’ us up, made us strip all our clothes off, eben our head tie. An then thew us inna barn an lock the doah. Next spring, hyeah come sixty baby. Pretty made that way. Yuh granmama, Mah Bette, too. He do dat ebry harvest or so till he die inna war. Sometime he and he gentlemen frins git up on innere, galavantin’, the bunch of em.”
Though Sabina did not know her own age, she knew her daughter to be seventy-two because it had been written in the manor book, along with the birth of those sixty babies, and the sale of twenty of them. Pretty, it was noted, was Sabina’s youngest, her twenty-second, twelfth born live. At the war’s end, while others left, Sabina had stayed waiting for the return of her children, the sight of them, any of them. Pretty tended her.
Dora envied the life that mother and daughter shared—the warm sounds and scents of the two-storied, leaning shack, lifetimes humming in the spinning wheels, the steamy mixture of salt air and vinegar in the dyeing room. On occasion they allowed her to hold the paddle-stick and stir the simmering cast-iron pots, then hang the heavy hanks of thread on the thick ropes stretched between the house and neighboring trees. Drying in the sun, the tangled coils of yarn formed a muted rainbow of henna, purple, indigo, and evergreen.
The women took turns wrapping Dora’s hair, twining each tuft to make it grow. While Bette fought to comb Dora’s head by pulling and yanking, twisting and cussing, Sabina and Pretty carded it gently with tortoiseshell combs and arranged it in intricate patterned plaits, the light and dark interplay between scalp and hair part of its charm. Folks said they had the growin’ hands. By the time Dora came of age, they had coaxed some length from her hair to match its thickness. Washing day she pranced around, the lioness!
This would not do for the parish school. The sisters insisted that her hair be pulled, slicked, and pressed down tight. “Anything but those pickaninny tie-strings!” they told her. There were new things to be learned. There were all kinds of new mechanisms to tame that wooly mess atop her head. “Magazines. Catalogues. Fine grooming,” Miss Highgate would rail as her fingers flit through the years-old Harper’s Bazaars, whose pages she had taped so assiduously at the binding to keep them from flying about the room. “Good manners are the tools that we need. We are not mere brutes to pick, hoe, scrub, and clean! We must free our people from the burden and expectation put upon them by slavery! And it starts with those tie-strings!”
Mah Bette hadn’t fancied Dora going by the Weavers’ any more than she had approved her attending the parish school. “All them coals and fire. One misstep, pot turn ovuh an you ruin all you got. Don’t nobody want no scarred-up heiffuh.” All three Sweet Tamarind women bore the signs. Bette, who had done her time over steaming vats of lye soap, had keloid welts on her arms and neck from where the scalding water had splashed her. Sabina’s hands were gnarled and twisted like the dry husk of a cotton boll. Miss Pretty was missing three fingers. Dora thought this was also from a weaving mishap. The women did not say, but Sabina herself had maimed her daughter to keep her near. An infant with a mangled hand would not sell.
They passed within days of each other, mother and daughter. One had prepared the body of the other, dressed in simple homespun with rosewater and a garland, a bright copper penny on her tongue. The other lay on a floor pallet of straw, curled upon herself as if sleeping. Dora arrived at the tin-roofed porch to find the wailing women who always appeared when someone died. She flew up the steps, but Bette caught her at the door. “Mother outlib even her baby chile. Gwon to find her again, Ah speck.”
Dora made matching coverlets of damask, double woven and ornamented with intertwining hearts. She placed the quilted squares over their frail birdlike forms and silently watched as they were sealed in separate pine coffins. She took some hanks of their colorful thread, a few calabash buttons, and placed them in her Sears Roebuck shoebox next to the photograph of her mother, Juliet.
The sisters, too, had moved away. The school, which was never well off, got worse as the few Northern dollars upon which the teachers depended shifted to the cause of suffrage. The children did their addition and subtraction lessons in boxes of pressed dirt and strained ink from pokeberry juice and blanched sheets of newsprint for papers. Bible pages frayed, as did tempers.
Dora had thought to become a missionary teacher herself, and she looked to the sisters for encouragement, but Miss Stubbins, packing the books of Botany and Greek which she had never used, retreated into tight-lipped obstinacy, while Miss Highgate had responded to an advertisement. “Bride? What a waste of time,” Miss Stubbins fumed. “While you were writing some lovestruck cowpoke, I have knit five pair of stockings. What age did you tell him you were? Thank God, we’ve given you the means to an honest living, Dora. Marry late, or better, not at all. Never depend upon anyone.”
Such declarations would send Miss Highgate into a frenzy of tears. “Oh, you are heartless.”
“And you are deranged. What do they call it? Brain fever? Illiterate sod-farmer. Does he know you’re a colored woman? ‘A slight admixture in my blood,’ indeed.” Miss Stubbins said she would return. “When I have found a more suitable and dependable companion and when we have achieved our needs as women, as equals.”
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Mah Bette simply folded her arms and watched from the comfortable distance of plantation talk. “Both of um need a good poke. Got neither chick nor child. Ain’t natural.”
“They work hard in devotion to our people, Mah Bette.”
“What yuh say? I sittin’ round inna rockin’ chair? What they teach yuh, eh? Sewing with that Yankee cloth, cookin’ with that store-bought flour? That old long-toof white one, try she carry fitty pound rice on she head stead of some book, she fold up into dust on duh ground. And dat colored gal, think she so somebody, somebody pozed to wait on huh. What she know?”
“Writing and arithmetic, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, to start.”
“Uh-hum. Don’t you start wid me.”
Dora ignored her grandmother’s ill-temper and made parting gifts for her teachers. Miss Stubbins was easy—a traveling bag of brocade. For Miss Highgate Eudora could not think of an appropriate offering. Miss Highgate had taught her the first letters of the alphabet, the rotation of the earth on its axis with a peach perched on the tips of her fingers. “Think of it, Dora May. Columbus discovering a world and never to realize what world it was! Our fate is in the hands of the Almighty. But He has given us free will to shape it in accordance with His law. We must be forever fearless to discover what wonders He has in store. There is a world beyond this island and it is glorious. Emerald fields even for an autumn bride.” The Weavers had taught her trust. Miss Highgate had taught her manners and poise and possibility. For her, Dora forswore the ancient paper patterns and created a design of her own invention. While Mah Bette gathered herbs and gossip in the woods and fields nearby, Dora scavenged patches of lace and silken threads and wallpaper scraps. pieces of doilies, table napkin trim, and the torn interior curtain that still blew in the breeze at the manor house—Tamarind, a moldering maze of scorched cathedral walls surrounding the last twist of a spiral stair. In one magical sitting, three days that seemed to pass as one, she fashioned an ivory gown, a patchwork scalloped sheath, gossamer in spots, laced with gold threads that glistened in the sunlight, and presented it to the sister soon to be married, who seemed now only capable of crying. “Why, Dora May! A frock to rival Titania. My mantua! It’s perfect for my wedding night! You could open up a store!”