Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  Sister’s teeth went clack-clack. She said, “Mama, Elinor is upset.”

  “What have I done now?”

  “Elinor’s not upset because of you, Mama. She’s upset because they have started to work on the levee, and she hates that levee the way you and I hate hell and the Republicans.”

  Mary-Love looked first at Sister, then out the window at Elinor’s house as if that façade, perhaps in the configuration of draperies opened and draperies closed, might provide confirmation of Sister’s thesis. Then she glanced down at Miriam toddling gravely across the rug, and said, “Sister, I think you may be right about that.”

  . . .

  Frances caught a bit of a cold late in February, a little cold that Roxie said was no more than any child could suffer at that time of the year and at her time of life. Dr. Benquith saw the child and agreed with Roxie. Despite the reassurances, Elinor insisted that the child was in danger of her very life. She told Oscar that for the time being she would sleep in the nursery in case the child should experience difficulty in breathing. Oscar, who could scarcely bring himself to argue against the well-being of his daughter, acquiesced to this. A cot was set up in the nursery and Elinor abandoned her husband’s bed.

  Frances, to all appearances, soon got over the cold, but Elinor continued to stay with her day and night. Mary-Love and Sister next door speculated that Elinor remained as close to the child as she did not for Frances’s protection and comfort, but rather so that no one might discern that the child was totally recovered. In any case, Frances’s illness, whether supposed or real, went on and on, and it kept Elinor indoors. Her only foray into Perdido society was her Tuesday bridge games, and these she insisted be held, ignoring rotation, in her own home for the duration of the child’s danger.

  Queenie Strickland saw more of Elinor than anyone else. Queenie believed in Frances’s illness, mainly because it seemed politic to do so. She frequently passed on to Elinor magazine articles that gave precise instructions for the care of ailing infants. She purchased little bottles of quackery at the pharmacy, tied the necks with pink ribbons, and waved them like a pendulum in Frances’s face. She came daily to ask after the child, and to relate to Elinor the progress of the levee. From Queenie alone did Elinor accept such news, and as the two women sat in the swing on the second-floor porch, Elinor gazed out through the screens at the Perdido and listened tight-lipped as Queenie spoke: “Yesterday afternoon Sister was down in Baptist Bottom, and on the spot she hired three colored women to work in the kitchen. They gone get two dollars a day and not gone do nothing in this world but cook for seventy-five men. I wish I got paid like that for cooking for Malcolm and Lucille! Then over at the mill, they tore down those little store-buildings that are right on the edge of the river, and some other men were there building ’em right back up again except thirty feet back, and this time they are putting in windows ’cause those buildings are so hot in the summer that the men cain’t hardly stand to go in there. And Mr. Avant and Early rode out to Mr. Madsen’s—where Mary-Love gets her potatoes?—and told him they’d pay him two dollars for every wagonload of dirt they took out from behind his house. Y’see, he’s got this mound right in back of his house—they say it’s Indian burying ground and some old Indian bones are laying at the bottom of it pro’bly, and Mr. Madsen says if they find the bones they got to take them away with everything else. He says he was planning to clear it off and plant potatoes back there anyway, but he’ll take the two dollars if they offer it to him, he’s not proud…”

  Because Elinor never objected to hearing these things, and because she had once cautioned Queenie not to tell anyone that she listened to them, Queenie understood that it had become her duty to find out everything there was to know about the building of the levee and to report it directly to Elinor. It was as if Elinor had been a proud sovereign, and the levee builders of Perdido had been her subjects raising earthen barricades and fomenting rebellion. Queenie was the loyal spy who reported every movement of the rabble so that her sovereign might know everything and yet still maintain the appearance of being above such small considerations.

  The Hines brothers continued work on the dormitory and dining room for the expected workers. Early and Sister went around Baptist Bottom knocking on doors looking for people in need of employment. Every Thursday the Perdido Standard was filled with long articles detailing the preparations under way for the construction of the levee, always including at least one photograph of Early Haskew. In general, the town wound itself up very tightly in preparation for the very first wagonload of dirt to be spilled out onto the bank of the Perdido River. As all these events were rumbling along with ever-increasing speed and ever-increasing noise, Elinor Caskey kept more and more to her own house, and was never seen anywhere near the construction.

  Chapter 23

  Queenie’s Visitor

  Work on the levee began on the Baptist Bottom bank of the Perdido south of the junction. Early hired men in Pensacola, Mobile, Montgomery, and even from as far away as Tallahassee, to come and live for a year or so in the dormitory. Quarries in three counties were widened and deepened as stone and earth were extracted and loaded onto trucks or mule wagons. Every morning these vehicles lumbered into town along each of the three roads by which Perdido was accessible to the rest of the civilized world. A few small houses had been razed in Baptist Bottom and the first loads of dirt dropped there, the loose earth packed and molded by an army of colored men with spanking-new shovels. This first wall of clay seemed no more than a child’s mud castle raised to enormous and ridiculous size, so that everyone wondered if so fragile-seeming an embankment could hold against the river if it took it in its mind to rise?

  Every day the local colored population gathered and watched for hours with never-failing interest as the same actions and motions were performed over and over again: a wagon pulled up, dirt and clay were unloaded, dirt and clay were raised to the top of the mound under the direction of an overseer, dirt and clay were tamped into place. On the other side of the river, in the field behind the town hall, an equal number of idle white people gathered and gawked equally hard. Both groups of spectators declared that it was such a slow and such a massive job that there could be no hope of its being finished within their children’s lifetimes. Perhaps Early Haskew was a great confidence man and nothing more. Hadn’t they better stop the business right now?

  A month or so later, one of the early morning gawkers behind the town hall looked across the Perdido and seemed to see the earthwork with new eyes. Previously, the mound of earth on the Baptist Bottom shore had seemed shapeless and amorphous to this man; but this day, in the morning air, without much actual change from the morning before, it seemed a gaudy vision of what the whole rampart would eventually be. This man, astounded by his sudden visionary extrapolation, pointed out what he saw to the next gawker. The second man was even more astonished, for he saw it too, and he had been one of the levee’s most vociferous detractors. The word—or rather the vision—spread, from man to man and from woman to woman throughout Perdido, and everyone went over to Baptist Bottom and looked at the thing up close, and actually applauded Early Haskew when he drove up in his automobile. Suddenly the levee had become a great thing in Perdido.

  This remarkable rampart was twenty-five feet wide at its base, about twenty-two feet high—depending upon the part of town—and about twelve feet broad at the top. With every fifty feet or so of the levee that was completed, a layer of topsoil was added to the top and sides, and immediately planted with grass. Black women in the community made forays into the forests and dug up smilax, small dogwoods, hollies, and wild roses, which were also planted in the red clay walls. Further to guard against erosion, Early had slips of kudzu placed at the base of the levee on both sides in great holes filled with pulverized cow manure. He had been assured that no amount of fertilizer could burn the roots of that rampaging vine.

  Early and Morris Avant conferred every day, and Morris pointed out that the speed with whi
ch the levee could be built was in direct proportion to the number of men they had working on it. Early did a little figuring and a little more talking with Morris Avant and his foremen, then went back to the town council and asked whether they wouldn’t authorize money for the building of another dormitory to house more workers. The cost would be offset by the overhead expenses saved in the quicker completion of the project. Early was told to do whatever he saw fit, and the Hines brothers went to work the next day.

  Early did not worry about finding workers now to fill that dormitory, for it had become known all over south Alabama, south Mississippi, and the Florida panhandle that wages, room, and board were to be had in Perdido. So when the Hines brothers finished the second dormitory, and two more colored women had been hired on to help in the kitchens, every man in search of work on the levee was accommodated. They drifted in from God-knew-where, appearing suddenly out of the forest or entering town on the buckboard of a wagon bringing in clay or simply trudging in on the road from Atmore. They all went by nicknames, and none seemed to possess a history entirely unblemished.

  These men worked so hard all day that it was a wonder that they had the energy, after the sun went down, to sit up for their meals in the dormitory kitchen. But the men ate voraciously, and seemed not to know the word “weariness.” At night, even more so than during the day, Perdido seemed to have been invaded by these men; people now locked their doors. The levee-men were rowdy, and they consumed vast quantities of the liquor brewed up on Little Turkey Creek. Two little Indian girls on a swayback mule brought in ten gallons of the stuff each day and sold it at the dormitories every morning before school, entrusting the proceeds to their teacher until school was over. A gambling den run by Lummie Purifoy opened in Baptist Bottom; his ten-year-old daughter Ruel passed her evening serving rotgut liquor by the tin-cupful. Two white women, it was whispered, had been driven up from Pensacola by a colored man in a yellow coat. They were the very lowest sort of white women, and actually rented a house in Baptist Bottom. The door of that house, it was said, was never closed to a man who knocked on it with a silver dollar in his fist. Perdido’s three policemen tried to stay away from these purlieus of the levee-men at night; even with their pistols, they were no match for one hundred and seventy-five powerful, brawling drunks. It was a mercy that, after dark, these men tended to keep to themselves. Only occasionally might three or four of them be seen reeling up Palafox Street, leaning against store windows with closed drunken eyes; and once in a while they made nuisances of themselves in the audience at the Ritz Theater with rude noises and obscene commentary on the movies. Very occasionally a black man would have to bar his door and plead pitifully for the purity of his daughter, while the daughter ran deftly out the back way.

  Yet the white workers—no-good, unpleasant, and possibly dangerous—were a necessary evil. They would go away after a year or so, but the levee they built would protect Perdido for an eternity.

  . . .

  It was the summer of 1923, and the whole town seemed to stink with the sweat of the levee-men. The construction on the eastern bank of the Perdido had been finished. Two sets of concrete steps had been built into the sides of the levee, and a track had been beaten into the earth along the top. This was a favorite promenade of the colored population after church on Sunday, and colored children played there all day. From the windows of the town hall, the levee was a bright red wall, and after a rain it became shining red and was a dominant feature of the landscape.

  Work had begun just behind the town hall now, and before long it would seem as if the Perdido below the junction were flowing meekly through a deep red gully. Already the river seemed to have surrendered much of its former belligerence and pride.

  Beneath the constant heat, the workers were wearier than before, but instead of dampening their spirit at night, the warm weather seemed to cause them to drink more and to carouse with greater vehemence and noise. On these summer nights, when respectable Perdido sat on its porch for air after supper, the racket made by the workers on the far side of the river was a distant but very audible roar, punctuated occasionally by a coherent shout. Perdido rocked grimly, and fanned its face, and said in a low voice, I sure will be glad when those men have gone back to wherever it was they came from. And to be on the safe side, hunting guns that usually weren’t taken out until deer season were cleaned and loaded and propped in the corner behind the front door. The unspoken fear was that the two white women from Pensacola who had taken up scandalous residence in Baptist Bottom would prove insufficient for the “needs” of the workers.

  One night, in the midst of the heat—and the rocking, and the fanning, and the worry—the telephone rang in Oscar Caskey’s house about ten o’clock, an advanced hour for the call to be anything but an emergency. Oscar and Elinor were sitting on their upstairs porch as usual and Oscar went to answer it. He came back in a few moments and said, a little uneasily, “It’s Florida Benquith, she sounds worried.”

  Elinor got up and went to the telephone. Oscar hung about and listened to his wife’s end of the conversation. This wasn’t much, for Florida was a great talker and on this occasion she had more than usual to say.

  “Listen, Elinor,” she began without preamble, “I’m sorry to call you like this, but I thought you ought to know what happened—or what we think has happened, because we’re not sure yet. I’ve just now sent Leo on over there.”

  “Are you talking about Queenie?” asked Elinor calmly.

  “Of course I am! I was standing in my kitchen, Elinor, putting away plates. My window’s open for a little breath of air and suddenly I hear all kinds of carrying-on coming from Queenie’s house—and it’s not Queenie going after those two children either, it’s Queenie’s voice and a man’s voice and who is Queenie arguing with? is all I can think. So I turn out the light and step out on the back porch so they cain’t see me—I didn’t want ’em to think I was spying, and anyway I wasn’t, I just wanted to make sure Queenie was all right—and I’m listening but I cain’t tell what anybody is saying but they keep on with it. Then I hear Queenie holler ‘No!’ and then I don’t hear anything else. Elinor, I tell you, I was starting to get worried.”

  “What’d you do?” said Elinor.

  “I run to get Leo. He’s in the living room, reading. I bring him out on the porch and I tell him what I heard and we just stand there listening, but we cain’t hear much. We cain’t hear anything at all, in fact, and I tell him what I heard before and he says, ‘It’s probably James Caskey over there telling Queenie she’s spending too much money down at Berta’s, that’s probably what you heard.’ I say to him, ‘If it’s James Caskey visiting over there, then why are all the lights out?’ And he doesn’t know. So we just stand there in the dark, and then I say to Leo, ‘Leo, maybe I ought to give a call over there and make sure she’s all right.’ And Leo says, ‘That’s a good idea,’ and I’m just about to go inside and pick up the telephone when Leo whispers to me, ‘Stop.’ So I stop and I look out across the yard and there is somebody coming out of the back door of Queenie’s house and it’s a man.”

  “What man?” asked Elinor.

  “That’s just it, we have no idea what man. But, Elinor, both Leo and I were almost positive it was a levee-man. He snuck around the front of the house and looked around and then he took off like lightning. I know it was a levee-man, I just know it, and I think something happened to Queenie, so I sent Leo right over there. I told him don’t even knock, just go on in, and he did it. So he’s over there now and I’m on my way over and, Elinor, I think you better come too.”

  Florida hung up and Elinor turned to her husband and said: “Well, Oscar, it looks like one of your levee-men has gone and raped Queenie Strickland.”

  . . .

  In the darkened room Queenie sat weeping on the edge of the bed. She had pulled on a skirt, but hadn’t bothered to button it. Her underslip was soiled and torn, and she had drawn a house jacket around her bruised shoulders. Florida had made some of E
linor’s special Russian tea and taken it to her, but the cup sat untasted on the small table beside the bed. Elinor and Oscar arrived, and Florida said immediately, “Well, Elinor, you’ve just got to talk to her. She won’t let us call Mr. Wiggins.” Aubrey Wiggins was the chief of the three-man Perdido police force.

  Leo Benquith came in from the kitchen.

  “Is she all right, Dr. Benquith?” Elinor asked.

  Dr. Benquith shook his head. “Elinor, what happened here tonight…”

  “I know, I know,” said Elinor soothingly as she sat down on the bed and put her arm about Queenie’s shoulder.

  Oscar, standing ineffectually by, could only think to say, “Queenie, did you have your door locked?”

  Queenie paid no attention to anyone, but continued to sob convulsively.

  “Where are the children?” asked Oscar.

  “They slept through everything, thank the Lord,” said Florida. “So I sent them over to my house. They’re fine.”

  “You didn’t tell those children what happened, did you?” asked Elinor sharply.

  “’Course not!” replied Florida. “But, Elinor, we got to do something. That levee-man walked into this house, and he”—out of consideration for Queenie she did not finish the sentence; but then she went on quite as if she had—“and so we got to call up Mr. Wiggins.”

  Queenie reached over and squeezed Elinor’s hand pathetically, as much as to say, Don’t…

  “No,” said Elinor. “Don’t call Mr. Wiggins. We don’t want to say anything. And, Florida,” Elinor went on, turning to Florida and eyeing her with purpose, “you are not to say anything to anybody, you hear?”

  “Elinor—” began Oscar, but was interrupted by Leo Benquith.