Vida bided her time on the upstairs porch thinking on her Frank. How they used to play, running after each other behind the road houses near Charleston. The time Frank went all the way to Atlanta only to come back and say he’d seen some gal from the bottoms working in a house of ill repute, and that he’d prayed for her and convinced her to lead a good Christian life. Vida thought that was so admirable. It never occurred to her to ask what it was that Frank was doing in that house of ill repute in the first place. Oh, but when that music got to playing, she and Frank would get to swaying, and all that was on Vida’s mind was her memories and the smell of salt air at dusk. Greer had been nice enough to put a canopy with mosquito nets over her bed, as well as finding a mauve chaise longue, which he said was good for her back. Vida counted her lace handkerchiefs, fingered her daguerreotypes, and sang love songs to her buddy who was waiting on her for sure.
It was a lovely day to do anything in the city of St. Louis. To go down by the river and look at East St. Louis where all them gaming houses and hoodlums were, or to jump on the back of a trolley and ride all the way downtown without being caught. Ordinarily Betsey would have stuffed herself with honey from the honeysuckles that grew wild all about the town, but today she didn’t even see the cherry trees in full bloom nor the azaleas creeping out toward the roadway as if they were making a flowering pavement for reigning nobility, or just for Betsey herself. She didn’t see any of those things. She was hustling long the streets like a woman bout to kick ass or break somebody’s arm just cause she felt like it.
Carrie heard all this door slamming and mumbling coming from the front, so she came out to see what was the matter. Miss Vida never made noise. She was too much the lady. So Carrie knew something was the matter with one of those children, but she couldn’t find whoever it was. Going from room to room Carrie looked under tables, behind couches, in the closets and behind the stairs. Not a soul was present.
Yet when Carrie went on about her business, which was fixing dinner, she spied Betsey on the back stairway next to new blossoms in Vida’s daffodils, just fuming and weeping all at once.
“Why Betsey, honey. Why ain’t you at school? You shouldn’t be home at this hour. Tell Carrie what’s wrong. Did those crackers call you names or throw you out of the games cause you colored? Tell me now and we’ll fix it up.”
Carrie hugged Betsey and wiped the furrows from her forehead, saying, “That’s the way you get wrinkles, from letting things upset you so.”
“I’m never going back to that old school. Never. I mean that too, Carrie. They have to pay me a whole lot of money like one thousand dollars to get me to go back there.”
Then the tears began again and Carrie kept swishing them away with her callused tender fingers. Something terrible must have happened for her girl to be in such a state.
“Well, if you don’t tell me what happened, it’s back to that old school, as you call it, right this very minute. Do you hear me?”
Betsey took a deep breath and relaxed into Carrie’s warm hug.
“How could anybody be so dumb and be a teacher, huh, Carrie?”
“Well. I don’t actually think I get what you mean, chile.”
“What I mean is, why did I have to tell her that Paul Laurence Dunbar was an American?”
“Why I do believe he was a colored man and an American on top of that. You right bout that, Betsey. I could testify on that one.”
“But this teacher tried to make me think that being colored meant you couldn’t write poems or books or anything. She called him an unacceptable choice. Now she did this only cause she doesn’t believe that we’re American. See I tried to tell them but nobody listens to me cause it’s just another nigger talking out the sides of her mouth.”
With that Carrie pulled Betsey close to her bosom but firm, like just before you’re going to get a whipping.
“I don’t never want to hear you call yourself no nigger to anybody. What’s on those white folks’ minds is one thing, but you gotta honor your own self and your people. Calling yourself a nigger means you don’t believe in your own self. And how you gonna make me proud of you, if you running around acting like what white folks think of the Negro is true. Naw, Betsey, there aint nothin in the world to make you a nigger, not less you honey up to them crackers and peckerwoods and let em walk all over you.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do? She’s the teacher, not me. And I said that being colored didn’t mean that Paul Laurence Dunbar was less than a man or not American. I’m the student. She the teacher. She’s supposed to be teaching me. Don’t nobody pay me a cent to teach a living soul, Carrie. I bet she doesn’t know who Langston Hughes is, let alone Sterling Brown or Countee Cullen.”
Carrie started wiping her hands on her apron. She was a mite quiet for her usual self. Then she said, “Humph, I don’t know that I’m familiar with any of those names in particular.”
“Oh Carrie, they’re poets. Mama said they are as good as Rudyard Kipling or even Shakespeare.”
“Oh I’m sure I’m not familiar with all them names.”
“Oh, Mama could tell you,” Betsey chimed, making a strawberry jelly sandwich for herself. “But it doesn’t matter if you know about them or not.”
“Why don’t it matter? You think it’s awright for Carrie to be ignorant and let the white folks learn, huh? Why Betsey, I thought you were my best friend.”
Betsey left her sandwich and pop on the sideboard and ran over to Carrie.
“Carrie, oh Carrie, you’re not ignorant, and we are best friends. I tell you everything, I swear. But Carrie, nobody ever insults you.”
Betsey stood defiant with her hands on her hips, while her little face pleaded for understanding that something dreadful had happened to her.
“Oh, so that’s why you aint in school, cause somebody insulted you?”
Betsey turned her back to Carrie and gathered up what was left of her strawberry sandwich.
“There’s such a thing as honor, you know.”
“And you call running away being honorable, I take it. You just walked outta your class cause you were insulted.”
“I got no reason to be insulted by some po’ white trash, and I didn’t run. I walked out like a lady. Humph! She didn’t even know who Paul Laurence Dunbar was, let alone that he was a full-blooded American.”
“Grab a towel, sit yourself down and help me with this crystal. No streaks and no smudges. Shine it up right fine, you hear me?”
“Yes, Carrie.” Betsey sat at the kitchen table glaring at the wineglasses her mother was so proud of. Not a streak. Not a smudge could be left anywhere.
Beginning the marinating of the meat for supper, Carrie murmured, “Seems to me a body with some pride could go anywhere.”
“No, you don’t understand. I’m never going back.”
“Suit yourself, but mind what I told you bout these glasses. No cracks.”
Betsey took the step stool from the corner where the mops and waxing sponges were hidden from view and gently placed each glass where she imagined her mother would want them. When she’d finished, Carrie gave her a glass of milk and two oatmeal cookies she’d made that morning. Then, sort of lady to lady, or woman to woman, she began a very confidential story.
“Hummm, there’s this occasion I recollect from when I was young myself. Now not as young as you are, but still young. I remember havin to straighten out some no good with a terrible mouth. I felt I couldn’t leave out less I stood up for myself. Oh, a whole lotta folks was busy laughin at me. The rest of em saying I should mind and be careful. See this lil ol’ heifer, she carried a knife.”
On the edge of her seat, Betsey blurted, “But Carrie, what did you do?”
“That lil ol’ twich of a gal callt me out my name. Trying to say that I didn’t come from a upstanding Christian God-fearing home and was a kind a evil mess.”
“But what did you do, Carrie?”
“Callt her out. I just couldn’t do no less.” Carrie slugged the
last of her coffee, as if the story’d ended.
“Callt her out?”
Betsey pondered what on earth could that mean. Carrie wasn’t ignorant, for sure. She used all these words that Betsey’d never heard of.
“What do you mean you callt her out?”
“What I done was to pick her simple behind off the floor. Now that was the first thing I done. After I’d done all that, I put her right out, right out the door.”
“You mean you threw her into the street?”
“Smack-dab in the middle of the street, if ya know what I mean.”
Then Carrie smiled a wicked nostalgic smile that tickled Betsey’s sense of mischief and daring.
“Wow! That’s what you did? Humph.”
Betsey was totally engrossed with the woman, or the twich of a woman, Carrie’d thrown out onto the street. Now, that was really somethin.
“Yeah, Betsey, that’s what you gotta do when somebody say somethin that smarts ya or makes ya feel real bad. You gotta call em out and then they won’t do none of that no mo’. Make em know ya get mighty upset, if somebody is fool enough to come round bein hurtful, like that teacher of yours. Now if that t’was me, I go call her out bout these colored poets. Make her take a step back. That’s good for white folks all the time, don’tcha know?”
“Me? Fight the teacher?”
“Well, you in the right, aintcha?”
“I don’t think I know how, Carrie. I can’t fight.”
Carrie’s heavy bosom was justa rumbling round in her housedress, while she listened to Betsey’s descriptions of her very own shortcomings.
“I don’t mean like in no boxin ring, darlin, but with them words you be throwing round. Surely you could put that ciddidy old woman down. And then carry your pride out withcha in all them long hallways. Then see, when it comes time for somebody to be messin with ya, they gonna know you just gonna call em out.”
“Everybody would know not to mess with me?”
By now Betsey was jumping up and down in space like “Sugar” Ray Robinson or Althea Gibson. Betsey the Champ. Humph. My, my, my.
“Well, sho’ aint nobody gonna come looking for trouble, lessen they a fool awready. But that don’t happen if ya don’t always stand up for yourself.”
There was in the kitchen a silence that bound Betsey and Carrie one to the other like blood kin. Something had been passt down.
Perky Betsey Brown picked up her satchel and most ran out the door, shouting, “It’s almost lunch time. I think I’m gonna go on back to school.”
“I thought you wasn’t never going back to that terrible mess of a school,” Carrie said, leaning on the kitchen table like nothing had transpired since Betsey’s sudden appearance.
Running backwards out the door, Betsey screamed, “I still got my pride, you know.”
Carrie watched Betsey running down the street like she’d been chased by a ball of fire. When she turned from the window, she whispered to herself, “ ‘Speak up Ike, ’spress yo’se’f.’ That’s Dunbar, the colored American poet, I guess.”
13
Just after midnight, when the spirits roam freely with the moon as their guide, Jane opened the door to her house, her husband, her home. She relaxed gainst the closed door, near to wrenching throbs in her chest, her palms sweating like dew. She was cold. She was hot. The staircase so long and winding. How could she make it to the top of the stairs without rousing her children?
Greer was enough motivation. She thought of his arms, his chest covered with twidly nappy black hairs, his hands stroking her hair from right to left, the moustache across his lips. Jane climbed those stairs with feline grace, a cunning she’d been unaware of for many years. But this time she had to make certain that this man, this particular colored man, was hers forever and ever. Just let some nurse look sideways at him and whoever that child was would be somebody else by the time Jane was through. No, more than that, Jane wanted Greer to feel how she’d grown. To actually grasp her new understanding of him, what he stood for, for their people, for the children.
Oh, Jane’d come home to stay this time, no matter what the current crisis might be in North Carolina or in her own bedroom. Jane Brown wasn’t ever going anywhere without this man whose thoughts so provoked her, made her see anew who she was and who they were.
Greer didn’t ask where she’d been and Jane offered no information, but an avalanche of passion swept through St. Louis that night. Thunderbolts. Tremors. Sweet rains dusting thirsty bodies. Jane never opened her eyes. She could see his face every time he touched her.
The secret of Jane’s return was not very long-lived. The children scampered this way and that, elated that their momma was home with them. There was so much everybody wanted her to know. Greer promised a grand celebration and lifted Jane off her feet nigh to the ceiling so she could say the party was not just for her homecoming, but for the progress of the race. Everybody cheered.
Vida whispered to Carrie, “I think you ought to be a bit more proper, now my child’s back. Ya hear?”
Sharon was busy speaking to Carrie from the other side saying, “No cursing or drinking, neither, now Mommy’s home.” Margot got the last word in; “Don’t mention nothin about Mr. Jeff.”
Betsey was hugging her mama while the rest of the brood frolicked bout the living room. “Oh, Mommy, it’s not the same as when you were here, but the house sure does run good.”
“Don’t you mean the house runs well, Betsey?”
“Yeah, Mama, that’s exactly what I meant.”
There’d be no bad feelings or scolding bout anything this day. Not the Sunday Jane Brown came back to her house. Why, Vida wept like she was the abandoned child insteada the sturdy rock of a woman that she was. She wrapped her thin-skinned tawny arms round her baby and kept murmuring bout her prayers to bring her baby home. Jesus never fails you, never lets you down, she sang.
Sharon and Margot pulled Jane’s billowing skirt to brag, “We don’t fight in bed no more.”
“You mean anymore, don’t you?”
“That’s right, Mommy, we don’t.” They giggled all the way back to the kitchen.
“Aunt Jane, Aunt Jane.” Charlie leaped as if he were dunking a basketball. “I don’t steal things from any store anymore.”
Then Allard chimed in, “Mommy, I make up songs like Chuck Berry, insteada burning up everything.”
Margot and Sharon came running back with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches oozing from their hands, when they announced, “Oh, Mama, we could sing most good as the Shirelles, really.”
Betsey felt things were getting a little out of control, so she quite sedately added, “We sing Christian gospel songs like Paul Robeson, too.”
“Yeah,” Charlie frowned. “Not like that man at the church Carrie takes us to.”
Allard jumped up to shout, “Yeah, the one where we could play the tambourine and getta spirit.”
Now it was a Brown family tradition to have “showtime” before a Sunday evening dinner. This one was a very special one, since Jane’d come home. Carrie disappeared into the kitchen to do her job and think on this Jane Brown woman. Meanwhile the children lined up like the Fisk Jubilee Singers singing, “Oh Lord What a Morning.” Then Allard careened cross the floor like Chuck Berry roostered, squealing, “Roll Over Beethoven.” Margot, Sharon, and Betsey sang “Tonight’s the Night” in a routine that would have put the Ronettes to shame. Greer brought out his conga drum and for a change, Jane led the merengue line all over the house. This mad, joyous house that was hers. Even Vida got up to do a sassy little two-step.
Slowly Jane slipped from the carnival mood of her household to think of more serious and practical matters. Carrie, for instance, or the girls reaching puberty with no direction.
“I think you boys, yes Allard, all of you, should go on out to play. We’ve done quite enough for the Negro race today.”
Jane smiled watching these wiry gangly short-haired gremlins running for their basketballs. Boys will be boys sh
e thought to herself, as if she’d ever thought anything else.
That was curious: what had she thought would happen to her household while she was gone. She’d speak to the girls first, then her mother, and finally, that Carrie woman.
Actually, Jane asked Carrie to please retire to her room while she visited with her daughters, even if a certain Mr. Jeff was lingering by the back porch. Oh, Jane was a self-contained woman, but a terribly observant one as well. She got so beside herself she stopped Carrie, who was on her way to her room, to have a short talk.
“Carrie, I realize you are at a disadvantage in this situation, since I myself didn’t hire you, but I would like to know who gave you permission to stay the loneliness of one gardener, meaning Mr. Jeff, in the presence of my children. Not to mention the fact that you have been taking them to some niggerish church to get the Holy Ghost. We are Presbyterians and that is not something Presbyterians get, the Holy Ghost. Plus, you’ve got them swishing and swaying, doing those dirty dances like the po’ children in the projects. You are turning my children into heathens or hoodlums and I will not stand for either. If I were you, I’d mind my place to hold it more securely. Is that clear to you, Carrie?”
“Yes, M’am. That’s plenty clear, Mrs. Brown. I know you and me are hardly the same. But I don’t see why you’d begrudge me the excellent company of Mr. Jeff. I didn’t come here to be meddlin with the way you want your younguns raised, but you weren’t round, Mrs. Brown, so I just did the best I knew how. I’ll continue with you long as you know my heart’s in the right place. I love these chirren like they was my very own, Mrs. Brown, I swear ’fore God, I do. But I’d like to remind you very respectfully, Mrs. Brown, that I’ma full growed woman, working hard to do my job.”
Carrie dropped her head slightly and slowly trudged up the servants’ staircase, which was actually just the back staircase, but when Jane was in a mood it was the servants’ staircase and Jane was in a mood.
“Girls, girls, sit down and we’ll discuss the facts of female life. You’re all reaching an age when things start to happen to your bodies and new strange feelings might come from your very souls, no, you’ll think they’re coming from your very soul, but they are, actually, carnal, no, feelings having to do with, growing up.”