Sarah’s bare palms flared with pain, but she didn’t let go of the tub’s hot handles. She turned around to look at Lela. “He touched you?” she demanded of her frightened daughter.
Wide-eyed, Lela shook her head. “I j-just got up, and this m-man was here—”
“Come on, now. I never laid a finger on her, Auntie. I was on my way—” the white man began, and Sarah cast him such a poisonous look that his tongue fell silent.
“I ain’t axed you. You jus’ hush,” Sarah hissed at him, and she turned her eyes back to Lela, who appeared to be calming. “You tellin’ the truth, Lela? He ain’t touched you?”
Lela’s head bounced up and down as she nodded. “It’s the truth, Mama. He only scared me.”
For the first time since she’d heard the scream, Sarah felt herself breathe. She quickly pulled her hands away from the washtub, rubbing her singed palms and fingers on her skirt. Her joints were shaking, and she felt weak at the knees. “Git on outta here,” she told Lela. “Go back in the room, put on yo’ clothes. Don’t come out ’til I say.”
“Yes’m,” Lela said, staring at the floor, and she ran out of the kitchen.
Next, Sarah turned her gaze back to the stranger, who was hastily buttoning his shirt. His smile, which had vanished when he’d seen the tub of water, slowly crept back to his ruddy lips. “See here, this is all a misunderstanding. I was on my way out—”
“An’ that’s where you best git to,” Sarah said, glaring. “ ’Fore I change my mind.”
The man sighed, glancing back at Etta. Then he stooped over and kissed Etta’s mouth, wrapping his arm around her waist. “ ’Bye, sweetheart,” Sarah heard him say.
But Etta didn’t even look at him, Sarah could see. Etta’s eyes were locked on hers.
After the man was gone, taking with him his scent of cigarettes, liquor, and perspiration, Sarah and Etta stood frozen in a silence so oppressive it could have made the room shrink. By now Sarah was breathing hard, her mind careening as she tried to make sense of the morning. A part of her was still struggling to believe what she had seen. In that one instant, believing a white man had come into her home and touched her daughter, Sarah had felt as if she had become someone new. She could easily have become a murderer.
“This may not help …” Etta began slowly in a soft voice, her eyes red from lack of sleep and sadness, “… but he’s not a customer. His name is Gregor, and he’s a friend. In all the time I’ve lived here, Sarah, I have never once entertained a man in my room, not until last night. I have too much respect for you. But last night I had a sip too much wine. I know I shouldn’t have, and I know it was wrong. I’ll tell Lela he was—”
“You ain’t got to tell Lela a goddamn thing,” Sarah said, speaking at last. The murderer she had very nearly become was still alive in the huskiness of her voice. “You already done told Lela you a no-’count harlot by bringin’ that white man in this house. An’ it make me sick in my stomach hearin’ you talk ’bout respect. You don’ know what the word mean. You don’ respect yo’ own self, and nobody else. But that ain’t my problem to fix. These the last words you gon’ hear from me, Etta, and you best listen good: Anything you got in this house that ain’t gone today gon’ be thrown out in the street tomorrow. I don’ wanna see you near me or Lela never again.”
Etta’s eyes overran with tears. “Sarah … ?”
Somewhere beyond her rage, Sarah felt hidden tears springing inside of her, too. Disgusted both by Etta and her own emotions, Sarah flung one of the kitchen chairs out of her way, toppling it over. Then she went to see about her daughter.
By late afternoon, Etta’s room was empty. Etta had found some men with a mule-driven cart and they had taken her clothes, her wardrobe, her bureau, her linens, her lamps, and the canopy bed she’d bought for herself. Once Sarah finished her deliveries, she’d spent her day washing clothes in the backyard with Sadie, avoiding the kitchen entirely because she didn’t want any contact with Etta. She stayed outside even though the dark clouds above had thickened, looking nastier than any she’d seen. When she left, Etta didn’t come to say good-bye, and Sarah was happy to be spared another painful meeting with her. When she remembered the sight of that man in her house, and the way he’d leaned over to kiss Etta so brashly in her presence, Sarah wished she’d doused both of them with that tub of hot water. The nerve!
“Sarah, child, I hope I didn’t bring you no trouble talkin’ about that woman around other church folks,” Sadie said. “It just got to the place where I couldn’t keep it to myself, the way she was taking advantage of a decent Christian family. I’ve been afraid this would happen, that there’d be menfolk in and out and you or Lela might get hurt. And it was a white man, too? I thought she had some shame in her, but I guess not. Ooh, I’m so glad she’s gone. I’m glad for you and Lela both.”
“Me, too,” Sarah whispered. “This ain’t nobody’s fault but mine.” Saying she was glad Etta was gone seemed to be a lie, because Sarah felt more like she was grieving. But for what?
“And you won’t have no trouble renting that room out. I’ll help you post signs, hear?”
Something made Sarah look up at that instant, and she saw Lelia standing a few feet away from them in the yard, her schoolbooks hugged across her chest. Lelia’s face told Sarah that she had overheard her conversation with Sadie. Lelia looked stricken, but there was nothing Sarah could say to her. Without a word to either of them, Lelia turned to march into the house.
Sarah sighed deeply. “Lord have mercy … this gon’ be the hard part… .”
“You just got to explain right and wrong, Sarah.”
“I knows it,” Sarah said. “But folks’ hearts don’t wanna hear ’bout right and wrong. Look at me! I always knowed I shoulda kept ’way from Etta, but my heart couldn’t hear it.”
Sarah heard rumbling thunder in the distance. She would have to hang the clothes she could in the kitchen, she knew, because it would likely rain tonight. Damn it! Can’t git the first thing to go right today, Sarah thought.
After Sadie went home to start supper for her family, Sarah figured she’d better do the same. She wished she had enough money to walk down to the eating house and bring a couple of plates of food home for her and Lelia, but she knew she had to be more careful now that she wouldn’t have Etta’s rent money. She had some precious beef on ice, so she’d make stew.
Inside, Lelia was sitting at the kitchen table, her head resting on her books. She looked as though she must have fallen asleep while she was crying. Sarah began her supper preparations without a word, chopping the meat on a cutting board with a sharp rapping sound, and she heard Lela stir behind her.
“Help me with supper, Lelia,” Sarah told her, but Lelia didn’t stand up. Sarah was glad Sadie wasn’t there to see Lela’s disobedience, because Sadie had told Sarah many times she was spoiling her child. Sadie was a hard parent, just as Sarah’s parents had been, quick to find a switch. Sarah had taken a switch to Lelia a few times, but she could hardly bear to hear her daughter cry. She’d cried enough tears as a child herself.
After silence had stretched between them a few more minutes, Sarah said, “It don’t make no sense to you, do it? You thinkin’, ‘How Mama gon’ throw her own friend out the house?’ ”
“I understand,” Lela said, surprising Sarah with her straightforward response. She suddenly sounded much older than ten, like a grown woman. “You’re jealous, Mama.”
Sarah whirled to stare at Lela, shocked. “What I’ma be jealous for?”
“You’ve always been jealous, ’cause Miz Etta is so pretty, and ’cause she’s been places and done something ’sides washing white folks’ dirty underwear. That’s why.”
Sarah would never have believed her daughter could speak such hurtful words, much less that she could actually believe that. Suddenly Sarah wondered if Sadie wasn’t right, that maybe Lela had been spared the switch a few times too often. “Well, you wrong ’bout that, Lelia,” Sarah said, her anger surging. “I?
??d rather be washin’ shit out of white folks’ dirty clothes ’til I go to the grave than spend one night throwin’ up my legs like that ho.”
The words were too harsh, and Sarah knew it as soon as she’d spoken. Where had those words come from? They had been meant for Etta’s ears, not Lelia’s.
“That’s a lie!” Lela screamed at her, leaping from the table. “You’re jealous you don’t got a man, too!” Then, with grief-crazy sobs, Lela ran out of the kitchen.
Let her go, Sarah told herself, tears streaming down her face. She love that woman, an’ you ain’t gon’ say nothin’ now that can ease what she feelin’, so you best keep yo’ mouth shut.
Lelia needed patience, that was all, Sarah thought. Time healed everything. In a few days, Lelia would be ready to hug her and climb onto her lap just like before. Then Sarah would be able to explain the rules of decency and indecency, and maybe they could shed tears together.
But Sarah wouldn’t have to wait nearly that long for Lelia’s next hug.
Within a few minutes, Sarah heard a train coming. Except, she realized after an instant, the train wasn’t running on any tracks she knew about; the monstrous sound was on the street just beyond her house. She heard her windows shaking, softly at first but then louder and louder, and the ceiling seemed to quiver. Sarah opened her kitchen curtain to peer outside, and she saw that the late-afternoon sky was pitch. The trees and lines in her backyard seemed to be dancing. Oddly, she saw a washtub lift from the ground and sail past her window. “What in—”
Then the glass blew in, spraying Sarah in a shower of cold rainwater and pricking pain.
For the second time that day, Lelia let out a scream. Shrieking herself, Sarah ran toward the bedroom, where she found her daughter crouched on the floor. “Mama!” Lelia yelled, her arms reaching out. Sarah nearly fell on top of her daughter, cradling Lelia as she tried to shield her from something she couldn’t see or name. She did not realize that she had bleeding scratches on her face; her only concern was holding Lelia, protecting her. The house trembled and groaned, windows crashed all around them, and she heard a howling, chugging sound outside that could have been Judgment Day itself.
Sarah had never experienced a cyclone to rival the one that ravaged St. Louis on May 27, 1896. When Sarah, Lelia, and their neighbors emerged from their homes, dazed and terrorized, they saw rooftops, buildings, and trees littering their neighborhood as if a giant had knocked them over and crushed them beneath his feet. Over the next few hours, they would hear about entire residential streets, factories, hospitals, mills, and railroad yards not far from them that collapsed in the sudden storm. A coachman named William Taylor, someone Sarah knew, had died trying to save his white employer’s horse. One hundred thirty-seven people died in St. Louis that day, and one hundred eighteen more died when the cyclone slammed across the river into East St. Louis.
All night long, as Sarah thanked God she and Lelia still had their lives and a roof above their heads, she worried about her friend and prayed for her safety. After so many years of friendship, why couldn’t she have just accepted Etta’s apology?
Sarah never saw Etta again.
Chapter Twelve
SPRING 1902
(SIX YEARS LATER)
“Lemme see, Mama,” Lelia said, lifting Sarah’s chin with her hand so she could study Sarah’s hairline as she did each morning. Sarah had to look up at Lelia. No doubt because of Moses’ influence in her blood, Lelia now stood four or five inches taller than her mother. At sixteen, Lelia was becoming stately, growing out of the gangly limbs that had troubled her so much when her growth spurt first began. She looked like a woman, all right, but Sarah knew better; Lela was still as much a child as ever, in some ways.
Lela washed clothes with Sarah to fulfill her obligations so she could keep the extra room to herself, but that hadn’t taught her a bit of independence, as far as Sarah could tell. Lela had no fondness for working around the house; she wanted her food cooked for her, her clothes mended, her hair combed. Sarah was amazed by Lela’s lack of maturity; her daughter needed constant reminders to complete her chores and tasks. The womanchild who was her daughter made Sarah marvel at the idea that women had routinely married long before Lela’s age when she was growing up. Why, Lela was no more ready to marry than she or Lou would have been at ten! Lela was fascinated by the menfolk, all right, but Sarah didn’t think her easily impressed daughter had nearly enough common sense even to begin supervised courting, which she’d been begging to do since she first started attending Sumner High School. She was likely to attach her heart to the first fool who beckoned her, Sarah thought.
Maybe next year, Sarah always told her. But the truth was, she didn’t want Lela’s immature heart swept away by any young man, not yet. Lela was going to college, and that was that. In college, Lela could meet a man of real standing, not these little pups with few prospects to improve their lives, or hers. Lela had never experienced real hardship, not like she and Moses had faced, and Sarah seriously doubted that her daughter had any talent for it.
Watching her daughter’s face that morning, Sarah saw the telltale pity and concern in Lelia’s eyes as she gazed at the frayed hairs at Sarah’s temples. “Worse?” Sarah asked her. There was a time she might have said worser, but her grammar lessons at night school hadn’t been completely wasted on her. Words like ain’t still felt as comfortable as old shoes, and Sarah doubted she’d ever really learn to say isn’t or aren’t except by reminding herself first. Attending classes so sporadically, she probably still couldn’t boast much more than a third-grade education, she thought. But she could read the St. Louis Argus every week to follow social events and news from the Negro community, and that was better than where she’d been.
Lela shrugged. “A little worse. But it’s not too bad, Mama.”
“That’s a lie and you know it, girl. Now go on to school ’fore you’re late.”
Lela grinned, and her face looked so lovely that the minor irritations that had been growing between them as Lela got older melted from Sarah’s mind, and she gave her daughter a lingering hug. They had their arguments, all right, but Sarah loved this girl like she hadn’t known she could love anyone. Maybe it was good Lela was still so childish, because it would be a few more years before she had her own life and family.
Sixteen! Could it really be?
Once Sarah was alone with her work, her mind went back to her other troubles, which occupied her thoughts day and night. For the first time in a long time, it wasn’t rent money or loads of wash that concerned Sarah. This time it was her hair.
Sarah’s hair and scalp had given her small degrees of grief almost as long as she could remember—and even now, her memory of accidentally bloodying her prize customer’s tablecloth still made her cringe—but it was only with the arrival of the new century that Sarah’s misery had begun to take over her life.
First, as always, there was the itching. Each night as she tried to sleep, she felt as if the chinch bugs she’d hated so much as a child were crawling beneath her scalp, leaving trails of stinging fire. When she scratched at one spot, the fire moved to another, then came back with renewed pain aggravated by the rawness from her scratching. The back of her head was the worst, to the point where she could sleep comfortably only on her stomach. When her itching woke her up, she scratched as gently as she could, but she could steadily feel her tender skin giving way until her fingertips grew moist with familiar spots of blood. She tried to let the thin scabs heal over time, even sleeping with her hands wrapped in rags to discourage the scratching, but by morning she often discovered that she’d wriggled one of her hands free and scratched herself sore while she’d slept. Sometimes she found thin pricks of blood on her pillowcase. More often she found the dried evidence beneath her nails.
She didn’t itch only at night, but that was the one time she wasn’t preoccupied with the business of her life, so it always seemed worse then. Sometimes, no matter what the time, she bundled herself up, climbed out
of bed, and went to the kitchen to heat a pot of water so she could soak her head and massage soapsuds through her hair and scalp; warm water gave her small relief, and she hoped fervently that keeping her scalp clean would stop the itching. But it never did for long. More often, the latenight washings gave Sarah a runny nose and sore throat from going to bed with wet hair, especially when it was cold.
Even the rod wax Etta had introduced her to, which Sarah now bought for herself at the pharmacy not far from her house (there, it was labeled petroleum jelly instead), didn’t fulfill her hopes for her itching scalp. Sarah had believed she was itching simply because her scalp was dry, so she’d hoped the rod wax would provide much-needed oil. But although Sarah had been using rod wax and a hot fork or hot cloth for years to make her and Lela’s hair less bushy and easier to braid, it did not help the itching.
Neither did lanolin, nor honey, nor oil from chamomile flowers, nor any number of remedies Sarah used to try to ease her suffering. Sarah and Lela began mixing her purchases together in a bowl in the kitchen, hoping they would luck into a combination that would be more powerful than any of the other ingredients alone, but all they’d made so far was a mess. Her scalp itched on.
To make things worse, Sarah now faced a new horror with her hair: It was falling out. Her hair had never been long, growing with a strawlike spikiness that was hard to pull into a ribbon or rubber band the way Lela wore hers after it had been softened and heated. But lately Sarah’s hair looked more blunt than ever. Now, when she ran her hand through her hair, wiry strands of it came out easily on her fingers. She could feel coin-size patches of bare scalp on the spots that itched the worst. And when she glanced at herself in a mirror, which was rare, she saw how drastically her hair had thinned at her temples, drawing high away from her face.