The Black Rose

  Sarah could barely recognize herself. She had never considered herself pretty, not in the way Etta had looked so delicate and comely, because the hardship of Sarah’s life had always made the notion of delicacy somewhat of a mystery to her; besides, she was just a little thick in her middle, a little too wide in the face, and a little too sluggish in her gait to draw gazes from the sort of striking, fine-featured colored men she noticed on St. Louis’s streets, walking with breezy confidence. Sarah didn’t know what sort of women those men pursued, but she knew it had never been her.

  And she was older now, too; she couldn’t forget that. The sassy, slender fourteen-year-old Moses had fallen in love with was a memory nearly as shadowy as her Delta cabin and her long-dead parents. Moses had been twice the man the ones who paid attention to Sarah these days were; grimy laborers with missing teeth, polite widowers with gray hair and frail bones she met at church, and crude-looking roustabouts who swarmed the levee, jockeying for any glance from someone of the female sex. Nearing thirty-five, almost past childbearing age, Sarah had begun seeing herself as she was sure the outside world did—matronly and staid—and she was just grateful she still had a reasonably high bustline and she hadn’t let her face fall prey to the ugly creases that so many women her age wore from too many frowns and too little affection.

  But this was different. Week by week, month by month, as Sarah’s hair rebelled against her and became thinner and patchier, she watched herself growing slowly more hideous, less like a woman at all. Sadie and Lela constantly tried to reassure her that she looked fine as ever, but Sarah knew she’d be a fool to believe them. They were either blind or liars, she decided, and they might even be both. As much as she tried to ignore it, her vanishing hair began to touch a misery in her soul that felt like a bottomless well.

  Nappy-head country pickaninny.

  She could hear the mean-spirited taunt as clear as yesterday whenever she glanced at herself in a mirror. Hadn’t even her beloved Miss Brown, who had taught her much more about washing as a business than even the courses she’d taken at night school (and who, Louvenia had written to her, had died suddenly last winter), told her pointedly once that she looked like a little monkey? Like you been dragged headfirst through a brier patch.

  Ugly, awful words. But true, every one of them. These days, anyway.

  In Sarah’s mind, it was bad enough her female organs had been untouched, except by her own hand, in the fourteen years since Moses had died. (She’d discovered, quite by accident, that residual rod wax had a very pleasant slippery effect on her fingers when she ventured to rub them between her thighs.) She’d once felt like a fountain of passion, but now she felt dried, shriveled, and useless. She’d loved Moses, and felt his gazes from heaven every single day, but she’d never intended to keep her body sacred to him. After the first two years of shock and grief, she’d hoped to find another worthy man to marry. But Sadie always complained that Sarah suffered too much from the memory of Moses’ good qualities—his hard work, his sly wit, and his serious-mindedness about political ideas—and Sarah had met no man yet who seemed even remotely cut from the same cloth. Sadie had tried her best to interest Sarah in her cousin, a well-built man named John who worked at a brick kiln in East St. Louis, but Sarah could barely talk to the man for the stink of whiskey on his breath.

  Still, part of her, at least, had taken for granted that if a suitable man passed her way, she could catch his eye. No more. Now, if anything, Sarah felt herself wanting to cringe and hide from the gazes of men, strangers and neighbors alike. No matter how hot it was, she rarely left her house with her head uncovered anymore. She had a collection of white and red kerchiefs she kept clean so dirt wouldn’t aggravate her scalp, but even when she wore head-wraps, Sarah felt naked to scrutiny, believing everyone must surely know what she was hiding beneath them.

  One day, however, she took off her kerchief because it was damp with perspiration and the itching had become unbearable. Besides, she was hanging freshly washed clothes in her backyard, with a fence and tall papaw shrubs leaving her only slightly visible from the sidewalk that passed behind her house. Sarah rarely paid mind to anyone who passed her while she was working, unless they called out to her. But that day, a young man’s voice caught her ear. She was hanging a bedsheet, and she noticed the candy-sweet, lulling voice of a stranger somewhere behind her. He was keeping his voice low, probably deliberately, Sarah thought. He couldn’t be more than a few yards away, hidden behind the bush.

  “… as pretty as you should have a beau. Don’t you know that?”

  A giggle. “You don’t really think I’m pretty.”

  That was Lela! And who was this man talking to her who sounded like he was grown, in his twenties? Sarah bit her lip, fuming.

  “Tell you what, if I put you on my arm and brought you down to the Silver Dollar, where I play, there wouldn’t be a nigger in there who wouldn’t wish he was in my shoes. You ever heard any ragtime?”

  The Silver Dollar? Was this a musician? Where the hell had Lela met a musician?

  “Oh, I like it fine,” Lela’s voice said, purring.

  “Well, you ain’t heard rag ’til you’ve heard me play, an’ I can’t think of nothing sweeter than a dance with you. Now, where do you live at? Why don’t you march me right on in so’s I can meet your mama and daddy?”

  “Not-uh,” Lela said, the purr gone. She sounded closer to her age again. “I can’t do that. I’m not allowed.”

  “Are you allowed to do this?” the man said in a throaty voice, and then there was silence.

  Sarah forgot the bedsheet, casting it to the top of her pile, and whirled around to see what that disturbing silence meant. Over the tall bush, she could see the top of a man’s black derby, angled downward. Does he think this child is one o’ his loose little Chestnut Valley tramps? He better think again, Sarah thought, her face set in anger. She began striding toward the fence, her feet crunching in the grass. Just then, as if he sensed her approach, the man’s hat popped up again.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “I can’t do that, Johnny,” Lela hissed. “Someone might see… .”

  His voice grew more hushed, urgent. “Who’s gonna see? Ain’t nobody ’round here but that baldhead washerwoman over the fence. She don’t know you, does she?”

  Sarah’s heart rocked to a halt in her chest. Baldhead washerwoman.

  There was another silence, then: “No, I don’t know her, but …”

  Crazily, Sarah was suddenly convinced she must have mistaken someone else’s voice for her daughter’s. That would explain the musician, wouldn’t it? But she’d been so sure! Did another girl really sound so much like Lela? She had to, because—

  “Then what you worried about, Lelia? Come on, girl,” the man went on, and Sarah’s knees nearly sagged beneath her. She’d planned to part those hedges, stick her head through, and cuss that man out, but the realization that Lela had spoken those words, after all, stole her breath. How could her own daughter deny knowing who she was? Sarah raised her hand to her stomach, feeling a cramping pain that reminded her of her first pain with Lela, right before she was born. Sick to her stomach and slightly dizzy, Sarah turned away from the voices and walked toward the kitchen door. Once inside, she slammed the door behind her with so much force that it made a cracking sound neighbors probably heard up and down the street.

  Still, Sarah wished she had broken the kitchen window like the cyclone had, so Lela would hear the glass shattering. Sarah had been angry at Lela many times, but she had not known, until that instant, how much pain Lela could bring her with mere words.

  She’s jus’ a silly girl courtin’, and girls’ll say ’most anything to win a man, jus’ like men do tryin’ to win them, Sarah reminded herself with a rational voice. But the voice didn’t help much. Lela was ashamed of her! Sarah had suspected it at times, but she hadn’t really known it until just then, and the knowledge coiled tight inside of her. Sitting on her bed, Sarah stared up at the m
ason jar on her bureau, three-quarters filled with coins and bills she had been saving to send Lelia to college. Then her eyes moved to the Wish Board, which was pinned with a dozen or more drawings from newspapers and magazines, many of them Lela’s—clothes, jewelry, even a picture of a horseless carriage with a motor, built by a man named Ford. Automobiles, they were called, and Sarah had seen a few of the odd-looking contraptions chugging along the streets, where they always drew pointing and stares. Lela wanted one of her very own.

  She’d done right by Lela, Sarah told herself firmly. She’d given her a good home and her dreams, all with the work of her bare hands. What more could she have done?

  “Mama?”

  Lela stood in the bedroom doorway in one of the school dresses Sarah had sacrificed to buy her from a shop instead of making it herself, since Lela had complained that her clothes looked shoddy compared to some of the other students; it was a lovely sky blue gingham dress with a white collar, much nicer than a dress Sarah herself would wear on any day except Sunday. Lela’s shoes, too, were buffed to a high black shine. Where did Lela think her nice things had come from, except from washing?

  “What you want?” Sarah sniffed, turning her face away.

  Lela sighed. She didn’t speak for a long time. “You heard me, huh? Outside talking by the fence?” she asked quietly.

  Sarah didn’t answer.

  “Yes, you did,” Lela said knowingly. “And you’re mad, too.”

  “You ain’t s’posed to be courtin’,” Sarah said, still not looking at her.

  “Yes’m, I know,” Lela said. “And I wasn’t—I mean, I didn’t know I was… . See, he told me his name is Johnny, and he’s always at the barbershop ’round the corner, so he sees me walking home from school every day. I never said he could walk me home, Mama, but he—”

  “What y’all was doin’ behind that bush?” Sarah said. This time she turned around so Lela could see the no-nonsense look in her eyes. “You let him kiss on you, didn’t you?”

  Lela glanced away, embarrassed, then bravely met her mother’s gaze. “Yes’m. I didn’t want him to, he just … and then … Well, Mama, nobody’s ever kissed me before.”

  “I don’t care how tall and big you are,” Sarah said, “if I hear ’bout you kissin’ on any other man, I’ma get a switch an’ whip you ’til you can’t sit down. You hear me? An’ I’ma meet you at that barbershop after school tomorrow so I can tell that man he better keep a distance.”

  Sarah expected Lela’s familiar arguments about how other girls she knew were courting, and a few had even received marriage proposals. But Lela only nodded. “Yes’m,” she said.

  “Well, get on out my sight, then.”

  Lela didn’t move. Her eyes shone brightly with a wisdom Sarah wasn’t accustomed to seeing in her daughter, and it made her look more womanly than ever. “Mama, I’m sorry he said that about you. He didn’t know. It was such a shock, and it hurt my heart so much… .”

  Again Sarah was silent, but her gaze didn’t waver.

  “And when he asked if you knew me, it’s …” Lela went on, stumbling for the first time, “… it’s like the words jumped in my mouth from someplace else. Like it wasn’t even me talking.”

  Yeah, those words jumped from your drawers, Sarah thought, but she kept that to herself.

  “I wouldn’t like that man nohow… . He smokes cigarettes and he’s got marks on his face… .” Lela sighed. “But Mama, I don’t know… . He said I was pretty, and—”

  “But you are pretty!” Sarah said, finally shaken from her silence. The part of her that felt like a hurt child herself mended instantly, and she snapped back into her more comfortable role as a parent. “Why do you need some strange man to say that?”

  To Sarah’s surprise, her daughter’s eyes glistened with tears. “I don’t feel like it, Mama. Just like you! I w-wish I was …” At that, Lela’s voice was sliced in two by a sob, and she started a new thought without finishing her sentence, an outpouring. “How come every time I find a picture of something p-pretty to wear, it’s always a white lady wearing it? I’ve never seen no colored lady looking pretty in a magazine!”

  “That ain’t true, Lela,” Sarah said, then she struggled to remember examples. It took her a moment, but then she brightened: “You’ve seen pictures of those ladies that won that beauty contest, Melanie Macklin an’ Gertrude Marshall, an’ they’re both from St. Louis. Melanie went to Sumner, too, ’member? The papers said they’re supposed to be the most prettiest women in the whole country—”

  “The only reason folks say they’re pretty is because they’ve got long hair,” Lela cut her off impatiently. “White folks couldn’t even tell Miss Marshall was colored from her picture, or she wouldn’t of won anyway, Mama. And you know which girls colored boys like best? The ones might as well be white, those high-yellow girls with straight hair.”

  “All boys ain’t like that.”

  “Yes, they are! They’re always sayin’ how I’m so black! And th-then when that man said you were b-baldheaded …” But Lela couldn’t finish, covering her face as she cried. She ran to Sarah, sitting beside her on the bed, and Sarah wrapped her arms around her to rock with her. Tears had been running freely down her face as she listened to Lelia, because her daughter’s words so thoroughly echoed the fears that had been hounding her. She’d hoped to spare Lela those same feelings, but how could she?

  She could deny Lela’s observations all day, but that didn’t make them less true. Her mother had told her that slave women desperately tried to straighten their hair because that could mean the difference between being sent out to the fields or working in the house. And most colored men did prefer light-skinned women, as if they were prizes stolen from the white man’s hands, bragging that they had good hair free of kinks. Sarah knew of colored women with the same preferences, but men seemed to have so much more disdain for women who were as dark as they were themselves. It would be an outright miracle if Lelia really thought she was pretty, Sarah realized. Why should any colored woman feel pretty?

  “You can’t pay that no mind, baby,” Sarah told her daughter. “That ain’t nothin’ but folks showin’ they’re ignorant. White folks got us so trained from slave times ’til we don’t even know how to think no more except the way they think. Don’t you know your daddy thought you were the prettiest little thing he ever did see … ?”

  At that, Lelia made a sound, half sobbing and half laughing. She savored stories of the way Moses had adored his tiny daughter so much, as she had almost since the time he died—especially the one about how he’d snatched her and taken her to the top of the stairs. To Lela, her long-dead father was like a prince in a fairy tale.

  “Colored women don’t got to be like white women to be pretty,” Sarah went on, speaking to herself as much as to Lelia. She realized with dismay that a part of her believed she was telling her daughter lies. She knew better in her mind, but her heart felt uncertain. Still, the resolve never left her voice. “We’ve got our own way of bein’ pretty. White women don’t got no curves like us, do they? They got hips like us? Or these big ol’ soft lips?”

  After a hesitation, Lelia shook her head against Sarah’s bosom. “No …” she said.

  Sarah patted Lelia’s firm backside. “They got rumps like us?”

  Lelia laughed ruefully. “Sure don’t.”

  “Believe me, child, back in slave times, white women were scared to death o’ colored women ’cause their men was running out to us every chance they got. Wasn’t for that, there wouldn’t be so many high-yellow folks in the first place! An’ if there’s colored boys sayin’ you ain’t pretty ’cuz you ain’t yellow, well, those boys just ain’t got no sense. They don’t know nothin’ ’bout where they come from. Tell you what, you don’t need to worry ’bout no man who don’t want a woman as dark as his own mama. ’Cause a man who don’t respect his mama won’t never treat you right, nohow.”

  Lelia sniffled. “Mama?”

  “What, baby?”


  Looking up at her, Lelia forced a tiny smile through the unhappiness on her face. Her brown eyes glinted with mischief. “Can I start courting, now that you gave me all this advice?”

  “Go on an’ try it if you want,” Sarah said sarcastically. “I’ll take a switch to you and those boys, too! Jus’ see if I won’t.”

  Lelia laughed, surrendering, and Sarah joined her, the coil of pain in her chest loosening. The sick feeling in her stomach had long passed. Laughter, even bittersweet laughter, always felt so good! Sarah held tightly to her daughter, wondering how much longer Lelia would allow herself to be rocked and hugged before she would finally pull away.

  Chapter Thirteen

  JULY 1904

  “Would y’all hurry on up?” Sarah said impatiently, clapping her hands. “The speech starts at noon, hear? We ain’t got to see the whole fair today.”

  Sarah and Lela had visited the World’s Fair three times since President Roosevelt came to St. Louis to officially start the fair’s machinery in April, but no matter how many times they came back to sacrifice fifty cents apiece to the turnstile for admission, each visit to the fair seemed more dizzying than the last. Sarah was convinced they would need to come back a dozen times to take in acre after acre that had been transformed, magically, into a wonderland. Every time she entered the fairgrounds at De Baliviere and Lindell, Sarah felt as if she were visiting not only an entirely new city, but a new world. Special fair trains sped past them lightning-quick (twelve miles per hour, she’d heard someone say), an electric bus rumbled along without any horses to pull it, and the giant Observation Wheel towered to the east, blotting out the sun itself while it made its slow, remarkable revolutions and passengers aboard could see the fair from the sky. To say nothing of the endless acres of exhibition halls, glorious statues, breathtaking gardens, restaurants with seats for hundreds or even thousands, entire native villages from around the world, and amazing replicas of cities like London and Jerusalem. Although Sarah knew she would never have the means to visit either of those cities, she had seen them at the fair.