The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  I follow Grandpops into the cool dark living room. I’m expecting him to say all right, what’ll it be, when he reaches into his briefcase and pulls out a new Uncle Wiggily book. Uncle Wiggily’s Travels. “Christmas gift!” he says, though it’s not Christmas or my birthday either. I try to act enthused. Uncle Wiggily is my old favorite too, but I’m worried that I should be reading books with smaller print about people in the real world instead of animals who talk in words that nobody would say in a million years. At least this is a new story; maybe there are some regular words I can learn from it. I get up next to Grandpops on the slippery satin couch and feel his hip bone clamp into my side so that I feel like a little boat that’s been anchored fast. There is a picture of the gentleman rabbit on the book cover. He is a big old jackrabbit who limps along on long, lean back legs. He has rheumatism so he uses a crutch. He wears round specs and a bow tie like Grandpops.

  Grandpops opens the book to the first clean page, the color of sand. I tuck my head against his skinny old arm and draw close to the smell of new paste. I start in. Grandpops and I have a way of reading books. I read what I can, which isn’t as much as it should be, and he reads the rest. Over the past few weeks, I’ve read more and more of everything he throws at me—The Saturday Evening Post, The Christian Observer, Mimi’s book of myths and legends—and he’s read less and less. Uncle Wiggily’s Travels I breeze through, stumbling only a couple of times when the letters don’t line up and I have to sound them out.

  Uncle Wiggily has been feeling quite sad. He’s been hopping along a dusty road seeking his fortune as usual when he looks in his trusty valise for lunch, and lo and behold, he’s forgotten to pack one. He’s the most miserable rabbit in the world because he’s hungry as all get out and getter hungrier by the minute, but then he runs into a pretty black cricket with the jolliest laugh he’s ever heard. Ha, ha, ho, ho, he, he!

  Mr. Cricket can’t help laughing all the time because the world is so lovely, with sun shining and birds singing and brooks babbling and all. Happiness abounds in the lovely, lovely world.

  Oh dear, though. A skillery-scalery-tailery alligator has just jumped out and is all set to eat, first Mr. Cricket, then Uncle Wiggily. But ha, ha, ho, ho, he, he, the black cricket starts to laugh harder and harder, then it’s Uncle Wiggily laughing too, and then, glory be, Mr. Skillery-Scalery-Tailery is laughing so hard, big old alligator tears are rolling down his scaly cheeks. He can’t help himself. Of course, Mr. Cricket and Uncle Wiggily are long gone before the alligator can stop giggling. Hop, hop, and they’re nowhere in sight.

  “You’ve got Uncle Wiggily down pat,” says Grandpops at the end of the chapter. “All right, got to get on back to the office.” He shuts the book and hands it to me. “More tomorrow. After that we can graduate you to something harder. We need to get down to the county library and ask what a big old fifth grader ought to be reading.” He pats me on the head and gets up, sidesteps the pile of sheets, and goes over to the mirror by the door. He fixes his bow tie in the mirror and takes his hat from the table by the front door. He gives himself a big smile in the mirror and squints at his teeth to see if they’re good to go. He puts his hat on his head and then tips it to me as he opens the door and calls out to the house, “All right, I’m gone.”

  Zenie hollers from the kitchen, “All right.” Mimi doesn’t answer. She’s upstairs taking her nap. Mama’s long gone. She must have slipped out the back door while we were reading.

  Grandpops walks out and the door clicks shut behind him.

  Zenie is still working in the kitchen making a cold supper for Mimi and Grandpops. I sidle in and ask her if she’s got any new Queen of Palmyra stories up her sleeve.

  She hands me four pieces of bread and some butter. “Spread that.” She starts to peel and slice a cucumber. “No, but did I tell you that the Queen gave her slave girl an elephant for her very own? They used to ride on it together, one in back of the other.”

  “The slave girl who baked the cobblers?” I want more story than that.

  “Yep, that one who was her favorite in all the kingdom.” She hands me pieces of cucumber. “Put these on the bread.”

  When I finish making the sandwiches, she wraps them in a damp dish towel and puts them in the icebox.

  “Get on out of here so I can mop the floor,” she says.

  I feel sleepy hot, and when I swallow, the hurtful lump in the back of my throat returns. In the living room I eye the pile of sheets, which looks like a cool white nest. I go over and untie the wrap sheet that’s holding the nest together and crawl right in. When I pull the sheet back over me, the nest turns into a cocoon and I’m the ugly brown worm who’s going to come out a pearly white butterfly. All I can see is light because I have folded myself up in the whiteness of the sheets, which have such old tender edges and folds. I rub an edge between my thumb and forefinger.

  But today Uldine comes early. She opens the door and grabs the pile by its ends, and tries to pick it up. Then she commences to hollering and carrying on when I wake up and start wiggling around under her hand. She throws the ends down. What now? she must think. What bed of vipers is this?

  But before I tumbled out, I was dreaming of Palmyra and roiling to and fro on the back of an elephant draped in satin and gold fringe. There was a parade and a jivey band with cymbals and rows of dark little children and a nice lady slave fanning me with giant palms as I passed on my elephant. Peach cobblers stretched out before me as far as the eye could see.

  I was the Queen of Palmyra.

  When I told Zenie my Queen of Palmyra dream that afternoon at her house, she had finished the Carver High majorette outfits and was starting on the uniforms for the band. The Carver band was the jivingest band you ever saw and that’s what made me think of my dream. My job was to feed the gold braid in a long even line through the top of the sewing machine so she could keep on sewing straight and fast on the blue serge material she was making the uniforms out of. This way she could finish up faster and have some time to make me some doll clothes out of the band uniform scraps. I was standing behind the machine facing her as she sat on her bench, foot to the pedal.

  “What do you think, Zenie?” This was my favorite way to start a conversation with her.

  “Beats me.” She didn’t raise her eyes from the material sliding evenly through the machine.

  “Guess what I dreamed.” I scratched a mosquito bite on the back of my leg with my toe.

  “What.” She kept on sewing. “Watch out now. Keep it feeding in straight. Don’t let up on it. I’m too tired to tear these out and do it over.”

  “Dreamed I was riding an elephant. Dreamed I was the Queen of Palmyra. Zenobia the Queen of everything. I was on an elephant in a parade!” I grinned big. “I went to sleep in the sheets and dreamed it all in flash right before Uldine came in and almost picked me up with the sheets!”

  Zenie pulled her foot off the pedal like it was a biting dog she’d kicked. She looked up at me across the top of the sewing machine. I saw for the first time how light her eyes were. The color of pennies. Thick like copper with something behind them, the way a coin isn’t just a coin but stands for something else that’s more than itself.

  “Queen of Palmyra my foot. You ain’t no Queen of Palmyra.” She said it with such scorn it made me mad.

  “Well, why not? I can be anything I can think up. You ain’t going to stop me.”

  “Pretending it so don’t make it so.” She looked hard at me. “Can’t make yourself any old thing you want to be. Don’t work like that.”

  “Yes ma’am, the Queen of Palmyra on an elephant! Can if I want to.” I stomped my foot.

  She glared at me. The penny copper in her eyes was usually melty. Now it looked cold and solid and thick. She leaned over the sewing machine so that we were nose to nose. “You can’t have everything you want. Some things just belong to folks. You got no truck with them. They none of your doing.”

  I threw my end of the braid on the floor. “How come
you being so ugly? I’m not helping you anymore because you’re so ugly to me.”

  “Well, I got news for you. You ain’t much help no how. And I’m getting sick and tired of white folks messing with my stuff.” Zenie stood up and put her hands on her hips. She looked down at me the way I’d seen her look at roaches running across the floor before she took off her shoe.

  When she did that, the lump in my throat throbbed a big throb, and I started to blubber. I was a chicken at heart and I didn’t want to be the Queen of Palmyra bad enough to get Zenie so mad at me she’d make me go home and I wouldn’t get to help her sew.

  “Oh hush, crybaby!” Her eyes cut across me like heat lightning. But then she sat back down and started straightening up the material around the sewing machine needle. So I wiped my snotty nose on the back of my hand and started to pick up the braid. “Go wipe that nasty nose and wash them hands before you take hold of my braid,” she commanded and I fled for the bathroom.

  Zenie had every reason to be sick and tired of me. May had come to a close. As June came on hotter than ever and settled in, Mama started dropping me off at Zenie’s early almost every day, before Zenie’d go to work at Mimi’s. Mama said she had things to do, though I didn’t see any evidence of them when I got home. The cake ingredients for the nighttime bakings were still laid out, but there was no supper on the stove or the food to make it with in the refrigerator. Mama and Daddy’s bed wasn’t made and dust balls piled up in the corners throughout the house. Mama would set me out in front of Zenie’s house right around the time Eva, all perky and fresh in her navy blue suit, would be leaving to go sell her policies. As far as I could tell, my remark about looking colored had gotten to be water under the bridge. Eva would flash me one of her knock-your-socks-off smiles, give me a little wave and say, “Bye, Flo.” Then off she’d go in her high-heel pumps carrying a little black satchel looking for all the world like she was heading off to work in an office in New York City. I’d watch her from Zenie’s front step, walking straight and tall but with a nice sway, getting smaller and smaller as she went on down the dusty street.

  If I got to Zenie and Ray’s before Eva left for work, the bathroom would be steamed up, and the smell of rosewater would have sweetened up the house like sugar in tea. The screen door would bang and Zenie would watch Eva go down the front steps. Zenie stood in the door, her arms folded. Sometimes she buzzed deep in her throat like a hummingbird who’s zooming through the air to start a fight. Sometimes she just shook her head. Then Zenie would walk on down to Mimi’s to start the day’s work, and I’d trail along.

  In the afternoon we’d walk back and here would come Eva at suppertime, hot and fretful as a colicky baby. She’d have spent the whole long ugly day knocking on folks’ doors thinking she was going to get a big fancy welcome. Thank you, baby, you’re so sweet and pretty, but we already got our assurance, they all said, though they were real polite about it. They asked her in, of course, and told her the story of how her mama had run off from Millwood after her roguish father, Jake, had visited some cousins. He had spent the summer of 1939. They’d just had the tornado to top all tornados that spring. It had blown away just about everything in the town, including a few people, and Jake had come down from Carolina to help his cousins the Harrises rebuild their place. They told her stories about her little mother, who was just a slip of a girl, taking one look at Jake hammering away out in the hot sun (what a pretty long neck he had!) and losing her heart on the spot. What a sweet girl her mama was. How pretty. How she favored her pretty mama. How that summer Jake would go out in the late afternoon and catch crappie the size of your thumb and give them away. He was a city boy, from Raleigh, and he didn’t know a thing about fishing. He thought he was giving people something real fine, so folks would smile and say thank you. Then they’d throw them out for the cats or use them for bait.

  So the people in Shake Rag gave Eva everything else she could possibly want in the way of refreshment and friendliness and stories partly because of her little mama who had flown the coop, but mostly for Zenie and Ray, who had stayed. But when she came by that first time, they all said they wouldn’t buy any insurance from her on account of how attached they were to their policy man, my daddy or one of the two other white men who worked for Mississippi Assurance.

  “Why buy white when you can buy black? Why pay more when you can pay less?” she would ask them, and they’d just look at her and shake their heads. She was just plain ignorant, and crazy to boot, they said, if she didn’t know the answer to that question. That Tougaloo girl was going to get herself in hot water around here. Don’t they teach them anything in college? At first clumps of ladies from the St. John’s Heroines of Jericho would come by Zenie’s and whisper to her in the kitchen. Zenie would hum and worry. Then the ladies stopped coming.

  Zenie and Ray talked about Marie and Jake too, but it was in whispers, about how he had turned mean and nasty and her weak and watery, putting up with his shit. And they did mean shit. At home and abroad. Eva was smart as a whip and they weren’t a bit surprised that she’d left home a long time ago given the situation, but they wished she’d found somewhere else to run to. Millwood wasn’t where she ought to be, though they guessed she came to them because they were her only family except for Jake’s kin, who they didn’t know but speculated were probably as evil as him.

  When I think back, I always wonder what might have changed the way things turned out. Maybe if I hadn’t been so worn out all the time. The heat curled around everything, twisting and bending us to the shapes it had in mind. We trembled before it; it made us helpless and tired. Most of the time I felt like a climber without a rope scaling up the side of each day. I could slide off the edge into the dark valley any old time. The summer lay ahead, a burning desert that seemed in June’s heat to stretch out endlessly before us.

  If Mama let me stay home, which was rare, one minute it would be noon and I’d be sitting up at the table with a spoonful of cold beans from the can going into my mouth. The next I’d wake up with my head on the table, dirty dishes and Mama snoring away at her afternoon nap. Her face looked as if it’d been sprinkled with cayenne. Her breath smelled like burnt cabbage. Daddy was out collecting his policy money, mad because the you-know-who can’t scratch it up. When they said you can’t get blood out of a turnip, he would give them a warning. “I can,” he would say. And when he said that, they’d move one long slow step back into their front doors all the time nodding like he was making a good point and saying, “Yes sir, next week we’ll have it for sure.” And they would.

  I knew all this because my father had started taking an interest in me. I was just one of Daddy’s interests. Daddy was a joiner, despite having grown up out in the country. He was voted most outgoing boy in his class at Mill County High the same year his own dad hanged himself with a calf rope in the barn early one frosty December morning so that his oldest son, my father, would find him when he went out to help with the milking. Why his dad planned it that way nobody knew, except Daddy thought he didn’t do it in the house on account of there not being any rafters strong enough to hold his weight. He was a big man with meaty hands grown thick and rough from milking the herd and whipping his five boys into shape. Two years before, Daddy’s mother had just fallen away from life, like it was a rope she couldn’t hold to anymore. Her hair turned white and she lay down in her hospital bed like it was a port in a storm and died sweet and quiet and determined. This is what I gathered up from the pieces of talk I heard here and there, though not from Daddy himself, who never spoke about his father’s dying, or his mother’s either.

  My father loved his meetings. The hall closet was stuffed with different hats and tassels and pins and outfits. Breakfast with some old men once a week at the drugstore. Dinners at noon at the King Plaza Hotel. He was a member of the First Baptist Church Southern Branch, the Moose Lodge of Millwood, the Knights of Pythias, the Masons, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Shriners, the Mill County White Citizens’ Council, and I�
��m leaving some out. He was against Integration and Communist Fronts and Outside Agitators and Mongrelization and Jews Sucking up the World’s Juices. Later on it would be Fluoride in the Water. He was for Things as God Meant Them to Be. All neat and divided up. This one here. That one there. The blessed purity of things was what he called it.

  Daddy had a map that he pulled out on the coffee table on nights he didn’t go out. It said United States of America at the top but it didn’t have the states outlined, much less the capitals, which was aggravating, since I was still trying to memorize them both and it would have helped to see the shapes of the states and their placement on the map. Mimi was sitting down with me on Saturdays and teaching me social studies from her high-school students’ books: agricultural products and material goods in Poland and other far-off places, economic opportunity and the melting pot of America, the amendments to Constitution. But the things I’d needed to have learned in the fourth grade but did not, like the states and capitals, I had to get on my own. There were lines all over Daddy’s map, but they were marked in pencil for when he changed his mind and erased them and drew them all over again. One line was wrapped around where, I know now, California and Arizona and New Mexico are supposed to be. He had this idea about how folks would be happier if they were cohabitating with their own kind, so he was working on a plan to move people around. He said it’d be like the Japs during the war. Off somewhere. Nobody bothers them and they don’t bother nobody. Live and let live. It’s all a matter of boundaries and categories, he said, and when he said the words boundaries and categories, his eyes shone like he’d made them up out of his own head.