The Queen of Palmyra Read online

“Hush,” Zenie said. “You’re going to wake her up.” Meaning Miss Josephine in her chair, though there was a fat chance of that, I thought. Her mouth was open, and her fingers were twitching like they had more leaves to count.

  Eva looked down at me and I could tell she saw something more than just me, but something I might become. Not a stray dog the way I thought of myself most of the time, but something valuable and secret, the way Daddy thought of his box and the stuff in it. Something that gave her that Queen of Palmyra feeling. When I had that thought, about the Queen of Palmyra, suddenly it came to me who I could be to her. I could be her own lady slave. I couldn’t make cobblers, but I could bake cakes. I could be her girl sidekick. And I wasn’t a dumb native like Bomba’s friend Gibo. I had good sense. I could be a succor in time of trouble. If she needed to go bouncing into battle, I would rip my shirt off too and get on my horse and follow to the death. It would be better than having long flowing locks and being rescued like a drooping lily.

  I hopped up off the couch. “Take me,” I said, “and I’ll be your lady slave.”

  When the words popped out, everything stopped short. I looked up at both of them. Their mouths had dropped open, the way they did when I said the thing about being colored. There was dead quiet for a minute; then Eva started giggling little-girl giggles. On the couch Zenie bent over double, slapped her thigh and started sputtering.

  “What in the world is she talking about?” Eva’s question sounded like a horse whinny.

  “Remember that old story I used to tell you about Queenie and the lady slave?”

  “The one with the cobblers? That’s what she’s talking about?”

  “Um hum.” Zenie sounded on the verge of being disgusted with me again. I looked down at the floor. I was still worried I’d gone and spoiled the whole thing, the way I’d done before when Eva made me so brown and pretty. I had a picture in my mind like a picture in a storybook. Me and Eva making a beautiful parade to Lafitte’s. I would get a palm branch to wave next to her face to keep her nice and cool.

  Zenie pointed a finger at me. “You. Go brush your hair and wash your face.” Zenie never told me to use the bathroom like Mama did, but I knew that’s what she meant.

  I ran for the bathroom. I made it fast. They could change their minds on a dime. Then a thought hit me. I didn’t have a red cent, and ice-cream cones were a nickel.

  I came back through the curtain. “I don’t have money for an ice-cream cone.”

  Eva was already at the door. “I got money. Not much respect, but enough money for ice cream. That’s one thing I got. Come on, girl, if you’re coming.”

  Zenie walked over to the door just as Eva’s hand was on the knob. “Tell me you not going in that.” She pointed at Eva’s front. The hot pink halter top brought out the copper in Eva’s face and arms. It tied around the neck and at the back. It didn’t show any navel because of a little skirt that hung off it, but the skirt didn’t go all the way around the back. Plus there was a plunge in front that showed a softness where Eva’s bosoms gathered strength. I had on a crop top that Zenie had made me last summer. It showed more flesh than Eva’s halter, but my flesh was paltry.

  Eva looked down at herself. Her face puckered for a minute. Was she going to disrespect Zenie? Tell her it was hot as fire and she was wearing the pink top? She was thinking about it, I could tell, because she had squinched up her mouth and was chewing hard on one side of it. Then she looked up at Zenie. She opened her mouth to say something, then looked down at me, then shut it. “Hold up,” she said to me, and went back into Miss Josephine’s room. In another second she whipped back the curtain. She was wearing a regular button-up shirt with little cap sleeves. It had little blue and green flowers on it and a little round collar. It was buttoned up to the next to last button to the neck.

  “This good enough? It’s sure hot enough.”

  Zenie nodded. “Bring me back some vanilla to put my peaches on, and make haste with it or it’ll melt. If you not back in half an hour, I be sending Ray after you.”

  Eva made a mock bow and opened the door. “Let’s go, lady slave,” she said, and I hopped to.

  So here we go down Moses Street, which was the main drag of Shake Rag, like Main Street was the main one for Millwood. Eva had her parasol to keep the sun off the tops of our heads so we wouldn’t get sunstroke in the heat of the afternoon. It was the parasol that made it seem like a parade. I gave up staying under it. The sun didn’t bother me as much as it did Eva, though the heat from it made my arms itch under the bandages, which weren’t covered by the umbrella anyway. So it’s Eva with her parasol and me bringing up the rear, thinking I wished I had one of those big palm leaves to fan her with or at least a long stem of mimosa. Both of us barefooted. Her putting one strong flat foot in front of the other like that was the most important move in the whole parade. Not looking down, though, but holding her head high, not looking right or left either, just moving through the world like a queen going to do battle with a terrible foe. And I didn’t feel like her pet dog either or even her lady slave. I felt like her own brave-hearted sidekick. All I needed was a sword and a white horse.

  The sun beat down. I tried to walk in Eva’s foot path, but her stride was too long. I could hit every other one, but not keep the pace. People were watching. I couldn’t see their faces in the windows, but I saw their outlines behind screen doors and at windows. I could almost feel their breath blowing us along, they were watching so hard. Then, as we got on down the street, they started coming out from behind. They came onto their porches and their stoops, even though it was the heat of the day. They brought out their peas to shell or their watering cans to water or the newspaper.

  Some just nodded and smiled. Some said, “How y’all doing?” Some just gave a little wave. Eva replied in kind but she didn’t stop or even slow down. We kept on moving like we were being unraveled from a tight knot of thread. There was no giant hand to stop us. We had to go our limit before we could stop unwinding. Then all we’d be was a thin line of thread stretched across a long distance. Easy to break.

  When we got to Lafitte’s, there was a bunch of old men sitting outside on rickety benches that backed up to the front wall of the store. Their arms poking out of their shirtsleeves looked wasted away, the way old people’s get if they live long enough. Some of them were smoking pretty little wood-carved pipes and some were chawing. On trips to the store with Zenie, I’d seen them get up and spit brown juice out to the side of the store. It made a puddle line in the dust. They were always in front of Lafitte’s. They weren’t pink-eyed with meanness like the gun toters outside the sheriff’s office, or dozy like the ones under Nathan Bedford Forrest’s horse’s butt. They looked satisfied with themselves. They had done their life’s work. Now they were taking a good long rest. One man liked to whittle little pieces of wood and once he gave me a little dog with a bobtail. It had had a pretty yellow tone, and he said it was cut from pecan.

  Sometimes Mr. Lafitte, a little man with marcels, would be sitting out with them, and sometimes his grown son L Junior would be standing in front of them, one foot up on the bench talking loud and making grand moves with his hands. They’d all be laughing and beating their legs. People said L Junior could tell a good story, but I never got to hear one because Zenie always made me come on inside the store with her and not listen to the men’s goings-on. She’d push me through them and their guffawing. L Junior would nod and tip his straw hat and stop his telling till we got through. I always felt like I had come upon a picnic. A whole lot of people eating potato salad and sweet pickle and me not even getting a single bite.

  When we rounded the curve in Moses Street, the store and the sitting men were square ahead. They eyeballed us like we were ghosts risen up from the grave. I’d seen men old, young, and in between cast their eyes on Eva. They all looked the same, bees on a flower, wanting to burrow in deeper and deeper. But this wasn’t that kind of look. It was a look that said they couldn’t believe their eyes. Even L Junio
r in the middle of his story looked taken aback. Eva just raised her head up higher and cut her eyes back to me. “Come on, don’t drag behind,” she said, and I came up and walked beside her. I tried to bring my head up tall too. I wanted my neck to be long like hers. Everything felt momentous.

  The men tipped their hats to her when we went by the benches and one of them got up and opened the door to the store. “How y’all doing?” she asked and smiled a little.

  There was a long moment of quiet. Then they all sighed and nodded carefully as if just a little “All right, how you doing, baby?” would be just too too heavy to drop into the soupy air.

  Eva nodded back to them and we swept on through the open door. Usually while Zenie was shutting the door on the men outside, we could hear them starting right back up again, but today there was not even a whisper.

  Mr. L was polishing his glass cases with vinegar and newspaper. The place was cool and dark and empty of people except for him and us. It smelled like pickles and tobacco. He was trying to scrape a spot on the glass with his fingernail so that at first he didn’t look up. When he did, he made a noise in his throat and look a step back.

  When Eva said “How you doing, Mr. L?” he remembered his manners and said he was fine and how was she? Everybody fit to be tied about her and here she is right in front of his very eyes looking mighty fine. Mighty fine indeed. Mrs. L was going to be greatly relieved, she’d been praying for Eva. All the Heroines of Jericho had. Eva said to tell Mrs. L it worked and she was feeling better and wanted to get her and me and her auntie some ice cream. Could we fix our own cones?

  Mr. L threw down his sour wad of newspaper. Not only could we fix our own, but we could have doubles on the house. “Get what you want. All you want.” He made a grand sweep of his hand to the back where the cooler lay. Then he peered over the shining glass at Eva. The store was dark except for a few dusty pieces of light. The thrown light caught the bottom parts of their faces in the glass below them. It made their mouths seem to tremble. Then Mr. L cocked his head, leaned over the glass case he’d just finished polishing, and said real quiet: “When you leaving?”

  Eva frowned. “Leaving? Who says I’m studying leaving? I’m staying right here.”

  Mr. L shook his head. “Girl, what you studying if you ain’t studying leaving? You got to get out of this here place. What, you low on cash, baby?” He patted his pocket.

  Eva wanted to get on with the ice cream, I could tell. She was moving a step or two back, but she couldn’t just walk away from Mr. L. He was being fatherly. Mr. L’s hair wasn’t gray, but it should have been. You could tell he just wanted to give her the benefit of his experience.

  “Just not leaving is all I’m studying.” She said it quietly and pleasantly, but it was as if she were Moses and had carved the words in stone.

  He leaned farther out over the glass case and tapped his finger on it, which left more smudges. “Listen up, missy. Nobody want to see you laid out on a board. Getting shipped back home in a box looking like that Till boy. That’s if they ever find what’s left of you.”

  That got her goat. She glanced over at me, then leaned over the glass case to meet him head to head, eye to eye. “I’m not letting a bunch of peckerwoods in sheets run me off.” She sounded like a snake hissing. Mr. L pulled himself back.

  “You crazy?” He swatted the air with his hand. “Get on out of here while you can do it on two feet. A pretty little lady like you. You can go anywhere. Do anything. You can have a life, girl. You can go to Paris France. Zenobia and Rayfield ain’t told you that? What your mama and daddy say about this?”

  “They can all tell me to go home till they’re blue in the face, but I’m twenty-three years old. I make my own decisions, and I got other plans.”

  I was rooting for Eva in this fight. I didn’t know what a peckerwood was, much less in sheets—I pictured him as a mean Holy Ghost running amuck—but Eva was fast becoming my Queen; she had gumption and I knew she wouldn’t run, I knew she had that thing in her that said No. Nobody was going to push her around without a fight. What she said set me to thinking about my mother and wondering whether she had it too, whatever it was the Queen of Palmyra and Eva had. Seemed to me Mama hopped back and forth like a baby bird on the ground between saying no with a little n and saying come on, world, stomp on me.

  Of course, it takes gumption to throw your whole self at a train. To think of yourself as a burst of light. Splayed limb from limb like a chicken getting cut up all at once. I know what happens to people who get run over by trains. An arm in the tall grass, a leg a half mile down. Where’s the head? Nobody can find it. Then it turns up in a feedlot in another county.

  Where was Mama now? Was she glad to find herself still attached to herself or did she feel like she’d lost some part just by thinking it? Was she sitting up in the hospital studying coming home to her sweet good daughter? Did they clean her up? Was she wearing the pretty nightgown with the puckered top? Did her bangs rest straight and smooth, or was she a bloody mess? Did Daddy tell her I almost burned down the place? The one who tells the story gets to say who’s bad and who’s good. Then the story rises up and puts on its clothes and goes out into the world. He’d made me out the bad one and him the good one. Saving the day. Keeping me from burning down the house.

  Eva tossed her head and leaned back from the glass. Her eyes caught a torch of light. “That ice cream still on the house?”

  Mr. L narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, but you better enjoy it, it may be your last.”

  “Maybe not,” Eva said. “A change going to come. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but a change going to come. Look at Harmony, over in Leake County. They brought in Medgar Evers and the NAACP and the Justice Department people, and they’re finally starting to get registered. Look at Winson and Cleo Hudson down there. Things are changing.”

  “Blood be shed first. You plumb foolish, you don’t know that.”

  Eva looked hard at him. “I may be foolish, but at least I don’t run scared. That’s more than I can say for some people in this podunk town. Present company excepted.”

  “Better scared than dead.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Some say scared is dead.”

  “Dead’s dead. There ain’t nothing worse than dead.”

  Eva made herself taller. “Yes there is.”

  The two of them locked eyes. In the glass case their faces had iced over. They looked like people felled dead in battle. Killed, but still standing with eyes wide open.

  Mr. L started up again. “You one hardheaded girl. Where’d you get such a hard head?”

  “Maybe from beating it up against a wall all my life.”

  “There such a thing as too far too fast.”

  “There such a thing as going nowhere no time.”

  I touched Eva’s hand. “Come on, let’s get the ice cream.” I tried to say it the way it was bound to taste. Sweet, cold, kind to the tongue. I wanted her to want it too. Want it more than she wanted to tell Mr. L a thing or two. She was stepping out of line. I could see it in the way Mr. L had tucked in his mouth and the way he talked to her like she was the one about to burn down the house. Here he’d been thinking his good fatherly advice would be respected. That Eva’d nod her pretty head with the little-girl barrettes and say yes sir, meek and mild, but here she was giving lip to a man old enough to be her grandfather. When she wasn’t even from around here. It was disrespectful, she’d be sorry when word got back to Zenie and Ray. He was only giving her the best advice possible. The benefit of his experience. I could see he was thinking all that and more.

  The minute I said ice cream, Eva unfroze herself, only too glad to break away from Mr. L. She reined in her stubbornness and put on a fake smile. Armor. “Thank you, sir, I appreciate it,” she said in a molasses voice, and squeezed my hand tight. What “it” meant she didn’t say. She looked down at me and pulled another fake smile out of her boundless supply. “Come on, Flo. Let’s take Mr. L up on his kind offer.” We walked hand in hand
till we got to the ice cream at the back of the store.

  We escaped into the dark cave of the back. She seemed to forget she was holding my hand so it just butter-slid out of hers. Her voice changed back to normal. “What kind you want?” When she took the scoop out, her hand was agitating like she was ready to swat a fly.

  “Chocolate ripple.”

  “A double? Dumb question, right?”

  “I guess. No, wait, one dip chocolate ripple and one dip banana.” Which took some thought.

  She gave me a real smile. “Girl, you know how to live. Think I’ll have that too. Now, here, take these two cones and hold them. I’ll put in the banana first for the chocolate to run on.” She leaned over the freezer to scoop out of the cartons of ice cream open in the bottom. She reached her arm down. In the light from the cooler I could see the chill bumps rise up on her arm when she put it down in the freezer. I wanted to rub her arm, warm her up. I decided then and there I had to love her whether she loved me back or not. I especially loved the way she bent over the freezer, herself so warm and it so cold. She took my breath away.

  Then the front door of the store opened. It had a little bell on the doorknob, which is what I heard. Then I heard talking. A white man’s voice. Mr. L answering. More talking between them. I heard the white man say what’s she doing down here and Mr. L say back I done already told her. Then I realized who the white man was. It was Grandpops. When I turned around, I was holding one cone and Eva had the other one. She had gotten us the two banana scoops and was digging in the chocolate ripple, which was frozen harder. She was having trouble getting it out.

  Grandpops took his time getting to the back of the store. He didn’t say boo to me, he just looked hard at Eva’s back and said to it, “What you doing bringing her out on the street with you for? I come to pick her up at Zenie’s and Zenie says she’s off gallivanting with you.” He didn’t even say afternoon, how you doing, Eva? which he normally would have done.

  Eva jumped and spun around. She looked scared and lost for a minute, then she got cocky again. “She wanted an ice cream so I took her. Don’t see harm in that.” She held up the scoop. Evidence.