The Queen of Palmyra Page 28

  I figured they’d be looking for her at the white bootlegger, but I didn’t say anything about the black bootlegger, which is where I figured she was headed. A picture of my little scraggly-haired mother had come into my head. She was Br’er Rabbit hightailing it through the briar patch in a car that had the look of a fire truck with fins and sounded like the Fourth of July. She’d be hiding her features under her bootlegger scarf if she’d thought to bring it. The foxes were after her. She’d be easy enough to find, I thought, either they’d hear the car or see it. I was having trouble knowing what to hope for. Did I want the scratchy-faced, yellow-toothed ones to find her? Or Big Dan with his beef-liver hands? Did I want Daddy to have her back, in his current state of pissed-offedness? Didn’t I want her to find herself an airship and fly off to the next adventure?

  What got me was not the fact that she had run off, but that she had left me behind. I wouldn’t have been any trouble riding sidekick. Uncle Wiggily always had somebody tagging along on his adventures. Why didn’t she just take me and her recipes and we could set up a nice little cake business in Jackson or down on the coast? We could pick up Eva and head for Raleigh like in my dream. Mama had seemed so intent on coming back when she left that I actually wondered whether she didn’t make up her mind until later on, when it was too late to come back for me. Maybe she was circling the block right now trying to pick me up. If she was, she’d sure enough get snagged in the trap Daddy and his friends were setting up.

  When I stood right outside the open front door and heard Daddy on the phone, the no, no, no, no of the midnight train whistle took hold of my insides and I was nothing but the sound of those two perfect Phonics letters. Eva said to put the flat of your tongue onto the roof of your mouth and moan: that’s the N. Make a circle with your lips and push the air through for the O. No to Mama having flown the coop again. No to Daddy sending out his buddies like mean dogs ready to tear her to pieces. My hand was on the handle of the screen ready to push it open and go inside, but I dropped it like a hot potato and turned around to face the outer darkness all around me.

  With the light of the house behind me and Daddy’s voice (find that bitch, get her, track her down) fading in my ears, I entered the noisy dark outside and started walking. My legs and feet hurt from the roach stomping, but I decided to put my foot in the road. I moved like a ghost alongside Miss Kay Linda and Big Dan’s house and up toward the street. Their kitchen light was on; Daddy had woken up Big Dan. As I glided past, I heard Big Dan call out, “Who’s that? Who’s out there?” I could hear him opening the door, so I crawled up under a fig tree by the side of the house. Just a few days ago, I had sat under the tree and eaten figs. No one knew I did it. Little Dan and May walked so close by me I could have reached out and tickled their dirty feet. They never knew I was there. It had been my secret place, my fingers sticky with the white pulp that oozed from the stems. The wasps were having a field day, made heavy and slow with the sugar, but there was plenty to go around for everybody. I didn’t bother the wasps and they didn’t bother me. Nobody could see me for the furry elephant ear leaves of the tree, which bowed all the way to the ground. They made a cave, and I’d stayed hidden in the cool darkness for hours in broad daylight.

  Big Dan came out of his back door, which opened into our front yard, and went striding around the yard. “Who’s there?” He carried a headache stick of his own and used it to part the shrubs around the house. I was sweating bullets that he was going to find me, but the tree had several layers of branches and leaves, so that when he pushed some aside, there were the friendly others to hide me. He stood just a few feet from me and hit the side of his leg with the bat. Thump, thump. I shuddered and shook. I felt like Bomba up in the tree with the cannibals all around and about. Finally, though, he gave up and went on back into the house.

  I waited a good long while and then took off running from shadow to shadow, house to house, making my way up the street, steering clear of the streetlights. I went on back up to Mimi’s first. The house was pitch black. I figured Mimi would be dog tired from the funeral and dead asleep. She had a stash of pills from the doctor. It would scare her to death if I rang the doorbell or threw rocks up at her window. I thought I might get into the back screen porch and lie down on the floor, but the latch was locked. I sat on the back steps for a while, wondering whether Grandpops still wandered the house. I thought anything’s possible, so I prayed to him, having given up on God and all his fingers a while back. Help me figure out what to do, I said to him, or what was left of him. The more I asked for help, the more agitated Grandpops seemed to become. I even fancied I heard him from deep inside the house, pacing back and forth, back and forth, the way he used to when something was worrying him. But he didn’t answer me or give a sign. When I looked out onto the backyard, the dark seemed darker. Even the lightning bugs had gone to bed. I wondered if Daddy had figured out yet that I hadn’t come in to bed. Maybe he was so aggravated about Mama flying the coop that I had slipped his mind. He was out cruising with his friends looking for her, expecting me to take care of myself. Maybe they were looking for both of us.

  Given my lack of options, I decided at that point to go on up Goodlett Street to Shake Rag. I reasoned that it would just be a case of Zenie taking me a little sooner than usual. I could take an early nap on Zenie’s couch and nobody would know the difference. I set on up the street. The moon was shining, but just a sliver of one. I felt light and floaty. My feet barely seemed to touch ground. I made a wide berth around the cemetery, though I could see the outline of bloated ground and the pile of flowers with stand-up sprays of glads all in a circle. Their spikes looked like spears in the shadows on the ground. There was a white cross of carnations. Daddy’s friends had sent that. At first it stood out in the moonlight like God had come down from heaven and placed it there. Then, even as I watched, a cloud floated over the moon and the cross turned evil. It looked like a ghost with his arms flung wide, ready to hug you tight, make you hot and sweaty and afraid. The Holy Ghost. As I stood there, the pukish stink from the ginkgo tree seemed to rise like a wave in the night and wash over me. I could taste it on my tongue even though—and this was the scariest part—I knew the smell wasn’t real but only a story I had made up. The tree made its mess in October, not June. Story or not, it was a horrible sight and a horrible smell. I started walking fast, too tired to run, but walking as fast and furious as I could. My feet and legs quaked. I could feel myself wobbling from side to side like Daddy. I panted hard, my heart felt like it was about to jump loose from my chest, and my face was wet like I was walking right into a rainstorm. I wished I’d never left Daddy. I wished I was home in my bed with his hand, I don’t care how heavy, holding me in place.

  Just when I came to the top of the little rise in the road beyond the cemetery, I stopped in my tracks. Shake Rag was lit up like a torch. It had to be two o’clock in the morning because the one-thirty had come through a while back, but behind the blinds and curtains, everybody’s lights were blazing. In a few of the houses you could see the TVs flash from picture to picture. Zenie’s street and several blocks beyond were as bright as the white side of town was dark. Zenie and Ray’s place looked especially lit up. Every room was bright. Through the green leaf curtains on the front window I could see the shape of four heads hovered around something. Was it the radio? Did the folks in Shake Rag always stay up this late? No wonder Zenie was so worn out all the time.

  I picked up the pace, kicking dust and rocks as I got closer. The crunch they made sounded cheerful. The sound a person makes when she has a place to go and that place is coming right up. I was almost running by the time I got to the house and headed for the front stoop. I could hear the radio inside. In Jackson somebody was dead, shot in the back in his own carport in front of his own house. Blood everywhere and T shirts saying Jim Crow Must Go all over the driveway. That’s all I could make out. Right in mid-step as I came up to the front stoop of the house, I had my hand raised to knock. Before I could bring my
knuckles to the door, the radio and all the lights went off, almost all at once as if one giant hand had flipped a single switch. Dead silence inside. It was as if everyone had decided to call it a night just as my foot hit the front stoop. I knocked anyway. I knew they were in there and awake.

  At first nobody came to the door, and when they didn’t, I strained my ears for someone to call out just a minute, or wait up, or who is it? But nothing. I banged again. The houses on either side had suddenly gone dark too. The night was still and lights were going off everywhere.

  “Zenie?” I said it slowly to the door. “Zenie, are you awake?” When nobody came, I yelled it out, “Hey Zenie, it’s me, Florence. Are you there?” even though I was dead sure she was. Then I heard footsteps, and Ray opened the door a crack. In the dark I could barely make out his face, except for the mouth. There was a pucker to it, like he was sucking on a sourball that wouldn’t turn him loose.

  “Yes’m?” he said it out of the side of his mouth. He’d never called me ma’am before. I didn’t know what to say back. I knew I must be a sight. I’d cried so much that day I felt like my eyeballs were falling out of my head. Standing there, I imagined roaches set on revenge were crawling up my legs and the gingko stink had stuck to me. But there was a lot of night ahead, and I didn’t know where else to go. “Is Zenie here?” I asked.

  “She gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “She not here right now. Go on home. Get on back where you belong now.” With that, he eased the crack in the door shut and clicked the lock.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I sat down on the stoop with my back to the door. Lights were going out everywhere now up and down the street. Inside Zenie’s I heard whispers through the open front window.

  “She still there?”

  There was a pause. “Um hum.”

  “You got to explain it to her. Explain it to her.” This last sounded like Eva.

  “Eva, don’t you go out there.” It was Miss Josephine’s singing voice. High and worrisome. “Don’t you go outside that door, Eva.”

  “Then she’s going to sit there till morning. Till doomsday. What are we going to do then?” Eva said.

  Well, you could ask her to come in and give her a place to sleep, I thought. You could be decent to her since her grandfather is spending his first night in the ground up the street, and she’s worn out with her mean daddy and her mother’s gone on the lam. Again. You could show her a little kindness, missy. I was working up a steam.

  The door opened again. Such a slow click it made that I almost didn’t hear it. I didn’t even turn around I was so mad. I smelled rosewater and glycerin and knew it was Eva. She came out and closed the door real quiet and sat down next to me. I didn’t look at her.

  “Listen here, girl, you got to get out of here. Right now. There’s folks would get mad at us for taking you in in the dead of the night. They’d hurt us. Do you get what I’m saying, Flo? We could get ourselves killed if we let you in. You’ve got to get.”

  Eva’s voice sounded so ragged and hoarse that it made me shiver. She had been crying her eyes out, you could tell, like me, but I knew it wasn’t over Grandpops dying.

  I looked hard at her straight on. We were nose to nose, just a few inches apart. “What you crying for?”

  She looked at me in surprise. “You haven’t heard? They shot Medgar Evers tonight. In his own front yard, with his little children in the house. He’s gone.”

  I knew Medgar Evers because his picture had been in the papers. Libraries and voting and Woolworth’s and a boycott. My daddy called him one of those damn Evers niggers and said he and his brother ought to be shot for all the trouble they’d caused. When Daddy found out about Medgar Evers getting killed, he’d say one down, one to go. Medgar ran the NAACP in Mississippi, which was a communist front—everybody knew that, Daddy said, from J. Edgar Hoover on down. But I could see why somebody would cry over Medgar Evers. He had a kind face and three little children, and his wife was pretty like Eva.

  “Did you know him?” I asked Eva. “Was he your friend?”

  “I met him once. Shook his hand. Yes, he was a friend of mine. He was a friend of the people.” She started crying. “But they killed him.”

  “Who? Who killed him?”

  “Crackers in sheets. Who else going to kill a black man?” Her voice was cold. “Lily-livered bastards. Shot him in the back in cold blood.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he wanted us to have what white people have.”

  “Why did somebody shoot him for that?”

  Eva hesitated a minute. When the words came out, they were like a snakebite. “Hell if I know,” she hissed. “Ask your daddy.” I couldn’t see her in the dark but knew she had that sly look the sheriff had when he told Mama to ask Daddy about Eva getting burnt and bothered.

  “You go to hell.” I snorted up a whole bunch of air and started crying again. I was sick and tired of getting my daddy thrown up to me. Everybody always saying your daddy this and your daddy that with an ugly sneer to it. Looking at me like I was bad seed.

  “You go home.” She stood up and thumped me on the shoulder. “Where’s your mama tonight anyway? Go on back to her. Here she is, first night back from that hellhole he put her in, and grieving, and you off midnight wandering. Get on home now.”

  Before I could say that Mama had flown the coop again, with Daddy’s latest car and the grocery list, Eva had risen up and gone inside. End of conversation. The lock on the door clicked. It sounded like someone spitting loud in the street.

  And that was that. Nothing else stirred. Nobody came out. Nobody said anything I could hear. No sounds but frogs.

  But I didn’t move on. I just sat. I looked up at the moon awhile and then I put my head down in my arms. Everything inside had quieted down and the lights were off.

  After a long while, the door clicked open again. I looked up and it was Eva. “Lord, girl, we can’t get rid of you,” she said. “You’re like one of those bad dreams I keep having over and over.”

  “Thanks,” I said and put my head back down.

  She sat down. “Well, there’s no sleeping for anybody tonight. Let’s go sit on the back steps. We might as well have our first lesson until the sun comes up. You’ve got to know already about subjects and predicates. So let’s talk about clauses and phrases.”

  I shook my head woefully. “Let’s start with subjects and predicates.”

  So we did. That night I learned more than I’d learned in my whole year on the lam all put together. Finally, after we’d made it through synonyms and antonyms and the birds had started in singing, Eva stretched. The moon was still up and I could see the streaks of dried tears tracking down her face. She said, “All right now. I’m tired enough to sleep. You go on down to your grandma’s now. Tell her you’re all right. Talk to her about the tutoring. Tell her your granddad signed you up. Tell her a dollar an hour. And don’t tell your daddy you were up here. You understand that?”

  I nodded. Then she touched my shoulder. “All right, go on now and let me take a rest. Lord knows what this day’s going to bring.”

  I got up and went on down the street. I was moving slow and it took a long time for me to get to Mimi’s. The house was still dark (what did I expect?), so I lay down in the front porch swing. It was hard and slimy with cold dew. I got the swing going a little by throwing my butt back and forth and I tried to think of myself as a baby getting rocked by some big invisible hand. A heavenly hope mother or daddy who was taking care I didn’t cry or fret. I tried to think of myself as precious cargo on a long bootlegger run to morning. And when the sun finally came up all pink and golden and I unfolded myself and got up and rang Mimi’s doorbell, she came down after a long while and took one look and sighed a big deep sigh. Her hair was mashed in on one side and her hairnet was hanging off the other. The lids of her eyes were so puffed out and her mouth so puckered up that she looked like a huge, white hooded owl perched behind the screen in the doorway. S
he had on a slip instead of a nightgown. Her bosoms were sausages lying flat from her shoulders to her elbows.

  “Have they found your mother?” By the way she asked the question, I could tell she knew the answer. Daddy must have called her last night.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where you been? You look like something the dog dragged in.”

  “On your porch, just resting.”

  “Why aren’t you at home with your daddy.” It wasn’t a question, and she knew it.

  I didn’t answer.

  She stepped out of the doorway and held the screen open for me to come in. She sniffed and made a face. “Girl, you need some Mum.” I started to say I needed a lot more than Mum, but then she patted my nasty head and said, “I haven’t slept a wink all night. I’ve got to lie back down a while before I can think straight.” Then she turned around slowly like she was in a dream and went on back up the stairs.

  I heard the springs on her bed squeak and sigh, and then I went on up too. I stood in the doorway to her room. Her back was to me in the bed. She had her knees drawn up tight and her feet folding over each other like flippers on a seal. No cover. I wanted to crawl in and hold on to her back, latch myself to her. She could be the tree and I could be Bomba. But then I heard the slightest little snore and I could tell that she’d fallen to sleep like a dog that’s been lost and running around all night long. So I tiptoed out and went on downstairs to the kitchen and started in on the funeral leftovers, which were considerable.

  Zenie usually came around seven thirty, but seven thirty came and went and so did eight with no Zenie. I went out and got the Jackson Clarion-Ledger that she usually brought in from the yard. No word of Medgar Evers getting shot that I could tell. Nothing at all. Screaming headlines about Governor Wallace, who had to stand down and let the Negroes come to school because the president sent in the National Guard. In the picture on the front page, the governor looked like a rooster on the side of the road, puffing himself up and twitching, but scared to cross. Plus, while I was stomping roaches last night, the president had made a speech and said we had to let the Negroes come on in. He said for white people to examine their conscience. We are supposed to be a free country. He didn’t say he wanted us to be polite to Negroes, but I bet he says Mr. and Mrs. to them.