The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  Bent over the kitchen table, eating the first thing I came to in the icebox, which was a big bowl of potato salad, I tried to examine my conscience the way the president said to do. Twice now I had been ugly to Zenie in that I’m-white-and-you’re-not sort of way. I was mortally ashamed of it and of the evilness in my heart it must have come from. Where did that foulness come from anyway? I still had that dream planted deep in my head by Daddy about me being Bomba up that burning tree with the savages down below. Every now and again I dreamed it, and I think somewhere deep inside me it had grown underground and sent up shoots in unexpected places, the way poison ivy does, just popping up where you least expect it. I hoped I’d made it up to Zenie by getting Eva out of the bed after she’d got beaten up. Now that I could see the evil thing lurking in my own nature, I was going to watch my mouth better. The way I saw it then, it didn’t matter about the ugliness in your heart if you just kept it out of your mouth. I thought maybe if you kept it locked inside you, unheard by anyone, it dried up after a while like a piece of rotten fruit, given that it’s not how you really meant yourself to be. Not your true-hearted self but a web of something else all around you that crawls up into your insides and tries to make a nasty little nest there out of poison and ugliness.

  I sat there eating this mountain of potato salad. It wasn’t done right, not like Mama’s. Not enough mustard, way too much onion, no vinegar whatsoever, no sweet pickle relish, but I couldn’t stop shoveling it in. The more I ate the more I wanted. There was a big roast sitting out on the kitchen table and a row of desserts, but all I had a taste for was this bad potato salad. The house was quieter than I’d ever heard it. Just the tick tick of the kitchen clock and the sound of me crunching too many onions. Grandpops in the ground, Mama flown the coop, Mimi upstairs in her grieving sleep, and Zenie doing a disappearing act on the day we needed her the most in the whole world, having locked herself away for Medgar Evers. I ate on. After a while I was full to overflowing. Then I put my head down on the kitchen table next to the bowl of potato salad. In the growing warm of early morning the bees were starting up in the nandina bushes outside the kitchen window.

  After a while I lifted my head from the table and felt the heat of the day settle over me like a blanket. Mimi was standing in front of me in her brunch coat. She said, “Well now,” with a bit of surprise to find me asleep with my head on the kitchen table of all places. She put the potato salad back into the icebox and boiled herself some coffee. Then she sat down at the table and put two spoons smack-dab in the middle of Mrs. Polk’s caramel pie, which was sitting right there along with two cakes and three other lesser pies and a plate of dried-up sugar cookies. With a sweep of her hand, she pushed aside the cakes and lesser pies and cookies and put Mrs. Polk’s pie between us. “Well,” she said, her eyes so red and swelled up she looked parboiled, “if we’re going to eat, we might as well eat something good.”

  15

  Some stories run for their lives. They zig and zag, moving so fast you can’t find the secret path of their steps through the fields, only soft prints here and there to let you know something with a quivering heart and a soft belly passed that way or this. In what direction it ran or to what end, you will never know. Sometimes you see the blood or fur, and you know it didn’t get away.

  In the days that followed I hardly ever saw Eva except in the late afternoons when we had our lessons. Mimi was ponying up the dollar an hour, and Eva was teaching me up a storm. I’d gotten so good at diagramming that she was throwing foot-long sentences at me, sentences with compound this and complex that, adjectives and adverbs and clauses and phrases galore, sentences you could build a house out of and move right into. She was particular about semicolons and drilled me on them until I was bored to tears. She lit a fire under me with such pronouncements as, “You can’t get into the fifth grade unless you know the function of the semicolon,” and, “You won’t make it through the first week unless you can spell Mississippi.” When I’d build a mansion on the page out of one of her tangled sentences and all the rooms were in the right places, she’d flash me a million-dollar smile and say, “Now see how easy that was, girl?”

  Especially when I diagrammed sentences, I could feel a little smile playing at my lips.

  Sometimes Eva talked to me about being a teacher. “Words open the keys to the kingdom, girl,” she said. “Words and sentences and stories. They’re all we’ve got to get by in this cold world.”

  Meanwhile, she was always running in and out at all hours. The more determined she got, the prettier she became. She’d gotten herself a new pair of specs with pointy ends that turned up with little rhinestones on them. Cat eyes. She kept on wearing her little cowgirl scarves tied crisp and perky around her neck. Pretty bright colors, yellow and red and blue. Zenie had given up trying to talk her out of anything, though Ray and Zenie were always whispering in the kitchen about where was she going, and who with, and what would come of her doings. Since Medgar Evers, there was a stir in the house. The whole state was on full rolling boiling. Folks riled up and on the move all over. In Jackson, boys and girls getting bit by dogs, hosed down, put in garbage trucks, and dumped like trash in livestock pens at the state fair-grounds. It was worse than when, a few weeks before, in late May, some men had poured ketchup all over Eva’s school friends at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson.

  One morning when Zenie was fussing about Eva putting everybody in danger, I heard Ray say, “We got insurance. Peckerwoods ain’t lighting no fires under us long as we got the girl in the house. We in the catbird seat. Got the devil over a barrel. He find himself without nobody to see after her, he be in hot water. I got a good mind to get out there myself.”

  There was a long silence, then Zenie’s voice burning fire. “You go doing that and you going to end up the next one six feet under and they ain’t going to bury you in no Arlington Cemetery neither. Pieces of you be scattered into the next county. Never find all of you.”

  “These days they kill you just for breathing air, leastways I go a man.” Ray said.

  Late in the day, after Eva had finished with my lesson—about the time people came out to sit on their porches with fretful babies or water their flowers—she would go from yard to yard with her encyclopedias. There were four of them selling now, the albino-looking one named Frank and two other white boys who looked like a pair of Seventh-Day Adventists with long hair. They all belonged to the NAACP. Zenie said they did too much race work and not enough encyclopedia work. At night the four of them were always heading off to meetings together. Eva asked Ray and Zenie to take in two students from up north who had hooked up with the students at Tougaloo College to organize the voter registrations. Zenie said they didn’t have room, plus Eva could play hari-kiri with them Freedom Riders, but she’d have to find her own house to do it in. Hurt and more hurt, Zenie said. That was what was going to come of it all.

  “Watch your back,” Ray hollered through the green leaf curtain to Eva when she was getting ready to go out one night. The lightning bugs were starting up. “Bunch of mean rednecks out there. They got your number. When you coming home, girl?”

  “Won’t be long,” she called out from her and Miss Josephine’s room, “be home in a while now.”

  Ray and Zenie were waiting for me to leave so they could eat. Zenie had warmed up some biscuits and ham left over from breakfast for Miss J, and she’d taken them on a tray to bed with her. That afternoon I’d come home with Zenie because some church ladies came over to get Mimi out of the house for supper and Daddy was collecting way out in the county. He was picking me up late. I told Zenie to let me just sit out on the front stoop, but she said no, too much going on. Just as Eva got all ready and was getting ready to head out the front door, Daddy’s car pulled up. Eva stopped short in her tracks. “Well, if it ain’t the devil himself,” she said under her breath and turned around and headed back into her and Miss Josephine’s room and drew the green leaf curtain.

  Zenie had me out the door in n
o time, though she didn’t need to worry. Daddy never came in. “He might have to pay you something if he knocked on the door,” Ray said under his breath one time. Daddy would just sit in his car smoking and hit the horn if I didn’t come right out. When he was parked by Zenie’s, folks would disappear from their stoops and porches into their houses and Zenie’s lively street would all of a sudden look like nobody lived on it.

  Eva was back to sleeping with Miss Josephine, who was now in the bed more than out of it. When Zenie would fix Miss J’s breakfast on a tray and take it in to her, Eva sometimes would still be asleep down under the sheet beside her. Miss J always said she wasn’t hungry, and Zenie always answered just eat a little bit then and drink your coffee. Eva wouldn’t budge. She had been out late. Zenie got Miss J up and took her into the bathroom for a good wash. When they finished, Miss J came hobbling out on her cane, nice and fresh in her pink brunch coat that Zenie had made for her with the peter pan collar trimmed in rickrack. When Zenie got her parked on the sofa, Miss J would close her eyes and have her morning nap. Then, when we got back in the afternoon from Mimi’s, there she’d be, exactly where we left her, all bent over and looking as relaxed as anything. She’d blink and say, “Oh my, here you are, back already. I must have dozed off.”

  One morning Eva got up early, right after Zenie had taken care of Miss J. She came into the living room, where I was sitting on the sofa next to Miss J, who had already gone back to sleep. I was looking at Zenie’s Sears catalog. Eva sat down in the chair right across from me. She propped her feet up on the coffee table.

  “Hey girl, what you looking at?” she asked, all sweetness and light.

  “Nothing. Just looking.” The truth was I had been looking at those little hooks you put on bathroom doors. I was studying how they attached. I thought that if I could lay my hands on one, maybe even take one off a door at Mimi’s, I could put it up on my bedroom door without too much trouble. All I needed was a screwdriver.

  Eva leaned over. “What you studying hooks for? What you got needs locking up?”

  “Not studying them. They’re just there on the page I was on.” Her nosiness burned me up. I wasn’t messing in her business.

  “How your arms doing now? They about healed up?”

  Her question surprised me. I hadn’t thought about my arms lately. I turned the insides up and looked down at them. Just webs of little white raised lines were left. They looked all right to me, though still tender to the touch.

  “How about your face?” I asked her.

  She shrugged and turned her cheek to me. “You tell me.” The little pink circle had settled in. It looked like it was there to stay.

  “It looks better.”

  “Still there, though, just like yours. Guess we both branded, Flo,” she said. I didn’t say anything. She looked me hard in the eye. “Guess we got something in common now.” She sat back in her chair and sighed. We sat there for a few minutes. I could hear Zenie flipping corn cakes in the kitchen.

  “Looks like corn cakes for breakfast,” Eva said. “Hope she got some sorghum in there.”

  “She does,” I said.

  “Have you heard anything from your mama? She’ll be coming on back before long, I expect.”

  I perked up. Nobody else would talk about my mother. It was as if she had never lived and breathed on this earth. I was one of the pagan babies they talked about at church. I had dropped from the sky into everybody’s laps. “I ain’t counting on her coming back.” When I said the words, I knew them to be true. Eva was like that. There was something about her that made you want to tell the truth.

  “Don’t say ain’t,” she said quietly. “She’ll come back. She will. She’s just confused about herself. She’ll come on back to herself and wonder why in the world she did it. You know, I did. You made me see myself lying there up in the bed like a big old toad frog squashed in the road. Feeling sorry for myself. I owe you one, girl.”

  I shook my head. “You got more get up and go than Mama does.”

  “Maybe, but when your get up and go just got up and went, you got to move off someplace in your mind before you can come back. And you need a reason to come back.”

  I kicked the sofa hard. “Seems to me she’s got one dadgum good reason sitting right here.”

  Eva nodded. “She does, and she’ll think it up before long. She just temporarily passed it by in her mind.”

  “You just saying that.”

  “It’s true, girl. She’s not going to leave you behind forever. You mark my word.” Eva pushed her pointy glasses back on her nose and leaned forward. “So what you been doing long about evening? You got some girlfriends?” She paused, but I didn’t say anything. “You been going out with your daddy and his friends at night? They take you to their clubhouse? Do you get to see them get all dressed up?”

  The way she asked the last three questions all in a little excited rush made me know that they were the whole point. She didn’t give a flip about Mama or who missed who. Priming the pump was all she was interested in. She wanted to know about Daddy and his club. The truth was I actually would have liked to tell her about the box and the Nighthawk and the password and everything else. All these secrets were weighing me down. I wanted to tell somebody the whole thing and be done with it all and have that somebody say, my goodness gracious, that’s all very very odd, grown men in costumes pretending to be birds. Wonder why they do all those strange things. Are they mental? But in my mind’s eye I saw Daddy with that pointer finger over his mouth.

  “I just stay home at night and listen to WLAC,” I said. “That’s all. Sometimes I read. Sometimes go out in the yard to cool off.”

  She got up and looked down at me. Her eyes were burning. She laughed a short little laugh. “Lord, child, you got one boring life. Boring. Nothing better to do than that. Y’all don’t even have a TV, do you?”

  My life wasn’t as boring as I made out. Watching Daddy to find out what he’d do next was keeping me on my toes. When he wasn’t out gallivanting, he was ranting and railing about outside agitators descending on Mississippi like a plague of locusts. Communist mongrels and Jews. Mud people. They wanted to eat off our plates and marry our daughters, take everything we held dear. We’d all be brown before you could say Jackie Robinson. Dirty bastards coming down here just to get into our business, tearing down everything we hold dear, making little brown mongrels pop out right and left. Daddy and his friends fretted that the agitators were going to come over from Jackson and try to integrate the mill. The men down in Milltown who worked there had gathered themselves together. Now, every night, Daddy got calls to come to meetings. When I’d answer, they wouldn’t even be polite. They’d just say, “Where you pa at?”

  Which was a good question. He stayed gone all night sometimes. With no Mama around to throw a fit, he kept the pretty wood box handy in the bottom of their closet instead of sending me down to the basement for it. There was another box beside it now, a rough pine box. No lock. Sometimes he took it along with the other one when he went out at night. I sneaked a look at it one night when he was gone. It held an interesting assortment of things. Some license plates, pieces of rope, a big hunting knife with a shiny sharp blade, the pieces of a broken-down shotgun and some slugs, a map of Mill County, a hatchet, some torches, a Westclox alarm clock. The whole box smelled of gasoline. He’d taken my white getup and hat out of the pretty first box and stashed it on the floor in the back of the closet. It probably had spiders making nests in it because the house was getting dirtier by the day, but I was getting bigger by the minute, so it probably wouldn’t have fitted anyhow. He didn’t ask me to come to meetings with him anymore, for which I was grateful. A little part of me wanted to go, the part that wanted to be paid attention to and told how pretty I was. Being at the meetings was like standing in front of a three-way mirror in a new dress, except for the rotten-smelling old men with whiskers who picked me apart from myself as if I were a pea to be shelled. But another part of me was growing stronger
and double-stitching me back into my shell in the same determined way Zenie sewed and then resewed the braid onto her band uniforms. That one wanted to keep herself apart and wait for something else to happen. For the Queen of Palmyra to come to the rescue in her chariot of gold. For Mama to come back with the ingredients and say she was sorry to have taken so long. For a new chapter in my story to commence.

  When Daddy was gone after dark, I made the most of it. Mimi had given me the full set of Nancy Drew books Grandpops had bought and been saving for me. They were better than the library books I picked out for myself, better even than the encyclopedias that Mimi said she’d buy from Eva since Grandpops was going to. They were better because of the stories. Disappearing staircases, diamond necklaces, buried treasure. Nancy always rescuing people who were locked up in basements or turrets, or getting locked up herself. Stories that pulled me through the long nights and brought me out on the other side of a world where everything turned out the way it should because Nancy was brave and tough and smart. Though Zenie wouldn’t have approved, I got to thinking of myself as Nancy Drew and the Queen of Palmyra rolled into one, with a bit of Br’er Rabbit thrown in. I got Mama’s radio and listened to John R on late-night WLAC out of Nashville just the way she used to. I danced around and sang to the hits. “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To.” The little black fan I’d propped up on a chair at the foot of the bed kept me company with the little shocked screech it made when it came to the end of its lazy turn.

  I had the idea that if my Hit-the-Road-Jack mother ever did come back, she’d wait until dark. She’d check to make sure Daddy’s car was gone, and come to the window by my bed and bat softly on the screen, like a moth coming to the light. I read my books next to the open window so I would hear her when she came. I spent the long slow nights waiting. The trains called their warnings. The owls made the baby rabbits cry out for mercy.