The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  Though Mabel wasn’t the motherly sort, she became my second mother despite her inclinations. She was not the proper lady that Mimi had been, and she was always saying she was teaching the two of us how to live. Mimi laughed more and was teaching social studies again. She had to roll up her sleeves and learn a whole new set of state laws and facts to get certified in Louisiana. When her school was integrated and a black girl was supposed to enter her homeroom, she got into hot water by telling her students beforehand that anyone who was mean to the new girl would just flat fail. No ugliness in her class. Her hats got louder and louder. She never took naps, and when she breezed out the door in the mornings, she’d say, “See you in the funny papers.” On Sundays she’d fix herself up and put this little number or that one on her head, feathers and bows and veils, and she and Mabel and I would take the streetcar downtown and have shrimp remoulade and martinis at Galatoire’s.

  Br’er Rabbit always gets loose, and so does Uncle Wiggily. In the end my mother did too. While it seemed that she’d just flat vanished off the face of the earth without a red cent to her name, what she really did wasn’t miraculous or even the smartest thing. But it worked. She went knocking on Navis’s door. Navis had a garage, no husband, and a soft spot for Mama. She took her in and hid her and the car for months without anybody suspecting a thing. During tax season, folks expected Navis’s door to be closed and her blinds drawn against the glare. They left her alone. After things died down, Navis drove Mama to Memphis in the dead of night and put her on a Greyhound bus to Navis’s mother’s house in Amarillo, Texas. And there my mother lived in the desert, helping Navis’s mother carry water for her garden and baking cakes at a truck stop on the main highway.

  When I was fourteen, Mama decided the coast was clear and it was safe to come out of hiding and make us a visit, which of course was a shock. Mimi, who had been secretly convinced that Daddy had murdered my mother and disposed of the body, almost fainted when she walked in the door from a full day at school and found my mother having iced tea in the kitchen with Mabel and me. Mama cried for days at Mabel’s kitchen table and couldn’t stop going on about how sorry she was. Her eyes swelled almost shut she cried so much, and her face stayed watermelon red from morning to night. When Mabel told her to buck up and brought her a shot of Southern Comfort, Mama said to get it out of her sight; she might as well drink poison. I got sick of her bellyaching and wished she would go on back to Navis or Navis’s mother, I didn’t care which.

  Although Mimi never said a word against my mother to me after we got to New Orleans, probably because she thought she’d be speaking ill of the dead, she didn’t exactly welcome my mother with open arms once she’d made her surprise appearance. When Mimi first laid eyes on my mother in the kitchen, she drew herself up and said, “Martha Irene, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. What a disappointment you have been to us all. Your father is rolling over in his grave.” After that icy pronouncement, my grandmother would say good morning and pass the salt to her daughter, but that was it. At meals Mimi kept her eyes down and the rest of the time she was either off to school or in her room with the door closed. For her part, Mama hung her head and didn’t press herself on us. But she didn’t leave either.

  Despite our lack of enthusiasm for her presence, she sent for her clothes and used her truck stop money to rent herself a little apartment with a big kitchen about eight blocks from Mabel’s. Soon she was baking her cakes for debutantes and Mardi Gras balls and such. Then one day Navis came down from Millwood with a carload of stuff and didn’t leave.

  For years Mama didn’t explain why she’d left me high and dry, and I didn’t ask. For a while, whenever I looked at her, all I could see were roaches under the streetlights. Finally the roaches scudded under the floorboards of my mind, and Mama’s never-ending trip to the A & P got to be more or less water under the bridge. By then I had come to understand that not everybody can be the Queen of Palmyra. For some people being afraid is the hardest thing in the world. I could see how such a person might do anything just not to be afraid anymore.

  So I didn’t hate Mama for leaving, though when she asked me to come live with her, I said no, I was with Mimi; Mimi was my mother now. This hurt Mama’s feelings, which I meant it to, but she pushed back her bangs and said all right, she didn’t blame me, she deserved that. Once, when I was in high school, she sat me down amid the pots and pans of her kitchen, laid down a thick slice of devil’s food cake in front of me, and said, “Florence, you know I meant to come back. I really meant to. I didn’t set out to leave. I just got to riding around in the dark, and then it got too late and I was afraid. I knew he was going to send me back to Whitfield, and I just couldn’t go back to that. I was afraid I would die in there. You know I love you, don’t you, honey? I always loved you.” I said yes, but the cake stuck in my craw. I don’t have much truck with love. It was not love that brought me over the dark water. It was something else. Something that didn’t give way. Something that held. Mimi and Grandpops and Zenie and Ray and Eva had that something; Mama didn’t.

  In school I learned that a story is a weaving. At some point, the final thread is tied off, and the pattern emerges before your eyes in plain sight. You see what there is to see, and the story is complete. The end. This story goes on. Years passed and we got a phone call saying that Zenie had died from a clot that broke loose from one of the bad veins in her legs and traveled to her heart. Mimi drove up to Millwood for the funeral. I wanted to go too, but she said no; I was still only seventeen, a minor, and my father had rights. She said I had to stay out of Mississippi until I was of age. A few months later a letter brought news that Ray had died in his bed of smoke inhalation. The police said the fire was caused by Jim Walter’s bad wiring, maybe the one thing Ray couldn’t fix since he didn’t know it was broken. I thought of Zenie’s pretty green curtains curling and burning. Miss Josephine of course was long gone by then.

  After four years at Loyola, only a short bus ride from Mimi and Mabel’s, I got a job as a teacher at Crossman Elementary, the very school I’d gone to myself, except now most of the students were black. Full circle I went, all the while flying so far from home that nobody from back there remembers my name.

  When Mimi died first and then Mabel, I took the money they left me and bought a little shotgun house on, believe it or not, Palmyra Street. Mama and Navis moved into Mabel’s house. The neighbors on Palmyra liked me because I walked out on summer nights with two cans of Raid and sprayed roaches all up and down the sidewalk. My goal was a roach-free block. “Here come the roach lady,” the children would say to one another and run for their porches. I bought the Picayune Creole Cookbook and made Sunday dinners. Some Sundays Mama, whose hair was now streaked with gray, and Navis, who had dyed her gray red, came to eat. They would ask me if I had any friends. I knew they were asking about men. I said I was too busy, which was true. Students want so much from you.

  So if I were writing this story a century ago, I’d say, Reader, I am content, except for that flutter that troubles me from time to time. Chalk dust has seeped into my skin, making it seem drier and white. I chew cloves because I take a cig or two at lunch—what’s wrong with that when your life is diagramming sentences for fifth graders who squirm and push against their desk like young horses? With families struggling to stay out of the projects, or to stay in the projects and off the streets, some of the children seem to dangle like misplaced modifiers. I know my job is to remain constant. Monday through Friday, end of summer to late spring, I am where I’m supposed to be. Most afternoons I stay late and tutor the ones who lag behind. I make them stay too, even if they don’t want to. I tell them they’re not getting out of the fifth grade until they learn what a semicolon does. How it holds things together but keeps them from touching too closely. How it balances and contains and keeps things from flooding over. For perfect assignments and good attendance, I give out roses from my little alleyway garden wrapped in wet paper towels and napkins. These the children handle with ca
re.

  “We watching your back, Miss Forrest,” the boys tell me on their way out the door in the afternoons. “Don’t you be worrying because we watching out for all your trees every minute of the day and night. Nobody going to cut down your trees on our lookout.” When they laugh at their own joke and pull up their drooping pants for emphasis, I take this to mean they have a certain affection for me. Who knows? Perhaps they like to think I belong to them, that we are one another’s precious cargo on a long ride to the future.

  When the morning light cuts across the classroom, making a V across the linoleum floor, there’s no turning back from the already steaming day, the school year, the chalk dust on my hands. And this is what I want most from teaching: it moves me through time. There is the beginning of the school year with its failing air conditioners and jumpy newcomers, the holidays glory be, then the victorious end of school and a blissfully empty summer. There are lesson plans, report cards, never-ending worries about Joseph with his druggy big brother or Mary whose mama wants all A’s. This and that. The gravity of it all keeps the flutter under control.

  The girl carefully touched the beautiful rose. Eva’s sentence. I write it on the board. “Copy it down,” I command, and they start writing, their heads bent low over their notebooks, scraping their pencils across the pages, noses sniffling and shoes tapping their desks. Then I begin the diagram: girl/touched. As I fill out the diagram with object, adjectives, and adverb, I plan the next sentence. It will be the other one from Eva. The careful girl was touched by the beautiful rose. I realize now just what a shrewd choice Eva made with this second sentence: not only does it illustrate the difference between active and passive voices and adverbs and adjectives, but it also shows how a word can mutate into metaphor. How the ordinary can become beautiful as well as ugly. How many ways one can touch and be touched. Or be full of care. The last sentence I plan is my own. It will be about thorns. How you have to watch out for thorns. But, of course, these children know that all too well.

  Sometimes when I look back, I see a tangle of webs in the dark basement. I see Eva putting on her red lipstick, tying the yellow scarf just so. Zenie with her back turned at the stove, all the eyes on high, pots boiling, skillets splattering the wall with hot grease. Then Zenie turns and her face is wet with sweat but with something else too, something heavier than sweat.

  I don’t see Daddy so much as I feel his hand on the shape of me, molding me like clay. But the mold didn’t hold. I was the bowl that broke. So when I see my life stretch out before me now like a long straight track, I am not happy but I am content with the view. I don’t mind being on the train calling out no, no, no, no.

  What I don’t know yet is that one day, forty-two years from that night Mimi and I hit the road, I will be in the middle of diagramming a sentence on the board. It will be getting toward the end of August, and school will have just started that week. We are all roasting. The old window air conditioner is barely stirring the air in the room. I will have brought in my big floor fan, which is on low so that I can be heard. I will be standing in front of thirty students, who loll about at their desks, feet in the aisles, fanning themselves in various poses of impatience and discomfort. I don’t know their names yet, but I have a seating chart. I’ve told them we are going to have our first test on diagramming, count on it, so most of them are taking notes.

  I am known for starting hard, and like Eva I love diagramming. The sentence I have in mind today isn’t the one Eva taught Ray and me about the girl and the rose; it is more complicated, more compelling. I like to think it is one of the knock-your-socks-off ones she promised me the last morning of her life. There is a collective groan when I write it on the board:

  When the fireman broke in the window, the girl woke from a deep sleep; with barely a moment to spare, she was able to see her dilemma and jump.

  A sentence with drama and flare, if I do say so myself. I chose it because I want them to learn a sense of balance and decorum. I want them to understand that a sentence isn’t a story that can just go on and on. It can take twists and turns. It can offer surprise and pleasure and terror. But it has to end somewhere. There has to be a period. I’ll admit too, I want to make them sit up in their seats and take notice. This class is not going to be a piece of cake. They are going to learn the difference between a subordinate clause and a prepositional phrase; they are going to know the function of the semicolon. You are going to be word architects, I tell them; but, to be an architect, you have to understand context. I’ve lost them with the context part, so I offer up my speech about how they’ll understand what I’m saying through the diagram itself. The proof is in the pudding.

  I start building the diagram on the board. First subjects and verbs. I call out to them, “Now then. What are the subjects of this sentence?” I am enjoying myself. It’s almost lunchtime and I’m looking forward to the Winstons stashed in my lunch box.

  On the front row, a girl who has been fanning herself with her notebook raises her hand. I can see the beads of sweat on her nose.

  I nod. I am hoping she is going to whip out girl and she. I am hoping she’ll be one of the smart ones. It’s a strong beginning, I’m thinking: one hand in the air.

  “Did that girl in the sentence die?” she asks. “When she jumped, did she die?”

  This is not the answer I wanted, this is not the question I wanted. This is not why I chose this sentence. “No,” I say curtly. “The fireman caught her. The fireman saved her life.”

  “Good,” she says, and a smile plays at her lips.

  Several students chuckle and murmur, “Um hum.”

  I turn back to the blackboard, and that’s when it starts to happen. She surfaces out of my own web of chalky lines and words, emerging the moment I make the catty-cornered downward stroke for dilemma to rest on. The words able to see have just rolled off my tongue. The second of three verbs in a compound/complex sentence, I’ve just said to the students. They groan again, and I hear one of the boys on the back row snicker and say, “Shit. Compound what?”

  I have my mouth open to say complex, compound complex, when there she is. There she is. In the space between the word and the line it belongs to. She stares at me over a man’s shoulder. The man seems to be leaning in to bear-hug her. Eva. Pretty Eva in her yellow scarf, looking at me through those cat-eye specs of hers. She seems to step out of the blackboard like a photograph that comes to life before your very eyes. Her face is the color of soot, not the pretty chocolate cream it once was. Our eyes lock. She nods at me, an odd sort of nod to the left: a slow-motion curtsy. Her arm comes up once, as if she is swimming, reaching for shore. Then she slides down out of sight behind the man, reluctantly it seems, like someone drowning, and there is only his back.

  Then the man turns and I see his face and what’s in his hand and a levee breaks deep inside my retinas and the river is coming in. Then I think no, it’s not the river, it’s the whole damn lake, it’s the whole damn Gulf of Mexico. I squeeze my eyes shut to hold it back, but there’s no stopping it.

  When anyone faints in public, there’s a fuss. And of course someone takes me home. I’m escorted into my darkened living room and put down on the couch. Someone gets me a drink of water, asks if I’m all right now, and leaves. I sit for a good long time and just try to breathe. I sit for hours looking down at my arms folded in my lap. In those hours, I come to notice that my hands are getting veiny, my forearms fleshy like my grandmother’s. I come to understand that Eva has waited long enough. Forty-two years—it’s 2005 by now—and she is tired of waiting. She has taken matters into her own hands.

  When the light outside turns gray, I leave the house. I walk over to Carrollton and catch the streetcar up to Riverbend. There I cross the railroad tracks and walk up on the levee that holds back the Mississippi. The brush and trees grow in thickets along the riverbank. Men with bottles in little brown sacks come and go from those thickets; their trips seem purposeful, as if they are attending an important business meeting. There
is a bend in the river by a transformer where the brush has been cut back and where I can see the water and walk down to it. At the river’s edge there’s an old rusted boat to the left and a broken-up wharf, gray and sharded, to the right, like the subject and verb of some vast and unfathomable sentence. In the coming dark I can’t tell where the bank ends and the water begins. Without looking, I can feel the river rising.

  The next morning I’m on a bus to Jackson and that same afternoon reading microfilm in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. When I come across the reports of Eva’s murder, I don’t need to read them. After all, I was there. I am drowning in details. Broad daylight, yellow scarf, nandina bush, screwdriver, bees. And, of course, my father the Nighthawk. Furious at Mimi for trying to take me away, furious at my mother for leaving, furious at me for the hatred and fear I bore him, how he swooped around that corner so slow and smooth when he saw her coming down that side street. How he did that thing I couldn’t see, didn’t see. A willed, necessary blindness.

  True stories happen, and then you tell them. But what you tell depends on what you see. And what you see depends on what you know.

  What I don’t know came later: a black boycott of white businesses organized by Rayfield Johnson, uncle-in-law of the victim, which made me wonder whether the fire that killed Ray was actually the result of bad wiring. Then a march led by Ray and Zenie and Eva’s friend Frank when nobody was arrested for Eva’s murder, even after a sheriff’s deputy found the screwdriver in the nandina bush and some of the men from Mr. Lafitte’s Grocery said they saw a Valiant with the policy man at the wheel go by. A small picture of the march, fuzzed by the microfilm, shows the three of them grim faced, Frank’s white face and hair leaping up like a flame in the midst of a sea of black people with placards held high surging down Main Street, ringed by angry white men who looked like Big Dan. The caption under the picture reads, “Race Violence Breaks Out in Millwood.”