The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  Mama took cakes up to Shake Rag all right, but they were offered in times of trouble, when Uldine Harris’s grandson Earl Two jumped the M & O for Memphis after he sassed Mr. Wilkins in the drugstore and Mr. Wilkins cocked his head back and said, “Two, I know who you are and I know where you live.” That was a caramel cake, icing still warm like fudge. When what happened to Zenie’s niece Eva happened. That was a lemon, which Mama knew from Zenie to be Eva’s favorite, but which Eva refused to touch.

  That spring I returned home not just to our little white house behind the house but also to Zenie and Ray’s in Shake Rag. Zenie had gotten stuck with me several years back when Mama became Millwood’s Welcome Wagon lady, having not yet discovered her talent for cakes. Back then I was little; somebody had to keep me. Zenie had kept my mother while Mimi taught social studies at the high school. Why not me?

  “I want Florence to love you like I do. I want her to know you. Really know you, the way I do.” That was the way Mama put it to Zenie. They were smoking together in Mimi’s kitchen, which was something they did when my grandmother wasn’t around. Mama had gone in and pulled out her Winstons. Zenie had taken one and lit it off the stove and sat down in her white ladder-back chair. She left the eye on for Mama so she lit hers at the flame too, holding back her bangs. Then Mama pushed the kitchen swing door closed, right in my face.

  I stood up next to the crack in the door and tried to keep up with the conversation. What I didn’t hear was what Zenie said back to Mama’s wanting me to know her. It was a lot softer and it had a little snort for a period.

  Then Mama was talking again in a fast and happy little rush. “I don’t think she’ll be much trouble.”

  Zenie cleared her throat and said loud enough for me to hear, “They all trouble.”

  “Zenie, I don’t want to make you do this if you don’t want to. You know I’ll pay you fair.” Mama whispered this last sentence like it was a shameful secret.

  The back of Zenie’s ladder chair hit the wall. Once and then twice. The chair legs were worn down from years of her tilting. “We try it out. See how much trouble she get into. These legs don’t go running after nothing no more.” Zenie was over six feet and heavy. She had bad veins that looked like dark purple irises blooming up and down her legs, which she said felt like two tree trunks under her. Her legs were prone to sprout blisters and sores that ran and made scars the size of nickels. Her legs pained her all the time but especially when it was hot.

  Now Mama’s voice was a happy little brook bubbling along. “She’s a good girl, Zenie. You won’t have to be chasing after her. She’s almost six now. Soon it will just be after school.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Zenie. Please don’t yes ma’am and no ma’am me. You know I don’t want you to call me ma’am. I feel like I’m half yours.”

  The chair hit the wall once, but nothing from Zenie. Then Mama opened the door. She jumped back when she saw me behind it. “You listening in again, Miss Nosy?” she asked.

  “No’m,” I said, and she looked at me hard, narrowing her eyes.

  Five years later, I still somehow ended up at Zenie’s house in the late afternoons. It seems odd, I know, that a half-grown girl wouldn’t be out running around town with the other children. The truth is, ever since we’d been back, people looked at me funny. I knew many of the children who were traipsing off to school so prim and proper, and for a short while I made it a point to hang around up at the sidewalk when they walked by on their way to and from school. I saw Helen Cooley, who used to play gypsies with me in the vacant lot down the street. I saw Elizabeth Lumpkin, who I’d spent the night with once and we’d made brownies from a mix. But their eyes slid off me, as if I were the ghost of a flesh-and-blood girl they had once known, the one who had left Millwood with her father and mother and had never been seen since. I knew it had something to do with Daddy, and maybe Mama too, after the colored-versus-Negro episode, but it wasn’t anything I could pin down.

  As I grew desperate, I even tried to catch the eye of that weasel May, who I wouldn’t have given the time of day to a year before. She and Little Dan would hang around with their spoons at the ready on Sunday afternoons when Miss Kay Linda and Big Dan went down for their nap. Mama would bring out their half cake and set it on our front stoop without even looking in their direction. They would grab it and stand in the yard like pigs at the trough, gobble up their cake, and put the crumb-covered paper plate right back on our stoop. I snatched it up and put it in the garbage can. I knew that having to clean up after them would only make my mother more furious. When May finished her cake, I asked her nice polite questions like when school was going to be out or would she like to walk to the drugstore with me. But the only thing she ever said back to me was, “My mama says there must be something wrong with you. You’d be in school if you was right in the head,” at which point I kicked her in the knee and that was the end of that.

  Even my mother noticed my unpopularity and called some of her cake ladies to get their daughters over to play, but their girls were always busy with their tap-dancing or swimming lessons or what have you. Since Mama herself was busy bargain shopping with a handful of coupons for her cake ingredients and doing housework during the day to clear her nights for baking and poison drinking, I started hanging around in the mornings with Zenie, helping her with the chores up at my grandparents’ while Mimi taught school and Grandpops went to his law office. Then in the afternoons, since I didn’t have anything better to do, I followed Zenie on her dusty trek home like an overgrown stray pup.

  When we got back to her and Ray’s house in the afternoons, which were heating up now that May was progressing, Zenie would start up her window fan and then go into the kitchen and turn on the flame under the beat-up aluminum coffeepot. The kitchen would fill up with the smell of burnt coffee that had been sitting since morning. She pulled out a cup she kept over by the stove and poured it half full of the smoking black sludge. Then she got a pitcher of milk from the top shelf of the refrigerator, scalded it in a little pot until a film formed on the top, and poured it in, hot and steaming. While her coffee was cooling down, she dumped in sugar straight from the sugar bowl in the shape of a little house that sat on the table, filling her cup right to the edge. Then she seined her bag for pieces of yesterday’s newspaper from Mimi and Grandpops’.

  She spread out the newspaper on the table, groaned as she took a seat, and leaned over the print, sipping from her cup as she read. She’d talk back to the paper. “You dog!” she’d tell it, or “Oh, baby!” Sometimes she looked shocked. Once she burst out crying and shoved me away hard when I sidled up to see what was wrong. “Leave me alone, white folks,” she said, and I could tell she’d read something that made her hate my guts. It’s true that the pictures in the paper were enough to make a black person hate every white person on the planet. Dogs and hoses and billy clubs and gas. Snarling white men in uniforms dragging people with soaked clothes and bloodied faces into paddy wagons. Tearing their clothes half off. White faces so twisted they looked fiendish. I didn’t blame Zenie for hating the sight of me.

  When she was liking me all right, though, Zenie told me Zenobia the Queen of Palmyra stories that her mother, Miss Josephine called Aunt Josie by most white folks, used to tell to her when she was a girl. Zenie was Miss Josephine’s firstborn, and Miss J took one look at her and said Zenobia right off the bat. She rolled the name off her tongue like silk, and nobody could talk her out of it. Miss Josephine worked for Miss Phyllis Milam until she, Miss J, got too old to maid. Miss Milam taught classics and she had books all over the place. So she and Miss J would get to reading about the heroes and ladies and lords and warriors and queens and such. Which is how Miss Josephine got attached to Zenobia, who was this Arab lady who rode at the head of her men into battle with her hair flying and one bosom bouncing out so they’d know who their leader was. Not to speak of the fact that Queen Zenobia told everybody her great auntie on her mother’s side was Cleopatra and her great-gra
ndmother on the other side was none other than the Queen of Sheba! When Zenobia wasn’t fighting wars, she was riding around hunting lions and such. They say that she was the man in the family and she didn’t lie down with her husband unless she got to wanting herself a little child. When she was captured and made to parade herself like a slave in the streets of Rome, those Romans put her in chains of solid gold!

  Zenie liked her mother’s stories about the Queen of Palmyra, and she liked to make up her own. You never knew how Zenie’s Queen of Palmyra stories were going to end up. You only knew that, like Uncle Wiggily, the Queen was going to come out on top. One afternoon soon after I’d gotten back in town, my tonsils were acting up, and Zenie had me sitting on the chair beside her at her kitchen table. She’d chopped some ice for me to put down my throat. One sliver at a time on a cold spoon. My glands were hot rocks, and it hurt to open wide. I had a fever and it made everything seem far away. Zenie had her coffee cup. She was sipping hot, I was sipping cold. When she told the latest version of the Queen story, it was better than Moses and the Ten Commandments and Ben Hur all rolled into one.

  So Zenobia the Queen of Palmyra is sitting right nicely up on her throne, and a poor captured lady slave comes into the palace and throws herself down in front of the throne and says, Your Gracious Highness, the man he working me in the field from first light till dark and then he wearying me all night. When I get too worn out to work, he bring out the leather. Queen Zenobia sucks her teeth and say, can you cook, miss lady? And the lady answers, why yes ma’am I can. I’m a good cook and I can bake too. So the Queen smiles and says, how about whipping me up a peach cobbler? Yes ma’am, the slave says. She allows as to how she can bake the best cobbler the Queen had ever ate bar none, and she heads right on into the big kitchen and sends a boy out to pick some peaches. She kicks all the other cooks out of the kitchen and shuts the door tight. Two hours transpire and no lady slave and no cobbler. Folks hankering round the kitchen door and wondering why it’s taking such a spell to throw together one little peach cobbler. Who this lady slave think she is to keep the Queen waiting and waiting? Now Queen Zenobia starts to get peckish, and when she gets peckish, she gets aggravated.

  Then the kitchen doors open wide and out comes miss lady slave with the best-looking cobbler you ever did see. A gold color with peach juice just oozing out the top and sides. Queen Zenobia’s itching to dig right in, but the lady slave says to her, wait up, ma’am. A lot of nerve, saying that to a queen. Then lo and behold she brings forth a dozen more cobblers, one right after the next, enough for everybody, and the Queen looks down from her throne at the lady like she’s been sent from heaven and says you was thinking about everybody for your cobblers. You’re a true teacher because you teach me to think about everybody in my kingdom. I want you for my helper, not my cook, except on Sundays when you can make us all cobblers! So the smart-as-a-whip Queen ruled her kingdom for many long years with the help of the lady slave. And the lady slave got her free papers and lived like a queen herself. The end.

  Zenie set down her coffee cup. “You cold enough in the throat?”

  I nodded. I was iced down to my toes.

  We’d started on a game of gin rummy when someone knocked hard on the front door. I was about to win with three kings and a ten and some other card I don’t remember. All I needed was another ten or another of the other card. This game was the most interesting thing that had happened to me all day, and I was on pins and needles when the knock came. I thought it might be my mother come to get me, but Zenie groaned and said, “Oh Lord, it’s the policy man. You. Get the door.”

  I ran to open the door. The man on Zenie’s stoop wasn’t my father but it could have been. He had the same way about him that Daddy had when he’d started selling burial insurance a few weeks before, a kind of white-man strut that says you owe me. He was younger than my father and had a crew cut and a way of jutting out his chin when he talked, like a cock getting ready to crow. He was surprised to see me but not too surprised. He had seen stranger things.

  He stuck his head in the door. “Hey there little lady, how you doing?” Then he changed his voice to a less friendly tone. “Zenie watching you? Where she at?”

  Zenie didn’t get up from the kitchen table. “She sitting right here in front of you, but she ain’t got what you want.”

  The man sighed. He was halfway in the door by now. “When you want me to come on back by here?”

  “Payday. Saturday.”

  “You getting behind on your payments, Zenie. You already shorted me one.”

  Zenie glared him down. “You can’t get blood out of a turnip. Don’t you go letting in the flies.”

  “Well, you better be figuring out how to get seventy-five cents a week to me, or you and Ray ain’t going to be covered. Then you’ll really have yourself some flies to deal with at a later date. I’m giving you a good deal for two as it is.”

  Even I knew that was a bald-faced lie, my father having just taken up the burial insurance trade. Zenie made a noise in her throat and picked up a doily in the middle of the table, turned it over, and put it back down. “Come on back Saturday afternoon, and I’ll catch myself up.”

  The man breathed an exasperated sigh. His breath smelled bitter, like stale coffee. “All right, then, I’ll be back, and I’ll be expecting you to pay yourself up to date.” He backed out the door, glaring at Zenie as he went.

  When he was gone, Zenie gave a snort. “Bloodsuckers.” She took a deep breath like she was getting ready to launch into a long list of bad names for the policy man, but looked at me and stopped short, for which I was grateful. I was mightily relieved that, shortly after we returned to Millwood, Daddy had found his niche in burial insurance after being in and out of this thing and that for so long. First the hardware store, next the drugstore delivery, then Sears & Roebuck’s warehouse, after that used cars.

  In those early days Daddy and Mama set out every day in a green Plymouth with a sagging burnt-out muffler. You could hear us coming a mile away. In the morning she packed him a bologna sandwich and dropped him off at his latest job. She dropped me by Mimi and Grandpops’ or Zenie’s, and then headed for the trailer on the outskirts of town where the Chamber of Commerce had its office. She’d put together her Welcome Wagon baskets and pick up her lists of newcomers to visit. Late afternoons she got me from Zenie’s, then plucked Daddy from this or that street corner, his shirttail loose on one side or the other and his bow tie hanging on the lip of his collar like a tired moth. Watching for us on the corner (sometimes she was late) he had a puzzled look on his face, like some question had frozen there with no hope of an answer. When he worked on the car lot, my mother’s eyebrows would be raised in expectation and a little smile would play on her lips. Did he sell a car, any car, even an old wreck? By then, she’d started up her cake business on the side, so at night she was up to all hours baking and ironing his shirts and putting a good crease in his khakis. She lost flesh, and the bones in her body looked like sticks that had floated to the surface of her skin.

  He hasn’t found his calling yet, Mama would tell Mimi and Grandpops. One day she dropped me off on her way to work and was half out the door before Grandpops said real quiet to her back, “How’s Win doing down at the drugstore?” Up to a few days before, when he’d gotten let go for sassing old blind Miss Northcross (my mother and father never said fired; he either quit or got let go), Daddy’s latest job had been delivery man for J & T Pharmacy.

  Another minute and Mama would have escaped. She stood framed in the door, one nice polished high-heel shoe inside the house and the other out on the front stoop. The three of us—Mimi, Grandpops, and me—stood in the middle of the big velvet living room, waiting. I knew this conversation wasn’t going anywhere good. Daddy was back home oiling his box. Mama had told me to stay out of his way. In the doorway, Mama seemed about to turn around to face Grandpops, but then she said, to the great outdoors, “It didn’t work out. Seems like some men just can’t work for somebody el
se. They got to find their own way. Free spirits.” She took another step out the door.

  Grandpops eyed the living room ceiling through his thick specs. “Free spirits. They any relation to free loaders?”

  My mother stopped again in her tracks. Lately she’d taken on the shape of a drooping vine, but now the set of her back made it look as if a hard little tree had sprung up in the open door. She stayed there a minute more. Then she just walked on out the door and closed it with a click. Not a word out of her. She just went on.

  When I helped my mother unpack boxes from our year on the lam, I came across an old photo of me and her from back in her Welcome Wagon days. Mama has the look of someone drifting in the ocean waiting for a rescue. She has her arm around me, but she’s looking somewhere off in the distance, to my left, over the long dark row of pecan trees in Mimi’s backyard. The ones that caterpillar worms build their webby nests in every summer, requiring Ray to light torches with gasoline and get up on a high wobbly ladder to burn them out. The webs curl up and vanish in clouds of smoke. The busy worms sizzle and crackle like chitlins in the pan.

  But, now at long last, glory and hallelujah, Daddy had found his true calling. A few days after we got back to Millwood that spring, he went out to his first meeting since we’d returned and met a man who sold burial insurance door to door in Shake Rag and Milltown. This man was old and tired. He said he’d tell the folks at Mississippi Assurance about Daddy. A big packet would come in the mail and Daddy would get the old man’s customers and his route. No Boss Man looking over his shoulder; he is the boss. What could be better?