The Queen of Palmyra Page 7

  Now that Daddy had a job he could live with, he was one of three policy men in Millwood and out in the county too. Mississippi Assurance had burial insurance for poor folks so they wouldn’t get caught short. “Everybody’s got a body,” he’d say to folks in Shake Rag, and then flash his pearlies at them. They’d be standing in their front doors, saying nice as spice, “Yes sir, that’s the Good Lord’s truth.” Then he’d say, “Now you don’t want to end up in a cardboard box, or worse, do you, Auntie?” and they’d say back, like they were in the choir at church, “No, sir, don’t put us in no box!” And then he’d get them to sign the papers and that’ll be fifty cents a week from now on, seventy-five for couples, twenty-five for each child. Mississippi Assurance had Shake Rag and Milltown locked up. Daddy told people not to worry. He’d take care of them when the time came, as it surely would. Some days, when he’d had a good day, we’d be driving home and he’d throw back his head, his curls loosening up from their heaviness, and belt out, “Blessed Assuuuuurance, Jesus is Mine. Oh what a fooooooretaste of Glory Divine. Wealth of Salvation, Purchase of Love. Wrapped in his Spirit, Washed in His Blooooood.”

  When the policy man left, Zenie threw her cards into the slush pile. “You win,” she pronounced, and struggled to get up from the table.

  “Wait!” I protested. “We didn’t finish the game.”

  “Could tell you had it by the look on your face. Look like the cat that ate the canary. I ain’t got time for fooling. Got to get some sewing done so I can pay that bloodsucker. Get on in the bathroom and wash up. Then go on out front and wait for your Mama. Tell her I need a raise.”

  4

  To go into Zenie’s bathroom I had to push aside a long curtain hanging ceiling to floor across where a door should have been. The bedrooms in her house had curtains for doors too. The curtains were light and airy, with green leaves all aflutter, as if they were floating down from invisible trees. Zenie and Ray’s house was a Jim Walter Home. Her grandfather, Miss Josephine’s father, had owned the lot but the house on it was falling in, so, after her grandfather died, Zenie and Ray moved into the two good rooms in the old down-fallen house and started their project of saving money for a Jim Walter Home. Zenie stopped taking her midday dinner at the kitchen table after Mimi and Grandpops were done and the table was cleared. Instead she carried her dinner and part of Mimi and Grandpops’ supper home in a pie pan she brought back clean every morning; she and Ray made their night meal off of them. She put most of her money from working at Mimi and Grandpops’ and taking in sewing into a savings account at the Millwood Bank and Trust. Grandpops was on the board of trustees of the bank, so he took her down and told them to set it up for her and they gave her a little navy blue book so she could bring it in every time she put her money in. She spent time looking at the book, working and reworking the figures until the edges got to looking like an old Bible.

  It had all started when Zenie saw an advertisement for Jim Walter Homes in an old Ladies’ Home Journal of Mimi’s. She tore the page out, folded it up, and put in her purse. She took it out and looked at it again and again until the creases started to tear. PICTURE YOURSELF IN A LOVELY JIM WALTER HOME! ONLY PENNIES A DAY!

  She still had the faded ad, which featured a picture of a pretty little family with a mother and father and three children all decked out like it was Easter Sunday. The girls had on shiny patent-leather shoes. They were standing in the front yard of a spick-and-span Jim Walter Home with trees and flowers and a white fence. They were the happiest family on the face of the earth to have such a Lovely Home, one of four floor plans available. When I was younger, it made me sick just to look at those white folks, which was what I’d taken to calling people of my color who had things I didn’t have, such as a nice house they’d bought for themselves and pretty clothes. Back then, before Daddy found his calling as a policy man, even before we’d moved to our place behind Big Dan and Miss Kay Linda’s, we were on the other side of town in a crummy duplex one street over from Milltown. I walked on my heels in my Sunday shoes because they pinched my toes.

  Zenie said she couldn’t care less what color the folks in the picture were. She thought the Jim Walter houses were the be-all end-all. I had to admit they did look pretty with their green sides and window boxes with red geraniums lapping over. What she liked most about them, she told me, is that they looked new. “Everything top to bottom brand spanking new,” she’d say, and the pennies in her eyes would glow.

  She and Ray needed a $300 down payment on the Cottage Style. Miss Josephine had given them half, and it had taken them two years to save the rest. Zenie had worked for Mimi six and a half days a week, coming in around 7:30 and leaving around 3 with a cold supper prepared in the refrigerator. A half day on Sunday, plus keeping me. Ray made good money. He worked from daylight to dark and sometimes, under a bare bulb in his shed, long into the night. He was a yardman in the warm weather and a handyman when it was cool, so some weeks were better than others. He could fix just about anything. People gave him their broken lamps, lawn mowers, radios, and all manner of stuff, and he bent over them like a genie in his little shed, making them good as new. Mimi paid Zenie $1.50 a day, or $10.00 a week (Mimi added in the extra quarter). Extra for holidays and canning. It was Grandpops’ idea to pay Zenie’s social security even though the law didn’t require it for maids then, and Mimi sometimes said that they had nothing to blame themselves for when it came to treatment of the Negroes. Plus she gave Zenie all of her old hats (which Zenie told me she wouldn’t be caught dead in).

  When Zenie took the bus to the bank twice a month to put her and Ray’s money into savings, she would take me with her. For insurance, she said. Once we got off the bus at Main and Goodlett, where the Millwood Bank and Trust Company was, she grabbed my hand just as we were walking up the steps to go into the door. I was seven years old then, but when we crossed Main Street, she treated me like a baby. The first time she did it, I jerked my hand out of hers, but she just snatched air until she got me again. She’d never held my hand like that before, like I didn’t have good sense, and I didn’t appreciate it. She clamped down. It made my palm sweat and itch and my fingers lose feeling.

  She hauled me up to the teller’s window and just stood there. First the teller dragged her pale eyes over Zenie like a net, holding her in view but not really looking at her. Then the teller looked down and saw me and her whole face melted and it was oh sweet little Florence this and isn’t she growing that and what a head of hair I was getting and do tell my grandfather hello. Only then did Zenie let me go and take out her handkerchief with the wadded up bills inside and smooth them out on the counter. The teller picked them up the way you pick up something hot, handling the bills at the edges and dropping them quickly into the money drawer, not even smoothing them out. Zenie just stood there looking at the place on the counter where the money had been while the teller took her own sweet time writing something on a piece of paper and bam! stamping it hard. When she finally handed Zenie the piece of paper, Zenie pushed her little navy blue book with the frazzled edges over in the teller’s direction, and the teller wrote something in it and stamped it. Zenie took her time looking first at the bankbook and then the piece of paper. Then she folded the paper up and put it in her little book and placed the little book back in her purse. We took the bus back to her house, where she unfolded the piece of paper and pored over the bankbook. When she was satisfied, she put a rubber band around the whole thing and put it in a drawer in a big dresser. Then she’d say, “Um, um, another slow day, another slow dollar,” and shake her head.

  When Zenie’s bankbook said $275 (she’d already put Miss Josephine’s money in to draw the extra interest), she wrote a letter to the Jim Walter folks and told them she and Ray were about ready for their house. The way she told it was here comes this white man with ducktail hair and a smile like sorghum molasses. He knocks and says, “Mrs. Zenobia Lee Johnson?” and she says, “You looking at her,” not believing her ears. A white man calling her
Mrs.! He comes on in and sits down and pulls out the house pictures and Zenie calls to Ray and he comes in and they point to the same picture at the very same time and say, “That one.” Two bedrooms. They were expecting Miss Josephine to move in when she got too old to do for herself. (What they didn’t expect was that Eva would show up, though she ended up sleeping with Miss J, who by then was too old to care.)

  Then Mr. Jim Walter says he’ll go ahead and take Zenie and Ray’s $275 now and they can send the $25 later and he’ll take Zenie to the bank to close down her savings and hand it over. But Ray allows as how he thinks it’d be better to wait till they’ve got the whole thing and can send it all at once by Western Union and get a receipt. That’s when Mr. Jim Walter knows he’s not dealing with a bunch of fools. He whips out the contract, and they sign Rayfield Eugene Johnson III and Zenobia Lee Johnson.

  When the house finally came, it came like gangbusters. Big old long truck with half a house on it bumping right up Goodlett Street, past Mimi and Grandpops’, and on down to the other end of Goodlett into Shake Rag where Zenie and Ray’s lot and the concrete-block foundation they’d had put down lay in wait. The truck drove up and the driver got out and said, “Where you want it?” Then Ray took one look and said he and Zenie didn’t order half a house, they ordered the whole thing, and the man said, “Other half’s up the road broke down. Be here later on.” When Ray told him where to put the first half, the man drove the truck right up onto the ground and he and another man took it off in sections and fitted them together like a big puzzle on the foundation. Later that evening the other half came, and the next day when they got it up and put it together and sealed, everything looked just fine.

  Then Ray went inside to look around. “Where the doors at?” he asked the man. There was a front door coming from outside into the living room and a back door opening from the kitchen to a drop-off into the backyard, but there weren’t any inside doors to the bathroom, either of the two bedrooms, or the closets. Everything was wide open like one big room with nooks and crannies here, there, and everywhere.

  “Inside doors ain’t included,” said the last driver, the first long gone.

  Zenie told me she put on her best talking-to-white-trash voice and said, “Got to be a mistake, mister. I never did hear of a house that ain’t got no doors in the deal.”

  “They is extry,” the man hollered from the cab of his truck and revved up the engine.

  “What they going to run us?” Ray yelled out as the driver shifted into first to pull out.

  “Don’t know. I just drive. Talk to the management.” He threw the words out the window like pieces of gravel. The truck had started rolling, and the black cloud of exhaust covered up Zenie and Ray so that all the neighbors who’d been watching from across the street couldn’t even see them.

  By the time the smoke cleared, Zenie was inside at her sewing machine making her green-leaf-curtain doors from the material she’d gotten for window curtains, which would have to wait, and thinking where was she going to get some red geraniums for those window boxes, worry about doors later. Ray was rummaging in his shed for some curtain rods.

  By the time Eva came to stay that spring of 1963, the green leaf curtains had been washed and ironed six times. I happen to know this because I helped Zenie hang them out on the line the sixth time. They were made of good material and were still nice and fresh looking, moving like ripples of water whenever there was a breeze coming through the house. Miss Josephine, who was so old now she’d bowed over like a live oak branch going back to the ground for support, had come to live in Zenie and Ray’s little back bedroom.

  The morning I first met Eva, Mama had dropped me off at Zenie’s early and I was helping her make the George Washington Carver High School majorette outfits. They were a pretty gold with royal blue braid and wavy rickrack. Zenie had gotten up before dawn to start on the skirts, which were tricky because you had to cut them on the bias so they’d twirl when the majorettes did. She was provoked. She’d just cut one wrong and was trying to piece it in the back where it wouldn’t show. She had just so much material, and she couldn’t afford a mistake. She’d told me to go outside and play, which was her way of saying get out of my hair. I was laying low on her front steps feeling insulted—you don’t tell a girl of almost eleven to go out and play. People were coming out on their porches in the cool of the morning. The lady next door was watering her petunias in their little round beds. She stood like a statue in her front yard. The water from her hose broke into a rainbow against the coming sun, drawing in birds to drink out of the puddles it made in the dirt.

  Miss Josephine was inside trying to help Zenie, which I knew was aggravating Zenie even more. You had to leave her alone when she was figuring out the pattern of something. I was sitting on the front step thinking about nothing at all, just beginning to let go of being mad and enjoying the morning air and the rainbow the water made, when along came a taxicab. It stopped right in front of Zenie and Ray’s house, which made me blink and blink again, since it was the first time I’d been at a house where a taxicab had stopped. Then out she popped like a party favor, all happy and smiling with two big suitcases and a little red hard box of a suitcase ladies used back then for their face and hair stuff. She was wearing a funeral outfit, navy blue suit with a white lace collar, high heels and stockings, and circle earrings with little pearls in them. My first thought when I saw her was that she must be hot in that getup.

  Eva stopped short when she saw me. “Looking for my auntie, Mrs. Zenobia Lee Johnson,” she said, and she said the t in auntie like an opera singer finishing up. She didn’t say and who, pray tell, are you? but I could see she was thinking it.

  I pointed to the front door. “She’s in there.”

  She ran past me up the steps and burst in the front door, making a big commotion with “Auntie Zenobia!” then “Miss J!” then “Where’s Ray?” There was yelling and scrambling around and everybody having a fit over this new one. I peeked through the screen. They were all hollering and jumping around like it was Christmas and she was snow.

  I’ve got to say I was feeling out of things. Zenie and Ray didn’t have any children, and here I was thinking I was the apple of Zenie’s eye, no matter what she said about white folks. Then here comes this fancy one, turns out to be a niece I didn’t even know Zenie had, calling her Auntie Zenobia this and Auntie Zenobia that, like Zenie was the Queen of Palmyra on her throne. I’d never heard anybody, not even Miss Josephine, call Zenie anything but Zenie, except for Ray who called her baby and honey and pretty little thing. I stayed put out on the step.

  Then I heard Miss Wonderful say down low, “What’s that scraggly white girl doing out there?”

  I tried to smooth my hair down. Did I comb it this morning?

  Zenie said, “That’s Martha’s one. I’m watching her.”

  “Ain’t you got enough to do all day keeping that hat lady happy? Now you got to watch her big old grandchild too.”

  Zenie sputtered, then belted out a laugh loud enough to blow the roof off the Jim Walter Home. Then I heard her wheeze and gasp for breath. “Lord, Eva, don’t get me tickled like that!” I knew that comment about my grandmother was sure to get Zenie going. One of her pet peeves was Mimi’s hats. I hated being in the house when Mimi came waltzing in with a new hat. She’d call me into her bedroom and I’d have to say the thing was pretty and no, ma’am, I most definitely did not think it was too loud. Then I’d go back to the kitchen and Zenie’d be banging pots around and making eyes at me like the new hat was my doing. “Them hats of hers cost more than some folks make in a month,” she would mutter while she pulled out the bottom broiler drawer of the stove and slammed a beat-up cookie sheet down inside. Then, bam, she’d kick the broiler drawer back. “All the hardworking poor folks in the world, some right under her nose, and all she be thinking about is piling up more hats on that dyed-blue head of hers. Sinful.”

  Eva piped up again. “That girl out there’s too large to need watching. W
hat she need watching for? Something wrong with her? She mental?”

  When she said that word mental, I felt as if an icy hand had grabbed me. Mental. That would explain Mama not letting me go to school. The way last year’s girlfriends turned away when they saw me. On the way to get my shots at the Health Department across the tracks in Milltown a few days before, Mama and I had passed a house with a girl on the front porch. She was a regular-looking girl in Milltown terms, blond and paper white and skinny. She was older than I was, maybe thirteen. Her apple-sized bosoms had popped a button on her shirt. All she did was rock in a little rickety chair with no paint. Sometimes the girl would be holding her arms out in front of her and whapping her hands back and forth so hard that they looked like they’d go flying off and be lost in the yard’s sky-high weeds. What was different about her, besides the rocking and whapping, was her mouth. It looked like it had been propped open with an invisible stick, and there was a line of spit running out of each corner of it. Where the spit had dried, it made chalk marks that ran from her mouth to her chin.

  “Why’s that girl always out there rocking and doing her hands that way?” I asked Mama as we drove by.

  “She’s mental, honey. Not right in the head.” Mama looked out the car window at the girl. “She doesn’t have good sense. That’s all she knows to do. Personally, I don’t think it’s right to keep her out there like that. Just asking for trouble.”

  Then I saw it. When you see something you don’t believe, something you know can’t be true, then forgetting can shove remembering out the door and if remembering ever does return home like that poor long-lost prodigal boy, forgetting wants to kill him. So what I first forgot to remember to see about the mental girl was that there was a chain wrapped right around her waist, like she was on a chain gang. It disappeared into her long pants and then came on out the end of one of her pants legs and curled itself around the porch railing. A secret that had slithered out for all to see, it glinted in the late-day sun.