The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  Can a person be mental and not know it? If you’re mental, how can you know it? Seems if you did know it, you wouldn’t be mental. I touched the corner of my mouth to check for spit.

  Everything in Zenie’s house had gotten quiet. All you could hear was Zenie’s fan squeak while it rotated. Then Zenie laughed like Eva’s ugly remark was the biggest joke in the world and said something real low. The only word I could hear was “Extra.” Something about me was “Extra.” After a minute or two, Zenie said something about my mother. She started her sentence by saying “good woman” and ended it with “too much.” There were a lot of words in between, but those were the only ones I heard. Good woman and too much. They were a relief because they didn’t include mental.

  After a while the front door burst open and here came Zenie and Eva and Miss J, laughing and carrying on. They stepped around me to get Eva’s suitcases out of the front yard. Eva grabbed the heaviest bag and the small red case. The small one she handed off to me on her way in the door, which gave me permission to sidle on in behind her. Zenie took the next heaviest, and Miss Josephine held the door for her.

  So there we were all sitting around in Zenie’s living room and Eva was being nice as spice, telling me the E in her name sounded like “elephant” not “evil.” Everybody was always putting a hard “ee” on it, which just drove her crazy.

  That was just the start of it. Eva talked a mile a minute. She could give you her life story in no time. Born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a student at Tougaloo College right over in Jackson, which is a good school with teachers from big colleges up north. She even has a professor from Harvard University! She’s going to be a schoolteacher. She loves grammar and diagramming. Lining words up just right so you can see how they make a path to somewhere. She’ll teach me how it’s done when she gets her stuff unpacked. This summer she’s come over here to Millwood from Jackson to sell insurance to make enough to get her through her last year in school. Good policies for burying folks, plus insurance for hospitals and doctors. She’s going to fix all Zenie and Ray’s friends right up. She knows they’re going to love to see her because this is her mama Marie’s hometown. They’re going to buy up policies left and right, and she’ll give them a payment book and some already stamped envelopes. Then she’s going back to Jackson to finish college in the fall, and the money will come pouring in. She’s got it all figured out. Plus her company doesn’t take advantage of Negroes. North Carolina Mutual of Durham, North Carolina, is the oldest (founded in 1898!), biggest, and best black-owned company in the United States of America. The Mutual gives Negroes their money’s worth and more; it doesn’t try to cheat them the way white companies do. Its mottos: The Company with a Soul and a Service, and Merciful to All.

  When Eva told us all of this, Zenie and Miss Josephine got quiet. Miss Josephine’s old bell of a head tolled back and forth, back and forth. “Um um, Lord have mercy,” she said.

  Eva looked around the place. “You-all got room for me to stay awhile?”

  Zenie got up and went over to the front window. She put her hands on her hips. “We always got room for you, Eva, but this place’s already got a policy man. Somebody’s daddy. Some others too. Told you that in the letter. How come you showing up here? You not agitating, are you, like some them people at that college? If you are, you better buy yourself some of that insurance because we going to be burying you.”

  Eva rolled her eyes at me. “This is 1963, you know. Times are changing. We’ll talk about this later. Little pitchers have big ears.” She turned to me. “What’s your name, girl?”

  “Florence,” I said.

  Eva smiled big and pretty. She had the prettiest set of white teeth I’d ever seen. Even and smooth, not like my snaggily mouth with this one that had come in big and crooked and another sideways. My mother was setting aside part of her cake money every week to get me braces.

  “Hey, Flo,” Eva said. “You want to see my stuff?”

  I’d opened my mouth to say please don’t call me Flo, though the O sound of it in Eva’s mouth gave me a strange pleasure, when Eva popped the latch on her little red case and, bingo, out popped a top tray with lipsticks and tubes of this and that, with a shiny mirror above. My mouth dropped open even farther when she passed me the case. It was the first time I remember looking in the mirror and really studying what you’d call my features. Hair dusty looking and standing straight out. Round face the color of old sand that’s been in the sandbox too long. Freckles sprinkled around like sand fleas. Yellowish eyes so light you could see straight through them. No eyebrows to speak of. Everything so light you could barely tell what was what. Ugly. I was amazed at how ugly.

  I could see that Eva had what I needed. Her hair wasn’t standing straight out. It had a nice round shape. It lifted on top, came down the sides of her face smooth and easy like water flowing down a little hill. Then it surprised you and flipped up on the ends. It shined from the oil on it, but it didn’t smell heavy sweet like Daddy’s. In fact, it didn’t smell at all that I could tell, though Eva herself carried a whiff of rosewater and glycerin, which was just right. She had on glasses with little points on the ends sprinkled with rhinestones. They made her look nice and smart, like she meant business. Her skin without a mark on it. The color of Mama’s devil’s food batter after she adds the buttermilk, and smooth like that.

  “You need fixing up, girl,” Eva said, and pulled out a lipstick the color of a plum, the dark kind that shines. Everything she said to me had “girl” attached to it, and it made me feel like I was part of a club, the girl club, and she was the president and she’d picked me to come on in and join up.

  “Fix me.” The words rolled out of me like I was in church and we’d started in on Glory Be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost. I knew before the words came out that they should have been: no thank you, my mama won’t want me painted up common. But I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. Plus Eva already had the tube rolled out and she painted my lips before they could say anything else. I looked again into the mirror and saw a blooming rose for a mouth.

  “Needs blotting,” I said, and all three of them got to laughing at that.

  “Blotting ain’t going to help when her mama catches sight of her,” Zenie said with a frown.

  Eva pulled out a brush and a jar of powder the color of cocoa. “How’d you like some powder on that shiny little nose of yours, girl?”

  “Oh Lord!” Zenie said and slapped her leg.

  “Give me some!” I was getting into the spirit of fixing me up. I’d looked in the mirror. I knew what they were up against.

  Eva looked at me and pursed her lips. “Maybe some foundation first.”

  “Won’t match,” Zenie grumbled, and then exploded with another one of her laughs.

  Before I knew it, Eva was working on me with a bunch of pencils. Pencils on the eyebrows, pencils on the eyes. Then a dust of cocoa. When she was done, I looked in the mirror again. A definite improvement. I was starting to look really good. My eyes were big and round. I was brownish, like a piece of light toast. Not as dark as Eva or Zenie, but closer to them than to my mama or daddy.

  “I’m colored!” I hollered out. “I look colored!”

  The words came out of my mouth like splashes from a pretty waterfall, happy and playful, but they froze when they hit the air. Everything in the room froze with them. Everybody had been laughing and talking and playing, even Miss Josephine. Now nobody said a word. It was as if a giant vacuum cleaner had come through and sucked all the words out of the room so that there was only air and dreamy dust. Then Miss Josephine let out a long sigh, and quicker than a flash Eva tossed her cute little powder and brush set into the red suitcase and slammed it shut. Bam.

  Zenie pushed herself off from the couch and headed for the bathroom, batting the green leaf curtain aside, the way you’d cut cane in the field, and rummaging around. When she came whipping back into the living room with some toilet paper and cold cream, she hea
ded straight for me, her mouth a thin straight line. She was going to wipe me down before I could do a thing to stop her.

  “No! I want to show Mama!” I loved this dark me. I wanted eye shadow and mascara. I wanted Eva to curl my eyelashes if she could find them. I wanted to look like Eva.

  Zenie took hold of my face and rubbed in the cold cream. Then she raked her scratchy toilet paper over my cheeks. She was being rough with me. She was mad as fire. There was something I’d gone and spoiled. Hard wipe across the mouth. Was she going to wash my mouth out with soap? My eyes were filling up just as I thought it. I’d managed to sneak into the secret club; then somebody noticed and I was kicked out.

  I looked over at Eva. She had turned her back. No more hey girl this or hey girl that, I’m going to teach you how to look passable and diagram sentences. She was looking out the front window.

  “When’s she getting picked up?” She said it without turning around.

  Zenie was still working on me. She’d gone back in the bathroom and now she had a washing cloth, wet and hot. “Directly,” she said without moving her mouth and started washing me down. The washcloth smelled like buttermilk. It had gone sour, and it made my face burn.

  When she finished with me, I looked around at them. Miss Josephine was staring off into space as if nobody but her was in the room; Eva was still planted at the window looking out. Zenie took the dirty washcloth and threw it into the tub and then walked slowly back through the living room and into the kitchen. I stared for a minute at a bright dot of sun on the gray linoleum floor, but nobody said a mumbling word. All of a sudden I remembered what Mama had told me about not saying colored.

  So, I thought, that’s it, that’s why Zenie and Eva and Miss Josephine were acting this way. But it was too late to say Negro; I beg your pardon, I know better, I meant to say Negro. When words splash out, they are gone forever. You can’t catch pieces of water in your hands and hold onto them. They run through your fingers and splatter where they will.

  Eva broke the silence. “Ride’s here.” She said it without turning around.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said real quiet, as if I thought Eva might be asleep in her pose at the window. She nodded her head but still didn’t turn around, so I headed out the door and down to the street where Mama waited, flicking ashes from her cigarette out the car window. My face still stung.

  When I went around and opened the car door, there was a cake sitting on the front seat beside my mother.

  “Be careful with that,” Mama said as I picked it up and sat down with it on my lap.

  The cake was white and looked naked. It had no icing and only one layer. “Who’s it for?” I couldn’t imagine who would have ordered it.

  “Gertrude. She’s diabetic, so I made it with a little juice.” Mama stuck her cig in her mouth and put the car in gear. Gertrude lived a couple of blocks over from Zenie. As usual, Mama was intent on breaking Daddy’s rule about Shake Rag. He said there was a difference between picking up somebody or something in Shake Rag and visiting up there. The first thing was Conducting Business, the second Socializing, which Daddy had forbidden Mama to do. He himself was up in Shake Rag all the time collecting his policy money door to door, and I was up there almost every day with Zenie, but all of that was Business. Over the years Mama had visited this one and that one with her cakes. She didn’t tell Daddy, and neither did I.

  Gertrude worked for Mimi as an extra server when she had the Saturday Matinee Club. Mimi was civic minded, and all of her clubs had civic duties except for the Saturday Matinee Club, where the ladies ate chicken-salad sandwiches and tomato aspic at card tables covered in white linen tablecloths and then played bridge all afternoon. Gertrude got dressed up and wore a lace apron when she came to work for Mimi’s special occasions. Zenie didn’t care for Gertrude’s fancy ways. “What that woman think we running here, a plantation?” she’d say. When Gertrude would show up in her nice black dress and tie up her apron with a flourish, Zenie’s already long thin lips would get longer and thinner so that they looked like they were reaching for her ears.

  The real problem was that Zenie didn’t like Gertrude from church. Zenie and Gertrude were both Heroines of Jericho at Saint John the Baptist, but they’d had a falling out over the communion glasses. Who was supposed to wash them. Zenie said Gertrude had agreed to do it for Sunday the fifth of March but hadn’t done it and had blamed it all on Zenie, telling everybody that she, Zenie, was supposed to have done it for that Sunday, which was most definitely not true. It was Gertrude’s turn to wash, not hers. The worst part of it was that nobody discovered the glasses were still dirty until the deacons were passing the trays and then the preacher held one up to the light in front of God and everybody and said Humph. Then people started really looking at them and saw they had purple streaks on the rims from the last month’s grape juice and red and pink from the ladies’ lipstick. Of course they drank from them. What could they do? Turn down Jesus’s blood because of germs?

  “Prissy,” Zenie would hiss behind Gertrude’s back. I’d be helping the two of them, Zenie filling the plates in the kitchen and Gertrude going back and forth taking them into the living room. Gertrude had a nice shape and her waistline showed to advantage in the apron. She’d sashay in and out to get the plates and serve them to the ladies at the four card tables in the living room. Every time Gertrude would go out of the kitchen with her plates, Zenie would make a noise in her throat like she was getting ready to upchuck, then mince her six-foot self around the kitchen like a poodle carrying an imaginary plate, and I would fall out laughing.

  But Gertrude’s sashaying days were over. A week ago the doctors had to cut off her left foot on account of the sugar sickness and trying to work when her toes were crusting over with sores. It was a surprising case in someone so young. Mama was bringing a special plain white cake to Gertrude that had been sweetened with fruit juice and had no icing, which was the only kind of cake Gertrude could eat and only a little bit at a time. She’d also brought Gertrude some old magazines, some clematis from our front porch wrapped in a wet napkin, and a Sears and Roebuck catalog. Gertrude loved glamour magazines. Her little living room was stacked all around with old magazines that leaned here and there with ladies on the covers doing this or that in frisky dresses, their hairdos gleaming like golden halos.

  First off Gertrude launched into telling us how her foot had looked like a burnt-out stump before it got taken off. Right then I started seeing flecks of cotton before my eyes and Mama took one look at me and shoved my head between my legs so I wouldn’t pass out or upchuck. My usually pinkish Mama looked very white herself especially sitting next to Gertrude, who was on the darker side and looked even more so in her white nightgown and the white gauze dressing wrapped around her ankle where her foot had been. The gauze had yellow spots sprinkled across it like the lemon zest Mama put on the tops of her white iced lemon cakes. Mama reached quickly into her purse and pulled out her Japanese folding fan and started fanning herself hard while she pushed up her bangs to wipe the sweat. They stood straight up and out, like those crab pinchers you see on big greenish beetles who are aggravated and ready to fight. Then she remembered me and started fanning me too. Gertrude had a round fan made out of palmetto grass, and she was working it hard.

  It was horribly hot. Gertrude had two windows in her front room, but they were both closed and you could tell they were sealed shut forever with paint globbed around the cracks. The air was so still in the room you felt that the words coming out of your mouth were making a breeze. Zenie had been over there that morning cleaning and the place smelled like Pine Sol. I was betting that Zenie was feeling pretty bad about her ugliness to poor Gertrude and was trying to make amends.

  “It’s close in here,” Gertrude said. “Going to be a hot summer.” She was stretched out on the couch, her foot on a pillow. Her crutches were propped up beside her. This Gertrude was a different person from the woman in the lace apron.

  “It’s awfully hot in here.
If it’s like this in May, you’re going to roast the rest of the summer.” Mama started fanning Gertrude too. “Do you have an electric fan, Gertrude? Anything to cool you off?”

  “Can’t say as I do. Till this happened, I was working this time of the day, so I didn’t need one. That’s all right. Heat don’t bother me too bad.”

  “Well, I’m going to try to find you one. A fan. I’ll call the church and see if anybody has one they’re not using.” Mama sounded determined.

  “Don’t worry yourself about it.” Gertrude looked over at her bottle collection on the windowsill. The little bottles were all shades of blue glass and whistle clean so the late afternoon sun sliced through them, spattering blue over the bare floor like little pieces of sky had fallen into the room. “Look how pretty my bottles look there in the sun. Well now. You tell your mama I’m sure sorry I can’t come back to work for her.”

  Mama rose. This was her cue and she was grateful for it, plus I could tell she felt bad that Mimi wasn’t there visiting with Gertrude too. Mimi had a good heart but a weak stomach; she didn’t visit Uncle Nash, her own brother, in the VA hospital until his war wounds healed. “I’ll tell her, and I’ll be back with that fan.” Mama looked hard at me. I scrambled up, dim-witted from the heat.

  Gertrude shifted her leg on the couch and smiled politely. “No, don’t bother nobody about that fan. Johnny down the street is coming up tomorrow to put me in a screen door. If that doesn’t cool me off, I’ll order a fan from Sears.”

  When we got into the car, Mama sat behind the wheel breathing hard. “Lord, that place is an oven,” she said. I could tell she was scheming. When Mama was trying to figure out a scheme, she would rub the tip of her nose and run her finger down over her mouth to her chin. Then it would go right back up to the nose. After a bit of rubbing, she started the car, the tip of her nose now flaming up against her still pale face. She didn’t say anything else, just drove straight over to Mimi’s and parked in front under the big oak tree that had uprooted the curb and the sidewalk it grew between.