Fire in beulah, p.15
Fire in Beulah, page 15
A tapping came at the back door, and her heart jumped, and she heard her mother release a little jumpy sound—Oh!—and Willie shoved himself up against her, silent. What are we acting so scared for? What is it we afraid of? And yet she knew, because there was only one thing to cause such silent, quaking fear. She wanted to snuff the lantern, prayed for her trembling baby brother to stay hushed. The tapping came again, a light tick behind the cardboard covering the door window. Her mother started across the kitchen, and Graceful whispered loudly, “Mama! No!”
In the slight moment before her mother reached the door, Graceful passed from fear to resentment that Mama had snapped at her when she’d started to open the door and now was going on and performing that very act herself. Cleotha lifted a corner of the cardboard to peer out, then quickly slid back the iron bolt, turned the wood block, fiddled with the skeleton key in the slot below the knob. Graceful thought, I never saw any blackfolks’ house locked up such a way in my life.
Her mother cracked the door a bit before pulling it open wide enough to admit Delroy, who slipped in lean and quick. Mama slapped the bolt back in place. “They all right?”
“Hungry.” Delroy sat heavily in a cane chair at the table.
“I’ll send something out in a minute. Got to get you fed first, you got to have some rest.”
“I’m not tired,” he said; indeed, his hands were restless at the table, fiddling with the saltcellar and the butter crock, his long ashy fingers touching the tin base of the lantern, now and again reaching out to flick at a speck on the dingy oilcloth. But his shoulders slumped, and his head dipped toward the table as his sister thumped and clanged softly over by the stove.
“You tired all right.” Cleotha set a bowl of turnip greens in front of him. “Eat now.”
Delroy fished up a chunk of fatback with two fingers (and Graceful thought, How come she don’t tell him to wash his hands?), wolfed it in one bite, and had nearly finished the bowl before Cleotha put the cornbread and the hoppin’john on the table. “Y’all come eat,” she said, and William came and sat obediently, bent his head over the bowl she put in front of him. But Graceful knew she’d vomit if she had to eat anything in that sour, overheated atmosphere, though Mama’s hoppin’john was her favorite food on earth. What she got to lift the lid on that pot of greens for, she going to make us all puke. Her indignation at being treated as her mother’s child swelled, joined with a deep long-ago resentment, and she thought, This is no way to act. Why she got to act so mean every time somebody die? Her mind cried out: T.J.! The dark welling began, and she saw her brother in the hands of a white mob, white faces hooting with laughter as that one had laughed while he pushed her face into the pillow so she couldn’t scream, couldn’t breathe.… She felt herself begin to descend, the room going dark and turning, and the sour smell smothering her as she went down, but her mother’s arms came around her and lifted her.
“Delroy! Clear off that chair!”
Her mother’s shout came from a great distance, but the sound was sweet to her, and the strength of her mother’s arms around her was firm. The hard ridge of wood came against her legs, and she sank into the spongy cane bottom as the sickness swirled over her, made a great roaring in her ears, and the wretched nausea swelled; she opened her mouth, helpless against it, and vomited fish and putrid cheese all over the table. She heard Willie yelp, heard her sister Jewell cry out, “Mama! Help her!” and she thought, How did Jewell get here, too? before she began to sink toward the tabletop, because she needed to lie down, she needed to put her head down. Mama’s hands gripped her, held her face, and brushed it with a dry cloth; she could hear the voices going on, many voices talking, but she leaned the weight of her face against her mother, let her heavy, leaden head rest in her mother’s hands.
“Ooh, Mama, she making it stink worse!” LaVona’s high, prissy voice came from the front-room doorway. She stood barefoot, on tiptoe, her hair springing in a thousand directions, her little slanty eyes big as coins. Beside her, Jewell’s legs were long and thin beneath a white cotton gown. Graceful thought, My Lord, they getting tall. She tried to sit up, but her head was too heavy, and she leaned against Mama, felt her face wiped again with the dry cloth, and realized it was Mama’s apron; then the shame came on her, more sickening than the body sickness. “Oh, Mama, I’m sorry.” She pulled away. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Mama.” She wanted to stand up and go to the water basin, but her lap was soiled with vomit. She started to cry.
“Hush!” Mama’s hands were tender, but her voice was the harsh, exacting voice that stood no argument, no sniveling, no weakness of any kind, and instantly Graceful quit. She pulled away, picked up her maid’s skirt in both hands as she stood and walked shakily toward the dishpan on the counter. It was then she first saw the little faces behind her sisters, peeping out of the dark door to the front room.
She couldn’t tell how many of them there were, maybe half a dozen, little smudgy faces that blended with the darkness. Their eyes showed round and scared in alternating heights from way-little to pretty-big, and then a bitty one in a dirty gown came toddling out and went to Jewell and put its hands up to be lifted. Graceful couldn’t tell if it was a boychild or a girlchild; its unplaited hair was a puff of soft, radiant fuzz all over its head. The child said, “Hold you! Hold you!” and tugged at Jewell’s nightgown, and Jewell bent and picked the child up and lodged it on her skinny hip, and Graceful could see the knobs of breasts on her sister’s narrow chest. She felt suddenly that there was a whole world she didn’t know, that her family had gone on and had itself, its family life, which was the only life, without her. While she was working at the whitefolks’, her sister Jewell had got big enough to have titties and LaVona was more sassy-mouthed than ever and getting tall and Willie was grown up enough to ride the trolley, and Mama had changed again, had gone hard-edged and gruff again, and a whole batch of little children appeared here from nowhere. They all knew what she did not know, and her grief at not knowing was as hard as her fears about T.J., as ferocious, even, as her secret rage and shame, though the grief didn’t come in crushing waves, as that other, but held her as fog does, dense and thick. She cleaned herself with the sour dishrag while her mother wiped the table and barked orders. The girls tried to hustle the many strange children back to bed, but the little one on Jewell’s hip started bawling, and another one, a boy of maybe four or five, skipped under LaVona’s outstretched arm and came on into the kitchen, stood with his hands on his hips, and announced like a big man, “We hungry!”
Before Graceful had finished washing, the whole bunch was in the kitchen, and her mother was allowing what she’d never allowed in her own household, which was a mess of children eating from bowls and cups with their fingers, not at the table with a proper blessing and a clean napkin, but scattered all about the room like a bunch of slave children, eating standing up and squatting on the floor and just anyhow. There were seven of them, five boys and a girl, plus the little one on Jewell’s hip. Graceful watched them gobble their food like wormy pups, and her wonder was equally at her mother as at the youngsters, for Mama dipped up the hoppin’john and handed it around and did not say to the children, wash your hands, sit up to the table now, use a napkin, wipe yo nasty mouth. The children’s nightshirts were filthy with old dried food, they had blackeyed peas and rice smeared all over their little bug-eyed faces, and Graceful thought, They’re not ours, that’s why. She don’t care how they act.
“Hurry up,” Mama said, and it took a second for Graceful to realize her mother was talking to her. “Take this in yonder and put it on.” Mama shoved something at her, and in a minute Graceful found herself in the dark front room, where she could make out an old springy double bed in one corner, three or four pallets spread around. She dropped her smelly uniform on the floor and put on her mother’s good white going-to-church dress.
When she stepped back into the kitchen, her mother was setting a small wooden crate by the door.
“Mama!” LaVona’s thin voice squeaked from the corner. “You’re not gone let her th’ow up all over your church dress?” Cleotha ignored her, motioned Graceful to come over, pulled her close, and said, “What make you to get sick like that?”
“This whole place stinks, Mama.”
Her mother looked hard at her a minute. “You over it?”
Graceful nodded. Cleotha continued to peer at her in silence, then, finally, she said in a low whisper, “I want you to take this to them yonder in the storm cellar. Listen good at the door once you get outside, you got to make sure there’s nobody around. It’s out to the side of the barn.” Graceful looked down. In the crate were some tin cups, spoons, a cracked blue crockery bowl, her mother’s steel stockpot with the lid on, a greasy slab of something wrapped in newspaper.
“What barn, Mama? Storm cellar?”
“Barn’s right up behind the house, if you go out the door and walk straight you can’t help but go to it. Then feel your way easy around to the side—” Cleotha suddenly turned to the room, said to her brother nodding at the table, “Delroy, go lay down on the bed and sleep. You got to get some rest.”
“Mama, that’s where me and Jewell sleep—!” LaVona started, but Cleotha looked at her and the girl piped down, went back to feeding a little one with a big spoon. Jewell was trying to edge over to where Graceful stood, but Cleotha gave her a hard look, too, and the girl stopped, bent to wipe the face of the little mannish boy. “Go in and rest,” Cleotha said again. Delroy scraped his chair back from the table and went into the dark room.
“Somebody going to be sick all over somebody’s church dress,” LaVona muttered to the child she was feeding. “Somebody won’t have nothing nice to wear to church.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that, missy. You not going to be there anyhow, you’re going to be right in this house minding these children. Hurry up and finish with that mess and get these kids in the bed.”
LaVona cut her eyes at her mother, said nothing more.
“Mama, what happen …” But Graceful let the words fade away. She shut her lips tight, lifted her head, stood silent while her mother whispered at her to sneak quiet, quiet across that yard, listen hard at the door, because if somebody was outside watching they might follow her and find them.
“Find who, Mama?”
“Hush!” And then, in a barely voiced whisper, “T.J. and them.”
“Tee—? You mean T.J.—? Ow! Mama!”
Her mother’s pinch was brutal. “When you going to get some sense?” The whisper was fierce with exasperation. She suddenly began pulling Graceful by the arm into the front room. In the dark Cleotha whispered at her eldest daughter, her fingers tight on Graceful’s arm, her mouth close to the girl’s ear. “If there ever been a time in your life you need to quit asking questions, this black morning right now is it. Hear me? I need you to pay some attention. Keep your mouth quiet and pay attention. T.J. and that trashy girl he got mixed up with and her mama are all out in the storm cellar, and now that’s the only time I’m going to say it. If the whitefolks find them, they bound to be lynched same as that girl’s brother last week.” Her whisper went harsher, lower. “They’re not the only ones in danger. If that mob come in here and find Delroy, they liable to take him. I don’t know but what they’d take you or me. We got to act calm. We got to act like we don’t know nothing but just we taking care of these children, we don’t know where their mama’s gone. Because Delroy got to sleep awhile, we got to let him get some rest. This is the most dangerous time, the most dangerous, and I need you to be your grown self and not some girl going to puke and pass out over smelling a little spilt sourmash. Not some girl going to open her loose lips and say what them in the next room don’t need to know. Your sisters too young to keep their face right if whitefolks ask them a question. But you’re not.” She paused, let her words sink in a moment, and when she continued her voice was softer. “I got to depend on you, Graceful. You my grown girl I got to depend on. How come you didn’t come home the minute Willie brung you that letter?”
“Mama, I didn’t know—”
“Nevermind. Hush. Listen. You got to carry that food quiet. I wouldn’t even send it, but they haven’t eat since yesterday, probably won’t get another chance till way up tomorrow evening. Now, listen. That cellar door face this way. Knock soft, three quick taps, then wait a little bit, then two more. All right? What’d I say?”
“Three quick taps, wait, then two more.”
“And go quiet.”
“Go quiet.”
Her mother’s mouth drew away, and Graceful felt the coarse palm on her forehead. “You’re still warm.”
“I’m all right, Mama.”
“Go on, then. Mind everything I said. And Graceful … be careful.”
When her mother let out her breath there was again the ragged, dry, unspent sob in it. Graceful, already moving toward the lit kitchen, heard it, and something turned over in her, like a stone plate turned upside down.
Mama’s white dress flowed around her, too big and floating, lifting its hem in the nightbreeze. The young moon was hardly a fingernail paring, but the white dress on the crowblack land took the little light and shimmered it back to the night. The crate was heavy in her arms, thumped against her thigh. Twice Graceful paused to listen, but all she heard was the wind soughing, a million night crickets singing, the alien sound of her own breath. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she gazed out across the shadowed land, imagining a white mob hidden in the folds, secreted in the moonshade below the clumps of cedars.
She saw the lump of hill to the side of the barn and made her way toward it, set the crate down. Three soft taps on the tin-and-wood door set into the mound, pause, two more. Silence. She bent over and hoisted the door with both hands, laid it open. The sour smell poured out through the opening, along with the thick odor of mildew, the dank sweet scent of dirt. Graceful waited almost politely, as if at a stranger’s front door. “T.J.?” she whispered. “It’s me.” The adjustment her eyes had made to the moonlight was no good now: the rectangle in the mound of earth was ink black, impenetrable. “T.J.? It’s Graceful. I got some food here for y’all but I ain’t comin—”
“Where at?” Her brother’s voice came from below, and she could have wept for gladness, though the rasp in T.J.’s throat was uglier even than Mama’s.
“Here,” and she lifted the crate down toward the opening. “Easy, it’s heavy.” She felt the weight relieved from her.
“In or out, but shut that door!”
She did not want to descend to that hole in the earth, but neither did she want to go back to the reeking kitchen and her mother’s hard face and closed mouth. She knew Mama was not going to tell her what she wanted to know. She felt her way onto the top step, stood breathing deeply of the night air.
“Shut the door!”
Graceful reached over for the cumbersome door, pulled it up from the mounded earth in an arc, lowering it over her head as she went down into a dark beyond any darkness. She heard scrabbling sounds below, like rats, a few soft murmured words, the rushed, gulping sounds of eating. Graceful stood as near the top of the ladder as her height would allow, clinging to a dank wooden slat.
“You coming down or you just going to hang there?”
How could he see her in such pitch? And then she realized T.J. was not seeing her but sensing her, as a blind man does.
“Ain’t y’all got any light down there?”
“Not at night. Leaks around the door. It’s nasty down here, Graceful, why don’t you go on back to the house?” She heard more hushed whispering.
“I’m coming down.” Slowly she felt her way down the ladder, stood at the foot of it. The dark seemed not an absence but a presence, solid, odoriferous. The rank smell must be sourmash, like Mama said. Her brother’s voice came from the back, very low, but distinct. “Delroy get some rest?”
“He’s sleeping right now.”
T.J. didn’t speak again, but she could sense his satisfaction with the answer. Suddenly it clicked into place that Delroy was to carry her brother away from here in the truck; that was the purpose of the tarps in the back, why everybody was so worried about the state of Uncle Delroy’s rest. Before she thought, she said, “Where’s he going to take you?”
“You don’t need to know that. Mama don’t need to know.”
“Why, T.J.? How come the whitefolks looking for you?”
“Hush!” The small, foul space was quiet a long time. She heard the soft scrabbling sounds come toward her across the dirt floor. T.J. whispered close beside her, “It’s better you don’t know nothing.”
She was silent. After a long while, she said, “You’re my brother, T.J.”
T.J. let out a slow breath of air, and when he spoke his voice was so low she had to strain to hear him. “On account of what I seen.”
“What was it?”
“You don’t need to know that either. It’s for your own good, Graceful. What you don’t know, can’t nobody make you tell.”
“They don’t care what a nigger see. It’s not something you seen. Why they named you, T.J.? What they name you for?”
“I told you to hush.”
“Everybody’s been telling me to hush. Everybody treating me like I’m four years old, like I ain’t got good sense.”
“Everybody who?”
“Mama. You and Mama. You’re my brother, T.J.! Tell me what it is.”
“I didn’t do nothing. I tried to save my friend’s life. Nothing.” He was silent awhile, and then he sighed slightly, as if he were tired of the whole subject. “I didn’t set out to kill no whiteman. It just happen.”
