A Matter of Souls

Text copyright © 2014 by Denise Lewis Patrick.

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Cover and interior photographs © Tsuneaki Hiramatsu (fireflies); © Elliot Elliot/Getty
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Patrick, Denise Lewis.

A matter of souls / Denise Lewis Patrick.

pages cm

Summary: A series of vignettes reveal life in the Deep South for African

Americans as they experience discrimination in a doctor's office, lynching, and other forms of oppression, especially during the 1960s.

ISBN 978–0–7613–9280–4 (trade hard cover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978–1–4677–2402–9 (eBook)

[1. Race relations—Fiction. 2. African Americans—Southern States—Fiction.

3. Southern States—History—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.P2747Mat 2014

[Fic]—dc23

2013017597

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 – BP – 12/31/13
eISBN: 978-1-4677-2402-9 (pdf)
eISBN: 978-1-4677-3985-6 (ePub)
eISBN: 978-1-4677-3986-3 (mobi)

For My Father

The Colored Waiting Room

Night Searching

Colorstruck

Hanging Out His Shingle

The Season To Be Jolly

Son's Story

The Time Pamela Ann Got Kicked Out of Catholic School

A Matter of Souls

Acknowledgments

E
lsie Timmons had gone through the wrong door. Maybe it was a mistake. All she knew was that her mama, Luther Mae, was hollering at the top of her lungs for her to “Bring her womanish behind back, right now!”

In fact, there didn't seem to be any other sounds at all on that late summer day in front of Dr. Baker's neat brick office building. Just the strange, trumpeting tone of Luther Mae Timmons's words.

“Girl, I
said
come back here!” Elsie had to turn around. Her mama's voice sounded shaky, that way it always did when Papa brought her a tiny sack of peppermints along with his paycheck, or when that big black phone would ring and she'd sit down hard, because somebody—some cousin or aunt, or uncle's first wife—had died.

Elsie had to shade her eyes; fall hadn't set in deep enough yet to dull the brightness of the Southern sun. As
the automatic glass door began to shut, Elsie could see her mother out there, slapping her thigh in frustration … no, it was fear! The navy pleats fanned in and out at each strike, and Elsie imagined the nasty red welts that must be rising on her mother's Carnation-milk skin. Elsie put her brown hand on the door handle. She was torn, and just a little bit worried.

But before she eased her mother's mind, before she let herself go back to being the “sweet, levelheaded child” that everybody at Galilee Baptist said she was, she had to
see
.

Her heart fell, and her face must have fallen a little, too. The White waiting room was near about empty, with only a very skinny man in a corner chair. He was staring at a piece of paper that he held in his hands. Elsie guessed that he must be hard of hearing, or shortsighted, or both—because he didn't even flinch when she stepped in. She glanced around, looking for something—she didn't know what. There were rows of armchairs; there was a potted plant; and a low coffee table held an arrangement of magazines. The sliding, frosted glass office window was closed.

Elsie's civil rights experiment had failed. Her mother was the only one worked up sufficiently—and Elsie felt sorry for that.

She banged the door open and stepped back out into the heat.

“Oh Lord, girl! What'd they say? You gonna give me a heart attack one day. You all right? 'Cause—”

“Mama.” Elsie allowed herself to be womanhandled, every bone and joint checked, as if she'd just come back from the war. Her brother was there, there in Vietnam, and he would get the same when he came back, didn't matter that he was twenty-two. If he came back.

“Mama, there wasn't nobody in there. I'm fine.”

Luther Mae sighed and straightened herself. Suddenly her backbone was like a board, and the way she held her head, the flush on her cheeks looked exactly like a hint of red rouge. The oil on her chocolate-brown waves glistened, and Elsie was reminded of a movie star in one of the double features at the matinee.

Her mama was that beautiful. Elsie felt double bad for what she had done.

“Now come on around to the Colored waiting room and stop all this crazy business,” Luther Mae huffed. She had regained her proper church-lady self. Shifting her worn old pocketbook on her arm, she grabbed Elsie's hand and marched up to the weather-beaten wood door.

Elsie couldn't help rolling her eyes up to the black letters standing out on the white metal sign nailed over the door.
COLORED ONLY
, it shouted without making any noise at all. It couldn't fade, it couldn't fall—couldn't be worn away by wind or rain. That sign would last until hell froze over, Elsie thought.

“How y'all do?” Luther Mae greeted everybody, but nobody in particular, as they walked inside.

The Colored waiting room was thick with bodies and
voices and heat so heavy that the air felt damp. A beat-up old fan chugged around and around, using its last gasps to try to make a difference. Elsie was almost hypnotized by its uselessness, staring with her mouth open as Luther Mae kept her march up to the frosted glass window.

She rapped on it sharply. Nobody came. Nobody called out “Just a minute, please” or even “Hold on, I'm coming!”

Luther Mae full-out knocked the second time. Her knuckles were hard; they were loud. The frosted glass shook, but nobody came.

Elsie looked upside her mother's head and saw the sweat in little tiny beads around her hairline; she had gotten a press and curl only yesterday. The back of Luther Mae's neck was creeping up red, and Elsie was suddenly mortified at holding up everything so that she could try her little game at the front door.

This wasn't even her own doctor's appointment. It was Luther Mae who'd been having “spells,” fainting over her sewing machine at the tailor's shop where she worked. And once at the Piggly Wiggly when Elsie was pushing the cart on another aisle. Papa had tried to say she might be expecting another baby, but even Elsie knew that her Mama was not hoping for that.