Apron Strings (10 page)

“I’m sorry you feel that way.” The icy tone in my mother’s voice made me flinch. Whoever she was talking to had done something bad; something really bad.

“I will not! I wouldn’t think of it. Frankly, Alice, I am surprised at this. I would have thought as president of the League of Women Voters you would have a different view.” There was a long silence. “It most certainly is appropriate—my children will play—excuse me—as I was saying before…”

Hearing “my children” catapulted me out of the chaise and up against the screen door, holding my breath. What had we done? It must be our back next door neighbor, Alice Giles. I racked my brain trying to think of what we might have done to cause my mother and Mrs. Giles to have a fight.

“I’m sorry that you feel that way. Good day.” I was so caught up in trying to figure out what had happened and who had done it that when my mother opened the backdoor I was still standing up against the screen door. “Sallee, were you eavesdropping?”

“No, ma’am, I wasn’t eardropping.”

“Eavesdropping, not eardropping,” she corrected. “I’ve told you before that it is impolite to listen to other people’s conversations. I mean it. Don’t let me catch you doing it again.”

I assured her that she wouldn’t and I meant it. I made a mental note to get better at sneaking around. I sure wasn’t going to give up listening. It was the one of the few ways I could find anything out.

“Was that Mrs. Giles you were talking to?” I asked, surprised at my boldness. My mother nodded that it was. “Did we do sumpin’ wrong?”

“The word is ‘something.’ You say ‘something.’” She pressed her tongue up against her top front teeth, emphasizing the “th” sound.

“Did we do something wrong?”

“No,” was all the answer I got. “What did I just tell you, Miss? Go out, play, and stop listening at the door, young lady.”

Pushing wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I made it look like I was doing as I was told and skipped off to find Gordy, Early, and Helen. The three of them were playing on the swing set not far from the wall that separated our house from the Giles’s. Having spied them, I had to jump up and down waving frantically to get their attention. I didn’t want to make noise in case Mrs. Giles was lurking about. I indicated with a big wide sweep of my arm that they need to come quickly. All three jumped off the swings like paratroopers and ran toward me with Lance trotting behind them. I filled them in as we carefully made our way toward the kitchen porch. I led the charge until I remembered that I had just promised myself to get better at sneaking around, so I fell behind and let
the others lead the way. We figured that my mother would be talking to Ethel as she always did when someone upset her. We were right.

An enormous bush that Ethel used as a source for switches was right up against the house by the kitchen porch. Our house had an English basement, making the kitchen porch almost an entire story off the ground. The bush, with its big branches, not only offered us cover, but also made it possible to be within easy earshot of any conversations taking place in the kitchen. Tiny, pearl-shaped blossoms in the spring gave rise to the shrub’s name, the pearl bush. We sat in our pearl bush and listened as my mother reacted to the conversation she had with our neighbor.

“I cannot believe the gall of that woman. How dare she presume to tell me whom my children may or may not play with!”

We all looked at each other in amazement.

“Who are we playing with?” Gordy asked, his brows furrowed in confusion.

“Shhhh, you’re gonna get me in trouble,” I said.

“Ethel, I just do not understand what has gotten into people,” my mother’s voice wafted through the kitchen window.

“Thas all right, Miz Ginny, I jus’ won’ bring ‘im no mo’.”

“Of course you will. No busybody do-gooder is going to tell me what’s right or wrong. You and I both know she is wrong, and that is all there is to it. Lil’ Early is more than welcome to come play with the children.”

The only sound in the pearl bush was the buzzing of bees as we—four wide-eyed children—collectively held our breaths and stared at each other.

Staying home from school when I was sick had the added bonus of giving me an entire day with Ethel. I made up all kinds of ailments. After shattering a thermometer on a light bulb, fevers were no longer a plausible symptom. I relied heavily on headaches until I found stomachaches to be more effective; they were harder to confirm. On any given morning, I writhed around in bed complaining of phantom pains in my gut. After I convinced my mother that I was ill, I would lie in bed listening for the quiet that settled on the house after everyone left. It was my first
sign that it was safe to leave my bed. If my mother’s car were still in the drive, I had to wait until I heard Ethel singing before I could open my door. The strains of “Rock of Ages” had miraculous restorative powers. My appetite returned; my pale face brightened. I was even able to drag myself to the kitchen where I would instantly be fully healed and eager to chat.

“I knew you was gon’ be down here soon,” she chuckled. “But if’n you keep it up, ya gonna be behind in school. Ain’t a good idea to miss too much, Miz So-sick.”

“School’s dumb. I’m not gonna miss anything. We do the same thing all the time anyway. Didn’t you think school was dumb when you went?” I asked. I pulled out my chair and slumped into it. Ethel turned away from the big kitchen sink while wiping the frying pan with an oil-soaked rag. As the toast popped out of the toaster, she put the pan down on the stove.

“Nope, I loved school. I only went ‘til I was ‘bout old as Gordy is. Den I went to work in the boardin’ house.”

“You musta been really smart to be able to get a job when you was as old as Gordy. He couldn’t get a job if his life depended on it,” I said as I heaped strawberry jam on the buttered toast Ethel had handed me.

“No honey, it wasn’t bout bein’ smart. It was ‘bout bein’ able to eat. I had to go to work. Momma had too many mouths to feed for me to stay in school. You is lucky an’ you should ‘preciate that you can goes to school; not have ta work hard.” She scraped scrambled eggs onto my plate and returned to the sink to wash the pan.

“Did you make a lot of money?”

“I made a nickel a day washin’ dishes and I was glad to git it, too.”

I pushed the eggs around my plate half wishing I had gone to school. The tooth fairy had recently come and left me twice Ethel’s boarding house wages for doing nothing more than pushing out a baby tooth.

“Did all your friends work, too?”

“The onliest friends I had was my sisters. We didn’t have time back then to be makin’ friends. We worked from morning ‘til night most ev’ry day.” She was standing in the middle of the kitchen with her hands on her hips.

“Did you have a better job than they did? I’d be proud of myself if I had a job. I bet Alberta wished she could have worked at the boarding house like you. I know if I had a job Gordy would wish he could have one just like mine. Were they jealous of you?”

“Honey, you ain’t got no notion of what it was like to be po’. Havin’ a job and working hard ain’t nothin’ you know nothin’ about. Ya can’t help it; it was jest the way you was born. I was proud that I could help my mama put food on the table. And even then there was folks who had less than we did, and some of them was fools that didn’t do nothin’ all the livelong day. Mama would give up food to help those no-accounts. Used to burn me up good.”

“Yeah, I know. There’s a girl at school who wears hand-me-downs from her cousin and her shoes have holes in them. She’s not very nice. My friend Faye said she was a no-account. I don’t like her either.” I was trying to understand what Ethel was talking about and to connect any way I could. If there was one thing I knew, it was that snobbery was a linchpin of our particular brand of southern culture. You were nobody if you weren’t better than somebody.

Ethel clucked disapprovingly. “Honey, that ain’t no reason ta not like somebody, ‘em not being as well-off as you.”

I’d stepped in it again, so I sought to defend myself with the third highest authority I could reference, after Ethel and my father. “But Mama says all the time that the Dabneys next door are not our kind of people. That I shouldn’t go over there. I should leave them alone. She even pretends sometimes she doesn’t hear Mr. Dabney call hello. Isn’t it because they don’t have as much money as we do? And their clothes are old? Isn’t that why you didn’t like those fools that Bertha gave food to?”

“No darlin’, that ain’t why. It was cuz they didn’t do nothin’ to help themselves that I didn’t like ‘em.”

I sighed, frustrated with the injustice of Ethel correcting me. Truth was, Ethel was every bit as much of a snob as was my mother. I knew she didn’t like Mr. Dabney anymore than my mother did and in one of our talks, I had asked Ethel about my uncle’s houseman. “Why does Leon have gold teeth with little diamond sparkles?”

“‘Cuz he low-count people, and they don’ know nothin’ ‘bout nothin’,” she’d sniffed. Her lip had curled slightly, the way it always did when my Uncle Gordon’s name was mentioned. I got the impression she not only didn’t approve of Leon, but that she didn’t approve of my uncle either—just like with Mr. Dabney she never said so in words. One of the things I learned early on was that people didn’t always say everything they thought, and they didn’t mean everything they said. Even when Uncle Gordon would come into the kitchen after a party or dinner and give Ethel some money folded over a couple of times like he always did, she had that look. She would smile and say, “Thank ya, Mista Gordon,” but I could tell she didn’t like him.

“You don’t think much of Uncle Gordon, do ya?” I asked.

Ethel picked up a brown bag, poured something out of it into her usual splatterware mug, and took a big drink. “Why on earth would you axe such a thang?” she said.

“Cuz you look at Uncle Gordy the same way Mama looks at Mr. Dabney, and I know she doesn’t think much of him.”

“No darlin’…you know, you ask mo’ questions than a school full o’ chil’ren. Lord have mercy! Now, you go on. I got work to do and I gotta get it done befo’ yo mama get back.”

Chapter 7

Ethel
1929

T
hat day in Miz Ginny’s bedroom I did my level best not to answer her directly. I got up and pulled the dust cloth from outta my apron string and made like I was dustin’ as I stole a peek out the window ever now and again. I ain’t no storyteller, and for the life of me I couldn’ come up with no answer that would satisfy both Mama and Miz Ginny.

“You done made me promise not to tell nobody what I saw today. Well, I’m gonna keep that promise, but you got to do the same fo’ me. I’m gonna tell you what’s goin’ on, but ya gotta promise me to stay right chere afta I do. Ya promise?”

Miz Ginny nodded yes. Before I could get the word “accident” out, she had thrown open the do’ and was headin’ down the stairs at a gallop. I did the best I could to keep up—no mean trick, considerin’ how much longer her legs was than mine.

“Miz Ginny, ya promised,” I wailed, breathin’ hard. The screen door bounced on the hard rubber ball that Mista Gus had Wilson put on it not two weeks ago to keep the door from making a racket when it was let loose. That thud made a racket in my head as I imagined the beating I was gonna get from Mama when she found out what I had done. “Miz Ginny, wait,” I called after her. She was runnin’ lickety-split down the drive almost out of sight. I followed, puffin’ like an old steam engine.

Around the bend where the river ran close to the drive they was a host of people and trucks, a tractor, a team of horses, and another of mules.
The yellin’ and directin’ made an awful din. CL was smack in the middle of the goin’s on, laughin’ and jokin’ like he was at a hootenanny—actin’ a fool. I spied Mama and Miz Bess over to the side wringin’ their hands and lookin’ every which way at once. One would be holdin’ the other up and then be shiftin’ so I couldn’t tell who was holdin’ who. Miz Ginny ran right up into the fray and almost got run over by a team of mules they’d hitched to the car tryin’ to pry it loose from around the tree. Over near CL I could see a body lyin’ on the ground covered with somethin’—a blanket, I think. I heard that no-account say to nobody in particular, “One shiftless old nigger ain’t no loss.” Then he laughed like he thought it was the funniest thing he ever heard. When I got closer I could tell from his shoes it was Sam lyin’ under that blanket. Wilson was runnin’ every which way looking for all the world like a man who done lost his mind. He seed Miz Ginny, and then he looked right at me as much as to say, git this here girl out my way afore I run her down. He looked mad with grief and fear. Then I remembered what he said in the kitchen: that Cy and Sam both was in the car with Mista Gus.

I grabbed Miz Ginny by the arm and pulled with all I was worth to git her outta the middle of the mess. “Ya come with me,” I said, tryin’ to put as much steel in my voice as Mama could. “Git on outta de way, girl. You ain’t helpin’ nobody.” I believe if CL hadn’t seen her and commenced to makin’ his way over to us, I’d still be there pullin’ on her. As it was, I still halfway dragged her over to where our mamas was huddled, proppin’ each other up. It took most the afternoon afore they could git Mista Gus and Cy outta the car. We went back to the house when we heard they was gonna have to cut off Cy’s leg to get’m free. About supper time, six men brought Mista Gus through the front do’ and up the stairs to his room on a do’ someone done pulled off a shed and made it up like a stretcher. The tired lookin’ doctor trailed behind. All the men was covered in blood. I run up and down stairs I know a hundred times that night bringin’ bandages, towels, sheets, water, and soap, while Miz Bess directed the goin’s on like a field boss. Miz Pansy stayed with Miz Ginny in that very same room Miz Ginny and I had passed time in earlier. Finally, the sedative the doctor gave Miz Ginny took effect. Then Miz Pansy stepped and fetched as much as me. Mama was nowhere to be
seen, and I didn’t have the time to catch my breath, let alone ask where she was.