Betsey Brown (12 page)

She was a secret now, lying in the dirt and dry leaves out of sight of Mr. Jeff's gardening tools. That man had a way about him. If there was an empty plot of ground, he'd sure 'nough find something to plant in it. But Betsey'd planted herself in the shadow of her tree and the fragrance of earth to conjure some way back at the white folks which didn't have one iota of the ways of the Lord in it. She wasn't certain she was making a bargain with Satan, but even if she did, white folks did it all the time. Come hell or high water, Betsey was gonna do em up right, least in her neighborhood.

Everybody'd gone off to swim at the Y. Friday was the day they cleaned the pool, that's how come the colored could swim on Fridays. Betsey'd missed that cause she got home from the white school too late to take the carpool of colored children over there.

The street was vacant. Like a big old movie set. Nothing. Nobody to do a thing with. What could she do alone? Better
yet, what could she do alone that could exclude the white folks, who were nowhere to be seen except in her wounds and aches of memories. Betsey decided to play hop-scotch, but she laid the hop-scotch pattern out with enough room to write “For Colored Only,” “Crackers and Dogs Not Allowed,” “Peckerwoods Got No Welcome Here,” “Guineas Go Home.” Betsey's hop-scotch was something to behold. Chalk never seemed so powerful as when it messed with white folks.

Betsey jumped all over her great design. She danced on the “No Whites” till it smudged beyond recognition. Then she wrote it over again till she was so tired she went into the house to take a nap.

The neighborhood was outraged. How in an era of desegregation and reconciliation of the races could such an ugly, hateful hop-scotch game appear on their street. Not one of the Negro families on the block admitted to having any hostile feelings toward white folks. Not a single one. Including the Browns, who were as astonished as the Blackburns and the Williamses that a prejudiced soul lived among them. Betsey volunteered to rid the street of the vile creation with a hose from round back of her house. There was no need to contaminate the minds of the young ones a moment longer. With a swoosh of water there'd be not one more unpleasantry about white folks visible on the block. But Betsey Brown had had her day, when she was in control.

But things were getting out of control for Jane and Greer. The melody of their first years together was wearing thin. Good help was hard to find. Good loving was hard to nurture, with the whole world going topsy-turvy round about you. Lean his kisses were, short her hugs. The children scrambled into their bed each morning with some new dilemma, or just a wet kiss
from the wrong side of the bed. Jane took refuge in decks of cards she collected and hoarded from whoever was learning their numbers. Queens, kings, jacks, hearts, spades, diamonds, her other reality. Concentrated, ordered and private. Now when Jane was in college, she'd laughed at the girls whiling their days away in pinocle, bridge, or whist. The drama of Bernhart, Holiday, and Home held too much for her then. Yet now that was so far away, solitaire was her forte.

“Since when do you have time to go play cards at the Alley Cat Club?” Greer asked one night, while undressing.

“Since you went away . . . ,” Jane sang sarcastically.

“You being funny or something?”

“I didn't know you had time to think about what I was doing with my leisure time. What little of it I've got.”

“At the Alley Cat Club, there's only so much you can do.”

“A club is a suit in a deck of cards.”

Greer lay next to Jane on their bed, being sure not to disturb the game she'd been playing so intently. “Is that your way of calling a spade a spade?”

“Might be.” Jane rolled over to put her diaphragm in. She didn't really know why she bothered. It hadn't helped before.

“You don't need to do all that,” Greer said.

“Oh no? You know what we're in store for if I don't, don't you? There's awready four of em. Don't be a fool and make it five. I'll be just a second.”

“I'm going to learn how to play cards, so I could see you sometimes.” Greer spilled the deck marked with little forget-me-nots at the edge of the bed.

“I said I'd be right back, and you know I only play solitaire.”

The house was bathed in Bessie Smith from a station
Betsey'd found on the radio downstairs. Betsey was adorning herself with the curtains and some feathers, stalking the front room like a teenaged Shirley Temple who was colored to begin with.

“Betsey, turn that mess off and go to bed,” Jane hollered down the halls. If it wasn't for Greer these children would have some sense. All that nasty colored music.

“Betsey, turn that mess off, do you hear me.”

Bessie Smith went down one decibel. Jane let it pass and fell into Greer's arms.

“You really should come home more often.”

They didn't bother to turn the lights out. The lights never went out at the Savoy or Birdland. Her skirts would twirl up toward the lights, the trumpets, and Cab Calloway's chants. All this was coming back to Jane, why she loved her husband and where they'd courted.

Downstairs Vida stole a lost moment for herself in the quiet of the parlor where she kept her photos of Frank and her children in their wedding gowns and graduation garb. The music Jane and Greer were moving to was inaudible to Vida, but the blues Betsey'd turned up again was athrilling Vida's china bones. She took the picture of Frank in his best suit off the wall and danced a strange little dance of “I love you, you scoundrel, you love of my life.” She remembered, giggling a bit, that once she'd gone to a roadhouse and danced on a dime, somewhere near Savannah.

“Oh that Frank of mine!” fell from her lips, made her smile. “Now, I wasn't there on Sundays, hardly ever on a Monday, but I could get most every man to smile, if I did a Charleston for a while.” Vida pulled up her nightie and twitched her thin legs this way and that. “I wonder was it like this?” she asked herself,
“Or more like this?” Vida slipped her hips to the east and then to the west. “Oh no, I couldn't have been so bawdy, not nearly so naughty.” Vida let herself down in an easy chair by the window where she watched her Frank come up the front stairs of her father's house. “I wonder if Vida is receiving company tonight?” Between the Bible and her man's photograph Vida drifted to a land of glory smitten with ragtime, her other times.

Betsey was in her own time, practicing her dancing and proverbs: the Bible and a little dance were a girl's way to salvation, if you counted a good man as salvation, which Betsey did. Talking to herself had never bothered Betsey at all. Why Tina Turner even said, “There Is Something on My Mind,” and there was always something on Betsey's mind.

Etta James crooned something low and nasty in the background. Betsey's little backside went everywhichaway trying to keep in the correct ambiance. “What am I 'sposed to do? Be deaf, dumb, and blind? A girl's gotta practice her dancin, the fast as well as the slow kind. Be up on her Bible and the ways of the Negroes from Akron Ohio all the way to Machito. I'm gettin too big to play tie-em up and skidaddle with Dale and Joe. I'm more of a heifer now than they'll ever know.”

Betsey laughed out loud, remembering being the calf the ropers were to brand by mixing spit and dirt on their hands and rubbing it on the cheek of the heifer. Pretty soon, as they got older, the cheek wasn't anywhere near her lips, but closer to her thighs. Her mama liked a died, seein that husky Dale and the tallest Joe this side of Enright Street rubbing Betsey's behind. No, she was way too big for games like that now. She had to practice her steps, the way Mama and Daddy did when they went out dancing, or to a formal or a masquerade ball. She'd have to know which hand to hold out and which foot to
move 'fore the next, when to turn, if the pull to the left meant turn right or turn left or just stop till the next measure. A girl had to practice her dancing, which is exactly what Betsey Brown was in the process of doing when Jane's voice plummeted down the stairs once again.

“Betsey, I thought I told you to turn that mess off!”

As Jane's reprimand sailed down the stairs, it muffled the little feet of Sharon and Margot eager to tease Betsey and still getta chance to hear a little blues.

“Didn't you hear Mama say to turn that mess off,” Margot whispered, turning herself to the arm of Greer's favorite chair.

“Yeah, didn't you hear Mama say to cut that mess off,” Sharon giggled, doing the bop the wrong way.

“I have my reasons,” Betsey said and kept on with the intricacies of everything she could imagine a colored boy trying to have her do on a dance floor without ever once opening his mouth, which would mean she was a good dancer cause you don't have to talk to a good dancer, they just feel what the next step is and do it. That's what Betsey had on her mind and her body sashayed and flung itself cross the carpet over to the speaker, past Sharon's off-time little numbers, round Margot's awkward turns and turn again.

“Girl, you a niggah to your very soul.” Margot stopped, out of breath and envious. “I can't imagine what a child like you is even doing in this house.”

Sharon grabbed Margot's hand and said something Betsey couldn't hear, but surely had to do with stealing from Vida's cookie jar and messing with Betsey's mind. They ran off to the pantry together mimicking Jane. “Turn that mess off, Betsey. Betsey that niggah noise is disturbing my rest.”

Betsey stopped dead in her tracks. She'd had enough of all
of this. Every time she played music she was a niggah. If she mentioned Nasser, she was a communist. If she wanted to boycott her school, she was a rabble-rouser. If she wanted to eat at Howard Johnson's, she was giving whites more than was their due. No matter what she said or did, it wasn't right. In addition to the fact that she hadn't been kissed since Eugene Boyd came calling that first evening. It was plain as could be to anyone with good sense, with the head God put on her shoulders, that the only reasonable thing to do was run away. That was clear as day.

Betsey turned the music way down low and let the rhythm help her figure her future. Her life wasn't going to be another Nadinaola meets Duke Pomade affair. She was gonna be in the trenches for the race, she'd win the dance trophies, put the white folks in their place. She'd paint her nails and wax her bangs, she'd do everything the bad girls did. Oh, she was gonna run away and see what the truth of the matter was.

Now, what should she call herself for this great journey? Sojourner she was not. The lady was still too much alive. Susan B. Anthony was a white woman. But Cora, Cora was a calling name. Cora Sue Betsey Anne with a “e” Calhoun (to make sure they'd know she was colored) Brown. Cora Sue Betsey Anne Calhoun Brown.

“I'ma big girl now with ideas of my own. These crazy folks round here just won't leave me alone. ‘Turn that mess off, Betsey.' ‘Betsey you know you're tryin your best to be a niggah.' As if I had anything to do with that. That was God's will is what it was. How can you try to be what you awready are? Sometimes these folks just don't make no sense at all. ‘Betsey, you could do better than to let the whole world know you a niggah.'

“These crazy people just won't leave me alone and this is my
mama I'm talking bout, my daddy, my home. I've gotta find some place to be on my own, where I don't have to explain and where I'm never ashamed that I'm Miss Cora Sue Betsey Anne Calhoun Brown.”

For some reason hearin Chuck Jackson singing made Betsey wanta get married. This is, after she'd run away and made a career of her own, like her mama had and Madame C. J. Walker. Oh yes, Betsey Calhoun would be coming to the altar with something of her own to offer, but who was to be the groom?

When I get married I could be Mrs. Cora Sue Betsey Anne Calhoun Eisenhower. I could marry the President, or maybe even Duke Ellington. That would make me a Duchess. Duchess Cora Sue Betsey Anne Calhoun Ellington. If one of them died I could marry Bobby Jackson from the eighth grade, but he's so colored, even I recognize that. No, I'ma stick with Eisenhower or Ellington. Oh, but what about “Sugar” Ray Robinson? He's so handsome. He's so sharp. Mrs. Cora Sue Betsey Anne Calhoun Brown “Sugar” Robinson. Sounds good to me. I'd still have to have my own career, maybe a philosopher or an actress like Dandridge or Eartha. An intellectual like Mama should have married W.E.B. DuBois. I wonder why Mama didn't marry ol' W.E.B.? He wasn't half so dark as Daddy and to my knowledge he didn't play the drums every morning, either. But there's no telling what can get on a person's mind when they're in love. Mama must just love Daddy to death the way she be screaming at him sometimes. But I like my daddy too, I just can't marry him cause then what would Mama do? When I marry the President I shall call Eugene to be my escort cause “Ike” will have to go visit some troops about the colored and I'll have a big party for all the colored who live in Little
Rock, Arkansas, with barbeque and cannons and lotsa root beer, just for the colored.

I'm Miss Cora Sue Betsey Anne Calhoun Brown, soon to be married to a Negro man of renown. There's Cab Calloway. Machito. Mongo Santamaria. Tito Puente. Colonel Davis. Nasser. Nkrumah. James Brown. No, that won't do, cause I'd be Mrs. Brown-Brown. And what about Eugene Boyd? I'll elope, that's what. Marry him first and then I'll tell him about the President and all.

“Betsey, I thought I told you to turn off that mess!” Jane meant business this time.

“Daughter, there's no need to raise your voice this time of night,” Vida sighed from the parlor.

“Betsey's still downstairs, Mama. I saw her,” Sharon cried out.

“There's no need to tell on people just to be telling on them,” Greer responded matter-of-factly to Sharon's brilliant espionage.

Jane slithered underneath her husband's torso. “Nobody had to tell me anything. You've got Betsey thinking she's the queen of the blues, but I got news for you, buddy.”