Queen (97 page)

    her mouth water, and hated the ringing tones of the muffin man, announcing

    his wares from his cart.

"Muffins! Get your fine muffins here!"

    Two hungry black boys took him at his word, and one distracted the vendor's

    attention with shouts of injury, while his companion filched a handful of

    muffins. But the thief was spotted, and a hue and cry began. The boys tried

    to run, but

588 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

were collared by some soldiers. In the commotion, Queen, furtive as a tiny

sparrow, slipped forward, grabbed two muffins and hid them in her pocket.

Heart racing, she turned away, and bumped into a white man who was watching

the fuss. Terrified, thinking she had been caught, Queen began an em-

barrassed explanation, but the man simply smiled at her prettiness, tipped

his hat to her, and apologized for not looking where he was going. Queen

ran.

    Convinced that her guilt must be blazoned upon her for the world to see,

    she turned into the nearest alley, and stood in the dark for a moment,

    breathing heavily, astonished by her own audacity, and appalled that she

    had broken a sacred commandment. The pangs of hunger relieved her

    conscience, and she wolfed into one of the muffins there in the alley, and

    saved the other for her breakfast.

    As she settled in her uncomfortable cupboard that night, she considered her

    circumstances. She would not go back. She would not return to The Forks of

    Cypress and have Miss Lizzie gloat over her. She could not go on because

    there was nowhere to go, and anywhere else might be worse than where she

    was. And since things couldn't possibly get any worse here, they must get

    better. All she had to do was survive, and since survival required food,

    and the muffins were not sufficient on which to live, she had to go to the

    soup kitchen. Her experience with the white man in the street had revived

    her faith in the color of her skin, but the soup kitchen was a daunting

    prospect, for other than a criminal life, it was her last hope.

    Soup kitchens had been set up in many Southern cities and towns, by

    churches and charitable institutions, to help feed the many who had been

    made destitute by the war. Despite the equality of the races announced from

    Washington, they were ruthlessly segregated. Even the most benevolent

    charity took the view that distressed white gentlewomen would be even more

    distressed to eat at the same table as blacks, and many of the ex-slaves

    down on their luck would have been embarrassed to reveal their new poverty

    in front of their former Massas. The less charitable would not tolerate

    integration at any level. Queen, who had once been a slave, had gone to a

    black soup line, but men had jeered her, told her to get her white tail out

    of there and get to her own kind. Queen had

    QUEEN 589

been too proud to tell them the truth. Wary of whites because of tier

experience with Henderson and his cohorts, she was as cautious of blacks,

because of the men in the forest who had rejected her.

    Now hunger gave her courage. She went to the Presbyterian Church Hall, and

    joined a small line of poor whites waiting to be fed. Her nerves quivering,

    she advanced to the head of the line, and a kindly white woman of her own

    age was nice to her, and gave her a big bowl of thin stew and some

    biscuits. Queen kept her head down and scuttled to a comer, where she

    sipped the delicious broth, which nourished her spirit like manna from

    heaven.

    She went every day at lunchtime, for food was served only then, and existed

    on that and the occasional muffins that she stole at night. She spoke to no

    one, and responded to any questions from the kindly white woman with as few

    words as possible. She would sit alone in her favorite comer, eat her food

    as quickly as possible, and leave as soon as she could.

    On one occasion, her spirit almost failed her. A young woman was in line,

    just in front of her, and Queen could tell that she was mulatta. A church

    warden had spotted her too. The mulatta, like Queen, kept her head down,

    and her eyes to the floor, but the church warden came to her and, gently

    but firmly, told her to go to her own people. The whites in the line hissed

    their angry agreement. The mulatta begged, and protested that no one would

    feed her, she had been rejected from the black soup kitchen, as Queen had

    been. The warden was moved by her desperate plight, allowed her to eat a

    bowl of soup outside, but told her never to come back again.

    It unnerved Queen. She accepted her own bowl of soup and went quickly to

    her corner, trying to took inconspicuous. After a few minutes she saw that

    the white woman who served the food was walking toward her. Queen wondered

    if she should leave now, rather than face the shame of eviction, but the

    woman had always been kind, and without this daily sustenance, Queen did

    not know how she would survive.

    The woman sat beside her and watched Queen eat. She said nothing for a

    while, which disturbed Queen more, and soup spilled from her spoon.

"It's tough, isn't it?" said the white woman in a whisper.

590 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

"Looking white." And then she added a word that the slave women sometimes

used when addressing each other.

"Sister."

    Queen was petrified. "Ma'am, I swear-" she began, but the white woman

    interrupted her.

    "It's all right, I understand," she said. She looked around, but no one was

    near enough to hear them if she spoke quietly.

    "Same as you," she said, and smiled. "High yalla, they call it. Dirty white

    would be better."

    It was a trap, Queen was sure. The woman couldn't possibly be mulatta-her

    features were fine, her skin was flawlessly white, and her hair was soft

    and wavy. She looked very much like Queen.

    "You funnin' me?" Queen asked angrily. The woman, to convince Queen,

    slipped easily into slave idiom.

    "Yo' think I's gwine sit in a room full a whites an' tell yo' I's colored

    when I ain't?"

    It was hardly reassuring to Queen. "Then what you doin' here," she

    demanded.

    The woman laughed. "Chile," she said, "this here's run by the church.

    Volunteering a few hours of my time each day gives me something that money

    can't ever buy. It makes me respectable. "

    She had an enchanting tone of self-knowledge and selfmockery, and Queen

    relaxed enough to smile. Still she was careful. The trap could be

    elaborate.

    "I'm Alice," the woman told her, "and I was born lucky. I could choose. And

    who'd choose to be black? Black's hard. Being white is so much easier."

    They talked for a few moments, and Alice suggested that Queen help with the

    washing-up. Queen donned an apron and worked with a will, but still she

    kept her head down, and avoided speaking to anyone but Alice. They helped

    the warden lock up, and he smiled at Queen, and thanked her, and gradually

    Queen started to believe that Alice was not a threat to her.

    As they walked down the street on the summer day, another change began in

    Queen. Men smiled and tipped their hats to the lovely, confident Alice, and

    some to Queen, and Queen made a conscious effort to hold her shoulders back

    and her

    QUEEN 591

head up, when for the last few weeks she had walked with a stoop, because

that made her feel less conspicuous.

    They went to Alice's apartment, a spacious room with a fireplace and

    sitting area, and a big brass bed in one comer. The drapes were burgundy

    velvet, the carpet heavily patterned, the chairs elaborate and thickly

    padded. To a clear eye it might have looked a little tacky and worn, but to

    Queen it looked sumptuous.

    "I picked up most of it for a song," Alice said, throwing her bonnet on the

    fine mahogany table. "You'd be amazed what the old mansions are selling

    these days, just to get some cash. "

    "It's beautiful," Queen said, sinking into the most comfortable chair she

    had ever sat in. "Is you rich?"

    "No," Alice said, and laughed, and knew that the truth must come out sooner

    or later. "But I have some-generous admirers. "

    Queen sat up straight. The general immorality of the world outside The

    Forks was still astonishing to her, and repugnant.

    "is yo' a whore?" she asked. Her vocabulary had increased in Decatur.

Alice looked at her, somewhat sternly.

    "If you want to pass as white," she said, "you must watch your speech.

    Nothing gives you away faster than slave talk."

    Queen, who was still worried about Alice's profession, was defensive. Her

    many frustrations came flooding to the surface, in anger and self-pity.

    "I don't want to 'pass' as white," she said, all trace of dialect gone. "I

    am white. And I don't want to be black, even though that's what I am.

    Little Miss In Between, that's me. One of God's mistakes."

    She bit her lip and turned away, because Alice had been kind to her. She

    got up to leave, thinking she must have offended, but Alice came to her,

    took her face in her hands, looked into her eyes, and smiled that

    confident, self-mocking smile.

    "Yo' ain't a mistake, chile," she said, in thick dialect. Her hands moved

    to Queen's straggly, dirty hair, and her eyes twinkled.

"But yo' smell," she said. "Yo' smell baaaaaad!"

592 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

    Queen could not resist the warmth and generosity of Alice's personality,

    and she smiled, and hiccuped because she thought she was going to cry, and

    Alice laughed, and held her for a moment, and told her it was time for a

    bath.

    They went down to the pump and got buckets of water, which they heated on

    the stove in the outhouse laundry. Alice pulled out an old zinc bathtub,

    filled it with water, and Queen stripped, a little shy about her nakedness

    in front of this woman who might be a whore, but who laughed about every-

    thing. Queen slid into the tepid water, looked at her feet which were

    filthy, and was appalled at how slovenly she had become. Alice set to work

    with soap and a cloth, chattering about slave dialect and proper speech,

    but Queen hardly heard her. The sudsy water, the sense of being clean

    again, the presence of another human being who seemed to care about her,

    and the relief of having a possible friend who understood her peculiar

    circumstances were all that mattered to her. She even ceased to worry about

    Alice's possible profession.

Alice was not a whore in the sense that Queen understood the word, although

she had some admirers who were generous to her in return for her favors. She

preferred to think of herself as a "demimondaine," although society might

have had a less tolerant name for it. She had been raised to it, for her

mother had been a maid in a fancy house in Atlanta, before the war. Her

pappy was a white Massa who had raped her mother and, on discovering the

pregnancy, had sold his slave away. Her mammy was bought by the house, and

cared for by the whores during her pregnancy. When Alice was born, she was

everyone's darling, and some of the regular clients would dandle her on

their knees and give her little presents, and whisper into her infant ears

that they would look after her when she was a big girl. Her mammy was

eternally grateful to the ladies for their charity, loved them and took care

of them, worried about them, comforted them when they cried and nursed them

if they got sick. She lived in the dependency in back of the house, with the

other slaves, and Alice had grown up in that special half world of easy

virtue and rewarding vice. Of consistent tolerance for class, race, and

creed, and rigid rules of behavior. Of generous benevolence by hypocritical

pillars of

    QUEEN 593

male society, which was all tinged with the potential for violence that is

inherent within a prostitute's life.

    Many expected that Alice would grow up into the profession, and handsome

    offers were made for her virginity in her early teens, but her mammy

    counseled strenuously against it.

    "Take care a what you got," she told Alice. "It's all a girl has got. Don't

    let it get wore out. "

    Still, she was a slave, and the time came when she had to do her Missy, the

    madam's, bidding. Happily, enchanted by her nubile body, the man had broken

    her into the adult world without too much pain. Her mammy protested

    vigorously, and so Alice, her deflowering having reduced her value, became

    a part-time whore, allowed to partake in the activities of the house if she

    wanted to, not if she didn't. Eventually, she fell in love with a handsome

    young man, and he, besotted with her, swore that he was going to marry her

    and take her away from all this. After a six-month affair of mutual bliss

    and reciprocal planning, he stopped coming to the whorehouse and Alice

    never saw him again. It broke her heart, and she became less generous in

    her attitudes toward men, and never again believed what they promised. She

    developed a small but regular clientele of older, wealthy men, who were

    less likely to make rash promises, and were generous with their presents.

    The war came, and the siege of Atlanta by General Sherman changed Alice's

    life. When the triumphant Union troops swept into the city, the whorehouse

    was a natural arena for the drunken, rampaging soldiers. All the

    prostitutes were raped, and when the madam protested, she was beaten so

    badly she was scarred for life. Alice, cowering in the dependency with her

    mammy, was found by three soldiers, and when her mammy tried to stop the

    ravishing of her daughter, they killed her, and raped Alice anyway. The

    house was burned to the ground with the rest of the city, and the employees

    scattered to the winds. Alice, friendless and alone, spent days on the

    road, until she was adopted by a Confederate officer, who fed her and

    tended her, and gave her money to get to Decatur, and an introduction to

    one of his friends there.

    They met in a hotel, and the friend, George, was as generous to her with

    his money as she was to him with her body. He set her up in a nice

    apartment, and visited her from time to

594 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

time, when he could get away from his wife. It was a perfect arrangement,

for George was not jealous of any other male admirers Alice befriended. His

wife was a demanding and jealous woman. Keenly aware that secrets were

difficult to keep in a country town, Alice kept a low profile, was selective

with her favors, and worked hard to achieve an apparent respectability.

Alice tried to explain something of her life to Queen, avoiding the more

exotic details, and concentrating on the rape, and her subsequent resolution

that any white man who wanted her would have to pay dearly for the

privilege.

    They lay together in the big brass bed, and Queen, who had never slept in

    a comfortable bed, sank into the thick feather mattress and nestled her

    head into the clean down pillow. Alice had burned Queen's ragged old

    clothes, and had given her a lovely silk nightgown to wear. The window was

    open to the summer night, and a cool breeze calmed Queen as she listened to

    Alice's sad story. She tried to come to terms with Alice's admission that

    she accepted money from men, but had great difficulty with it.

    "I couldn't do that," she said, but she didn't want to offend. "And anyway,

    I'm not pretty like you."

Alice laughed, and looked at her.

    "What did they do to you in that big old mansion," she asked. "Didn't

    anyone ever say nice things to you? Didn't anyone ever tell you how pretty

    you are?"

    Queen stared at the ceiling and remembered her life. No one had ever told

    her she was pretty. No one had ever said anything very nice about her.

    Except one person.

    "Only my mammy," she said, and the memory of Easter made her sad.

    "Well, your mamuny was right," Alice told her. She was silent for a moment.

    "Mammys always are," she said, and some soft sadness in her voice made

    Queen turn to look at her. She was staring at the ceiling remembering her

    own mammy, and a tear was trickling down her cheek.

    Queen could not bear to see her new friend in distress. She reached out and

    gently stroked Alice's hair.

    QUEEN 595

"I miss my mammy," Alice whispered.

    She took Queen's hand, kissed it, and held it against her cheek. They

    drifted to sleep, the pair of them, side by side, each loving the closeness

    of someone who wanted nothing except friendship, and each remembering her

    own dead mammy.

    69

They were fast friends within days, and the only thing that worried Queen

was that she had no money and was completely reliant on Alice's generosity.

Alice insisted she shouldn't worry about it, two could live as cheaply as

one, and the right job for Queen would come along eventually. In the

meantime, they should simply enjoy life. In doubting moments, bewildered by

Alice's continuing hospitality, Queen wondered if her new friend had a

devious purpose, if Alice was trying to prepare her to accept the concept of

giving her favors to genflemen, and she would become quiet, and sulk for a

while, but then Alice would dazzle her with some small kindness that didn't

seem to require any return, and Queen would laugh, and be happy again.

    The truth was simpler than Queen's occasional imaginings. Alice needed

    Queen's friendship almost as much as Queen needed hers. The attentions of

    men came easily to her, for she was a lovely woman, but she was brutally

    aware of the price they expected her to pay. Despite her circumspection,

    and her careful cultivation of a respectable image, and despite her devoted

    hours of charitable work for the church, mild rumors about her virtue were

    whispered through the town, and no woman of any standing would befriend

    her. Added to this, she was living a very dangerous lie. She passed for

    white without question or demur, but if one hint of her true blood was gen-

    erally known, she could easily have been run out of town, or worse. More