Sapphire's Grave (12 page)

RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA

SEPTEMBER, 1903

Queen Marie had not been inside the library of St. Augustine’s College for many years. Much had changed, she noted. The students, for example, were less reverent, the atmosphere less sacred in this once-hallowed hall that smelled, as it had smelled from its beginning, of old books, of dust, and of mold. These students, some of them second-generation students of St. Augustine’s, had a greater sense of worthiness, of belonging here; a confidence born of breeding and privilege. Queen Marie allowed herself a few minutes of wistfulness, then took a deep breath and marched up to the reference desk.

“May I be of assistance?” A woman looked up at Queen Marie over the rims of her glasses, then removed them to stare solemnly at Queen Marie, as if pondering already the response to a query not yet voiced. She was young, Queen Marie saw once the glasses were removed, as she had herself once been, in what seemed a short time, but was in fact a lifetime, ago.

“Yes,” Queen Marie replied. “Do you have any, um, newspapers from, um, Brooklyn, I reckon. Yeah. Brooklyn.”

The young woman’s frown deepened. “Brooklyn. Hmmm. We do have a fine Negro publication from New York . . .” She paused for Queen Marie to respond. Then, “I don’t know that it will contain the information you are looking for . . .” And when this elicited no response: “What, exactly, are you looking for?”

Queen Marie felt foolish. Her question had not been specific enough. “Um, jes news.” She lowered her head. Tears stung the backs of her eyes, and she could feel her nose reddening. “My—my daughter is there. I—I haven’t heard nothin’ from her here lately, and I just wondered if . . . you know . . .”

The young woman’s features softened. She knew; but she would not say “obituary,” or even “news,” as that would imply
bad
news. She rose and led Queen Marie to a stairway that led down to the depths of the building, to a yet dustier, book-filled room; and another, and another. Finally, Queen Marie and the young woman faced rows and rows of stacks of paper. One such row bore the designation: “
Contender
(New York).”

The young librarian heaved a pile of newspapers into Queen Marie’s arms, and lifting another for herself, she led Queen Marie to an apparently unfrequented area where dust-covered tables and empty chairs were arranged. Here, they unloaded their burdens onto a table. Queen Marie was grateful for the solitude. She had felt frumpy and incongruous among the youthful, smartly dressed students. The librarian offered her further assistance should it be needed. Queen Marie thanked her departing back.

She sat staring at the formidable piles for what seemed a long, long time, her heart filled with dread. Finally, she began thumbing through pages, starting with the most recent issue. Headline after futile, meaningless headline presented itself, bold in brazen black type, and full of self-importance. Queen Marie decided to begin her search just over three months back—when Vyda Rose’s letters, usually biweekly or so, had ceased to arrive with regularity; had in fact ceased to arrive at all, she had realized over the passing weeks. Slowly, painfully, Queen Marie began scanning headlines, reading death notices, society news, even, desperately, editorials and fashion articles. And a world unknown to her but inhabited by her child began to unfold to Queen Marie; a world of gaiety and violence, of irony and change; a world where colored people could sport the most recent trends from French and Italian couturiers, live in spacious apartments, and create their own newspaper, by, for, and about themselves; a world that had swallowed her baby whole to contribute barely, if at all, to the girth of that great city.

She slept for a time, her head resting uncomfortably in the space on the table between editions read and editions untouched. She dreamed, at moments recalling Vyda Rose the infant, stubborn and ill-tempered; Vyda Rose the child, playing content and nearly docile, alone with her imagined friends. Queen Marie had missed almost entirely Vyda Rose’s early teens, a period during which Queen Marie had herself been in the throes of maturation. But she dreamed of the woman Vyda Rose, proud, uncertain and hiding her uncertainty behind her self-assured gaze, always respectful, but never apologizing; and she dreamed of herself, Queen Marie, as judgmental and unforgiving of herself as her own mother.

She thought, too, of Sister, her nemesis in a past existence, the grandmother of her daughter; Sister strong, haunted and harrowed, but lately come into her own, minister to others of a newfound peace that Queen Marie envied; Sister whose lined face held a beauty born of an unenchanted youth and the knowledge of God, the knowledge of her own power; Sister who knew things, and for whom the knowing was enough, sometimes far too much; and the two princes, Sister’s princes, who had given Queen Marie the most enduring joys of her life.

Including her Vyda Rose, of whose presence in her life Queen Marie had not been worthy.

Awakening, standing to stretch her arms and legs, she looked at the stack of editions unread, and thought again of Sister.

may I discern between the lines
of ancient truth that adorn your face
the secrets that our daughters will discover
in distant ages when we have forgotten
the hiding places of old

for we are their dwelling place
and our God is etched into your face

She sat and picked up the newspaper at the top of the unread pile—the one dated just before the letters no longer arrived. She read voraciously of a school for colored children; the slaying of a white man by an unnamed colored girl in Brooklyn; an upcoming vaudeville show; a wedding on the Harlem River; and in the next edition, finally:

WOMAN BELIEVED DROWNED

Police report that a woman who jumped from a ferry near the New Jersey shore is believed to have drowned in the bay early on Saturday morning. The incident is being treated as a suicide.

The woman, identified as Vyda Rose Alston, was a resident of Warrenton, North Carolina, visiting with friends at the time of the incident. Passengers on the ferry who witnessed the suicide say that the woman was clearly distraught. Police would not confirm reports that Alston was wearing trousers and a man’s coat.

Tears had been waiting for their cue, which they had known would come. Nodding at each other, they stepped out from behind Queen Marie’s eyes. Now was the time for grief to spill—again.

After a time, she noted again the date on which the short article had been printed, recalling that her news of Fields’ death had been returned to its sender, postmarked just after the date of this
Contender
. UNABLE TO DELIVER, the envelope had read, sending the fear of the worst down Queen Marie’s spine to the place in her stomach where her heart had then begun to reside. BELIEVED DROWNED. Had no one bothered to know for certain? Had the bay, the river, the ocean into which it flowed, been drained and their bottoms combed to confirm to Queen Marie and to the world their loss, the appropriateness of mourning, the necessity for burial of Vyda Rose’s memory, someplace safe, known of, and accessible? Had the waters been commanded to yield their dead for inspection, lines and rows of them, standing erect and shoulder to shoulder, colored and white, woman and man, in various states of decomposition, their clothing tattered by the merciless sea, their shins scraped to the bone; some of them only bone and teeth, perhaps hair; some missing body parts severed by sharks or moving vessels, torn apart by winds that tossed the waves directionless and witless?

But the Africans would have endured, Queen Marie felt. The ones who had sank themselves unanchored with their children had endured, and Vyda Rose would be among them, erect in men’s clothing, perhaps with her baby, if the seas gave up their dead. She preferred to think of it this way. Fields would urge her to think of it this way: her baby, and her baby, yielding themselves to the awful sea, rather than be taken by a world so fierce as to swallow them, involuntary and whole. How she wished she had been there when that beast, whatever the beast, had opened its hideous mouth, its noxious breath threatening the breath of her daughter. She would have set fire to its nostrils, and died in a flame of her own setting, to rescue her own blood from the beast, whatever the beast, that Vyda Rose had found more awful to face than the death of the sea. But if she could not have been there, she preferred to think of it this way: her baby, chin lifted, eyes expectant, yielding herself to the sea.

INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA

OCTOBER, 1903

“I am a
widow,
” her mother had often said, lifting her chin in that haughty way intended to put moral distance between herself and others, and to distinguish herself from the scores of women, indecent or undesired, left manless at the close of an era of frank concubinage; when for the first time, Negro women were free, ostensibly, to love a man of their own choosing. But he had better be a Negro man—not the enslaver, the perpetrator of shame upon a race and its women; but a fine, Negro man, no matter how humble his circumstance, and no matter how ill-matched the union. A
widow,
Queen Marie had understood, was a validated woman, a step or two above the partnerless strumpets; more dignified, even, than a wife.

Now, at forty-six, Queen Marie found herself counted among them: the widows, survivors, outlasters; enduring after death’s partition.

Others had gone on: Prince; and Dottie, who had died during childbirth; the father she had never known. Fields’ departure, attributed too hastily, in Queen Marie’s opinion, to a heart attack by confounded doctors, had left her stunned and pondering, while others saw to the burying of her husband’s remains. And now her daughter, her baby, had gone on. She felt this in her spirit. But then, her spirit had been wrong before.

She had taken to drinking—it eased the pain of uncertainty, making her days sufferable. She had strange, vivid dreams. Sometimes, as she drank alone in her house at night, she saw Dottie, pigtailed and large-breasted, giggling with Queen Marie over some adolescent conspiracy; or Prince, silent, his face closed, or his broad back to her. She did not mind his silence. It comforted her to have someone, anyone, near; even her mother, with whom Queen Marie visited infrequently, and whose silent judgment Queen Marie had borne since the beginning of her involvement with Prince. She wanted only to have someone, anyone, near.

Queen Marie ran the Feels Good Inn now—competently, to her own surprise, through an alcoholic haze. She knew that Fields would restrain her, if he were here, gently taking the bottle from her eager hands, and holding her until the pain subsided. She missed him horribly, and needed him more than ever before.

Queen Marie watched the wind a lot; or rather watched the evidence of wind. It was not seen or heard from her stool before the window of her house, now great and empty, colossally lonesome. But leaves drifting toward the ground from nearly empty branches were disrupted in their downward path, caught up by the unseen, soundless wind. And Vyda Rose emerged—from behind a tree, Queen Marie later supposed—wavering in her mother’s drink-impaired vision and delirium, and dressed oddly in the oversized clothing of a man. She did not speak at first, but waited, as she often had, for Queen Marie to greet her, her hooded eyes direct in their stare, even though she was, Queen Marie knew, ashamed and uncertain.

It took a moment for Queen Marie to find her voice. Her heart was beating rapidly, and her palms began to sweat. “Hi’ya doin’, Baby?” she slurred. Vyda Rose sighed; in relief, Queen Marie thought, and tears welled in her daughter’s eyes.

“Mama?” Vyda Rose whispered, and her fingers rose to her mouth in a gesture Queen Marie had never seen her affect. She stepped closer to the window as Queen Marie rose unsteadily to her feet. They stared at each other, knowing that this was their last meeting, and Vyda Rose wiped a tear from her cheek. “Mama. I want you to know that I’m all right. My life is good . . .” Her voice trailed off, as it always had; and she looked down at her bare feet for a long moment. Then—“Got me a little girl, Mama.” She giggled, and her fingers moved back to her mouth. Another tear escaped her eye, and her hand moved to wipe it away. “She so precious—” And her voice caught in her throat. The two women stared fondly at each other for a long moment. Vyda Rose swallowed. “Mama, I need you to do one thing for me. You let my daddy raise my baby, okay?” She met her mother’s eyes with understanding and forgiveness. Queen Marie stared back relieved and freed from reprehension. “ ’Cause she got her mama spirit,” Vyda Rose continued, “and she need him to nurture her soul.” Her language did not strike Queen Marie as odd or incomprehensible. She understood completely, and nodded her acquiescence.

Prince Junior would recognize in his grandchild the spirit of the daughter he would never know was his: the spirit of his mother and his aunts; the spirit of his furtive lover, whose name he had not known; and he would nurture it in ways that Queen Marie, in her present state, could not.

Later, and more lucid, Queen Marie would recall her words: “My life is good,” Vyda Rose had said. And her heart would lift with the hope that Vyda Rose was alive and, more importantly, well. But now, she reached toward her daughter, her hand grazing the glass of the window; touching her face, she felt, though a glass pane separated her from her only child. Vyda Rose smiled once more, reassuringly, almost happily, and vanished as suddenly as she had appeared.

INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA

APRIL, 1904

Queen Marie was not surprised to see a man as he approached her house, a tall man with a reckless appearance and a swaggering carriage. He held a woman by her elbow as they made their way through the soft red mud, the high, narrow heels of her shoes making the trip difficult and perilous. Several times, she nearly fell, and the young man caught her, bearing her considerable weight, and that of the child she carried, in his long, strong arms. Her hat was askew, and she was breathing with effort by the time they reached Queen Marie’s house.

She watched them from her chair on the porch, thinking of other cool spring evenings spent on this porch, waiting for someone to come, as she had believed they would. She waited as they climbed the three short steps to her porch.

The woman was short and stout, with an air of dignity that reminded Queen Marie of her mother. She held the child in a manner suggesting a fierceness of attachment, as if no manner of arm-twisting or pulling of teeth could induce her to yield the child. Yet that was the reason for which she had come.

The young man had loved Vyda Rose, probably more than he had ever told her. He lowered his eyes just as Queen Marie noticed that they were damp. He was in pain, and his pride could not conceal this.

The woman spoke first, her voice pacific and intense, like quiet thunder. “Queen Marie Fields?” she asked.

Queen Marie nodded. She had assumed, correctly, that the pair knew whom they sought. “Evenin’, Ma’am,” she replied.

“Good evening,” the woman smiled grimly. For a moment they were silent. The baby whimpered, and the woman bounced her gently. Finally, Queen Marie grasped the arms on either side of her chair and struggled to her feet.

“Come on in. Come on in,” she said, in that way that Southern colored people have of repeating themselves. She opened the door of her house, and her visitors followed her inside.

Queen Marie motioned toward a settee, and the two strangers sat uncomfortably. “I am Magnolia Stokes, and this is my son, Hiram. We are friends of Vyda Rose.”

There was a long silence. Hiram stared absently out the open door. Queen Marie watched him with interest. The baby gurgled happily. Magnolia continued. “We wanted to keep her.” She pointed her chin at the baby, holding the child away from her own body. “But we couldn’t. Vyda Rose had family down here somewhere. We thought it wouldn’t be right.” Magnolia’s eyes were serious, troubled. Queen Marie almost asked her if she had seen Vyda Rose in the months since her passing, but decided against this. “We knew she had relatives around here,” Magnolia repeated. “We seen the letters she got sometimes . . .” She glanced at Hiram, who stirred uneasily. “We thought you wouldn’t be hard to find.”

Queen Marie wondered what they knew of her daughter. Did they know that Vyda Rose had made love for a living, and was happiest giving and receiving love? Had they known that she had been courageous in her wantonness, heedless to models of purity, attuned to her own needs, and the needs of those who met them? Did they know that Vyda Rose had acquired—no, inherited—defenses to ignominy from her mother, and her grandmother?

Vyda Rose had chosen a vocation that few mothers could be proud of. Queen Marie would never stop regretting her role in this. But Vyda Rose had come from a lineage of women struggling to balance their own longing with the expectations of others, and had determined to live on her own terms. Queen Marie was proud of her.

Magnolia was standing with the child. “Well, it was nice to meet you, Mrs. Fields.” She held the child toward Queen Marie, who stood and took the baby, surprised by the child’s heft. She was nothing like Vyda Rose—it was hard to believe that this was Vyda Rose’s child. Brown and round and dimpled, the baby gurgled cheerfully. Queen Marie bent her head downward to kiss the tender cheek. Her heart swelled with love for the motherless infant, then sorrow as she envisioned what must lie ahead for this child.

hush hush
somebody’s callin’ our
mama
sister
somebody’s
discovered our blackened
name

“We gonna be goin’ now. We’ll let you know if we hear from her.”

Queen Marie’s head snapped upward, her eyes wild with both surprise and relief: These friends of Vyda Rose were keeping her alive. Her startled reaction seemed to surprise Magnolia. Queen Marie looked at Hiram, whose rigid jaw declared his own determined hope. He had loved Vyda Rose, and in his heart she had survived.

She was, after all, from a lineage of survivors.