The Queen of Palmyra (6 page)

I came out a raggedy mess, trailing blood and slime. The doctor cut the cord and wrapped me tight in a clean red-and-white-checked dish towel so that I looked like a lively loaf of bread. He plopped me down on the sofa, which Mrs. Chauncey later told people she thought was a bit much, her nice living-room rug long gone from my mother’s hemorrhaging and the sofa being almost brand-new. What kind of man was Winburn Forrest to let his wife work in that condition, anyway?

It was Mama who named me Florence. She’d come upon pictures of the city in
Look
magazine at the doctor’s office and thought it was the most beautiful place she’d ever seen. All that art. Mama’s name was Martha, and she believed in serious names. No Susies or Kathys or Judys or Peggy Sues. “You want a name that’s worth all this trouble,” she would say to me. She’d give her batter a thumping stir. “And don’t let anybody call you Flo.”

This was not the story my father told when he started coming into my room that May. Lying on his side, he peered at me through the shadows. I turned my head toward him because I loved to home in on his eyes. When the moon was bright, I could see my own face swimming in their soft darkness. I thought I looked beautiful, like a girl in a dream. The stories he told me were about brave Christian men who, yes siree bobtail, fought to the death like true soldiers for little girls like me and beautiful and pure women like my mother. In the early days they rode
horses. White horses. He would get excited in the telling and start rubbing my belly hard. Round and round, like he was shaping a pot. One way for a while. Then the other way. Sometimes he would flop over on his back and sing “Onward Christian Soldiers marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before,” sweet and low, like a lullaby.

Daddy’s stories faded into the warning
no no no no
of the trains that clattered through Millwood all night long, leaving only the tracks of dreams. Valiant knights stamping out evil monsters in the kingdom, saving the ladies in distress, riding off with them draped like drooping Easter lilies across the fronts of their white steeds, the ladies’ long blond curls trawling the dust. My hair was short and no color at all, but it was a different girl I saw in Daddy’s melting eyes, a girl in all white with that long blond hair flowing along behind like a river of gold. Pure and innocent and beautiful beyond belief. Sometimes, when I dreamed, Daddy’s stories would get mixed together with my old storybook favorite, the gentleman rabbit Uncle Wiggily, who limped along with his satchel and crutch seeking his fortune, and who was always getting into scraps and having to be rescued from getting eaten up by savage beasts and giants. They all wanted a bite of him, old and tough as he was, but story after story, book after book, he always got away in the nick of time. You have to wonder how lucky one rabbit can be.

So I didn’t really hear my father’s stories so much as they washed over me as if they were the sea and I was a lonesome stretch of sandbar. I waited for them and they rescued me like the brave men on the white horses. And when they came, they flooded my heart and changed me into something unrecognizable and strange.

Finally, in the early morning hours when the oven had cooled down, Mama would sift into my room to turn off my fan. She would wake me up saying, “Win, come on to bed,” and Daddy would rise up like a dark mountain and stumble after her.

If my father could stumble through the long night and find his way back into this story, he’d say I wasn’t telling it right. All this business about his box and Mama’s icings and Mrs. Chauncey’s ruined rug. He would say tell about the brave men of olden times, how they rode through the night on white horses, like heat lightning shooting across the sky. How they saved the precious ones from darkness. He’d say this story of mine has too much clutter.

But some stories are whiskery old men. You walk past them fast, but they snatch at you with their fingers of bone and make you stay. They hold you up to their faces and scratch you. But after going through all that, you still don’t know them. You don’t know the little boy who had one leg that was shorter than the other and a foot that turned in. The one who loved the smell of the sea in the old oyster shells on his mother’s dresser. The one who wanted to grow figs.

That one, that dark-eyed boy, is the slippery fish. What’s left is nothing but scum on the pond.

It’s easier to look deep into what you know will stay put. What doesn’t wander in and out and cry for mercy. The details. Our town of Millwood, a place on a map of the world as it was in 1963, stays calm in my mind in spite of the terrible thing that happened that summer.

It was called Millwood on account of there being a big cotton mill, which was the town’s largest employer, followed by two plants that were always in danger of exploding and in third place a fish hatchery run by the government. The
Feds
, Daddy would say, and his lip would curl. The plants, the Millwood Fertilizer factory and the smaller sulphuric acid plant, roosted on the north-south railroad line like two buzzards eating roadkill. Their stacks pumped out twin clouds of black soot day and night, seven days a week.

A sign on the outskirts of town read: “Welcome to Millwood:
Transportation Hub of the South,” and though that was an overstatement, it was true that the only reason Millwood had for existing in the first place, with its bustle of factory and mill workers and county courthouse lawyers in their straw hats, was the fact that the Mobile & Ohio and the Frisco Railway lines crossed in a big
X
just west of downtown in the exact spot where Highways 78 and 45 crossed. We called the
X
Crosstown. There were pull-outs and railcar exchanges there, plus the Curb Market, where farmers brought in cantaloupe and watermelon and butter beans in summer and greens and turnips in the fall and spring. As May progressed and the produce began to come in, Mama took me nosing through the Curb Market for berries to garnish the angel icing on her devil’s food cakes. “Hold up the baskets and look at the bottom for drips and stains,” she’d command, “and watch out for trains, don’t get near the track.”

The trains went through Crosstown slow, but they made me jump and start when they’d lurch and bang together without warning, coupling and uncoupling like testy old lovers. The Negroes bought their tickets from the Colored Only window outside the Crosstown depot and stood out front to wait. When it rained, they huddled under the dripping eaves, being careful not to block the door.

The trains came through the other crossings all over town like noisy threads through a garment. You couldn’t get them out of your head because once you did, here they’d come again. Midnight, one thirty, three, four thirty. In the deep early-morning dark, they howled and blew and cried. When you first heard them, they seemed to call you to them. They wanted you because they were oh so lonesome, lonesome. But as they got closer and moved through the crossings dotted all over town they had to warn you against their loneliness, and then they screamed out no, no, no, no, their big cyclops eyes glowing, hunting you down.

If you grew up as I did listening to trains every single night, you could begin to hear the turning point where a train moves from its coming to its going. It is a slipping moment. The awful tormented thing that is coming does not come. In its place is something ordinary, just another clattery train to make you toss and turn in the heat of a summer night.

The people who worked at the mill and the fertilizer factory lived in Milltown, which was downwind from the factory just over the railroad tracks in Millwood. Milltown was actually part of Millwood, but it looked like a different place altogether. Up and down the streets you could see nothing but rented duplexes with peeling paint and a coat of gray powder rising from the red clay dirt like huge misshapen toadstools. The children who lived in them were so white they looked like puffs of cotton themselves, hanging on porch railings as if they had been dropped from a giant picker in the sky. No dusty crape myrtle blooming or pretty wisteria bells, just worn-out honeysuckle and weeds. The Health Department squatted in the dead center of Milltown, a monstrous brown toad of a building that made me want to whimper just looking at it when Mama would take me in for my free boosters and checkups.

Nobody in Milltown, where the poor white mill workers lived, ordered Mama’s cakes. Neither did anybody in Shake Rag on the south side of the color line, which ran straight down Goodlett Street by the cemetery. White people called it Shake Rag. I never heard anyone who actually lived there call it that. Zenie, for example, would never in a million years say, “See you later. I’m going back to Shake Rag now.” Instead she’d give Mimi’s kitchen table a final swipe, tuck in the loose ends of her bun, and say, “All right. I wore out sure enough. Going home now. Done enough for one day’s work. Way more than enough.” When Eva Greene, who was Zenie’s niece, came to live with Zenie and Ray that summer,
she tossed her flipped hair and laughed out loud when she first heard somebody say Shake Rag. “Who’s shaking that rag, I’d like to know,” she said. “Only rags I’ve laid eyes on around here are dust rags. Nobody around here’s
wearing
rags.”

People lived in all sorts of places in what was called Shake Rag, ranging from two-story houses with rusted screens rolled up at the windows like curled eyelashes to a wisteria-wrapped school bus on a well-kept lot across the street from Zenie and Ray’s. Mama told me four generations of folks lived in the old bus, no telling how many of each. They had to keep the windows pushed up in the heat and sometimes I saw a girl hanging out one window and playing one potato two potato three potato four with another girl hanging out the next one. An old man in the family kept bees in two white boxes behind the bus. There was a sign written on a board propped up against the side of the bus that said HONY,” which Eva, who was studying to be a schoolteacher and said there was never any excuse for misspelling with dictionaries in the world, snuck over to one night and put an
E
in the middle of.

Whatever kinds of houses they lived in, the ladies in Shake Rag had their zinnias and petunias planted out front and their tomato and cucumber vines staked out in the back or the side alley if there wasn’t a back. Down in Milltown the poor white people gathered up their sickly children and moved on. Who knows where. You hope for better days and better places, though places are sometimes not so easy to leave. Shake Rag people planted themselves on their front porches, babies blooming like dark red roses from the laps of great-grandmothers, who held them with swollen fingers in a death grip.

Mama took cakes up to Shake Rag all right, but they were offered in times of trouble, when Uldine Harris’s grandson Earl Two jumped the M & O for Memphis after he sassed Mr. Wilkins in the
drugstore and Mr. Wilkins cocked his head back and said, “Two, I know who you are and I know where you live.” That was a caramel cake, icing still warm like fudge. When what happened to Zenie’s niece Eva happened. That was a lemon, which Mama knew from Zenie to be Eva’s favorite, but which Eva refused to touch.

That spring I returned home not just to our little white house behind the house but also to Zenie and Ray’s in Shake Rag. Zenie had gotten stuck with me several years back when Mama became Millwood’s Welcome Wagon lady, having not yet discovered her talent for cakes. Back then I was little; somebody had to keep me. Zenie had kept my mother while Mimi taught social studies at the high school. Why not me?

“I want Florence to love you like I do. I want her to
know
you. Really
know
you, the way I do.” That was the way Mama put it to Zenie. They were smoking together in Mimi’s kitchen, which was something they did when my grandmother wasn’t around. Mama had gone in and pulled out her Winstons. Zenie had taken one and lit it off the stove and sat down in her white ladder-back chair. She left the eye on for Mama so she lit hers at the flame too, holding back her bangs. Then Mama pushed the kitchen swing door closed, right in my face.

I stood up next to the crack in the door and tried to keep up with the conversation. What I didn’t hear was what Zenie said back to Mama’s wanting me to know her. It was a lot softer and it had a little snort for a period.

Then Mama was talking again in a fast and happy little rush. “I don’t think she’ll be much trouble.”

Zenie cleared her throat and said loud enough for me to hear, “They all trouble.”

“Zenie, I don’t want to make you do this if you don’t want to. You know I’ll pay you fair.” Mama whispered this last sentence like it was a shameful secret.

The back of Zenie’s ladder chair hit the wall. Once and then twice. The chair legs were worn down from years of her tilting. “We try it out. See how much trouble she get into. These legs don’t go running after nothing no more.” Zenie was over six feet and heavy. She had bad veins that looked like dark purple irises blooming up and down her legs, which she said felt like two tree trunks under her. Her legs were prone to sprout blisters and sores that ran and made scars the size of nickels. Her legs pained her all the time but especially when it was hot.

Now Mama’s voice was a happy little brook bubbling along. “She’s a good girl, Zenie. You won’t have to be chasing after her. She’s almost six now. Soon it will just be after school.”

“Yes’m.”

“Zenie.
Please
don’t yes ma’am and no ma’am me. You know I don’t want you to call me ma’am. I feel like I’m half yours.”

The chair hit the wall once, but nothing from Zenie. Then Mama opened the door. She jumped back when she saw me behind it. “You listening in again, Miss Nosy?” she asked.

“No’m,” I said, and she looked at me hard, narrowing her eyes.

Five years later, I still somehow ended up at Zenie’s house in the late afternoons. It seems odd, I know, that a half-grown girl wouldn’t be out running around town with the other children. The truth is, ever since we’d been back, people looked at me funny. I knew many of the children who were traipsing off to school so prim and proper, and for a short while I made it a point to hang around up at the sidewalk when they walked by on their way to and from school. I saw Helen Cooley, who used to play gypsies with me in the vacant lot down the street. I saw Elizabeth Lumpkin, who I’d spent the night with once and we’d made brownies from a mix. But their eyes slid off me, as if I were the ghost of a flesh-and-blood girl they had once known, the one who had left Millwood with her father and mother and had never
been seen since. I knew it had something to do with Daddy, and maybe Mama too, after the colored-versus-Negro episode, but it wasn’t anything I could pin down.