The Undertaker's Daughter (16 page)

At the cemetery, as Honey Pratt’s white casket was lowered into her grave, Myrna and Jessie wept. My father thought they would maybe someday weep for their mother, but he knew that on this afternoon they wept only for the jewelry box that was descending into the red earth forever.

Old hurts, sore souls, and the sneaky destiny of jealousy are difficult to control when death is in the air. They build and build until, in the wake of electrifying air, they either combust or they are buried deeper than the grave. We laughed in disbelief at some of the squabbles, until one unwelcome day, the story of the fighting Pratt sisters would be a painful reminder of a darker time when Evelyn and Jemma and I would have no amusing memories to recall.

 CHAPTER 6 

M
any days the daunting task of waking Evelyn in the morning fell to me. Oh, what a joyous task it was. Even in her sleep my sister looked angry, unsettled. It was the only time I could comfortably watch her without her snapping, “What are you looking at?” Evelyn often made me think she was awake and then went back to sleep when I left the room. But I was under strict orders not to let her fall asleep again, so I stood there, staring. She slept late on Saturdays and woke at the last possible moment on school days. My mother allowed her these long lie-ins but woke the rest of us with a drill sergeant’s precision. I wondered if this was a preventive measure, so that we wouldn’t get any ideas about following suit. She eventually gave up on any concerted or effective methods of discipline for her eldest daughter.

Evelyn always slept in her bra and in full makeup. She was too lazy to wash her face before she went to bed, so the pillowcases were soiled with traces of mascara and Pan-Cake makeup that
was the texture of putty and came in a white plastic tube. She wore no lipstick, but smeared the Pan-Cake on her lips, a mystery my entire family tried to unravel to no conclusion. Enamored of her tweezers, she plucked her eyebrows. At first she left a quarter of an inch, then she plucked most of that out as well until barely anything was left. She didn’t draw them back on, preferring the bare look. She was fiercely loyal to these curious beauty habits, and despite all her efforts, she had an attractive face. Her lips were full and well shaped, which I, with borderline-thin lips, envied. To then see her cover them with the Pan-Cake makeup was bewildering. In spite of her ghost-colored lips she had a pretty smile, almost dazzling, though not often seen.

Evelyn frequently slept with one arm raised above her head. Sprawled across her bed in her white bra and smudged makeup, she looked like the cover of a detective comic. A dark brown mole resided on the underside of her arm near her armpit. She called it her “beauty mark” and made much of it, explaining that only beautiful people have them and that hers was even more special because of where it was placed. I believed her and was devastated that I had no beauty mark and was therefore never destined to be beautiful. I pointed out that I had a spray of freckles across my nose, but she quickly cut me down by telling me that freckles were undesirable and common. Many mornings I stood staring at her beauty mark, willing it to fall off, hoping that she would scratch it off in her sleep.

Waking Evelyn was like disturbing a grizzly in the middle of winter. The arm with the beauty mark came down and brushed the thick, chestnut-brown strands of hair from her face. The mascara smeared around her eyes made her look as if she were peering from two large buckeyes. The first words out of her mouth most mornings were “Go away.”

Evelyn had always acted upon her whims without a thought of any consequences. While we watched our home movies on the large screen, Evelyn’s young history leaked out. Popcorn, corpses, and Evelyn’s angry, little image were our Saturday-evening fare.

“There goes Evelyn again,” my father said as we watched an eight-year-old version furiously stomping away from a family gathering.

A deep, guttural sound erupted from Evelyn as she viewed herself—it may have been a laugh.

More moving pictures of Evelyn floated by as she wrestled with her cousins, shoved Thomas, cocked a BB gun, tore through her Christmas presents; there was nothing calm about her. I imagined her bucking like a wild horse in harness, struggling to gain freedom. An impatient or harsh word from my father usually tamed her. She sulked when he was angry with her, whereas she was indifferent to my mother’s frustrations.

On this morning I didn’t care if she woke. It was the first day back to school for me and I was anxious to get there. Who knew if Evelyn would go to school anyway? Once in high school she’d skipped classes with little or no consequence. Jubilee was too small for truancy to go unnoticed, and she was always found and given a token punishment, but she couldn’t have cared less. She wasn’t academically motivated and had no particular interests or hobbies. I was usually out the door before Evelyn had a chance to smear her lips with more makeup after breakfast. I felt I’d already lived an entire day by the time I left for school.

I was old enough to walk there on my own now. As usual, Belle put too much starch in my dress and I crinkled and crackled all over the place. When I first attended school and the teacher enforced quiet time, I remember thinking,
oh that’s something I know how to do
. I switched off easily while others fidgeted and
giggled. I often walked away from the playground covering my ears because the screaming and shouting was too loud for me, feeling isolated and yet buffered. Those first silences I endured as a young child created an organic need. I grew up feeling split down the middle with a partial stake in the robustness of life, and another that needed to retreat to silence and observation, to be alone and undisturbed. It was impossible to claim anonymity in our tightly knit community and as the years passed the more I felt the walls of the town closing in.

The morning was so warm there didn’t seem to be enough air for the twenty or so fourth graders in my classroom. Our school had no air-conditioning, and the open windows only invited in a more intense heat though it was still an early hour. I’d felt more air circulate inside a mausoleum than in that classroom.

This year, the doors of our elementary school opened to receive the first black students in its history. This is the moment that cost Paulette tears in the lemon meringue pie; the moment whispered and worried about behind Jubilee’s segregated doors. Our teacher asked all four of our new classmates to remain standing by their desks as she introduced them. These girls and boys could not have been more on display if they had entered the classroom naked on the backs of white horses.

When the girl across the aisle shyly introduced herself as Ophelia, I turned to look at her. My stomach flipped over. She was wearing my red plaid dress. I was shocked to see the dress again and had a strange feeling seeing it on her. I had worn it the previous winter and I didn’t know it was missing. Whenever my mother gave my clothes away, I had a romantic notion that they were sent across the globe to Siberia, or maybe to the jungles of South America. I did not expect to see my clothes on my new classmate. The dress, made of coarsely woven, thick wool twill,
had been one of my winter jumpers, designed to be worn with a blouse underneath. This was a sweltering September day in an airless schoolroom, and this frightened young girl was wearing my red plaid wool jumper with nothing underneath, as if it were a cool, breezy summer frock. For one ridiculous moment I chased the thought that someone might recognize her dress as my own. But no one was concentrating on Ophelia’s dress when the color of her skin beckoned. I immediately felt ashamed; my face flushed with a moment of private embarrassment. I realized it was stupid of me to be concerned about whether anyone else recognized that the dress had belonged to me.

Ophelia was the last to be called upon, and her three friends were no longer standing in support. The teacher asked her to tell the class her name. “Oh feel ya,” she said in a soft, singsongy way. I stared at her when she sat down. The dress was too small for her. It pulled in all the wrong places and looked as if it might cut off the circulation under her armpits; what was left of her baby fat puffed and poked around the armhole of the dress. I thought she must be terribly uncomfortable, her warmth, the itchiness of the wool, and her blackness all glaringly obvious on her first day in the white school. I knew that in that moment she felt completely and utterly alone. As I tried to make eye contact and caught her eye, I smiled, but she turned away. When I returned home from school that day I wanted to tell my mother about Ophelia and the dress. But she was busy with Belle and Jemma.

“Go do your homework.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Well, stay out of my way, I’m busy right now, can’t you see that? And have you seen your daddy?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, where is he?”

“I don’t know, I’ve been in school all day.” I ran downstairs to find him before she could slap me for sassing.

The funeral home was all but deserted except for Sonny. I caught him sitting in my father’s chair, his legs and feet propped up on the desk like he owned the place.

Sonny had a wily way of appearing civil to me in public, but certainly less so when occasionally we found ourselves alone in the funeral home. Oh, how we glared at each other. I knew he tolerated my siblings and me only because it would be unwise to show his irritation in the presence of my parents.

He cleaned his nails with his pocketknife. “So how was school today?”

“Fine.” I held the phone book up to cover my face.

“Y’all had some new students today, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“How did it go?”

“Huh?”

“No trouble out of those niggers?”

I got up, went to the bottom of the stairs, and yelled up to my mother, “I’m going across the street.”

I didn’t wait for a reply.

When I walked past Sonny, he said, “Damn right there was no trouble. They know their place.”

I guessed I pretty much hated Sonny.

Years later the desegregation of our school system would be recorded as having been “without incident.” In his own detestable way, Sonny was right.

The clouds gave coverage from the stinging sun, and a balmy breeze teased by pretending to cool the air. I walked across Main Street to the building on the corner. The elegant two-story brick building was a former bank with a history that screamed Jesse
James. Jubilee’s historical memory was a convenient one, and for a long time the story was that Jesse James robbed the bank in 1868. One of the gang shot a man and stole the money, and the legend had lived in vibrancy since. The James-Younger Gang definitely robbed the bank, but people debated for years whether Jesse James was present. (Turns out, he wasn’t.)

The bank was now our public library, and that its doors were only a few steps away from my own was like a drop of dew on a dry patch of grass. Jubilee didn’t have a bookshop, and I didn’t even know that bookshops existed. The first time I opened the door to the library and smelled the scent of a multitude of hard-covers, I was entranced. The high-ceilinged library had tall, dark wooden, freestanding bookshelves. Our librarian, Theodocia Graham—Theo to her friends—introduced me to reading for pleasure. This was a lifesaving solution to the long hours of quiet time during the funerals and nights of visitation. The library was quiet, too; so quiet that if you closed a book too loudly, it echoed in the massive room. But I was a partner to quiet and I felt at home. Most of the time I roamed the shelves alone, the only friend to all the books. Finally, I had thoughts to fill my head other than my own. Theo was single-handedly responsible for implanting glorious mind journeys fueled solely by a book. I visited New England and San Francisco, I discovered the ingredients of that Southern confectionery delight Divinity in a Junior League cookbook, and because Theo wasn’t prissy, tales of pirates and knights abroad captivated me. I ran my hand over the covers of the books as if I could feel the story underneath. The little thrill of taking the books home to keep even for a few days was comforting, especially on a day like this when the afternoon turned gloomy.