Weeds in Bloom (13 page)

Only a soul.

F
LORIDA FELT CHILLY THAT MORNING
.

I’d stopped for gasoline at an outdated two-pump station beside a red-clay road on the Florida Panhandle.

Research, for my dough, is not library work. It’s finding the back paths—lonely, beckoning—and scouting rural areas. Prospecting. There are dirt roads aplenty here, connecting Florida and Georgia and Alabama. A good place to strike gold among grit.

A frayed rope had been strung horizontally from the front corner of the fill-up station to a pine tree that stood seventy feet away. The rope sagged with homespun merchandise. On the pine, a crudely lettered sign read:

WARM QUILTS

I’d seen close to a dozen signs for QUILTS along these roads and had resisted considering a purchase. This particular sign felt cozy. Warm.

Nearby stood an elderly woman wearing a ratty old Army coat, a gray scarf, no stockings, and a pair of man’s shoes. Knowing nothing about shopping for roadside bedding, I walked to the nearest quilt, one in two colors. Yellow and white. The quilt’s maker had somehow captured sunshine and woven the strips of cloth into a rectangle of solar strength.

My hand touched its softness.

The old woman approached me. “I call that’n ‘Sunday Morning,’” she said, in a voice as gentle and comforting as her quilt. “I give ’em all a name.”

Walking along in front of the row of quilts, I stopped at each one, allowing the quilter to introduce us.

“‘Benevolence,’” she said, “because there’s five different shades of blue, and all of ’em’s so kindly.”

Her third quilt was neither rectangular nor square. Instead, it was octagonal, featuring what appeared to be eight characters, in pairs. Four maroon, all larger and plainer than the four smaller ones, which were frilly, in pink.

“‘Barn Dance,’” she said, silently clapping her hands, “on account it looks like promenade your partner. Years back, when I was a young girl … oh,
how I could square-dance. And clog. My toes flew like wrens.”

“Did
you
make all these quilts?”

She nodded. “Ever single one. You’ll see a
down yonder in ever corner. A trademark. My name is Hosannah Holbert.”

Touching the brim of my cowboy hat, I bent her a grin. “Nice to meet you, Miss Hosannah. I’m Rob.”

“I’ll turn seventy-seven come May. Been at quilting for over sixty year.” She shook her head. “Young girls today don’t do a lick of it. Leastwise not the bubblegummers I meet up.”

“What’s this next one called?”

It was black and white, with eight durable objects; yet the powerful pattern seemed to be more might than music, so I doubted it represented a dance.

“Them there’s oxen,” she said. “Holsteins. They’s all black-and-white, them cattle, so I named this’n ‘Ox Pull.’ See? I weave two ox in each of the four corners, facing out. All pullin’ like fury. Four yoke. When it’s spread out flat to a bed, why, them ox tug so strong you’d swear the quilt was growing and growing.”

“It’s beautiful work,” I said.

“That’s because it’s usual pleasing to chore at
something you enjoy. Not once—no, not even a one time—did I ever fashion the same quilt twice. Quilts are my children. Each’ll git a fresh face. Like a sheet of cookies.”

“Makes sense.”

“This’n I call ‘Attic Window.’ If you stand still and study on it, you’ll begin to feel you perch away up high, looking out across a meadow of flowers.” She leaned an inch or two closer to me. “I hate selling ‘em. It pains to part with kin.”

“Yes, I suppose it does,” I said. “I’ve often wondered how a painter can stand to sell a painting. He has it one minute, and poof! It’s clean gone.”

Hosannah looked at the sky.

“At night, after I trade away one of my quilts, I look up to the stars and pretend I can still behold it, spread out across God’s bed.” Lowering her gaze, she squinted at me for a moment. Then she so slowly smiled. “That’s a lot like life itself. Having and losing.”

I agreed. “Living is a gain and then a loss.”

“What’s so sad,” Hosannah said, “is that I’ll eventual sell all seven of these quilts, and each one’ll leave and wander off in a strange direction. To a different place. They’ll never again be a family like now, all in line, as though sitting to a supper and blessing their food. Or side by side in a church pew.”

Insanity struck me!

“Would you be willing,” I asked her, “to allow me to purchase all seven of your quilts? Because I want
all
of them. Right now, before I change my crazy mind.”

She blinked a few times.

“All seven?”

“Yes. I’ll keep them, give them a good home, and they’ll be together. Our family and our guests, snuggled beneath your family.”

Hosannah let out a sigh. “That’d be righteous.” As she spoke, her smile was warmer than any coverlet.

We sealed the deal.

Happily, I headed for home, wondering how to justify such a spree of impulse buying. As it turned out, no problem. We Pecks are all a tad tilted, so everyone understood. And did so again, a couple of years later, when I collected the quilts, loaded all seven in my car, and drove north to the Panhandle to do research—and to visit Hosannah, of
fame.

She was there. It was a warm homecoming of seven prodigal quilts welcomed by their creator. Eight joyous souls, like a …

Barn Dance.

T
HE BAR WAS QUITE DARK
.

And very noisy, a blend of yelling and fighting and canned reggae being played louder than a civilized ear can tolerate. Music declaring war.

Being an intruder, I was dressed as the other men were. Poorly. Everyone around me was brown or black, either from Jamaica or Haiti. I had dishonestly charred my face with Florida muck and tied a twisted red bandanna around my head as a headband.

My complexion is naturally dark. Here, it helps.

On this particular night, I was in Belle Glade, Florida, beneath the belly of Lake Okeechobee. It was winter, but warm. The harvesting season for sugarcane. Straddling a barstool, I ordered beer from a bottle, refusing to put a glass or a fork (or
even one of the willing young ladies) near my mouth. Most voices spoke English, others French. I can speak both, or so I always thought; except here, where I couldn’t clearly understand either.

A cutter on the next barstool fired a joint.

His first drag was hot and deep and demanding, as though his lungs were desperate for disease. Holding the marijuana smoke inside, he held it as long as possible, then exhaled from one nostril. The other must have been clogged. Looking at me, he offered me a free hit.

I grinned, touching a finger to my throat as if to explain why I was refusing his generosity.

“Thank you,” I told him. “I can’t smoke.”

He smiled imperfect teeth. “Hey, that is okay, mon. No problem.” After his next inhale he said the obvious. “You not Jamaica.”

I shook my head.

“Where?”

“Here, in Florida.” Offering an open right hand, I said, “Roberto.”

We shook.

“They call me Movement,” he said, “or sometime Move.” One more pull on the joint. “What you doing in cane-cutter bar?” His eyebrows raised. “Look for young woman, eh?”

“No,” I said, much too quickly.

Holding up a finger, he warned, “Hey, don’t put no pansy Yankee hands to my body. Mon, I am straight. You dig?”

“I dig. Me too.”

“Movement is not my real name.”

Tempted to say “Nor am I truthfully Roberto,” I held quiet. In bars such as this one, nobody asks for a name, and few offer identification, formal or informal. Fake green cards, a big business, are kept out of sight.

“Why do they call you Movement?”

Wordlessly, he serpentined off the barstool, turned around once, leaped, waved his arms, bent to retrieve a bottle cap from the filthy floor, tossed it up, and caught it. All in one symphonic motion. He wasn’t solid. Instead, he was fluid and breeze, flowing and billowing as a ballet. As he whirled, everyone noticed, watching with the same fascination as I did, even though (from those I had observed) many Jamaicans are graceful. To call Movement a dancer would be unjustly inadequate. He wasn’t merely a dancer.

He was
dance
.

There was nothing effeminate about him. He appeared to be a total male, so confident of his own swaggering masculinity that he was comfortable with grace. Even his hands were delicate. But not all soft or silken. Movement’s handshake had been
forcefully firm. Yet a man of lace, a child born of ferns, hemlock, or cypress.

“Move,” someone said to him, “do some more.”

So he did.

Realizing that all eyes were now focusing on him, Movement gracefully performed, to charm us as easily as a cobra slithering from a wicker basket. As he danced, the reggae began to make sense, because Movement added meaning. He swayed to each note as though creating it on a sheet of music with his body as a feathery quill. He was a perfect visual interpretation of sound.

For a moment, a young black girl danced with Movement as his partner. Yet, despite that she was lithe and pretty, I found myself watching him instead of her. When he danced, or walked, or shifted to another position on a barstool, all eyes followed Movement, mine included.

“Mon,” he laughed, “I got style.”

In sequence, half a dozen girls danced with Movement, each reluctantly releasing him to the next partner. He coaxed them to improve, to leap, to fly.

People bought and brought Movement drinks, one after another. He thanked everyone, his black eyes flashing as though he deserved the attention in which he was basking. To every lady, he bowed. When he did so, even an adolescent bar harlot
imagined, perhaps, that she had become a princess, a king’s daughter, or the beloved sweetheart of a prince. Movement drank. He smoked, danced, shouted to me within an inch of my ear because the music was as loud as the crowd.

“Where,” I asked Movement, “did you learn to dance the way you do? You really are good, you know. More than good. You’re the best dancer I’ve ever seen.”

“Want to know who teach me?”

“Yes, I do.”

“No problem.” He giggled boyishly. “Fred Astaire.”

I laughed too, prompted by the fact that Fred Astaire had retired before this lad was born.

“Old movies,” Movement told me. “In Jamaica, only rich go to new movies. Us peoples see old gray mares. That where I meet Mr. Fred Astaire.”

The evening got later, and drunker, and I would have offered a sawbuck for a lungful of fresh air. Yet as long as Movement danced, or even paraded to the men’s room, I had to tarry and watch his return.

Next morning, however, came very early.

It was Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the day before, I’d taken careful notice where the burners were burning the fields of sugarcane. Growers burn on the day before they
harvest. No sugar company wants an author (or a reporter) to visit a cutter camp or a cane field. I was officially told that no cane chopper permitted himself to be photographed.

Cameras, in Clewiston and Moore Haven and LaBelle, were regarded with mistrust. To be photoed was bad luck. A camera was merely one more white man’s demon.

A devil box.

For a few bucks, Movement smuggled me into the camp. His temporary domicile, loosely described, was an unpainted cement-block structure of one story, one room, with neither stove nor electricity, and no working toilet. Disguised as I was, I slept unnoticed with about a dozen other men in a room that stunk of sweat and filth and hopelessness.

To a cane cutter, such is home.

I had my own cane knife.

Carrying it, I boarded a dull-green school bus the next morning, before dawn. The darkness protected me from detection, masking my identity, allowing me to chop sugarcane (at almost the age of sixty) with men who were one-third my age.

Movement was my sponsor.

First off, he called me Tall, or Tall Guy, a moniker that suited me because I am, after all, a tall guy. Cane, I learned, is not chopped from an erect
position. We cutters are only erect from the waist down. The upper body remains horizontal.