Almost Famous Women (19 page)

Lank had what he called a ministry project, a postgraduate demonstration of ideas in action. “Roughly one-third of our neighborhood is Christian,” he told us one Sunday, “but most of them are elderly. Think about it—we only have a short while to lead the other two-thirds to God.”

I was vain and ambitious in those days, and easily moved. I've always had get-an-A syndrome, so when Lank casually mentioned he could use some volunteers for his ministry project, I blushed, raised my hand, and said I was available. He nodded approvingly in my direction. The Sunday evening light came in blue through the stained glass, and I felt hot inside with righteousness, or perhaps an early notion of lust.

My eyes never left Lank during youth group. He sat in the middle of a semicircle of folding chairs, Bible on his knee. I stared at his bare, tan ankles; like most of the men at Heyside Baptist, he wore his loafers without socks. The skin, exposed when he crossed his legs and his pressed khakis rose up his leg, fascinated me with its adult qualities. Though he would turn out to be someone I was embarrassed to smile at when I returned home from college, he was my first crush. After youth group I practiced French kissing Lank, sliding my tongue across the bathroom mirror, full of wonderment and a little shame.

The Sunday afternoon of my short-lived evangelical career, I arrived in white shorts my mother and I had argued over. The crepe myrtles dumped pink petals onto the parking lot, browned by the morning's fast rain and the wheels of Mom's Chrysler minivan.

“You're going to lead people to the Lord in booty shorts?” Mom had said.

Though I didn't see it then, she was always calling me to reason, nudging me to laugh at the world. Or myself. She had some brains behind her suntan, but she spent her prime shuttling me between school and the softball field, between a split-level home and extracurricular activities in which I did not excel. She liked Agatha Christie and Mary Kay, chose the Junior League over college. She rented out our home every year for the big golf tournament, cleaning the place frantically for the caddies and their families, decking it out with bouquets of lilies and her grandmother's china, earning enough to pay my undergraduate tuition in cash.

Three of us from youth group showed up that day, all girls in short hemlines, all ready to lead the elderly to the Lord for the love
of Lank Harris. After flirting with our mothers—or maybe it was the other way around—he led us across the road and into the neighborhood he had in mind, four blocks of Sears kit bungalows, shotgun shacks, and the occasional vinyl-sided contemporary cape.

“Who wants the hard one?” he said, turning to us beneath an ancient oak tree.

We all raised our hands. The humidity plastered my hair to my forehead and the back of my neck. Sunlight glinted off the long blond leg hairs I'd missed shaving.

“Anyone know Butterfly McQueen?” Lank asked.

None of us did. He told us she was a former actress and an avowed atheist. We nodded and made knowing, sad eyes at each other. “What movies?” we asked.

“Gone With the Wind,”
Lank said. “She was one of the maids, the one that said ‘I don't know nothin' bout birthin' babies!' But don't ask her about the movie.”

“Why?” we asked.

“She doesn't like to talk about it. She thinks her role reinforced stereotypes.”

I nodded as if I understood, but Mom had not yet let me watch the movie. Living in the South, one could know the movie without ever having seen it. Mom's bridge group had
GWTW
parties, gatherings that included hats, gloves, mint juleps, and red velvet cakes. These women named their cats Scarlett and Rhett, had homes that looked like the Kmart version of Tara, and took it personally that the burning of Atlanta had been filmed not in Georgia but in Hollywood. In 1939, war raging, my grandmother and her sister had dressed in period clothing and waited six hours on Peachtree Street in Atlanta to watch Vivien Leigh's motorcade drive by. Decades
later, leafing through the scrapbook with stars in her eyes, she told me about the ovations for Confederate veterans, the chilly air shot through with roving spotlights.

“We've been working Prissy for years,” Lank said, using her character's name. “What I want you to do is think of Jeremiah 20:9.
His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones
. Can you feel that?”

We nodded again.

“I said can you
feel
that?”

“Yes.” YES.

“Elizabeth,” Lank said, looking me deep in the eyes. “I want you to go in there and say everything we've practiced. I want you to ask Butterfly to let the light of the Lord into her heart.”

“I will,” I said, on fire not for the Lord but for Lank Harris.

“No one has ever been able to get through to her,” he whispered. “That's how I'll know I have a star on my hands.”

Lank abandoned me at her door, which was flanked with a broom, parched flowers, and a pair of small tennis shoes. I took a deep breath, rang the bell, and stepped back from the door. Nothing.

“Ring again,” Lank mouthed from the sidewalk, gesturing with his finger before heading down the block. He didn't go far. I suspected only later that he liked to watch people struggle.

The door opened slightly, and Butterfly put her head through the crack. She was a small woman, and we stared at each other eye to eye. I was surprised at the immediate feeling of embarrassment that washed over me. I was starstruck, nauseated. She was famous and I wasn't. She was part of one of the South's biggest cultural moments. She had touched Vivien Leigh.

“What do you want, honey?” she asked. Her voice was high-pitched
and childlike even though she was in her eighties. She wore her white hair pulled back and smiled apprehensively. The crack of the door widened.

“I want to talk to you about your faith,” I said, using the line I had practiced with Lank.

Butterfly scoffed. “Again? You can tell that minister of yours that he can stop trying,” she said. “Don't you think everyone else has already tried? My family? My friends?”

“He cares for you,” I said.

“Who?”

“The Lord,” I said.

“I won't be anyone's trophy,” she said, pointing to her head. “I can think on my own.”

I took a deep breath. I started to wonder if I had the guts, maybe even the faith, to see this through. I searched in my heart for some deeper commitment, some understanding about the universe that I had and Prissy didn't, but I came up empty.

“If you believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead—”

“I don't believe any of that,” she said, “and I got tired of pretending. Aren't you?”

I said nothing. All I had were canned lines, which I had memorized dutifully but could not—when it counted—feel or defend.

“Trust me—I'm trying to do right by others and be honest at the same time,” she said.

“Don't you worry about what's going to happen when you die?” I said, suddenly genuinely curious.

“I already know what's going to happen when I pass,” she said. “I'm giving my body to science.”

I was dumbfounded.

“To do some real good,” she said. “Good we can see and good we can know.”

I forgot about the Lord. “What will they do with your body?”

“Cut it open, learn, give my organs to someone who needs them,” she said. “I don't know and I don't care.”

This was the first time I'd ever heard of someone not wanting to lie in a grave in their best dress, plastic lilies stuck in the ground next to a granite tombstone. It seemed to me so rational and selfless, one of the greatest gifts you could give: your whole body.

“Now if you'll excuse me—”

“I was hoping—”

“I know you were, but I'm going to save your time,” she said. “Go on to the next house, honey.”

The door shut and I stood there looking at it, stunned.

“And God bless,” Lank whispered from behind an azalea bush, whose blooms had withered and were now brown and plastered to the porch.

“Say it,” he hissed.

“And God bless,” I said, my voice anemic.

“Next house up,” Lank said, wiping sweat from his brow. “Keep momentum.”

“I want to call my mom,” I said, tugging at the hemline of my shorts.

“You're letting fear in,” Lank said, holding me by the elbow. He craned over me, eyes earnest, skin tanned from frequent golf games.

But what I'd really let in was a kernel of doubt.

Butterfly's black cat stared at me through the window, ambivalent. “I want to go home,” I said.

I didn't think of Butterfly again for years, not until I was twenty-four years old and in bed with my mother, watching
Gone With the Wind
.

Those days I was working a job as a marketer at a firm in Richmond,
marketer
meaning someone who scheduled conference calls and hounded executives for calendar time nine hours a day. I'd married the wrong guy, and too young. I ate everything put in front of me. Anytime I got into my car alone, I cried. Two decades into life and I was burnt out.

Mom was in and out of sleep that day, exhausted from radiation treatments. I held her hand and ate two doughnuts and an entire bag of popcorn. At that time in my life, movies were salvation. I could quiet my brain, stop thinking about the things I didn't understand: my mother's cancer, pharmacology, why I didn't love my perfectly nice husband. Instead I could marvel at Vivien Leigh's waistline, her savage femininity.

But then Scarlett, outraged with Prissy's failure to find a doctor when Melanie was in the throes of labor, shoved her on the staircase. I froze.

“Oh my God,” I said, sitting up. I was struck by how horrendous that scene was, how sharp. No wonder Butterfly was uncomfortable with her role.

“That's how it was,” Mom said, stirring. I brought her broth.

Three weeks later she was dead. Lank spoke at her service, his blond hair now thinned out on top and swept to the side, but I was too ripped open by grief to listen. I'd tuned him out years ago.

It turns out that Vegas had cancer, and this sobers us. One of our team members finds a chemotherapy port surrounded by puckered skin and scar tissue.

“I can't believe I was wrong about his heart,” Sarah says.

“You could still be right,” I say. “We'll know in a few weeks.”

While we wait for the lab technician to inspect our work, Sarah tells me that she'd like to open a free clinic in Florida for the workers who get bused in for orange picking. “They have these makeshift camps,” Sarah says. “And no health care. What about you?”

“What about me?” I ask.

“Why did you come here?”

“After my mother died,” I say, “I quit my marketing job and started taking biology classes at the community college.”

“So you didn't always want to be a doctor?” she asks, as if this is a strike against my character.

“No,” I say. “Definitely not.”

“What do you think Vegas did before he died?” she asks. “Landscape architect? Toll booth operator? Who
are
these people?”

That night, as I scrub the embalming fluid from my hands—it had seeped into my gloves and made my fingers tingle—I remember how Butterfly McQueen died.

Mom read the obituary to me at the kitchen table. I was in high school, fifteen or so, and constantly sulking, but the news had caught my attention. It had been a little over a year since I'd met Butterfly, and she'd lodged in my imagination. She'd been a dancer, a maid, a Harlem social worker, and attended college in her sixties. I recall something she said in an interview about how she
wouldn't let Vivien Leigh slap her, and refused to eat watermelon. I remember cringing at the sound of her roles: maid, Auntie, a “blind negress” in
Huckleberry Finn
.