Read Catfish Alley Online

Authors: Lynne Bryant

Tags: #Mississippi, #Historic Sites, #Tour Guides (Persons), #Historic Buildings - Mississippi, #Mississippi - Race Relations, #Family Life, #African Americans - Mississippi, #Fiction, #General, #African American, #Historic Sites - Mississippi, #African Americans

Catfish Alley (8 page)

BOOK: Catfish Alley
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A large handsome colored man comes
into the room behind Adelle. He's wearing a white coat over his white shirt,
with a tie and suit pants. His shoes are black and polished shiny. I've never
seen a man with shiny shoes on before. He kneels down beside me and looks at me
over the top of his spectacles. His voice is gentle.

"Grace, we haven't met. I am
Dr. Albert
Jackson,"
he says; then he gives me his big hand to shake. I take his hand and try to
fight the tears I feel starting to form under my eyelids. "Grace," he
says, "do you think your brother might have forgotten the time, maybe gone
over to Green's for a soda pop or a piece of candy? Adelle tells me he got a
nickel for his birthday today."

I'm so overwhelmed I start to
blubber and stutter. "I don't know, sir. He's usually on time. He knows
Mama will be upset with us if we're late. She's cooking his favorite supper
tonight and Grandma made him a cake, and we have
to milk ..."
I finally burst into tears and Dr.
Jackson puts his arm around my shoulders. Mrs. Jackson and Adelle are patting
me, too.

"Don't worry, Grade,"
Adelle says. "I'm sure he'll be here soon."

Just then there's a loud banging on
the front door. Before Dr. Jackson can reach the door, it bursts open. I hear
loud voices coming from the hall, and Adelle and I rush to see what's going on.
I get to the hall first and I take in a big gasp. Two boys, one of them
Adelle's brother and the other someone I don't know, are lunging into the
doorway with Zero barely held up between them. Bright red blood drips from a
long gash across Zero's cheek. His nose looks crooked and blood oozes from his
nostrils. One of his eyes is swollen shut and
his clothes are dirty and torn.

"Zero!" I holler, and run
to his side, trying to help the boys hold him up. "Zero, what
happened?" He looks like he's trying to say something to me, but I can't
understand him. Dr. Jackson steps in.

"In here, boys. Get him up on
the table." Dr. Jackson looks calm and in control. I try to follow him
into the room but he stops me. "Now, Miss Grace, you just go with Adelle
and let me take care of your brother. He's going to be fine. You just go on
with Mrs. Jackson and Adelle." He eases me toward the door. The last thing
I see as Dr. Jackson closes the door is a tear running down Zero's face from
his good eye.

Things happen in a blur after that.
I sit with Adelle in her bedroom upstairs, while Mrs. Jackson sends Junior out
to our house in their wagon to fetch Mama. I worry that Mama will be terrified
and I keep getting up and going to the window to watch for her. Mrs. Jackson
brings us some supper on a pretty tray with flowers on it. There are dishes
with flowers on them, too, and cold milk in crystal glasses. If I wasn't so
worried about Zero, I might feel like I was at a party. Adelle tries to help by
reading to me from Mr. Dickens, but I can't concentrate. Every sound out on the
street makes me jump.

Finally, after what seems like
hours, there's a soft knock on the door and Dr. Jackson comes in and sits down
next to me on Adelle's bed.

"Grace, your brother is going
to be fine. He took quite a beating today, but I've gotten him stitched up and
I gave him some medicine for the pain. He's asking for you. I think you better
come and see him before he goes off to sleep again."

I follow Dr. Jackson down the stairs
and he takes me into a big white room, where Zero is lying on a narrow bed,
covered with a quilt. Dr. Jackson guides me close to the table and reaches out
to gently touch Zero's shoulder. "Zero, here's Grace."

Zero opens that one unswollen eye
and gives me a weak smile. "Hey, Grade," he whispers. I notice his
words are all slurry. "Don't get Mama all worried now, you hear?"

I don't know whether I'm crying
because I'm mad at him or worried about him, but I nod my head and stand there
not knowing what to do. He reaches out from under the quilt to take my hand.
"I'll be all right, Grade," he says. "Don't you worry ...,"
and he drops my hand as he dozes off.

We hear a horse's steps and the
crunch of gravel outside and Dr. Jackson walks over to the window and peers
between the curtains.

"Your mama is here. How about
we go out on the front porch to meet her?" he says. When Dr. Jackson opens
the door for us to leave Zero's room, Adelle is standing right outside waiting
for me. She puts her arm around me and gives me a quick squeeze. Right then I
think how lucky I am to have a friend like Adelle. She steps back beside Mrs.
Jackson as I run out on the front porch to meet my mama.

 

Roxanne

 

I feel the bond between Grace Clark and Adelle Jackson.
I wonder what it would be like to have a friend like that, someone you've known
practically your whole life. It occurs to me that no one knows me that well. Of
course, I've made sure not to get too close to anyone; otherwise people might
find out about my background. But it would be nice to have a friend to confide
in; maybe someone who could tell me what I ought to do about Dudley.

But then, as far as I can tell, neither one of these
women ever had a husband and child to complicate their lives. I look at them and
I can't imagine that either of them would ever fall head over heels for the
wrong man. Was Dudley the wrong man? He seemed to fit everything I needed per
fectly
at the time. Was I so ambitious that he simply served as a vehicle for me to
complete the story I made up about myself?

Having children was certainly a part of my story that
didn't work out according to plan. I always thought that Dudley and I would
have our first child about a year after marriage and then maybe one or two
more, two or three years apart. Everything seemed to be moving right along
according to schedule. I got pregnant right away and Dudley was delighted.
Milly came along in February and it was wonderful. I loved being a mother,
knowing that things would be so different for my little girl. She would have
genuine social status. I poured myself into mothering her. I even began to
wonder how I would be able to love the next child as much as I loved Milly.

But there never was a next child. The same cancer that
killed Mama because she ignored it for thirty years started early in me. My
dreams of surrounding myself with beautiful children disappeared along with my
uterus and ovaries. No son for Dudley. No more daughters for me.

I never confided my sense of loss to anyone. Instead,
any conversation with women in the community could so easily be turned to the
subject of Dudley, or a home

I
was restoring, or my daughter, Milly. Deflecting attention from myself had
become a habit very early in my life and I never broke it. Dudley's parents
were so indulgent, of him and of Milly, that it was easy even with my own child
to gloss over my particular past. Milly has always been a happy, contented
person. She must have gotten that from her father. She doesn't seem compelled
to ask questions. She takes her secure place in the world for granted. All
through school as she was growing up, I focused her attention on Dudley's
family. It was fairly easy to just say that my Louisiana parents died young and
I was taken in by the Stanleys.

I
see a lot of myself in Milly. She's very interested in appearance, but she
doesn't have to work as hard at it as I did. She really does have wealthy
grandparents. She really was a debutante and a sorority member at Ole Miss.
It's all part of her reality, not a fairy tale. Milly has no problem allowing
me to indulge her; having everyone's attention is her birthright. It's probably
my fault that the child has been on the fast track since conception. She was
even born two weeks early. She whizzed through high school, finished college in
three years, married her prelaw boyfriend this past summer, and is now
complaining about being bored and trying to decide between opening a boutique
and going to graduate school. I always dreamed that we might go into business
together. After last night's phone call, I have serious doubts about that.

"Hey,
Mama," she said in her distracted tone. I can always tell when she's doing
something else during our phone calls. I could even hear magazine pages
turning. We chatted randomly about nothing — mostly clothes, home decor. I
haven't told her anything, of course, about the problems between her father and
me. She did ask what I'm working on now. I told her about the tour.

"An
African-American tour? You're kidding, right?" she said.

"No,
I'm really not kidding. The committee wants to launch it next spring."

"Ew.
Sounds depressing. What is there to tour?"

"So
far, not much. A couple of interesting houses, maybe," I equivocate,
surprised at myself for feeling a little defensive. I might not like it, but
this tour is part of my work.

"But
you don't really know any black people ... well, except maybe Ola Mae. How are
you getting your information?"

"From
a woman named Grace Clark, who taught school here forever. She's retired now,
but she's helping me out." Of course Milly doesn't know her, because Milly
has been in all-white private schools her entire life — until Ole Miss, that
is. She seemed to seamlessly mesh herself into an integrated environment in
college. Although she never brought home black friends, there were two black
girls in her sorority.

"So,
how does that work, exactly?" Milly asked. "Does she just sit and
tell you about these places? Or, I mean, like, do you have to actually go see
them?"

I
took a deep breath, already imagining her response to my answer. "Miss
Clark has insisted that I drive her to the places and that I write down the
stories that she tells me."

"Wow!
So let me get this straight. You actually go to the black parts of town and
visit these places with this old black lady. Are you, like, the only white
person there?"

"Well,
I've only been to a couple, but yes, pretty much. ..." I think about
telling her about my experience with Del Tanner, but decide not to.

She's
laughing now. She's so smug in what she thinks is her enlightened racial
attitude.

"Oh,
Mama. I would love to be a fly on the wall when you are touring around with an
old black woman. That would be a sight to see."

I
manage to change the subject and get off the phone, feeling even more
frustrated and confused. Am I angry because I'm having to do this or am I angry
at Milly for thinking I can't?

Adelle
puts her arm around Grace's shorter bony frame and gives her a comforting
squeeze. It's obvious that standing here in Dr. Jackson's exam room eighty-one
years later still brings back some painful memories for Grace.

Grace
looks up from the exam table and shakes herself slightly, as if trying to wake
up. "I guess you'll be wanting to see the rest of Dr. Jackson's office and
the house now. Adelle, be sure and take her in there and show her the
library," she says, walking out of the office, talking over her shoulder.

"Just
a minute," I say, following her. I can't seem to help myself. "You
stopped in the middle of the story. What happened to Zero? Who was his fight
with?"

She
pauses, but she doesn't look at me. "I'll finish the story, but first I've
got to sit down. Y'all complete your tour while I rest in the parlor. When
you're done, come meet me."

Adelle
shows me through the rest of the

Jackson
home. It's not an antebellum, but it's an attractive Victorian. I wonder how
both these women ended up as old maids, but I decide not to ask right now. My
list of questions about these women just keeps growing — and their history is
not even part of this tour.

"Miss
Jackson, how do you feel about your family's home being part of an African-American tour of Clarksville?" I ask, after we finish the tour and head
back to the parlor.

"If
you can put together something like that in Clarksville, Mississippi, I would
be happy to have y'all tour this old house. There are a lot of memories here
for me, some good, some bad. Since I walk around with a couple of ghosts all
the time, it might be nice to share them with someone else for a change."

This
makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. She sounds so matter-of-fact.
"Ghosts? You're not serious, are you?"

She
doesn't answer me. She just chuckles low under her breath.
Maybe Zero died that day, right
there in that exam room.
We get back to the parlor, where Grace dozes in a
chair by the window. She wakes up when we come into the room.

"How
did you like the rest of the house?"
she asks.

"It will be a good house for the tour," I
say. "Authentic antiques, interesting history. Now, Miss Jackson, about
those ghosts."

Adelle and Grace look at each other and smile, but I
can't read them. They seem to share a secret.

BOOK: Catfish Alley
5.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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