Marching to Zion (11 page)

When the door opened, there she was, an answered prayer, Mags Preacher McCallum, looking exactly the same as she did ten years before when he’d left her at that very doorstep with the funeral car and her baby girl, little Sara Kate. Twin boys, maybe five years old, clung to her skirts, one on each leg. A girl child with small bright eyes and cheeks as sharp as two arrowheads stood just behind her. She peered around one of the boys, chewing her lower lip and looking like the pint-sized ghost of George McCallum himself.

Sweet Jesus, it’s you, Magnus Bailey, ain’t it? Mags said. She opened the door wider to give him a swift, chaste embrace before waving him in. Babies, she said, this is a man I knew years ago, a man who was kind to me when I was just a green country gal gone to the big city to make my fortune.

She invited him to sit down at the kitchen table and sent the boys to find their father in the fields and bring him back to meet their very special visitor. She put Sara Kate to heating up the stew pot and fixing some chicory brew that Magnus Bailey might refresh himself.

She’s just like her daddy, Magnus said. Right down to the way she walks.

Mags sighed. She felt an uncommon need to express herself, the way people often do when the past comes up by surprise and smacks them across the face, when all the old feelings sleeping inside revive intact and strong. She spoke to Magnus Bailey as if they’d been the very best of friends and confidants those years ago when all they’d ever been was passing friendly, their sole communalities in life Miss Emily’s rooming house and the Fishbeins. But time gone can burnish old acquaintances with sentiment, and Bailey was the reason, indirectly anyway, that Mags met George McCallum to begin with, which is why she leaned forward with her elbows on the table and let go.

It’s true what you say. I swear she’s so much like George it sometimes makes me sad just to look at her. I married again, mostly because her father made me so happy, I couldn’t live alone anymore. I kept wantin’ company, especially with this one sproutin’ up around me, remindin’ me how nice life is when you got somebody. Now, the boys’ father. He’s a good man alright. I wouldn’t dishonor George by marryin’ anybody but a good man. Still, when I look at my Sara Kate, I think of her daddy, and Lord help me, I miss him more’n a bit.

The child in question brought Magnus Bailey a hot bowl of squirrel stew with onions, yams, and collards, and he found it wasn’t half bad. Mags went on while he ate, reminiscing about George’s way with a needle and how much he comforted the bereaved just by standing there, looking dignified. It must have been a good twenty minutes before she mentioned the Fishbeins. For Bailey, it felt like hours.

Mr. Fishbein was good to us, very good. He’d learned some hard lessons from life in the old country, so I was told, but they never turned him cruel. Always respectful, he was, and not once did he cheat us of a dime we had comin’. And what a generous soul! Remember that big old bus he gave me? I sold it pretty fast. Know what I did with it? I put half in the bank for Sara Kate’s welfare. There’s enough there for all my children’s future, I’m bettin’. How many of us can say that? Then I bought me some beauty supplies to add to the dead man’s paints Mr. Fishbein let me have, and a great big old hair dryer, tough as a gun. It wasn’t much more than a couple of trash-can lids wired to hold a bundle of lightbulbs. Why, I woulda got more heat on a lady’s head if I set her down in front of an open oven door. We didn’t have the electricity up here yet. I had to buy a dynamo for an old shed out back. That dynamo cost me a whopper but it made me a shop out of those four walls. It was drafty and plain. The country cousins, they flocked to me from all over anyways just to get a look at it. I did everything for ’em I told you I would in times gone. I made beauties out of good-lookin’ gals and lookers out of plain ones. More than a few owe the catchin’ of their husbands’ eye to me. Then the chemicals got to me. I started to cough too much. I had to give it up. I never did make my fortune from that business. I guess that means you were right to deny me my hundred dollars, Mr. Magnus Don’t-Turn-Nobody-Down-No-How-No-Way Bailey!

She laughed heartily. Bailey joined her, laughing with just the right measure of nostalgia, nothing too loud or harsh in his tone, although his heart raced and his mind burned for the next moment when he could bring up Minerva. Casual, he thought, it’s got to be casual. He arranged his features in a simple, curious expression and opened his mouth.

I wonder how he and his daughter are these days, he began, when Mags Preacher McCallum’s second husband came in the door, a good-natured smile on his broad, happy face, his big farmer’s hand extended for Magnus Bailey to shake.

Joe Dunlap, he said, pleased to meet you.

Magnus Bailey, the other replied with a false smile. All hope of conversation about the Fishbeins was about to turn to dust. Desperate, he tried to steer talk back to the old days.

How is it, he asked, that you’ve taken over the Stanton house? I’ll never forget the night we delivered you here and the hospitality we enjoyed. Come to think of it, where are Aurora Mae and Horace? Why, I can see us all dancin’ at your weddin’ and sittin’ together at this very table as time went by. You were over there and Horace up the head and Aurora Mae facin’ him. Then me here, where I am now, with Miss Minnie beside me …

All his machinations brought him was an excited spill of words from Mags about the curious fates of her cousins. Half of it made no sense to him, but he nodded and oohed and ahhed while she rattled on anyway.

Oh, there has been so much, so much gone on, I don’t know where to start tellin’ you, she said. Poor Aurora Mae. How she suffered, you know, just for bein’ what she was. So big, so beautiful. No woman like that can live in peace. Not in this world. The night riders come up some year ago, while she was all alone, killed her dogs, and took her away. Why, when poor Horace got back here, she was gone without a trace, and no matter how hard he tried, he could not find her.

Bailey thought of Minnie then, of her violation on the road to Tulips End, and how her father, like Horace, searched and could not find her. His eyes stung.

They were reunited by the flood, Mags continued. Somewhere, somehow, they found each other, got a hold of money, too—piles of it. They came home awhile, and then, without warnin’, they left, each their separate ways. I took the house over. Aurora Mae wound up in Memphis. I know, as we write from time to time. I don’t know where Horace went off to.

The mention of Memphis gave Magnus Bailey the opportunity he needed.

I’m very sorry to hear all that, he began. We all vulnerable, ain’t we? In the good times and the bad. Poor George, Aurora Mae, even I been hurt, although to a lesser degree.

He studied his hands which were rough and raw from his life on the barge and the hard labor he’d been put to after. He waved them about for her to see. Mags shrugged and shook her head.

Aurora Mae’s in Memphis? She doin’ alright?

Mags shrugged again.

Money heals all kinds of wounds, she said.

Yes, it does, Miss Mags. It certainly does. I wonder if she’s in touch with our old boss. I haven’t seen him in years.

Well, I don’t know about him, Mags said. But that Minerva, that l’il redheaded devil Minerva …

She broke off. Bailey sucked in a great breath of air, then let it out slowly, waiting. Mags dropped her head and sighed. Her mouth twisted as she pondered how much to tell Bailey, how much to leave out. She glanced at her husband, who’d remained quiet throughout their talk. He nodded encouragement for her to continue with a seriousness that frightened their guest. He could not imagine what all this hesitation was about. Dead, he thought. A hot, hard lump throbbed in his throat. My Minnie must be dead. What he next heard made the grieving of her look good.

Aurora Mae had a terrible time with those night riders. You can imagine how they used her. When they was done with her, they took her over to Minerva Fishbein’s bawdy house. L’il Red might have turned into the stone dead weight of her daddy’s heart and the biggest whore in all of Tennessee, but she saved Aurora Mae from that life. Took her in, then got her out of there. I believe she got her off to be a cook somewhere. No matter what, I got to thank her for that.

At last, the coward Magnus Bailey’s wait was over. His soul received its just deserts. Standing in for the Hand of God, Mags Preacher McCallum Dunlap’s words bound him to the racks of hell. He spent the night at the old Stanton place, on their best feather bed, as befit an honored guest. It might have been a bed of hot coals for all the rest it gave him. He writhed the night long in a fresh agony of guilt. In the morning, he quit the hospitality of the Stanton farm for the rigors of the road to Memphis, where he resolved to journey and put things right.

During the long walk
to Memphis, Magnus Bailey resurrected everything he’d forgotten about artifice and the exploitation of human weakness. This was not the halfhearted attempt at restoration he’d made in the days after he’d left the barge or even the hasty effort he made as he approached the Stanton farm. He was dry now, and his purpose that of the zealot reborn. He recalled first the simple things, those basic skills in how to convince others to do what they least wanted. He practiced the various ways he could turn his head or hunch his shoulders to provoke the desired response to a leading question posed in just the right tone of voice. While he walked down dusty roads, thrusting his walking stick forward, pulling up his thoughtful self behind, he muttered stock phrases he’d not used in years, practiced the laughter of collusion, the sigh of feigned surprise. His lips and eyes danced along the rhythm of his murmurs. With fluid grace, his body made sudden pivots and his arms grand, bold gestures either to the left or the right, depending on which side he carried his suitcase that was packed with canned goods, a bit of dried meat courtesy of Mags Preacher McCallum Dunlap, and everything else he needed to keep his suit brushed, his shoes shined, and his hair tamed. Walking down the road, he looked like nothing so much as a well-groomed, hyperkinetic lunatic. A handful of automobiles and wagons passed. None offered him a ride.

It was half a year since the flood. The flood water had long drained from the streets of Memphis, but the damage was everywhere. Homes abandoned and rotting out dotted even affluent districts. Businesses owned by families established before the Chickasaws left were gone without a trace. Downtown corners were piled high with planks of wood placed when needed across the thoroughfares to facilitate travel on roads where the mud was still thick. The air was cold but the hard frost, always a random visitor in that town, had not yet come. Everywhere Magnus stopped to pass the time of day and catch the pulse of life, folk voiced a longing for freezing temperatures that the mud might get rock hard and ease their burdens. Oh yes, he’d respond solemnly, the hard frost will come. But to himself, he said: Lordy! Hard mud on the streets of Memphis? Crunchy, maybe, long about dawn in January. But hard? And then his heart cheered thinking if folk were that desperate, his pickings might be considerable.

So far they’d been anything but. He couldn’t understand what was wrong. Whenever he needed money in the past, it came to him like rust to iron. All he had to do was wait and keep his eyes open. Where his genius lay was in seizing whatever opportunity presented itself and wringing it dry of purpose. He wasn’t a visionary so much as an expeditor of the ideas of others. If you had something to sell, a problem to solve, an inside chance to coax into a sure thing, Magnus Bailey was your man. But these days, folk played their cards close to their vests. The word on the street was mum. Since the disaster, no one trusted the future anymore. Old gamblers had become hoarders. Entrepreneurs minded the store and kept their dreams small. The high life had gone low and hard. Beale Street was about nothing but the blues.

Magnus Bailey needed money. He needed lots to make things right. He wasn’t at all sure how he would do that. The only thing he was sure of was that he’d need to be flush. At first, the only work he could get was as a part-time doorman over to the Robert E. Lee Riverside Hotel, a place sparsely visited by parsimonious guests mean with a tip. He bided his time. He made inquiries, found out that L’il Red’s was still in operation after the flood, that in fact the doors had never officially closed. When her premises went underwater, L’il Red pitched tents next to the encampment of the government- and relief-worker guards, trading her whores’ services for food and medicine instead of coin. He wasn’t half ready to go to her place and confront her, although he knew such a confrontation was essential, the first step toward emancipation for them both. Then the angels of forgiveness smiled upon him. He secured a second part-time job, cleaning floors and toilets at the main library two nights a week. The regular janitor was a churchman who wanted one night for prayer meeting and Saturdays for his family. That man hid copies of the
Chicago Defender
in the maintenance closet between the mops and the buckets. It was still a dangerous matter in some quarters for a colored man to be found with the
Defender
in his possession. Magnus found them and read the papers in his spare time. Between articles urging Negroes to quit the South and move north, where equality and decent jobs awaited them like ripe fruit ready to drop from the trees—argument that to Magnus Bailey, veteran of the St. Louis riots, rang false—he read stories about Josephine Baker and Langston Hughes living the white-man’s life in Gay Paree, and these he swallowed whole. A dream was born. Why hadn’t he thought about it before? The world was bigger than the Mississippi. There were places he could take Minnie where they could be together without fear. He assembled the texts he needed to discover where those places might be and how to get there. Soon enough, Bailey’s grand design was in order. He took to dreaming about his inevitable meeting with the instrument of his redemption and the dozens of tricks he tucked up his sleeve to win her cooperation for what came next. Lack of funds kept everything in the future, a future he envisioned bathed in a rosy mist, spiked with dangerous challenge and bright with glory altogether. If ever he got the money.

He avoided contact with her father. He went by the old place at night to see what he could from the curb. The house was derelict, the paint a mess, chipped and riven with mold. One of the front windows was broken and patched over with board. The lawn was wild and full of weeds. Inside on the first floor, there were lights on, and another light glowed on the second floor where Fishbein’s bedroom had been. The thin, stooped shadow of a man crossed the bedroom window. It looked enough like his old partner to soothe his mind. He’s hangin’ on, Magnus Bailey thought. I guess me and Minnie haven’t killed him yet. Though this came as a relief, over the next few days he lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling while he adjusted his calculations to include the rescue of Minnie’s daddy, for it looked to him that rescue was required.

For the time being, he stayed with Thomas DeGrace, who was about the only family he had left. He slept on a cot near the stove. Thomas lived in a shotgun house built when Orange Mound was established as a colored district nearly fifty years before. He bought the place on the cheap from an unmarried ironmonger getting ready to die, ornamenting it with scraps of Italian molding and hand painted tile he scavenged from swankier neighborhoods. That was before the flood. Afterward, everything changed. Thomas was conscripted for levee work down in Greenville just before the deluge. While he was so bonded under the gun, unable to escape, his home was looted and stripped of everything the tides hadn’t swept away. Later, the house was sold at tax auction to a white man. When the levee let him go, Thomas rented his own house from the new owner. That just about broke him.

There’s no such thing as a free Negro in America, DeGrace told his cousin. I was mindin’ my business, buyin’ up supplies downriver to take to Tulips End. I knew the folk back home would be in trouble. My daddy and mama, my aunties. They never would leave when the river got high. I rode all over three states lookin’ for what I needed. Finally, I had a cart loaded up and a mule. The day I was headin’ back to Tulips End, I was stopped on the road by militia, they called themselves. Foulest, evilest-lookin’ crackers you can care to imagine, ten of ’em on horseback and totin’ rifles, each one pointed in my face. They took my cart and put me on the levee. Oh, dear God. What a hell. We slept in the mud with near nothin’ to eat. They put tags around our neck like we was livestock. When we got sick with the dysentery and the fever, they just let us rot and waited to see who nature would save and who not. I got assigned to unloadin’ the relief boats after the flood. I stole what I could, and that’s the only reason I’m alive today. That and Jesus. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord Almighty. You comin’ to church?

Thomas DeGrace had got religion. He dressed like a country boy now, his home was without creature comfort, and every spare cent he got hold of he gave to the Miracle Church of God’s People, the congregation set up over a storefront by the Rev. Dr. Willie Smalls, a minister arrived in Memphis just as the water receded, a man looking to preach penance to unworthy survivors. Though sometimes he felt he might like a taste of some old-time religion, sing a hymn or two, and pray for his mama, Magnus Bailey would rather die by lightning than stand up and clap hands under the sway of a man like Dr. Willie—in Bailey’s opinion a big-bellied, sweet-tongued fraud bleeding the poor while he danced on the graves of their dead.

Wednesday nights were for prayer meeting above McCracken’s Cash Groceries, held to keep the burnish of vows made on Sunday gone and keep them bright ’til Sunday next. One Wednesday night Bailey felt like a walk and kept Thomas DeGrace company as he headed over to Pendleton Street to warm up his soul. When they got there, DeGrace tried to persuade him to come in. Bailey glanced at the sign to the right of the front door.
free trip to heaven
it read,
second floor
.

Nothin’ free about any trip Dr. Willie’s takin’ you on, he said.

His cousin pursed his lips and lifted his chin, pointing it high in the air with righteous defiance.

Church got to pay the rent, just like you and me. Dr. Willie got to eat and put clean clothes on too, he said.

Magnus put a hand up to the sky, gave him an amen to shut him up, and made to walk on toward the river, maybe pass L’il Red’s just to torment himself, which he did often enough. Nights when a certain mood stole his good sense, he stood on the street opposite L’il Red’s, hiding from the light of a gas lamp in a doorway. If the weather demanded the windows be closed, he could not hear the whores’ laughter and shrieks, the piano man pounding out furious pleasure on the keyboard, or the whoops and bellows of the clientele within. So he watched them dance, embrace, and fight in pantomime and hoped for a glimpse of Minerva Fishbein passing through the room to settle an argument or make a match. He never managed to spy her, but he kept on hoping. That night, as he quit Thomas’s company and put up his collar against the night air, his head was turned by a sight that would stop a pack of rapine marauders in its tracks and wake the dead at the same time.

A woman crossed the street, the sight of her stopping traffic from every direction near or far. She was a large woman, a very large woman with skin as black as Bailey’s own, evidence of an African heritage undiluted by the lust of white men. She stood half a head taller than he himself and was so wide at the hip and the breast he imagined she could bear twins and suckle triplets all at once. Her clothes were rich, her blouse a brilliant yellow silk ruffled at the neck and cuffs, her suit cut in the latest fashion to expose her legs from the calves down. Its plush gray wool was tailored against her frame in a way that confirmed she’d still a waist despite her girth and smooth, if enormous, thighs. She wore a great, broad-brimmed hat with a veil such as women rarely embraced after the Great War. Its netting came down to her neck and was tied by velvet ribbons at the back of her head. Its brim tilted slightly to the left so that it resembled wings in flight. The crown was studded with ropes of pearls entwined with feathers and topped by a pair of hummingbirds so artfully stuffed they looked about to burst into song. Beneath that remarkable hat, a mountain of thick black hair was piled up, secured by a dozen pins whose knobby heads were also of pearl. At the distance from which Bailey first saw her, it was impossible to see her face, but her size, her dress, the confident, almost military, strength of her stride—all of it created a tableau of spectacular feminine power and beauty. He wondered who she was, why she was in Orange Mound. If she’d strolled the streets of his neighborhood at any time before the flood, he’d know her. He’d have to. She would not go unnoticed or forgotten anywhere. He guessed she was a voodoo queen visiting out of New Orleans or an heiress through a lover to a vast sugar plantation somewhere in the islands. But what, he continued to wonder, was she doing here?

She walked directly toward him. A thrill enlivened his blood. He straightened his back and widened his smile, prepared to bow his head and kiss her hand when she got near. He could not believe his luck and thought, Ahhh. Big rich woman comin’ right at me. My money troubles are over.

Then she walked directly past him to the door Thomas DeGrace held open and ascended the stairs for her free trip to heaven.

Thomas made to follow her, but Magnus Bailey’s hand on his sleeve pulled him back.

Who is that woman, Thomas? She is surely the most curious lady I have ever seen.

Thomas jerked his head back and looked at him with surprise.

Why, you know her. I’m sure of it.

I could not forget such a creature. Tell me. Who is she?

Why it’s Aurora Mae Stanton, Thomas said. From those Missouri Stantons I know you spoke of when you first got back home.