The Queen of Palmyra (12 page)

My father loved his meetings. The hall closet was stuffed with different hats and tassels and pins and outfits. Breakfast with some old men once a week at the drugstore. Dinners at noon at the King Plaza Hotel. He was a member of the First Baptist Church Southern Branch, the Moose Lodge of Millwood, the Knights of Pythias, the Masons, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Shriners, the Mill County White Citizens’ Council, and I’m leaving some out. He was against Integration and Communist Fronts and Outside Agitators and Mongrelization and Jews Sucking up
the World’s Juices. Later on it would be Fluoride in the Water. He was for Things as God Meant Them to Be. All neat and divided up. This one here. That one there. The blessed purity of things was what he called it.

Daddy had a map that he pulled out on the coffee table on nights he didn’t go out. It said United States of America at the top but it didn’t have the states outlined, much less the capitals, which was aggravating, since I was still trying to memorize them both and it would have helped to see the shapes of the states and their placement on the map. Mimi was sitting down with me on Saturdays and teaching me social studies from her high-school students’ books: agricultural products and material goods in Poland and other far-off places, economic opportunity and the melting pot of America, the amendments to Constitution. But the things I’d needed to have learned in the fourth grade but did not, like the states and capitals, I had to get on my own. There were lines all over Daddy’s map, but they were marked in pencil for when he changed his mind and erased them and drew them all over again. One line was wrapped around where, I know now, California and Arizona and New Mexico are supposed to be. He had this idea about how folks would be happier if they were cohabitating with their own kind, so he was working on a plan to move people around. He said it’d be like the Japs during the war. Off somewhere. Nobody bothers them and they don’t bother nobody. Live and let live. It’s all a matter of boundaries and categories, he said, and when he said the words
boundaries
and
categories
, his eyes shone like he’d made them up out of his own head.

As June wore on, Daddy started taking me on his policy rounds at least once a week. At night he told me his stories about brave brotherhoods who saved the women and children from terrible harm. He said I was finally getting old enough to be inter
esting, plus he said I wasn’t as dumb as I looked; he could teach me more than those damn schoolteachers ever could. At night his stories and hot hand pushed back sleep. The forlorn whistle of the midnight Frisco would come and go, and sometimes the one-thirty, when Mama baked late. On the nights Daddy went out, Mama made her night runs to the bootlegger with me riding shotgun. She kept on carrying the little notes from time to time, but most nights she just made a liquor run, no fooling around with milk shakes or beer or little pieces of paper. She stayed with clear stuff—moonshine, gin, vodka—and poured it into her poison bottle when we got home. On Sunday, which was supposed to be a day of rest, I had to get dolled up to go to church with Mimi and Grandpops. I sat between them in the church pew, and they’d take turns pushing me from side to side when I slumped into sleep. My eyes were always grainy and my hair thinned out. My brush filled up with it. I felt like those walking-dead people you see at the picture show who can’t stop moving. Zombies.

Zenie was the only one who would let me take my rest. That summer I felt better on her couch than any other place in the world. It had a handy washable slipcover Zenie had made out of some velvet-feeling material the color of dark plums and a little folded cloth out of the same material to put over you in case of chills. Plus it had pillows on both ends to put my head on and prop up my feet. The more I slept the better she liked it. Zenie was always busy, either with her sewing or cooking for Ray, Eva, and Miss Josephine, not to speak of her regular job with my grandmother.

Ray never said much to me, but he didn’t seem to mind me around when Zenie was keeping me. His shed, which he’d built out in the backyard, was a ramshackle-looking thing because it was made from left-over pieces of wood he’d gotten from his handyman work. Sometimes when Zenie would tell me to go out
and play, I’d go out back and stand in the door of Ray’s shed and watch him sharpen things with a big file he had. He was careful. He never took his eyes off the blade when he’d say, “How you doing, lady girl?” I’d say, “All right, how you doing today?” He’d say, “Can’t complain too much.” We’d have us a good chuckle and that would be all we’d say. But he let me stay and watch as long as I stood back. Zenie told me he’d rather work at home in his shed than at people’s houses, though he did some of both when things that needed fixing were too heavy to carry home. He wore overalls and blue shirts buttoned all the way up to his chin and heavy black shoes. He usually had on a hat that looked like the ones that Grandpops wore except it was all beat up and the band had a sweat line around it. He wore it at a cocky angle and always put it in the same spot, on a little table in the kitchen, when he came home. Whenever Mimi came out to tell him what to do in the yard, he took it off and held it in his hands. Then he looked like a newborn chick with his hair all pressed down flat. When Mimi was telling him to weed that bed or water that one, he cocked his head a little like he had a crick in his neck. Ray had an artistic streak in the yard. He planted a good bed, making pretty scallops and circles with the daylilies and iris he’d dig up and divide in the fall. I liked to watch his hands working the clay, his knuckles gray with calluses and raw skin, the palms a pearly pink like the inside of a seashell. For a while I thought Ray was shy. Then I realized the Ray I saw wasn’t really Ray, unless he didn’t know I was watching.

When he was doing something for Mimi, like weeding her big beds of peonies, he’d come to the kitchen door pouring sweat out from under his hat and wiping his face with a handkerchief. He never set foot into the kitchen, much less the rest of the house. Zenie would fix him a tall glass of ice water in a jelly jar and he would take it on the back steps. She’d wipe her hands on her apron and go stand out there with him in the hot sun. They’d put
their heads together and talk and talk like they hadn’t seen each other in a hundred years. He’d say something, and Zenie’d throw her head back and laugh out loud. Once, when he hauled off and puppy-bit her shoulder, she laughed and petted his head like he was a pup sure enough. Then she threw back her shoulders in a way I’d never seen, as if she was starting up a dance.

There was a little room in the back of Mimi and Pops’ garage that was usually kept locked. I always thought it was for sharp tools, but once, when the door was ajar, I looked in. There was nothing at all in it except the nastiest-looking commode you ever saw. It didn’t have a place to sit on, much less a lid, and it was pitchy with grime. No toilet paper. No lavatory to wash in. When I asked Zenie what it was for, she said it was for folks who worked in the yard and had to use the bathroom. She was frying corn in a skillet on the stove when I ran into the house after my discovery.

“You mean like Ray?” I asked.

She didn’t turn around. “Um hum.”

The thought of Ray, who was the neatest man alive, who even cleaned off his tools and lined them up just so, having to use that nasty bathroom made me feel sick and ashamed of Mimi and Grandpops for even having it in the first place.

“Why can’t he come inside and use the bathroom?”

She kept stirring the corn, her back to me. “Dirt on his feet. Might track it in.”

“You could clean up that bathroom out there.” I wanted to be helpful.

“You think I’m messing with that nasty thing out there, you crazy, girl. If he got to go, he can go in back of the garage. Good clean ground.” She turned around and looked down at me. “Ray don’t mind dirt, but he do hate nasty. He wouldn’t have me clean that thing out there even if I wanted to.”

When I’d wake up from my naps on Zenie’s couch and hear
Ray and Zenie talking, I liked to keep my eyes shut and just listen. When my Mama and Daddy talked, it was like little hummingbirds fighting over a piece of the yard. Fast and hungry. Where’s supper and how long and are you going out tonight and who called and what kind of cake did they want.

The way Zenie and Ray talked when they thought I was asleep made me see butterflies in my head. It wasn’t the words, it was the way they had of flitting back and forth and finally lining up just so. Touch and then touch again. Melting the lines Zenie’s and Ray’s sentences made.

The back door would creak and creak again. Then there’d be a click.

“Where you at, baby?”

“Right here, right in front of you. You blind?” Zenie would come around the corner from somewhere else in the house.

A chuckle. “Glad I ain’t. How’d I be able to see your pretty little face?

“Little? What you talking about little? Nothing on me little.”

Another soft chuckle. “Well, now, I wouldn’t say
nothing’s
little.”

“Hush that mouth, you going to wake up the girl. Ain’t you got nothing better to do than come in here bothering me when I’m busy working? What you so full of yourself for all of a sudden?”

“Man can’t all the time be studying work. Got to get some pleasure in this world.”

“Whoa horse. Got a peeping-tom girl on the couch and a restless old one in the back. What you think going to happen here, mister? You and your pleasure just going to have to hold up.”

“Me and my pleasure willing to hold up a good long time for a pretty lady. But is the lady willing to wait for her pleasure? That’s what I’m wondering. Sometimes ladies don’t want to wait.”

“This here lady can wait till doomsday if she has to, mister. Want some tea?”

“I sure will take some
sugar
with that tea.”

My mother didn’t talk sugar; she poured sugar into bowls and mixed it with shortening until you couldn’t tell which was which. When Daddy came home, he gave her a peck on the cheek and then hollered out, “Give me some sugar, sister,” and started up nibbling on me like I was a bowl full of left-over icing, which made Mama turn away and start rattling the pans.

A week or so after Eva had come, my mother was baking her cakes and my father and I were tucked in. He was telling me his favorite book in the whole world,
Bomba the Jungle Boy and the Swamp of Death
. Daddy loved Bomba, and he knew the stories by heart. Though I was getting sick of Uncle Wiggily, I was sicker still of Bomba, despite the fact that he was an actual boy instead of an animal. Even though Uncle Wiggily had the rheumatism, the old gentleman rabbit still managed to fly around in his airship with his crutch and valise. Grandpops, who walked with a cane when his own rheumatism acted up, said Uncle Wiggily overcame adversity. Despite the fact that he was so crippled he could hardly walk, he had adventures galore. Plus he was lucky as he could be. He got stuck in mud holes and trees but there was always somebody to pull him out. Everybody loved him and loved his catnip tea, which could cure the epizootic. His ant friends fed baked beans to a hungry giant so the giant didn’t eat up Uncle Wiggily. He laughed along with the black cricket when they got loose from the skillery-scalery-tailery alligator, who was laughing too.

But Daddy was dead set on Bomba. What I’d found out the hard way by that time was that people will get their own story like people get a dog and no other dog will do, no other dog is sweet and good like
their
dog. Zenie had her Queen of Palmyra stories, Grandpops favored Uncle Wiggily and Uncle Remus, Daddy thought Bomba hung the moon. Grandpops read a few pages of Daddy’s book and said to forget Bomba, it was nothing
but poisonous trash. I knew Zenie wouldn’t take to Bomba in a million years, so I never bothered to tell her about him. When I told Daddy the Zenobia story, he said Queenie should go back to Egypt where she’d come from. He thought Uncle Wiggily was an old fool.

Daddy told me I’d come to appreciate Bomba when I knew more. Knew more about what, I asked. The world, he said, the world. World or no world, that night I was feeling too tired to listen to Daddy talk about Mr. Smarty Pants Bomba. Besides, I knew the story.

Bomba is a white boy who got left in the Amazon jungle. He’s smart and strong and brave beyond compare when he’s in deadly danger, which is nearly always. The man who wrote
Bomba the Jungle Boy and the Swamp of Death
says Bomba has the simple dignity that is the end and aim of good breeding. One minute he’s saving folks from the slimy, evil-smelling dismal swamp of death. Or the hideous painted-up cannibal savages. Or stinky anacondas and monster boa constrictors. All of which are hungry as all get out. Everything bad in the Bomba story is colored black. There are black streams of sluggish water, black mud that catches your feet and drags you down to death. The boa is a huge black rope whose red blood gushes out when Bomba skillfully kills it with an arrow. Not to speak of the savages who are so black you can only see their paint.

Bomba talks about himself like he was somebody else. Plus he’s long-winded. When his native sidekick Gibo, who’s dumb as a stump, yelps like a sick puppy, “Oh help me, Master, this black swamp’s demon slime is sucking me down,” Bomba hollers back, “Let Gibo be of good heart. Bomba will help Gibo.” When Daddy would read this part, I couldn’t help but think that by the time you got all those words out, Gibo would have been long gone.

So great is Bomba that Gibo plumb worships him. “Great is
Bomba,” Gibo says, but what Gibo doesn’t know is that Bomba just used his white brain to get out of this mess. He found some vines, and pulled himself and Gibo out. Gibo thinks it’s a miracle, but that’s because he’s a stupid native. In Daddy’s Bomba book there are natives, who are like Gibo, nice but witless, and there are savages, who are cannibals with war paint and big appetites for white-boy flesh.

Bomba’s problem is that he wants to come home to his whiteness, but he can’t find it. His blond-haired parents are long gone, and he doesn’t know how in the world he got dropped like a hot potato down in the jungle with all the savages. When he accidentally rescues a bunch of smart scientists, he’s so happy to see their white faces he can hardly stand it. They tell him he’s the whitest boy they ever met, by which they mean he’s the smartest and nicest. Then they shake his hand, which is the biggest thrill of all since only equal white men shake hands. Natives don’t, and certainly cannibal savages don’t. They eat hands, plus every other part. So now he’s being admitted to the white brotherhood. His whiteness is complete. Glory be and Hallelujah!