The Queen of Palmyra (13 page)

The white scientists tell Bomba about the world of white people. Great cities with real houses, human voices coming from boxes, real fathers and mothers who love their children and take care of them, men who slap each other on the back and laugh together. No wild beasts or black mud holes or monster snakes. No black savages.

When I opened Daddy’s Bomba book, it had the smell of an old house that had collected dust for a hundred years. It made my chest seize up and sometimes set off an asthma attack so that Mama would have to take me into the bathroom and run the water in the tub to get some steam. There was a single sheet of notebook paper inside. I’d folded and unfolded it so much that the creases had torn. This was Daddy’s book report from when he
was in the fourth grade, which was the grade I’d just missed this past year. It read:

That Friday night, when he told me the Bomba story, Daddy was lying on his back and rubbing my stomach. I was about to melt from the heat of his hand. We were both sweating. He moved restlessly in the bed, like he was about to get up.

When he took a breath in his Bomba story, I snuggled in closer, wanting to keep him interested. “Daddy, guess what.”

“What.” He sounded preoccupied. He kept on moving around and rubbing my stomach.

“Zenie has a niece who’s trying to sell policies in Shake Rag.”

His hand paused in mid-rub, and he stopped moving. “What you say, girl? What niece? Selling insurance? A
nigger
selling insurance? For crying out loud. Whoever heard of a nigger girl selling policies? What kind of policies she selling?”

I lay very still. His hand, still heavy on me, had clinched up so that his fingernails raked my skin. “I don’t know. The kind to bury people, I guess. Maybe some other kinds. For doctors and medicines and stuff like that.”

“I’ll be goddamned.”

“She’s a nice girl,” I said quickly. “She’s just working her way through that college in Jackson.”

“What college in Jackson? That Tougaloo place?”

“I think that’s what she said. Started with a T. Sounded Indian.”

He sat straight up in the bed. “I’ll be goddamned. That girl’s an outside agitator! All them people down at that Tougaloo. Conspiring. Nothing but troublemakers and agitators. N-double-A-C-P and them Evers brothers. They’re over in Harmony now. Guess they’ve made their way to us. Got to vote and eat at Woolworths and taking over the library and taking over the schools. Taking over everything. Goddamn.”

I sat up fast. “No, no, she’s just a regular girl, Daddy. She’s not agitating anything. She’s just trying to make money for her last year so she can go teach grammar and stuff. She’s not trying to cause any trouble. Daddy, she’s
nice
.”

He stayed a while longer but didn’t go on with the Bomba story. He just lay there quietly, stroking my leg. Then he patted my stomach nice and easy. One, two quick businesslike pats. Then kissed the top of my head like always and got up. He put his shoes and socks back on and his shirt too, which he’d hung on the doorknob.

After a while I heard him talking on the phone and clumping down to the basement to get his box. Then I heard Mama say in a slurred voice, “Win, where you going to at this hour?” and the front door shut without him saying a word back.

I lay there for a long time. First I was burning up and threw off the sheet. Then I shivered like I had a fever and pulled the sheet up around my neck. When the midnight Frisco came through and let out its
no no no no
, it seemed to be saying something urgent. Then whatever its message was fell away and dissolved like a web, or the fragile beginnings of one, leaving me uneasy and restless, as if there were something I’d forgotten to do.

I thought about getting up to talk to Mama for the company,
but I knew from the way she called out to Daddy that she’d been into the poison, which now seemed to follow her around the house. Empty but still strong smelling glasses turned up in odd places, like on the back of the commode after she’d cleaned the bathroom or the top of my dresser along with bottles of Windex and the furniture polish. Plus I was too tired to get out of bed. Daddy and his stories and his hand never rested me; they gathered me into a knot. I just wanted to lie there and untie myself. Let myself go.

It had started to rain outside. First it was a soft wistful sound, then it began to pour. I heard thunder in the distance. When I’d interrupted Daddy, he was just coming to his favorite part, where Bomba’s about to be eaten by bloodthirsty cannibals. They’ve got him cornered up a tree. Now I’m just minding my own business trying to get a little rest and it’s me getting chased up the tree. Now it’s my white flesh they want, my blood they want to drink. Naturally, Bomba’s long gone.

They’re circling the tree I’m parroted away in. They’re wearing paint and headdresses of wild feathers and they’re carrying spears and bows and arrows and knives. I’m about to wet my pants I’m so scared. Then here comes one of them with a torch and I can smell the gas and he pours some on a rag and puts the rag on a broom and starts firing up the leaves and branches like Ray does the pecan trees to get rid of the caterpillars.

In fact, he looks like Ray.

“Ray, is that you down there?” In my dream I’m choking and coughing up here in this burning-up tree. I’m counting on Ray to save me, carry me off on his white steed.

“Sure enough,” the cannibal yells up, “and I’m going to roast you like a partridge in a pear tree.” Then he throws back his head and his hat—Ray’s hat—goes flying. He waves his spear and lets out a war whoop.

“Ray, it’s me, Florence, Martha Forrest’s girl,” I holler again from the top of the tree. “Zenie keeps me. You know me! How you doing today?”

But the tree is burning and the smoke is making it hard to breathe and all I can hear is whooping and hollering. Ray and his friends down below having a birthday party and I’m the cake. Now I’m thinking about an old postcard of Daddy’s that I found pressed up in the Bible that had belonged to his dad. The card was a picture of a burnt-up man lying on the ground on a pile of blackened logs. The man was so burnt he looked like a tree trunk felled by lightning. There were a whole lot of people standing around him, white people: mothers and daddies and little children and babes in arms. The strange thing was that they didn’t look sad or worried. They looked like they were having a church picnic on the grounds. A party. One little boy with a big smile on his face was holding up a chicken leg. My idea of a postcard was the one Mimi’s sister Nell sent to her from her trip to Florida. Pretty blue sky, white sand, and sky-high waves a blue-green color. Who would send a postcard with a picture of a burnt-up man on it? Who would they send it to?

Now in my dream, everybody changes places. Now it’s Ray perching in the burning tree. He’s a big dark bird and folks are trampling his hat in the dust below. And me, I’m down here on the ground having the party with all the white folks in the picture. I don’t know what’s worse: being up there or down here, though I guess anything’s better than getting burned to a crisp.

Then I see Ray has grown wings. He can fly. Now he’s opening his wings (they’re huge) and laughing, like Mr. Cricket in my Uncle Wiggily story. Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho! He! He! Finally he answers my question about how he’s doing. “Can’t complain too much!” he calls out as he flies away. Now he’s up in the clouds and far far above me. Now he’s a speck in the night sky, red with flames.

I woke up the next morning feeling jittery.

“Where’s Daddy?” I asked, as Mama came swooping through my room with a cloth stirring up dust right and left. On the kitchen table her Saturday cakes were laid out in all their splendor. Her cake ladies had placed their usual orders that week just as Navis predicted.

“He’s gone to a meeting,” Mama said. “Get on up and make your bed right for once.” She looked skinnier than usual, her black patent belt pulled tight. I wondered if Daddy’d come home last night.

I got out of the bed and headed for the basement. My father’s box was gone. There was a rectangle of dust around the clean spot on the stacks of
Citizens’ Council
magazines that were its resting place. The headline on a magazine on top read “B
OYCOTT THE
B
OYCOTT
! J
ACKSON
M
AYOR
T
HOMPSON
D
EFIES
O
UTSIDE
A
GITATORS
.” I looked at the clean spot on the magazines. My stomach felt like I’d swallowed a bucket of nails.

The phone rang as I was climbing back up the stairs. It was
Mimi, who asked Mama if I’d like to go to the beauty parlor and get a haircut. Mimi said I looked shaggy, and she’d made an appointment for me. I jumped at a chance to (a) get out of the house, (b) improve myself, and last but not least, quiet the churning in my stomach.

“Going to the beauty shop gives me a new lease on life,” Mimi said on the way home, patting her fresh do. She’d had her usual blue rinse and her rolls of curls had a frisky bounce, like hydrangea blossoms quaking in a little breeze. Her fingers were still pink from having been soaked in a kidney-shaped bowl while she sat under the hair dryer and read the
Ladies’ Home Journal
. Jansie the manicure girl, whose daddy worked at the mill, had taken Mimi’s pudgy fingers in her peeling hands (Jansie had developed allergies to the soap she used) and patted them dry, creamed them up, and pushed back the cuticles with a little wooden stick. Mimi shuddered a bit when Jansie rubbed her fingers and hands with the cream. Now that Mimi got a manicure every week, she said she would feel a rush of pleasure just looking at Jansie coming to get her from under the dryer, Jansie’s dyed red hair slipping from its bun, her uniform stained with shades of pink and red polish like poppies. When the cream had soaked in, Jansie painted Mimi’s sweet baby nails in “Dusky Rose,” which Mimi said was a ladylike color, dark enough to notice, but not garish. The color of pink crape myrtle, not the hot pink but the grayish pink that looked like dusty cotton in the field with the old red sun swinging low in the sky. Not too loud.

I was feeling fresh too, my hair cut in a neat bob and puffed out from the rollers, which made me look like I had three times as much hair as I really did. Since Mimi was so full of vim and vigor, she’d decided it was time to give me my weekly social-studies lesson to catch me up in school. I was sitting in Grandpops’ mean old chair, which kept me alert. That chair can stab you out of the
blue. It’s always hungry and it wants a piece of you. There are two such chairs in the family. The evil twins. They used to sit side by side in my grandparents’ bedroom like Venus flytraps, golden wood shining to invite the unsuspecting victim. Nobody in the family but my Grandpops would get near them. For some reason, maybe because he didn’t have any extra flesh to grab onto, they didn’t bite him. He made a big to-do about sitting in his favorite one next to the fireplace. “I don’t know what you think is wrong with this chair,” he’d say, and rub the curved arm of it. “This is a
good
chair.” Mimi got furious one day when she sat down in hers and got nipped in the back so bad the thing made a hole in her brunch coat. “Piffle,” she said, “he can keep his chair, but that’s the last bite this one’s taking out of me.” She hauled it over to Mama in the trunk of her Plymouth with the lid flapping and banging and said, “Here. Put a pad in it.” Mama was glad to get it but she never got around to the pad. You can be rocking along feeling safe and good, and then, oh! it takes its slice out of you.

I leaned forward to avoid Grandpops’ chair’s pinch, rocking just a little, my head in my hands, but I was having a hard time holding up my end of the lesson; I was plain worn out. Sitting under the hair dryer had made me sleepy. I’d studied the branches of the government and their functions, but I was more interested in a magazine piece I’d read at the beauty shop about Jackie Kennedy and her pretty clothes and pretty children. Everything about her was pretty. I loved the way she held her head at a tilt. I loved her pillboxes in the magazine pictures and the way they sat like crowns on her perfectly smooth hair.

Mimi had a way of bribing me with chocolate-ripple ice cream and vanilla wafers, which I was busy mushing together in a clear green sherbet dish. Depression glass. As usual, she was making the most of my social-studies lesson to display one of her too-loud hats. She’d plopped a silky brown number with one enor
mous velvet rose on the right side of the brim on top of her fresh hairdo. A red rose, but a swarthy red that looked like it’d been oil-painted right onto the rose, which flopped up and down while Mimi talked and rocked. Even given the rose, the hat might have just barely squeezed under the wire of too loud except for the fact that sprouting out of the side of the rose were two bright green leaves as big as Mimi’s hands. To make matters worse, the leaves were also velvet, so they flopped, making Mimi look like somebody’s round-faced stuffed bunny with curly blue hair and ears, a rabbit that had seen better days.

“I think it’s sweet. The way your daddy takes such an interest in you,” Mimi said out of the blue. Her chair did a little bounce. She nodded at me over her social-studies book. The rose bobbed along with her, but the leaves waggled back and forth helter skelter, like someone was shaking the rabbit’s poor head.

Then her eyebrows shot up and disappeared into the leaves. “Florence Irene,” she said.

I snapped to. Looking back at myself, I can see the crevasses of chocolate ripple in the sides of my mouth. A smudge here. A smudge there. Vanilla wafer goo on my chin. (It’s easy for the woman I am now to see the girl I was then. Not so easy to know who rides the space between us, the in-between one this story is coming from.)

Nobody called me Florence Irene unless I’d done something. I thought of all the sins I had committed in the past month. Too many to name.

“Florence Irene.” Mimi said my name a second time, her rabbit ears quivering. I’m the cabbage and she’s ready to take a bite.

“Yes ma’am.” I stopped rocking. I tried to look into her eyes, which were a cloudy blue, almost gray.

“How’s your mother doing? Is she behaving herself?” She tossed the last question into the air between our chairs. It hung there, a dead man swinging in a noose.

“My
mother
?” Surely she meant me.

Mimi bobbled her rabbit ears. Yes, she meant Mama, not me.

I opened my mouth, then closed it. Actually my mama was not behaving herself. She was riding wild and free through the nights that Daddy went out with his club friends, taking me with her, though I begged her to leave me at home so I could get a decent night’s sleep. Joe’s for the milk shake, which I was starting to get sick of; I’d gone through chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and banana. Bootlegger the next stop. Sometimes she’d pass those little bits of papers to the dark man she now called Eugene, sometimes not. Then up and down county roads with a fifth of Old Crow or a pint of moonshine depending on what she had a taste for, zero to sixty in as fast as it took to open your mouth and tell somebody you wish they’d take it easy. One time a bunch of boys in a souped-up car pulled up beside us to drag race, and then peeled off in a panic when they saw a grown woman and a girl in the car. I bounced along, sometimes clutching the door handle in case I might need to make a quick jump for it.

Once, when I was in the third grade, some serious mothers volunteered to drive us children to the state park in the next county. I rode with Mary Frances McDougal’s mother, a tall buck-toothed lady who drove so slow it felt like we were crawling on all fours. I got to sit in the front seat with Mary Frances and Miss Mac, as she liked to be called. This was before seat belts, and when we’d make a turn or stop, Miss Mac’s skinny tree-limb arm would come looping out in front of us.
Whap
on the chest. “Don’t want you two flying through the windshield,” she’d say cheerily. “Children are precious cargo!”

To think of myself as a child, and precious cargo to boot, made me glow inside. Folks in my family were always acting like I was grown up or the wallpaper, one of the two and sometimes both at once. When Mama was behind the wheel and I was riding shotgun, she acted like she didn’t even know I was there.
Everything was between her and the green Ford, which one of them would get the biggest kick out of the ride.

“She’s behaving,” I said, and the minute I said it the crack in Grandpops’ chair gave me a big pinch. I startled up, slopping some ice cream out of my dish and onto Mimi’s rag rug. “Oh, damn it the hell!” It just popped right out, as if the ice cream had had a big red cherry on top and I’d just spit it out.

Mimi stopped rocking and lowered her head so that I was eye to eye with the rose. “My sakes alive. Where’d you learn to talk like that?” The question zipped toward me as quick and determined as a mockingbird whose nest has been disturbed.

I didn’t say anything. We both knew who said damn it the hell.

“I don’t want you to talk like that, Florence Irene. You were raised better than to talk like that,” she said, and her leaf ears took a hop. “And your mother shouldn’t be saying it either! It’s a good thing your daddy is taking an interest.”

I was getting tired of the way Mimi was ragging on my mother, her only child. Wandering around Mimi and Grandpops’ house, playing with Mama’s old-timey dolls with china faces and lips painted red on eggshell faces, I used to get myself mixed up with my girl mother. When Mama would tell me a story, like how she used to line her dolls up on the swing on the front porch and push them real easy to get them to sleep, I’d do it too, and when I did it, I’d stir myself up like soup and all the ingredients of me would melt together and change. I’d become my girl mother. I’d drink in her thoughts and my mouth would say the things I thought she would have said. My name would be Martha Irene, not Florence Irene. I always thought Martha went better with Irene than Florence did anyhow.

All of this is to explain why I said what I did to Mimi, which was: “You look like Honey Bunny in that hat.” Honey Bunny is a
big old stuffed rabbit I got for Easter when I was three and have kept ever since. I still have him up in my closet. I myself love Honey Bunny, but Honey Bunny has a big round face with hanging down cheeks and an expression that makes everyone laugh when they look at him. One ear up, one ear down. So what I said to Mimi was an ugly and treacherous thing to say and I was the first one to know it. I feel bad about it to this day, especially after all my grandmother ended up doing for me. It reminds me of the time Little Dan told me I looked like a frog and he and May started calling me Florence the Frog. After that, whenever I looked into a mirror, all I could see was Frog with a capital F. No matter how too loud her hats were, Mimi thought she looked
pretty
in them. In fact, I noticed that the wilder they were, the prettier she thought she looked. She even put her hats on in front of the mirror so that she could see herself in the act, her soft arms with their drapey flesh swinging in love with her hatted self, like a caged bird doing a mating dance with its own image. Honey Bunny, my rabbit, was definitely not pretty, and we both knew it.

So what happened was this. Mimi snatched the hat off her head and smacked me with it. In the scuffle, the rose, which I guess had been hanging by a thread, fell off kerplop into my dish of nicely melted ice cream so that it had chocolate splotches all over it. Mimi took one look at the ruined rose and screeched at the top of her lungs, “You, you! Get on out of here! Just get on out!” So I ran on out, down the stairs, through the kitchen.

“What you gone and done now?” Zenie was leaning back in the ladder chair waiting till Mimi got through with me so she, Zenie, could take me on down to her house for the rest of the afternoon. She looked as if I’d just woken her up from a sitting-up nap. She was already provoked at having to wait to go home.

“Told Mimi she looks like Honey Bunny in that stupid rose-leaf hat of hers.”

Zenie looked up at me in disgust. “Well Miss Smarty Pants, getting her all put out with you. Said she going to drive us home when the lesson’s over. Expect we got to walk now.”

“She was talking ugly about Mama.”

Zenie rolled her eyes. “Listen here, girl. You can be mad inside and nice as spice outside. Won’t hurt you none. Just zip it up. Zip it up and stay out of the doghouse. Me, I get mad as fire at that woman every day of the week, but she don’t know the first thing about it.”

“How come you don’t say so?”

“Cause the good Lord didn’t make no fool. Got to keep on working, Miss Know-It-All. It don’t grow on trees, and she ain’t the worst.”

“Well, I ain’t working for her.”

“Maybe you is, maybe you ain’t. Sitting around having conversation with her in those getups of hers is pretty hard work to my mind.”

I grinned. “I get ice cream.”

“More than I get waiting for you.” Zenie didn’t crack a smile.

So here we went dragging on back to Zenie and Ray’s. Zenie was slow as Christmas on account of the phlebitis in her legs. She had on her heavy stockings, which, though hot as blue blazes, made her legs feel better. By afternoon the stockings always had pus spots on them where the sores came through. When we got to her house, I would put hot packs on her legs so she could get the stockings off without tearing into the sores.

Zenie lived on the same street as Mimi, just on the Shake Rag end. I was carrying yesterday’s newspaper, which Zenie brought home every day. She had her satchel with her purse and handkerchiefs in it and some biscuits wrapped up in waxed paper and a jar of last year’s sweet pickled peaches Mimi told her she could have when she cleared out the shelves before the new crop came in
down at the Curb Market at Crosstown. We were trudging along by the cemetery. The headstones looked hazy in the heat. Trees bent low as if their branches were trying to get back to earth for a drink of water. Zenie was moving slower and slower. I was beginning to think we were never going to get there. She told me to quit rushing her; it was my fault we were having to walk. Her legs pained her.