The Queen of Palmyra (38 page)

The next morning Mabel handed the
Times-Picayune
to Mimi over a bowl of scrambled eggs. “Look what happened up in Millwood. A girl got herself killed. They say it must have been a spat with her boyfriend. Did you know an Eva Greene?”

Mimi gasped. She put her coffee cup back in the saucer so hard it cracked and the coffee sloshed over into the broken saucer. After she read the story, which was just a few sentences in the folds of a back section, no picture of Eva, nothing like that, she rose to her feet with the paper still in her hand. “Oh my God. Poor Zenie and Ray. I must send them a telegram.” She went to the phone on the little table in Mabel’s hall, picked it up, and then hesitated and put it back down.

I followed her into the hall. “Eva didn’t have a boyfriend,” I said.

“Flowers,” she said. “I’ll send flowers. Maybe I should go back. Oh my God. What monster would do such a thing? My Lord in heaven a
screwdriver
.” She sat down in the chair next to the phone and didn’t do anything. She just sat there and stared down at the floor. I came and stood next to her.

“Eva didn’t have a boyfriend,” I said again.

She looked up at me. In the dim hallway, her face seemed ashy; her eyes scurried over my face. She put her hand on my arm and searched my eyes as if she were looking for a lost piece of color in them. Then she reached over and hugged me around my waist. After she let go, she sat staring hard at a red rooster door-stop on the floor as if she had asked it a question and was waiting for an answer. It stared back at her with its little beady black eyes. Finally, she cleared her throat and said, “All right. Let me do this. Go on up to your room and let me do this.” She said it sternly, as if she were correcting me for acting up.

I started to cry. “Say I’m sorry,” I whispered. “In the telegram tell Zenie and Ray I’m sorry too.”

Upstairs I sat on the bed and crossed my legs under me. Something fluttered at the back of my mind. Wash on a line, a scrap of paper blowing down the street, feathers. A bit of color. There were nubby tuffs on the white spread, and I started picking at them. I could hear Mimi talking on the phone, but her voice seemed to be coming from under water. I kept on picking threads from the nubs on the spread, piling them up like Miss Josephine’s mimosa leaves. I began to count them, putting them in piles of tens. I thought I knew how Miss J felt when she counted. It was something that had to be done to quiet the flutter. Something had broken out in my chest, something awkward, then loose, a bird falling from the sky.

I tried to see Eva going home to Raleigh in a box the way Mr. Lafitte had said she would. Would they dress her in a bright scarf? Would they let her keep her cat-eye specs? Would they put her on a train? I tried to see that kind of stillness settle down upon her. But I couldn’t. The stillness wouldn’t stay still. It fluttered.

Even when the shock of Eva’s death had dulled, I’d turn a corner and think I saw her sashaying down the street dressed to
the nines in her navy blue suit. She remained alive in my mind’s eye, popping up here and there as time went by, saying things like look what the cat dragged in, or bye, Flo, or hey, girl, when she passed through my thoughts in a pretty whirl. When I came to understand the work she did in Millwood, I saw her as the Queen of Palmyra, riding off to do battle against wickedness and save her people. I wondered if someone had killed her for that. I was pretty sure she didn’t have a boyfriend, and if she did, she was too smart and sassy to choose someone who would stick a screwdriver into her throat. She would have chosen a man like Medgar Evers, someone with enough spunk to match her own.

The flutter, it hovered at the corner of my sight, always there but just outside my line of vision. Sometimes, when it got especially close, I wanted to reach out and close my hand on it the way you’d grab at a gnat that’s buzzing around your head. Mostly, though, I tried to ignore it as best I could, though as time went on, the flutter wore on me, the way a recurring dream you can’t remember but can’t forget either wears on you. You have to either forget it or remember it; otherwise it will spin a web around you and never let you go.

But as time went on, Millwood and everybody in it began to fade like an old dress. Zenie I missed like crazy, but with Mimi and Mabel showing me how to ride the streetcars and what kind of snowball turns your tongue blue and where to cross Carrollton Avenue to get to school in one piece, Zenie too faded for me, just as my mother had.

My father loomed in my mind, but only because I was afraid he’d come after me and swoop me up, which he never did. Mimi heard he’d moved over to Greenwood soon after we flew the coop, and he’d started selling tractors for John Deere. I made up a story in my head that he’d become an ordinary man living an ordinary life. I started thinking that maybe he was just angry about some
thing when he said he’d kill me. Maybe he didn’t mean it and now he was sorry. He did send money from time to time. I came to dread those smudged envelopes with his handwriting on them. They made Mimi take a dark turn. She’d take them to her room and put them in her top dresser drawer like they were something dirty. Years later, when she died, I would find them, the checks still inside.

Though Mabel wasn’t the motherly sort, she became my second mother despite her inclinations. She was not the proper lady that Mimi had been, and she was always saying she was teaching the two of us how to live. Mimi laughed more and was teaching social studies again. She had to roll up her sleeves and learn a whole new set of state laws and facts to get certified in Louisiana. When her school was integrated and a black girl was supposed to enter her homeroom, she got into hot water by telling her students beforehand that anyone who was mean to the new girl would just flat fail. No ugliness in her class. Her hats got louder and louder. She never took naps, and when she breezed out the door in the mornings, she’d say, “See you in the funny papers.” On Sundays she’d fix herself up and put this little number or that one on her head, feathers and bows and veils, and she and Mabel and I would take the streetcar downtown and have shrimp remoulade and martinis at Galatoire’s.

Br’er Rabbit always gets loose, and so does Uncle Wiggily. In the end my mother did too. While it seemed that she’d just flat vanished off the face of the earth without a red cent to her name, what she really did wasn’t miraculous or even the smartest thing. But it worked. She went knocking on Navis’s door. Navis had a garage, no husband, and a soft spot for Mama. She took her in and hid her and the car for months without anybody suspecting a thing. During tax season, folks expected Navis’s door to be closed and her blinds drawn against the glare. They left her alone. After
things died down, Navis drove Mama to Memphis in the dead of night and put her on a Greyhound bus to Navis’s mother’s house in Amarillo, Texas. And there my mother lived in the desert, helping Navis’s mother carry water for her garden and baking cakes at a truck stop on the main highway.

When I was fourteen, Mama decided the coast was clear and it was safe to come out of hiding and make us a visit, which of course was a shock. Mimi, who had been secretly convinced that Daddy had murdered my mother and disposed of the body, almost fainted when she walked in the door from a full day at school and found my mother having iced tea in the kitchen with Mabel and me. Mama cried for days at Mabel’s kitchen table and couldn’t stop going on about how sorry she was. Her eyes swelled almost shut she cried so much, and her face stayed watermelon red from morning to night. When Mabel told her to buck up and brought her a shot of Southern Comfort, Mama said to get it out of her sight; she might as well drink poison. I got sick of her bellyaching and wished she would go on back to Navis or Navis’s mother, I didn’t care which.

Although Mimi never said a word against my mother to me after we got to New Orleans, probably because she thought she’d be speaking ill of the dead, she didn’t exactly welcome my mother with open arms once she’d made her surprise appearance. When Mimi first laid eyes on my mother in the kitchen, she drew herself up and said, “Martha Irene, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. What a disappointment you have been to us all. Your father is rolling over in his grave.” After that icy pronouncement, my grandmother would say good morning and pass the salt to her daughter, but that was it. At meals Mimi kept her eyes down and the rest of the time she was either off to school or in her room with the door closed. For her part, Mama hung her head and didn’t press herself on us. But she didn’t leave either.

Despite our lack of enthusiasm for her presence, she sent for her clothes and used her truck stop money to rent herself a little apartment with a big kitchen about eight blocks from Mabel’s. Soon she was baking her cakes for debutantes and Mardi Gras balls and such. Then one day Navis came down from Millwood with a carload of stuff and didn’t leave.

For years Mama didn’t explain why she’d left me high and dry, and I didn’t ask. For a while, whenever I looked at her, all I could see were roaches under the streetlights. Finally the roaches scudded under the floorboards of my mind, and Mama’s never-ending trip to the A & P got to be more or less water under the bridge. By then I had come to understand that not everybody can be the Queen of Palmyra. For some people being afraid is the hardest thing in the world. I could see how such a person might do anything just not to be afraid anymore.

So I didn’t hate Mama for leaving, though when she asked me to come live with her, I said no, I was with Mimi; Mimi was my mother now. This hurt Mama’s feelings, which I meant it to, but she pushed back her bangs and said all right, she didn’t blame me, she deserved that. Once, when I was in high school, she sat me down amid the pots and pans of her kitchen, laid down a thick slice of devil’s food cake in front of me, and said, “Florence, you know I meant to come back. I really meant to. I didn’t set out to leave. I just got to riding around in the dark, and then it got too late and I was afraid. I knew he was going to send me back to Whitfield, and I just couldn’t go back to that. I was afraid I would die in there. You know I love you, don’t you, honey? I always loved you.” I said yes, but the cake stuck in my craw. I don’t have much truck with love. It was not love that brought me over the dark water. It was something else. Something that didn’t give way. Something that held. Mimi and Grandpops and Zenie and Ray and Eva had that something; Mama didn’t.

In school I learned that a story is a weaving. At some point, the final thread is tied off, and the pattern emerges before your eyes in plain sight. You see what there is to see, and the story is complete. The end. This story goes on. Years passed and we got a phone call saying that Zenie had died from a clot that broke loose from one of the bad veins in her legs and traveled to her heart. Mimi drove up to Millwood for the funeral. I wanted to go too, but she said no; I was still only seventeen, a minor, and my father had rights. She said I had to stay out of Mississippi until I was of age. A few months later a letter brought news that Ray had died in his bed of smoke inhalation. The police said the fire was caused by Jim Walter’s bad wiring, maybe the one thing Ray couldn’t fix since he didn’t know it was broken. I thought of Zenie’s pretty green curtains curling and burning. Miss Josephine of course was long gone by then.

After four years at Loyola, only a short bus ride from Mimi and Mabel’s, I got a job as a teacher at Crossman Elementary, the very school I’d gone to myself, except now most of the students were black. Full circle I went, all the while flying so far from home that nobody from back there remembers my name.

When Mimi died first and then Mabel, I took the money they left me and bought a little shotgun house on, believe it or not, Palmyra Street. Mama and Navis moved into Mabel’s house. The neighbors on Palmyra liked me because I walked out on summer nights with two cans of Raid and sprayed roaches all up and down the sidewalk. My goal was a roach-free block. “Here come the roach lady,” the children would say to one another and run for their porches. I bought the
Picayune Creole Cookbook
and made Sunday dinners. Some Sundays Mama, whose hair was now streaked with gray, and Navis, who had dyed her gray red, came to eat. They would ask me if I had any friends. I knew they were asking about men. I said I was too busy, which was true. Students want so much from you.

So if I were writing this story a century ago, I’d say, Reader, I am content, except for that flutter that troubles me from time to time. Chalk dust has seeped into my skin, making it seem drier and white. I chew cloves because I take a cig or two at lunch—what’s wrong with that when your life is diagramming sentences for fifth graders who squirm and push against their desk like young horses? With families struggling to stay out of the projects, or to stay in the projects and off the streets, some of the children seem to dangle like misplaced modifiers. I know my job is to remain constant. Monday through Friday, end of summer to late spring, I am where I’m supposed to be. Most afternoons I stay late and tutor the ones who lag behind. I make them stay too, even if they don’t want to. I tell them they’re not getting out of the fifth grade until they learn what a semicolon does. How it holds things together but keeps them from touching too closely. How it balances and contains and keeps things from flooding over. For perfect assignments and good attendance, I give out roses from my little alleyway garden wrapped in wet paper towels and napkins. These the children handle with care.

“We watching your back, Miss Forrest,” the boys tell me on their way out the door in the afternoons. “Don’t you be worrying because we watching out for all your trees every minute of the day and night. Nobody going to cut down your trees on our lookout.” When they laugh at their own joke and pull up their drooping pants for emphasis, I take this to mean they have a certain affection for me. Who knows? Perhaps they like to think I belong to them, that we are one another’s precious cargo on a long ride to the future.

When the morning light cuts across the classroom, making a V across the linoleum floor, there’s no turning back from the already steaming day, the school year, the chalk dust on my hands. And this is what I want most from teaching: it moves me
through time. There is the beginning of the school year with its failing air conditioners and jumpy newcomers, the holidays glory be, then the victorious end of school and a blissfully empty summer. There are lesson plans, report cards, never-ending worries about Joseph with his druggy big brother or Mary whose mama wants all A’s. This and that. The gravity of it all keeps the flutter under control.