The Queen of Palmyra (39 page)

The girl carefully touched the beautiful rose
. Eva’s sentence. I write it on the board. “Copy it down,” I command, and they start writing, their heads bent low over their notebooks, scraping their pencils across the pages, noses sniffling and shoes tapping their desks. Then I begin the diagram:
girl/touched
. As I fill out the diagram with object, adjectives, and adverb, I plan the next sentence. It will be the other one from Eva.
The careful girl was touched by the beautiful rose
. I realize now just what a shrewd choice Eva made with this second sentence: not only does it illustrate the difference between active and passive voices and adverbs and adjectives, but it also shows how a word can mutate into metaphor. How the ordinary can become beautiful as well as ugly. How many ways one can touch and be touched. Or be full of care. The last sentence I plan is my own. It will be about thorns. How you have to watch out for thorns. But, of course, these children know that all too well.

Sometimes when I look back, I see a tangle of webs in the dark basement. I see Eva putting on her red lipstick, tying the yellow scarf just so. Zenie with her back turned at the stove, all the eyes on high, pots boiling, skillets splattering the wall with hot grease. Then Zenie turns and her face is wet with sweat but with something else too, something heavier than sweat.

I don’t see Daddy so much as I feel his hand on the shape of me, molding me like clay. But the mold didn’t hold. I was the bowl that broke. So when I see my life stretch out before me
now like a long straight track, I am not happy but I am content with the view. I don’t mind being on the train calling out
no, no, no, no.

What I don’t know yet is that one day, forty-two years from that night Mimi and I hit the road, I will be in the middle of diagramming a sentence on the board. It will be getting toward the end of August, and school will have just started that week. We are all roasting. The old window air conditioner is barely stirring the air in the room. I will have brought in my big floor fan, which is on low so that I can be heard. I will be standing in front of thirty students, who loll about at their desks, feet in the aisles, fanning themselves in various poses of impatience and discomfort. I don’t know their names yet, but I have a seating chart. I’ve told them we are going to have our first test on diagramming, count on it, so most of them are taking notes.

I am known for starting hard, and like Eva I love diagramming. The sentence I have in mind today isn’t the one Eva taught Ray and me about the girl and the rose; it is more complicated, more compelling. I like to think it is one of the knock-your-socks-off ones she promised me the last morning of her life. There is a collective groan when I write it on the board:

When the fireman broke in the window, the girl woke from a deep sleep; with barely a moment to spare, she was able to see her dilemma and jump.

A sentence with drama and flare, if I do say so myself. I chose it because I want them to learn a sense of balance and decorum. I want them to understand that a sentence isn’t a story that can just go on and on. It can take twists and turns. It can offer surprise and pleasure and terror. But it has to end somewhere. There has to be a period. I’ll admit too, I want to make them sit up in their seats and take notice. This class is not going to be a piece of cake. They are going to learn the difference between a
subordinate clause and a prepositional phrase; they are going to know the function of the semicolon. You are going to be word architects, I tell them; but, to be an architect, you have to understand context. I’ve lost them with the context part, so I offer up my speech about how they’ll understand what I’m saying through the diagram itself. The proof is in the pudding.

I start building the diagram on the board. First subjects and verbs. I call out to them, “Now then. What are the subjects of this sentence?” I am enjoying myself. It’s almost lunchtime and I’m looking forward to the Winstons stashed in my lunch box.

On the front row, a girl who has been fanning herself with her notebook raises her hand. I can see the beads of sweat on her nose.

I nod. I am hoping she is going to whip out
girl
and
she
. I am hoping she’ll be one of the smart ones. It’s a strong beginning, I’m thinking: one hand in the air.

“Did that girl in the sentence die?” she asks. “When she jumped, did she die?”

This is not the answer I wanted, this is not the question I wanted. This is not why I chose this sentence. “No,” I say curtly. “The fireman caught her. The fireman saved her life.”

“Good,” she says, and a smile plays at her lips.

Several students chuckle and murmur, “Um hum.”

I turn back to the blackboard, and that’s when it starts to happen. She surfaces out of my own web of chalky lines and words, emerging the moment I make the catty-cornered downward stroke for
dilemma
to rest on. The words
able to see
have just rolled off my tongue. The second of three verbs in a compound/complex sentence, I’ve just said to the students. They groan again, and I hear one of the boys on the back row snicker and say, “Shit. Compound
what
?”

I have my mouth open to say
complex
, compound
complex
,
when there she is. There she is. In the space between the word and the line it belongs to. She stares at me over a man’s shoulder. The man seems to be leaning in to bear-hug her. Eva. Pretty Eva in her yellow scarf, looking at me through those cat-eye specs of hers. She seems to step out of the blackboard like a photograph that comes to life before your very eyes. Her face is the color of soot, not the pretty chocolate cream it once was. Our eyes lock. She nods at me, an odd sort of nod to the left: a slow-motion curtsy. Her arm comes up once, as if she is swimming, reaching for shore. Then she slides down out of sight behind the man, reluctantly it seems, like someone drowning, and there is only his back.

Then the man turns and I see his face and what’s in his hand and a levee breaks deep inside my retinas and the river is coming in. Then I think no, it’s not the river, it’s the whole damn lake, it’s the whole damn Gulf of Mexico. I squeeze my eyes shut to hold it back, but there’s no stopping it.

When anyone faints in public, there’s a fuss. And of course someone takes me home. I’m escorted into my darkened living room and put down on the couch. Someone gets me a drink of water, asks if I’m all right now, and leaves. I sit for a good long time and just try to breathe. I sit for hours looking down at my arms folded in my lap. In those hours, I come to notice that my hands are getting veiny, my forearms fleshy like my grandmother’s. I come to understand that Eva has waited long enough. Forty-two years—it’s 2005 by now—and she is tired of waiting. She has taken matters into her own hands.

When the light outside turns gray, I leave the house. I walk over to Carrollton and catch the streetcar up to Riverbend. There I cross the railroad tracks and walk up on the levee that holds back the Mississippi. The brush and trees grow in thickets along the riverbank. Men with bottles in little brown sacks come and
go from those thickets; their trips seem purposeful, as if they are attending an important business meeting. There is a bend in the river by a transformer where the brush has been cut back and where I can see the water and walk down to it. At the river’s edge there’s an old rusted boat to the left and a broken-up wharf, gray and sharded, to the right, like the subject and verb of some vast and unfathomable sentence. In the coming dark I can’t tell where the bank ends and the water begins. Without looking, I can feel the river rising.

The next morning I’m on a bus to Jackson and that same afternoon reading microfilm in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. When I come across the reports of Eva’s murder, I don’t need to read them. After all, I was there. I am drowning in details. Broad daylight, yellow scarf, nandina bush, screwdriver, bees. And, of course, my father the Nighthawk. Furious at Mimi for trying to take me away, furious at my mother for leaving, furious at me for the hatred and fear I bore him, how he swooped around that corner so slow and smooth when he saw her coming down that side street. How he did that thing I couldn’t see, didn’t see. A willed, necessary blindness.

True stories happen, and then you tell them. But what you tell depends on what you see. And what you see depends on what you know.

What I don’t know came later: a black boycott of white businesses organized by Rayfield Johnson, uncle-in-law of the victim, which made me wonder whether the fire that killed Ray was actually the result of bad wiring. Then a march led by Ray and Zenie and Eva’s friend Frank when nobody was arrested for Eva’s murder, even after a sheriff’s deputy found the screwdriver in the nandina bush and some of the men from Mr. Lafitte’s Grocery said they saw a Valiant with the policy man at the wheel go by. A small picture of the march, fuzzed by the microfilm, shows the
three of them grim faced, Frank’s white face and hair leaping up like a flame in the midst of a sea of black people with placards held high surging down Main Street, ringed by angry white men who looked like Big Dan. The caption under the picture reads, “Race Violence Breaks Out in Millwood.”

By the time I get back down to New Orleans, a Thursday night, there is a storm brewing in the Gulf. Everybody on the bus is talking about it. It has hit Florida, turned around, and is heading back toward us. The joke amongst the passengers is that we’re heading in the wrong direction.

The phone is ringing when I unlock my front door. It is Mama. “Damn it the hell, Florence, I’ve been trying to reach you for
two days
. When are you going to get a cell phone? Where on earth have you been? We’ve been worried sick we’d have to evacuate without you.”

When she stops for breath, I say, “I went up to Jackson for a few days. Listen, Mama, I think it would be better for me to drive one of your cars out of here. We need to get all the cars out of here.” I don’t own a car myself, and I need one for what I have planned.

She draws a shaky breath. “Well, all right. I guess so. Damn this place. How the hell did we end up here?”

I think, well, after you ran yourself into the train and Grandpops died and you took the grocery list and left me with nothing but a stack of greased pans, and Daddy hurt me and killed Eva, Mimi had the courage and decency and good sense to throw me and her hats in the Plymouth and bring me over the dark water to Mabel because she didn’t know where else to go. Then you came back because the coast was clear and there was smooth sailing. I say, “Okay, so can you bring me over a car, then?”

“Are you sure you’ll be all right driving by yourself?”

“Of course I will. Just bring me the car.”

“Why don’t you just follow us? We’ve got two rooms in Jackson. We’re leaving early in the morning. Crack of dawn.”

“I need to see Daddy.”

There’s a pause. “Oh. Do you think that’s really necessary?” Mama still hasn’t forgiven me for stashing Daddy in Roselawn Nursing Facility down in Chalmette, just a few miles away. When they called from the John Deere place in Greenwood because he had started to carry his headache stick to work and whap it on his leg when he got aggravated at a customer, Mama had long since gotten a divorce, so it was my little red wagon. I told them to take the stick to him, but soon after that, he had a stroke right there on the sales floor.

The nursing home is a ranch-style house built low to the ground. It’s flooded twice already and the one time I was there for the paperwork, it smelled like a sewer.

“Yes I do think it’s necessary.”

“You’re not going to bring him with you, are you?” Her voice has iced over. There is only one possible answer to the question.

“Are you crazy?”

Mama breathed a sigh of relief. “All right, we’re coming right over with my car.”

I hang up and pour a shot of vodka. It sits on the kitchen counter like the beginnings of a little altar to a lost one on the side of the highway. I pick it up and drink it down.

I resist the temptation to pour again and instead pick up my suitcase and take it into the bedroom and lay it on my bed. I unpack dirty underwear and put in clean. Then I close it back up. I am ready to go. I light a cigarette and turn on the TV. The storm is back in the Gulf and is building strength. Florida was just a warm-up.

In a few minutes Mama hurries inside with the car keys. Navis is waiting out in the other car. They are thinking of leav
ing tonight. They’ve gassed up both cars. Will I be right along tomorrow?

Yes, I say, yes. I notice that Mama’s hair is more white now than silver. Her bangs all white.

She stops in her tracks when I come out of the shadows of the kitchen. She peers at me. “You look terrible. What’s the matter? What’s wrong with you?”

Somehow I make the words line up.
I
is the subject,
saw
the verb,
Daddy
the direct object, the rest of the clause unthinkable.

She gasps and pushes her bangs straight up in that old lost gesture. “God in heaven, how could you have forgotten
that
? You remember
everything.
It’s impossible you didn’t remember seeing him
kill her
.”

“It’s not that I didn’t remember what I saw. It’s that I didn’t know what I was seeing.”

“You’re not a fool, Florence. You must have realized later. Surely you must have figured it out.” My mother’s voice is cold. She looks shocked and innocent. A little old lady with nothing to hide.

I don’t answer. What I remember about that time right after Mimi brought me to Mabel was my delighted dive into normalcy. Mabel’s spacious high-ceilinged house with long windows and cool wood floors. School down the street and outfits that matched. A little room with a twin bed all to myself. No hot hand, no bootleg runs. I remember taking long naps in the quiet late afternoons, then doing diagrams on the kitchen table while Mabel cooked supper. Lining up the words the way Eva had taught me so that you could tell what belonged to what: where the sentence led and what story it was telling. Where that story began and where it ended. I remember eating scrambled eggs for supper and French toast with powdered sugar for breakfast. Moving from the middle of fifth grade, which Eva’s tutoring had earned me, to the top. I
remember my grandmother’s hair turning to gleaming silver, how she let it grow out and wore it on top of her head like a crown. I remember getting to watch
Bonanza
and
Mr. Wizard’s World.
I remember Mimi, Mabel, and me clustering around the TV and crying when President Kennedy got shot with poor Jackie in her bloody dress. I felt I’d come into the real world for the first time. It was a world that took its life from my mother’s absence, and, I now see, from Eva’s death.