The Sweetest Thing (9 page)

“Silly girl, of course not! You've seen me have fun! I guess we just have different interests.”

“Boys don't interest you?”

“I told you! I have Hank.”

“But you're going to be so awfully bored around here if you don't go to movies or to parties or have boys over. Poor you, Dobbs.”

She let that sink in without a word. I imagined her curled up on her bed with a book and rolling her eyes at me.

Finally I blurted out what I'd wanted to tell her in the first place. “At any rate, I love boys, and I've just been invited to a fraternity formal by the handsomest boy on the Georgia Tech football team. Isn't that swell?”

“Oh, Perri! I'm so happy for you!” That's when I heard Dobbs's contagious enthusiasm bubble up. “What's his name?”

“Spalding Smith. His father is a millionaire—made his money with Coca-Cola—and apparently the Depression hasn't hurt them at all. Anyway, Spalding is over the top, and I can't believe I'm lucky enough to be going with him. Now, I just have to find an appropriate gown. I cannot possibly show up in a gown I've already worn.”

Dobbs listened to me jabber for a few more minutes, but I had the distinct impression that in her mind she was miles and miles away, maybe as far away as Chicago, Illinois.

Dobbs

After talking to Perri I made my way to the kitchen for a glass of tea. I found Parthenia there, clutching a white basket in her arms. She had a little bonnet on her head and was wearing a pretty dress instead of her servant's uniform.

“Where are you going dressed so nicely?” I asked.

“I'm going to see my mama ova' at the Alms Houses.”

“Oh, good for you. I'm sure that will make her happy.”

“Yep. Papa takes us on Sunday afternoons after church 'cause we have the day off and on account that Mama has off too. We goes in the ol' Ford Mista Chandler lets us use. I try to make some of her favorite things to take to her. We ain't gone last coupl'a Sundays on account of Mista Singleton's passing, but today we git to go.” She nodded forcefully, and gave me a weak smile.

I watched her walk out the back door and across the lawn to the garage where Hosea and Cornelius were waiting in the Ford. Parthenia put her basket in the back seat and climbed up front with them. I thought of the fear that I'd seen in Parthenia's eyes when she'd first told me about her mother being at the Alms Houses. I was sure that little girl knew something, but someone had scared her enough to keep her from telling it to anyone else.

Later that afternoon, while Uncle Robert napped in the big drawing room downstairs, snoring softly as the radio played an episode of
Amos and Andy
, I turned to my aunt, who was busily knitting a sweater for one of her grandchildren, and asked, “Aunt Josie, what exactly are the Alms Houses?”

“The Fulton County Alms Houses have been around since before the Civil War, but about twenty years ago, they built new houses out past Buckhead on Powers Ferry and West Wieuca Roads—to house the county's poor. Wonderful work done there, really. A white Alms House and a black Alms House. Both of them have more inhabitants than there's room for right now—very understandable. I do believe this is the worst year yet of the Depression.”

She frowned slightly and squinted as if she were concentrating hard on her knitting. “And just recently, Mr. Chastain sold Fulton County about a hundred acres of land out there, and they made a prison camp around the Alms Houses. The colored prisoners live in the rear of the black Alms House. Mrs. Clark—the superintendent—is the one who looks after them. There must be forty or fifty of them there, and the women are in charge of fixing meals, cleaning, tending the gardens. The colored men prisoners run the farm across the street.”

“Parthenia told me about her mother being at the Alms Houses for stealing some of your silver knives. What happened?”

“Ah, that's why you've asked.” Aunt Josie continued her knitting, relating the facts without so much as a glance my way. “It's a horrible story, but I suppose you deserve to know.” She kept her head bent down, a look of deep assiduity on her face.

“Women like Anna are serving time for offenses such as stealing clothing from department stores, playing the ‘bug'—you know, gambling—and, of course, stealing from their employers.” Aunt Josie had regained her composure and reported this matter-of-factly.

“The women work in the Alms Houses, and on the prison farm, raising vegetables for the complex and for other prison camps in the county.” Stitch after stitch she moved her needles in an effortless rhythm.

“Wait a minute, Aunt Josie! Wait a minute!” I jumped off the sofa and startled her so that she snapped her head up, met my eyes with a stunned look in hers, and set down her knitting. “There's something I don't understand at all. Parthenia told me about the stolen knives—that they were never found. She said everybody knows her mother's innocent, but that she had to go to the Alms House on account of being accused by a white lady.”

I did not want to mention that I knew the white lady was Aunt Josie's daughter. “Couldn't you do something? I mean, do those five knives mean so much that she'd have to stay out there for months?”

“Of course not.” And Aunt Josie looked, for an instant, vulnerable. “Heavens, dear Anna was the one who reported it to me in tears right after the party. She knows very well what a stickler I am for making sure nothing gets lost. And she knew how much those pearl-handled knives meant to me—my grandmother's favorite possession. Oh, they came from France in the sixteenth century. Priceless—they're worth a fortune—thousands of dollars, if you can believe it. I should have never used them at the party. It was foolish of me, but heavens, if you have beautiful things and keep them hidden away, what's the point?” Another sigh. “So Anna came and told me right away.

“We searched everywhere, and Anna and Hosea, of course, opened their servants' quarters. I didn't call the police, didn't report a thing. But later, Becca found the silver serving spoon that was also missing right among Anna's things—in a drawer hidden beneath her undergarments. We never found the knives, though.”

“Becca turned her in? Didn't Anna
raise
Becca?”

“She did. It's complicated, Dobbs. Terrible and complicated.”

“Couldn't you pay to get Anna out?”

“We've tried.”

“Parthenia says her mother will never get out until Hosea pays back what the knives are worth!”

“Mary Dobbs”—this she said a bit harshly—“you'll be doing well not to believe everything that Parthenia tells you.”

I felt as if Aunt Josie had reached across the room and poked me with one of her long knitting needles. She frowned, looked at me for a long moment, opened her mouth as if she were going to say something else, and then closed it. She turned her head back down to her knitting project and said, “Mary Dobbs, I'll be needing you to help me get supper fixed. Hosea and his children have the evening off.”

So I guessed that was as much of an explanation as Aunt Josie was going to offer me. I knew that every family had its ugly bruises—those places that stayed raw and tender in hearts, places no one on the outside knew about, places kept hidden and locked deep inside a family's history—but somehow, the way Aunt Josie glossed over Becca's accusation, the way her face varied between stoicism and crushing vulnerability, I knew another thing. It came to me as I watched Aunt Josie finish up her knitting and stick the needles forcefully into the yellow ball of yarn. The Chandlers' story went a lot deeper than a daughter accusing her servant of a theft she didn't commit.

———

When I returned from school on Monday afternoon, three letters were waiting for me on the little desk in my room. Of course I tore into the one from Hank first:

. . . You'll be happy to hear that I got up all my courage and talked with your father last night. He had known for a time, I believe, and he gave me his blessing, all the while reminding me that you are still a minor and that there's no need to rush and that you intend to finish high school in Atlanta and hopefully pursue higher education.

I'm planning to come down to Atlanta the last weekend in May. I've saved the train fare. And I promised I'd bring Frances and Coobie too. Don't worry about your parents paying, because I've been saving for their fares too. We're all excited about visiting Atlanta and then bringing you back with us to Chicago.

We were bolstered by Mr. Roosevelt's Fireside Chat last Sunday night. I was impressed with the way the president explained the banking crisis and the reasons for the banking holiday in such simple terms. . . .

I found myself smiling—Hank had talked to my father about us and he was coming down in two months.

Dear Sis,

Thank you for your letters. We read them over and over and it all sounds so wonderful. Except the part about that poor girl's father dying.

Last night Hank talked to Father about you. I wasn't home, but you know Coobie. She followed them to the church and hid under a pew and heard the whole thing. But don't worry. She said Father was real happy about it.

I can't wait to come down to Atlanta.

Missing you.

Bye, Frances

There was a short one, too, from Coobie, in her seven-year-old scrawl.

I folded the letters and closed my eyes, picturing Hank and Frances and Coobie, feeling an ache to be there with them. At least they'd be visiting in May, and then I'd have the whole summer back at home with them in Chicago.

Uncle Robert and Aunt Josie and I had listened to every word of President Roosevelt's Sunday night speech on the radio, and at the end of the first Fireside Chat, Uncle Robert had sat back in his armchair, puffed on his cigar, letting his lower lip stick way out, and grunted, with his hands resting on his ample belly, “The man seems to have a good head on his shoulders. God help him.”

Not long after I read the letters, Perri came over, and we jabbered about pop-calling for a while. Then she said, “Can I ask you something, Dobbs—something that isn't very polite?”

I grinned at her. “You think you have to be polite to me—the rudest, biggest-mouthed girl who has successfully shocked all of your friends in just one short week?”

She looked surprised with that statement.

“Yes, I know what the girls are saying about me, and it's probably true. I do have a big mouth. Anyway, I'd love to hear you be impolite, Perri, if that's possible.”

“It's just very personal.” Perri attempted a half smile that failed miserably. “The thing I keep wondering is this: Why didn't your father get a big inheritance like your aunt did? I remember my mother helping Mrs. Chandler care for her parents and the way she did everything for them, and then when they died, everyone said that Mrs. Chandler was a saint and they were glad she would keep the house and have plenty—more than plenty. Gobs and gobs of money is what everyone said.

“So where was your father, and why didn't he receive any money? I can see him choosing to live frugally and preach and do God's work—leading people down the Sawdust Trail, or whatever you call it—but I just can't imagine him letting his family go hungry when he could have money. Have you ever thought of that?”

She took a breath and looked like she might cry. “I'm sorry for asking. It's none of my business, but it's just hard to think of your family going without.”

Perri had dared to voice the question that had been brewing inside of me for days and days. How
could
Father not have any money? I understood that he might turn his back on Atlanta society, but surely he had not refused to take the money from the inheritance? With it, I imagined he could keep us well fed and then hand out his charity with greater gusto.

It made my stomach cramp to wonder.

“I've asked myself that a hundred times. And I don't know, Perri. It's one of those things I guess I'll never understand.”

“Like why my daddy killed himself,” she whispered.

I bit my lip. “Yes, I guess it's like that.”

CHAPTER

7

Perri

Sure enough, Mamma started working down at the capitol sorting license plate registrations. It sounded like the most boring job in the world, but it paid real money, which was what we needed. She came home exhausted and cranky, and Dellareen tried extra hard to fix her favorite dinners and have them ready when she walked in the door.

I kept Barbara and Irvin from arguing when Mamma got home, which usually involved giving them a treat and sitting them in front of the radio to listen to
Little Orphan Annie
every afternoon at 5:45.

I was proud of Mamma, but I knew from our accounts that she'd need to be making a lot more money than what the license department was paying her if we were going to keep the house. Mr. Robinson assured me the bank would give us a grace period, since Daddy had been such a well-respected employee, before they stepped in to repossess the house. But how long would that grace period last? I worried, too, that we'd not be able to pay Jimmy and Dellareen, and I couldn't imagine letting them go with their five children to feed.

I thought a lot about the darkroom at the Chandlers' barn and checked out three books on photography from the school library. Soon I knew more than enough to equip my darkroom. I needed developing trays, an enlarger, a light box, and a deep vat for holding several rolls of film at a time. Once a week after school, Mrs. Carnes walked me through the whole process of developing my film, and she applauded the idea of my personal darkroom, but she didn't know that I had no idea how I was going to afford the supplies.

———

Apart from Dobbs, if anything could help me forget about my poor Daddy and all our family's problems, it was taking part in, and often leading, several of Washington Seminary's committees and clubs. So I spent the spring days of 1933 in school, with committee meetings in the afternoons, boys calling on me later at home, and with my siblings planted by the radio in the evenings.

It looked, I suppose, to the outside world, as if I'd just picked right back up with my former life. My friends at school seemed relieved that I had rejoined these activities. It meant we avoided talk of “the tragedy.” But on the inside, I was all knotted up with worry and heartbreak and anger and a lot of other things I couldn't explain.

I felt far away from Mamma. We'd never been extremely close. I was definitely a daddy's girl. But she'd been a fine mother, always doing just the right thing for her husband and children. Now I watched her transform before my eyes from the pretty, petite blond wife into a brittle-looking older woman, her face drawn and determined, her eyes empty of their normal sparkle.

At least Patty Robinson and Josie Chandler and Ellen McFadden still came over and sat with Mamma. I didn't hear Mamma's laughter, light and musical, but they were there with her, and that to me was true friendship—sweet and solid and present.

We never talked about Daddy when Mamma was around, but on those spring nights after Mamma had tucked Irvin in, I'd go into his room, where he was cuddled up in the bed and surrounded by a hoard of stuffed animals that I think he felt protected him from all that was terrible in his life. I wanted him to keep hugging those animals tight, no matter that he was almost eleven years old and most of his friends had long ago traded their stuffed animals for baseball cards.

“Perri,” he said almost every night, “I miss Daddy.”

“So do I,” I'd whisper through the catch in my throat.

But one night his questions continued. “D'ya think Daddy's in heaven?”

“Of course he's in heaven, Irv. Up there with Granddaddy and the angels.”

“Pete said he might not be. Said that if someone took his own life, well, that was the worst sin in the world, and he'd go straight to hell.” Irvin fought back tears, but they trickled down anyway over his profusion of freckles.

I grabbed him in a tight hug. “Oh, Irvin. Pete doesn't know anything at all! Don't you dare listen to him.” I held him for a long time like that, feeling his body heaving up and down. At last I gave Irvin a kiss on the head, tucked his covers tight around him, piled his stuffed animals on each side, and left the room.

I went to check on Barbara, who was painting her fingernails while she looked at a comic book. As usual, she paid me little attention. Her thirteen-year-old scowl worried me though. She surely was hurting behind her façade. I whispered “Good night, Sis,” and she grunted something unintelligible back to me.

I trudged to my room, haunted by Irvin's question, a question for which I had absolutely no answer. Until Daddy's death, I had hardly given a thought to the hereafter. My feet were firmly planted on the earth. Part of me wished I'd listened more carefully to what the preacher at church said about heaven, and part of me was terrified to know what he thought. I figured I could ask Dobbs Irvin's question about heaven, but I had no desire to hear her answer either.

Dobbs

I don't know how Perri managed it, but she got me invited to Peggy Pender's spend-the-night party, in spite of the fact I could tell that Peggy didn't particularly like me. Hosea drove me to the Pender home in the Pierce Arrow. Peggy's family lived outside of the community known as Buckhead, on Powers Ferry Road, in a sprawling white brick home with lovely oak and hickory trees in the front yard as well as a few dogwoods that had already lost their petals. Across the street from Peggy's house were acres and acres of farmland.

Before I got out of the car, Hosea said to me, “That there's where my Anna is.” He nodded to where colored men and women were out working the cornfields.

“There? That's where the Alms Houses are?”

“Further ova' there is where she lives, but she works out in the fields most days. Raises all kinds of vegetables, not just corn.” He took a deep breath. “I'm goin' to see my Anna this afternoon on account of being right here across the street.”

“It's horrible about your wife. Do you know why anyone would frame her for stealing? Does she have enemies?”

Hosea shook his head slowly, and I was sorry I'd asked, because his shoulders slumped just the slightest bit and his usually jovial appearance became as dark as his eyes. “I kain't say she has enemies; guess our main enemy is just the color of our skin.” He said it without resentment, more resigned than angry. “Have a good time with your friends, Miz Mary Dobbs. I'll be here tomorrow to pick you up.”

I nodded, and as he drove away, I said again to myself, or maybe to God,
I want to help Hosea and Parthenia prove that Anna is innocent. Somehow I've got to help.

———

“Who's got a joke?” Peggy asked the six other girls sitting in the spacious guest bedroom at her house. It was after dark, and we'd eaten a delicious meal and painted our nails, and several girls were experimenting with different ways to curl their hair.

Stocky Brat immediately launched into one. “A frat boy is talking to his girl. ‘Honey, do you know the difference between a taxi and a streetcar?' ‘No,' she says. The frat guy says, ‘Good. We'll take the streetcar.' ”

The girls giggled, and Lisa Young said, “We can use that one! Not bad, Brat.” Lisa was a tiny little thing with dark brown hair and big eyes and, so Perri had told me, was responsible for finding jokes and ads for
Facts and Fancies.
She scribbled Brat's joke down on a piece of paper and then stuck her pencil behind her left ear.

“Oh, I have one!” Macon Ferguson said. She was the tallest girl in the junior class and had short red hair and was always talking with her hands. “Teacher—‘Peggy, if a number of cattle is called a herd, and a number of sheep a flock, what would a number of camels be called?' Peggy—‘A carton.' ” Macon winked at Peggy and pretended to be smoking a cigarette, and the girls giggled again.

“Does anyone have a ghost story to tell?” Brat asked.

“Oh, I've heard that Mary Dobbs tells the best stories,” Mae Pearl said, smiling sweetly and glancing first at Perri and then at me. “Won't you tell us one?”

“Yeah, go ahead,” Perri encouraged. “All of her stories are true,” she added, turning to the other girls, as if to convince them that I was somehow legitimate.

“But they aren't ghost stories,” I said.

“That doesn't matter. Just tell us something. Unless you'd rather hear another one of my jokes,” Brat said.

There was a chorus of “No thanks, Brat!” and they all turned to look at me.

We sat there on the comfortable old bed—big enough for a tribe to sleep in—with all the overstuffed pillows and two quilted comforters wrapped around us. The windows had blown wide open, and the sweet scent of honeysuckle wafted into the room. I almost wanted to climb out the window and pick myself a long white and golden cord of the plant, but I refrained. I needed to be on my best behavior. I searched my mind and landed on the perfect story.

“One summer about three years ago, Father and Mother took us to a little town in Oklahoma. In that town the people were so poor that they'd been eating their pets for two months.”

Mae Pearl let out a squeal, Macon said, “How disgusting!” and Peggy just raised her eyebrows and gave me a doubting look.

“Every person had to contribute a dog or cat to the cause of survival, and they all did, because they'd read in the Bible about people sacrificing their kids, and they sure didn't want to have to do that.

“My father, Reverend Billy, had gotten wind of the horrors going on among those desperate people in that little town, and he was preaching to them about grace and God providing and trying to comfort them in his way when this old, old woman, all wrinkles and loose skin, walked straight up the aisle toward the pulpit, wobbling along like she might just fall flat on her face before she got there. She was holding on to a leash with this big ol' mangy dog beside her—the ugliest dog I'd ever seen, all yellowish brown with his long hair missing in spots and so dirty and skinny you saw his ribs through his long hair—and he couldn't walk any better than the old woman.

“Daddy was still preaching but having a hard time of it on account that no one was really listening to him but everyone's eyes were completely glued on that old woman. When she got to the front, right by the stage, she stopped and started shaking so much that I was sure she'd topple over. Then when she regained her balance, she bent over, just shaking and trembling, and reached her withered hands down onto that dog and gave a loud grunt that every one of us could hear—there were only about fifty people at the meeting that night—and she lifted that big ol' mangy-looking dog up in her arms and started hollering at my father, saying, ‘If God provides, why do we have to eat my dog tonight? You tell me what kind of God provides that way, Mister Preacher-man! You tell me!' And she cried and wailed for a while, and then murmured, ‘He's all I have, my only friend, and now we have to eat him.'

“The people were completely speechless, and I wanted to go puke right there. But Mother always knew what to do, and she rushed up to the old woman and took the dog from her arms and gently placed it down on the ground—and that dog must've been half dead already because he didn't move—and Mother said, ‘You will not be eating this animal for supper! You, and anyone else who is hungry, will be eating at our tent tonight.'

“And you could tell that some of those people in the crowd were the ones telling the old woman that they had to eat her dog. I promise those people were the saddest-looking bunch, all hollow-eyed and so skinny you thought they just might be dressed-up skeletons.

“Well, Father just looked over at Mother from the pulpit like she was as loony as the old woman, because he knew we didn't have a scrap of food in our tent, and we were half starved ourselves. But Mother smiled and said, ‘Loaves and fishes, Reverend. Loaves and fishes.' ”

I paused for a second and let the silence speak for itself, and the girls—every one of them, Mae Pearl and Peggy and Brat and Macon and Lisa and even Perri—looked completely mesmerized, as if they'd never before in their lives heard a good story being told at a girls' spend-the-night party. I stood up and said, “I'll be right back. I've got to go to the powder room.”

When I came back in the bedroom, those girls hadn't budged.

Brat begged, “So what happened, Mary Dobbs? What happened to the old woman and her dog and your mother? Did she have food in your tent?”

I smiled and shrugged. “Just what Mother said. ‘Loaves and fishes.' ”

They looked at me, annoyed. Peggy said, “Look, Mary Dobbs, we get the biblical symbolism. But what we want to know is how
your
story turns out. How
your
mother got loaves and fishes.”

Satisfied with their interest, I continued. “Well, after the meeting probably fifteen or twenty of the hungriest-looking people you can imagine crowded around Mother. She was trying to soothe them with her words, and Frances and Coobie and I were whispering behind our hands about what was going to happen.

“And then this lady—a real lady, she could have been one of your mothers, all dressed up fancy with her pretty suit and her hat and her gloves—came up to Mother. She was wiping her face with a handkerchief, and you could tell she felt pretty emotional about something.

“She said, loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘Mrs. Dillard, I'd like to invite all these people to my house. I can drive some in my car, and whoever else has cars can bring the others, and we'll have a fine dinner for all of you who want some good country cooking! It would be a privilege to have y'all at my house.'

“Well, Mother swooned a little, caught herself, and said, ‘You don't have to do that, ma'am.'

“And the woman said, ‘Yes. Yes, I do. I haven't heard a real sermon in a long time, and I haven't wanted to listen to the Good Lord for a longer time—just wanted to protect my family and my things—and all the while He's been asking me to feed the poor that are right here in my backyard.'