Absalom's Daughters (7 page)

“Looky here.” A sledgehammer-sized revolver lay in a row of rusted pistols. “You know what that is?”

The barrel was big enough to stick a finger in. Its trigger was thin and rusted. Cassie shook her head.

“That there's a horse pistol from the war a-tween the states. We got one at home, exceptin' ours in better shape. Still got some shootin' left in it.” Judith picked up the gun with both hands and held it out straight, aiming in the general direction of the barn. “He a heavy old thing. I wonder if he got a name.”

What always impressed Cassie about Judith's lies was that she never seemed to spend even a second coming up with them. It was like she had a store of spontaneous stories at the tip of her tongue. “Why would it have a name?” said Cassie.

“Ours do. He's called Big Red.”

“It's a red gun?” said Cassie.

“Nope,” said Judith. “He's named for the horse he had to shoot. My great-great-great-granddaddy came home on his horse from the war a-tween the states with that pistol, and there weren't nothin' to eat. And my great-great-great-granny said to him, ‘Suh, we gonna have to shoot Big Red an' butcher him, or we gonna plumb starve.' And my great-great-great-granddaddy said, ‘Over my dead body, woman,' so she shot him, and then she shot the horse.”

“She
killed
your granddaddy?”

“She shot him in the leg so he couldn't get in her way. Then she held onto his gun so if he got vengeful about the horse, she could defend herself. She taught my great-great granny how to shoot it, and she taught my great-granny, and granny taught my momma, and my momma taught me.” She hefted the pistol with both hands. “I'll teach my daughter one day.”

Cassie left Judith to decide where to spend her dollar. She found Grandmother at the back of Tawney's old store. The wringer sat at an angle on the ancient, sagging veranda. Lil Ma stood near the veranda, on the ground in the weeds, her hands pulled back into the sleeves of her coat. Grandmother stood under an oak tree a little ways off. One of Miz Tabitha's aged female relations was on the disintegrating porch, holding herself up with a cane, counting bills. Cassie recognized old Mrs. Tawney, Mister Elmer's great-aunt. It was rumored that she was over a hundred years old and had shot at the Union troops from the top story of the Tawney house. Cassie had always believed this because her age made all the other elderly women around her seem young in comparison.

Old Mrs. Tawney pushed the bills into her apron pocket. The bargaining was over, and Lil Ma had done her reluctant part. “It ain't enough,” old Mrs. Tawney said to Lil Ma, “but I reckon nobody else wants the damn thing.” Old Mrs. Tawney looked down from the porch like she owned the whole place and everyone on it. “You-all better have it out of here by tomorrow, or I'll have it sent to the junkyard. I don't want no niggers round here after dark, y'hear?”

“Yessum,” said Lil Ma. “We have a man come by.”

Old Mrs. Tawney went back into the house with the money. Lil Ma looked up and saw Cassie, and for a second Cassie saw the unhappiness in Lil Ma's eyes. Not just today's unhappiness, or the way she felt about the insult of the moment, but the years of it, a lifetime's worth.

Grandmother came out from under the tree. “Good,” Grandmother said to Lil Ma, “good,” like she was talking to a dog. Lil Ma let her shoulders slump. Grandmother motioned to Cassie. “You run on back to the laundry. Get a dollar out of the moneybox and give it to Beanie Simms. Tell him to bring his truck. Right
now
.”

*   *   *

Through the back door of the laundry, past the neatly folded ironing and the dresses waiting to be pressed, Cassie went to the front of the store, took the cash box out from where it was hidden under the counter, and opened it. Inside were five quarters and seven one-dollar bills. She took a dollar for Beanie Simms and put it in the pocket of her old woolen coat. She looked at the rest of the money. She took out three more bills, one at a time, and held them like a fan in her hand, thinking about the New York voices that could only be heard at night. She thought about Judith living in Heron-Neck forever, just like Judith's mother, and her mother's mother, and all those horse-pistol-wielding women in Judith's past, never getting away, never going to Virginia to fulfill her destiny as
progeny.
She thought about the look on Lil Ma's face just now at the Tawneys', and about the albino boy sitting in his sunlit bedroom listening to the blackest music he could find. She wanted a radio. She would listen to it in the middle of the night, and she would hear what other songs black voices sang when it was blackest outside. She put the money back in the cash box, just to see if she could still make an honest motion with her hands, took it out again, and pushed it deep into her coat pocket.

*   *   *

Beanie Simms's truck coughed and shuddered. It seemed ready to rattle right apart. Beanie Simms let Cassie sit in the passenger seat while he drove.

“I wisht I still had my ol' mule some days,” said Beanie Simms, loud over the noise of the engine. “There was a reli'ble critter.” Beanie Simms held onto the steering wheel as though he thought it might come off in his hands. “I ever tell you 'bout my ol' mule?”

Cassie knew most of Beanie Simms's stories by heart. She looked out the window as the town crawled by.

“Why you so quiet, gal?” said Beanie Simms. “You sick?”

“I ain't sick.”

“Better
ain't
let your granny hear you talk like that.”

“I'm not sick.”

“Then what's the matter with you?”

Cassie rubbed her knees. “You got a radio, Mister Simms?”

“Sure, I gots a reddio. Over at de shoe-shine.”

“What you lissen to?”

Beanie Simms ground the truck's gears. The road started to rise as they neared the Tawney place. “I lissens to de gospel music.”

“All week long?”

“Well now, a man kin git tarred of the same thin' all week long.”

“You ever lissen to colored music?”

Beanie Simms laughed. “What you know about colored music?”

“I heard about it.”

“Your mama and your granny ain't gone want you list'nin' to that.”

Cassie put her hand over the money in her pocket. Outside, bare trees crept past the car. Exhaust puffed up from between the floorboards. “You ever think about leavin' here, Mister Simms?”

“Shore,” said Beanie Simms. “Alla time.”

“You do?”

“Shore. Ain't nothin' here t'keep me.”

“What about the shoe-shine?”

“Well, if'n I still had my ol' mule, I'd jus' put the shoe-shine inna back o' the cart and take 'em on to th' next town.”

“But you have a truck.”

“This truck ain't got no dur'bility. A mule ain't gone do nothin' stupid. This truck don' care if I drive it inna ditch.” He turned down the road that would take them to Tawney's. “Mule
object
to bein' driv' inna ditch. What about you, lil gal? You ever think o' leavin'?”

Cassie shifted in the seat, thinking of Judith, the car in the woods. “I couldn't leave my mama and my grandmother.”

“I guess I'd be thinking 'bout leavin' if I was you,” said Beanie Simms. “'Specially with that new white boy in town.”

Beanie Simms was a tall man with close-cropped hair. In the cramped noisiness of the truck, he loomed over her. Cassie felt herself cringe in the threadbare seat. Did the entire town of Heron-Neck know about Grandmother's scheme? Was the entire town waiting to see what would happen next?

“Some folks do ennythin' to get themselves whiter,” said Beanie Simms. “There an easier way than what your granny got in mind.”

“I heard you talk about it when I was a little girl,” Cassie said.

“It ain't jus' talk,” said Beanie Simms. “It a town called Porterville, where white folks and black folks live in perfeck harmony. All them white folks useter be black as tar.”

Did Beanie Simms know about the car in the woods and Judith's plans to escape to become a reddio star? There was no telling what Beanie Simms knew.

“Why don't you go there yourself?” Cassie said.

Beanie Simms drew himself up in the truck, taller than ever. “I's the messenger. One day I'll go, but in the meantime, I's got to stick around to help folks out.”

He let her off by the Tawneys' barn and pulled the truck back to where the house was. Judith was nowhere in sight, not by the table with the miscellaneous and ancient guns, or the jewelry. Cassie made her way through the crowd and through the smells of sweat and tobacco to the table with the radios, where a white lady she didn't recognize was standing guard.

The two-dollar radios were gone. The only one left was a brand-new three-dollar model, still in its box. The box was white with a picture of a white man on it, obviously enjoying the music coming out of the radio inside.

“'Scuse me, ma'am,” Cassie said to the white lady. “I'd like to buy that, please.”

“You got three dollars?” said the white lady.

Cassie took the money out of her pocket and felt a prickle of naked curiosity from the white woman as she wondered where a little colored girl had gotten that much cash.

“What a girl like you need with a radio?” said the white lady.

“We ain't got no radio inna laundry,” said Cassie. “We ain't got no ways to lissen to de gospel music less'n we sings it ourselves.”

The white lady held her hand out for the money. “You're Adelaine's girl?”

“Yessum.”

“So
this
is why she charges so much for pressing.” The white lady snatched away the three dollars and pushed the boxed radio into Cassie's hands.

When she got home, Cassie could hear Beanie Simms and another man shouting advice to each other out back about where to set the new wringer. She crept in the front door, careful first to see that no one was inside. The back door was open and gave up a narrow view of the backyard through the kitchen. The men steered the new wringer into the sheltered space where the old wringer was with Lil Ma and Grandmother darting back and forth, giving directions. Cassie slid past the stove and ran up the stairs before anyone could see her. She reached the second floor just as the screen door slammed downstairs. Someone clinked glasses together. Beanie Simms shouted something from outside, and from the bottom of the stairs, Lil Ma let out a musical laugh. Cassie knelt on the floor and opened the thin cardboard box and lifted the radio out of its silky paper wrapping.

The radio was tiny compared to its box. It was the size of a pocketbook or of a neatly folded shirt. It was white plastic, with a smooth gray knob that made a little red needle swerve across numbers in a neat row in a window.

5.8   6   7   8   10   12   16

Cassie twirled the knob back and forth, watching the needle move. What kind of music would come out of this little thing? She hadn't thought about it, but maybe there was a special kind of radio you needed for the colored music that made your feet want to move and your hips want to swing. What if this radio only played gospel or music that white folks wanted to hear?

She unwound the cord, and the cord answered her question, but in a different way. She looked up from the radio to the walls papered in yellowing newsprint, magazine pages, and letters in blue ink from strangers. There was no electricity in these walls. Heat and light came from coal, kerosene, and candles.

Out the window, Beanie Simms gulped down a glass of cold water. Water came out of a pump. Water cooled outside in a ceramic pitcher. Instead of indoor plumbing, there was an outhouse. Everyone on Negro Street lived like this.

Cassie hid the radio under her own thin mattress, not knowing what else to do with it. She folded the cardboard box and the silky paper into the smallest wad she could manage, and when she was sure she wouldn't be seen, she took the wad downstairs and dropped it into the furnace heat of the stove.

Judith didn't show up that afternoon. By three, Grandmother told Cassie, “You'd better get those wagons loaded. That laundry isn't going to deliver itself.”

While Lil Ma and Grandmother disparaged Judith's lateness, her family's hopeless problems, her character in general, Cassie loaded the wagons, then pulled the wagons down the street, across the tracks, and up the hill. She tried to sing to herself as she dragged the heavy, squeaking things, but in her heart she could feel that Judith was gone, gone in the car, supplied with her family's old horse pistol and a trunk full of ham and cornmeal. Maybe the albino boy had gone with her, heading home to New York City, encouraging her to be a reddio star. Cassie pushed one of the wagons off the side of the road and into the bushes, where she could find it later for the second half of the deliveries. The first stop was the Wivells'. Cassie tried to make herself tall and straight. If the albino boy was there, it meant that Judith was still in Heron-Neck and for whatever reason hadn't shown up for work. Cassie leaned into the weight of the wagon and hauled it up toward the Wivells'. A car came out their driveway, paused, and turned toward her. Cassie stepped aside. It was the Wivells' car, and she peered in to see if the albino boy was inside. He was in the passenger seat and smirked at her through the glass.

“Where's Judith?” Cassie shouted at him.

The albino boy ignored her, and Mister Wivell, who was driving, frowned as though he'd heard something go wrong with the engine.

*   *   *

Back home in the early evening with the empty wagons, Cassie found Lil Ma in the yard, hanging sheets. “Judith's gone,” Cassie said.

Lil Ma looked at her in surprise. “Gone where?”

“She's up and left to find her fortune in Virginia,” said Cassie. “She's going to be a big singing star.” Even as the words left her mouth, she could hardly believe it. “I thought she left with that albino boy, but he's still here.”