Authors: Susan Gabriel
Tags: #Southern fiction
“I’m not proud of going along with it all these years,” Old Sally continues. “I left it up to Queenie to say whatever she thought was best, and I stayed out of it. But I owe Violet a big apology, and I hope she can forgive me.”
“Violet needs an apology from Queenie, too,” Rose says.
“She and Queenie got some mending to do, for sure,” Old Sally says. “We’ve all got mending to do.”
Betrayals are commonplace in the Temple lineage. In fact, you could almost say they are a Temple family trait. Yet it seems that Queenie, as well as Old Sally, were not without their reasons.
“We humans be on this planet for about a minute and a half,” Old Sally begins again. “And all that time we be struggling with ourselves and each other, trying to be something that we’re not. Even this old, I still don’t understand why we do that,” she continues. “Seems like we spend our whole lives sleepwalking. Not noticing the love and beauty all around us.”
Old Sally continues to look out over the sea, like the answers to her lifelong questions might ride in on the waves. The old woman takes a deep breath and Rose does, too. They stand in silence for a long time, Rose digging her toes into the moist sand of the rising tide. Even though she has never been comfortable with the quiet, something about this moment feels different. Rose always thought silence was empty and lonely, but while standing next to Old Sally she realizes how full it is.
Old Sally begins to walk again and Rose joins her. “What do you think you’ll do?” Old Sally asks.
Rose almost regrets the end of the silence. “I can’t imagine how Max will react to all of this,” she begins. “We’re always worried about money, but he isn’t the type to be bought. The ranch is his life. Besides, we’re too old to start over.”
Old Sally laughs. “Nobody ever be too old to start over,” Old Sally says. “I may just start over myself one of these days.” She laughs again, as if the idea tickles her.
Their walk is snail paced compared to the vigorous walks Rose has done for exercise since she’s been here. Yet this rhythm feels more natural. It occurs to her that if she walked this way every day of her life, she might finally arrive at contentment.
The ocean breeze blows in her face. The grasses among the dunes wave at her in the breeze. Rose stops and picks up a sand dollar in perfect condition. She runs a finger along the raised petal-like design on the shell’s back.
“Violet and I used to collect these as girls, do you remember?” Rose asks.
“Like it was yesterday,” Old Sally says. “You hid them in the roots of that old oak in the garden. You thought I didn’t know your hiding place, but I did.”
Memories clamor for Rose’s attention. “Do you remember that day we tied our entire collection onto the lower limbs of the oak with white kitchen string that you gave us?”
Old Sally smiles. “It looked like a Christmas tree covered with beautiful white ornaments,” she says.
Rose smiles. “Violet and I lay on our backs looking up at that tree for hours until Mother told us to take those tacky things down. Of course, we shot up like rockets,” Rose continues. “Violet got scared and ran into the kitchen to find you and left me standing there to face Mother alone. That woman scared me to death.”
“Nobody be forcing you to take anything down now, baby. You free,” Old Sally says.
Rose looks into Old Sally’s eyes, the brown having more flecks of gray than she remembers. “Am I really free?” she asks.
Old Sally nods. “The door to the jail cell be open. Now you just got to walk through.”
Rose picks up a pebble and tosses it into the ocean. How many times has she walked this same coastline with Old Sally? She wishes now she’d kept count. As a girl, one of the biggest treats of her life was getting to spend the night at Old Sally’s house. Old Sally would move all her special trinkets and make a bed for Rose in the window seat where she could watch the ocean in the moonlight. Sometimes Rose awoke at dawn and dolphins would be playing on the waves. Later, she would wonder if she’d dreamed it.
After wandering down the beach, they turn around and walk back over their own footprints. An unexpected calm flows through her.
“I’ve missed this place,” Rose says. She breathes in the sea air.
“This place has missed you, too,” Old Sally says.
Rose feels ready to come home to Savannah now. She’s tired of running from the past. Tired of pretending that she doesn’t miss the people and the land here. Her mother’s bribe has helped her take an honest look at where she really belongs. It has everything to do with who she is at this moment and what she needs in life.
But Max will never leave the West
, she tells herself. It is his home just as surely as the Georgia coast is hers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Queenie
“Holy heaven, what a disaster,” Queenie says to herself. She places the keys to the Town Car on the hook in the kitchen. Her secret is out and not at all how she wanted it to be. After Iris died, she gave herself a month to tell Violet. The plan was to take her out to dinner some night and spill the secret she’d bottled up all these years. She has to admit, though, it will be nice to get some sleep again. She’s been worried for weeks that this very secret would show up on people’s doorsteps all over Savannah and everyone in town would know. Not that anybody would even care, except Violet.
The drive home from Bo River’s office with Violet was the longest ride of her life: Violet’s painful silence—silence that proved fertile soil for Queenie’s shame. Then Queenie’s apology. Violet’s silence back. Another attempt at an apology. Then once they were home, Violet’s insistence that Queenie stop apologizing as she got out of the car, slammed the door and ran inside.
The moment called for something more than Queenie had. A better reason. Better words to explain. In all honesty, it felt inevitable that she would have a child by Iris Temple’s husband. Wasn’t that what history expected of her?
The phone hasn’t stopped ringing in the foyer, even though she had it changed to a private number. It is unreal how many people have called looking for a job after this morning’s ad. Did they really think it was real? Queenie unplugs the telephone and goes upstairs. She doesn’t have time to worry about phone calls or the handful of protestors outside. She seeks refuge in the green armchair in the corner of her bedroom. She pulls out her journal and pen from the side table drawer where she keeps it hidden. The last thing she needed while Iris was alive was Iris finding all her private thoughts. They might fill a whole other book of secrets.
Journaling is something Queenie picked up from watching Oprah, and she is faithful to the practice of documenting her feelings and thoughts. In the margins she writes the three things she’s grateful for every day. But she is not ready for gratitude yet. Too much is in the way. Queenie picks up a pen and begins to write the story she never shared with anyone until now, not even her journal.
I was sixteen when Mister Oscar first invited me into his study. I hated him for suggesting it, but another part of me liked the attention since I’d never really had a daddy. Not having a parent is like having only half of a road map in life, one torn right down the middle, so you never fully know where you’re going or where you’ve been. Of course I always knew that Iris and I had the same father. But he never acknowledged it. Not once. Sometimes I would sneak looks at him to see if I could recognize parts of me that came from him. As far as I could tell, we had the same nose, but other than that we could have been total strangers. He was tall and thin and very white. Did I mention he was
very
white!? Maybe the biggest thing we had in common was how well we could keep a secret!
What secret, you may ask, dear journal? Well, when I was a girl, my mama would disappear from time to time into his bedroom, and I knew not to ask where she’d been. It
was just the way things were. Other girls I knew had mothers who did the same thing. All housekeepers for Savannah’s upper class. Afraid to lose everything they had if they refused to do what the Misters wanted.
So, in a weird way, going into Oscar’s study that first time when I was sixteen was like being initiated into the secrets that my mother knew. But unlike the Sea Gypsies that Rose and Violet created, I never enjoyed being a member of this secret society.
Don’t get me wrong. Oscar was a nice enough man. He wasn’t cruel. Sometimes he was even sweet. But I hated the way he smelled, a combination of liquor and cigars. To be honest, I think we were both playing at a game we hated, but a game that was expected of us.
Queenie pauses and recalls the smell of Oscar’s cigars and his bittersweet breath and thinks:
Funny how smells can bring back memories so strongly
. It’s as if Oscar stands right next to her this very moment. She looks around like maybe he is. At this point, the dead outnumber the living in the Temple mansion.
More than once, Iris accused Oscar of making her sick to her stomach with all his smells. He let Iris use him as a doormat on more than one occasion. At times, her harsh treatment made Queenie feel sorry for him. Didn’t he know that men—white men—ran the world?
It never occurred to her that Iris didn’t know about the affair, just as it seemed that Iris’s mother must have known what Queenie’s father was up to.
How do you deny children running around the house who are a light brown version of your husband?
The Temple features are distinct: a nose just a bit too pointed, eyes just a bit too small, yet with kindness around the creases that doesn’t necessarily match up to the personality—facial features that most people would find hard to miss. However, the denial in the Temple family is powerful enough it could power all of downtown Savannah. Denial that’s served up in their shrimp and grits every morning, as if to fortify them to keep the secrets. Secrets that are now showing up all over Savannah.
It feels good to confess, even if it’s only to her journal. She begins to write again:
When I was fifteen, Oscar would come into the kitchen all the time. I wasn’t a great beauty—I was already what you might call FULL figured—but my complexion often got me compliments. Of course, Oscar was no spring chicken and was already worn around the edges. He liked to make me laugh, and made jokes about boys beating down the Temple door to get to me.
“Don’t be silly, Mister Oscar,” I remember saying to him. “That door’s too old and heavy.”
Then he’d say how he’d break a door down to get to me if he had to.
At the same time that I hated the attention, I also craved it. Mama watched his subtle advances and didn’t say a thing. Not one thing. She just stayed busy, refusing to look up from her work. I waited for weeks for her to say something. I kept thinking she would stop Oscar from flirting with me and tickling me right under her nose. Maybe Oscar was
waiting for that, too. But when Mama turned a blind eye to it, I hated her with every bit of my teenage vengeance.
Since then I’ve learned that nobody’s mama is perfect, but this was the first and only time she ever disappointed me. And I think she disappointed herself, too.
Then over the years I resigned myself to what was expected of me. I wasn’t proud of what I did. But there were consequences to saying no, and who knows, I may have loved him a little bit, too.
Queenie puts down the pen. “How could Violet possibly understand how things were back then?” Queenie says aloud.
History pulled at Queenie from every direction and created a dangerous undercurrent of shame in which she thought she might drown. She didn’t have the strength to choose anything different from what her mother and grandmother had done.
Hadn’t we been taught our whole lives to take care of the needs of white people? And didn’t that include the bedroom needs, too?
If her mother had stood up to Oscar she might have been fired and never worked again. That’s how things were. One word from the Temples and you could be blackballed forever. Blackballed from Savannah, the whole state of Georgia and maybe the Carolinas, too. Then how would her mama support herself?
Today, keeping servants in their place is much more covert. Messages are sent by innuendo, a wink, a glare. Yet they are just as potent. She thinks of Violet downstairs and wishes she could go to her. But Violet made it clear she isn’t ready to talk.
W.W.O.D?
she writes in her journal. What would Oprah do?
She thinks for a few seconds and decides her hero would give Violet the time she needs. Then take responsibility for the pain she’s caused. Queenie sighs. Sometimes making Oprah proud isn’t the least bit easy.
Thanks to Oscar, Queenie found an alternative to spending her life in a kitchen and cleaning until her shoulders froze up and her knees went bad. For years, she’s being saving up her puny allowance Iris gave her so that Violet can stop working here and finally open that business she’s always wanted.
It was Oscar’s idea for Queenie to become Iris’s companion. But even this so-called luck came with a price tag on it. She was never to tell anyone that Violet was their child, especially not Iris. And when her older sister, Maya, tragically died a short time after Violet was born, Oscar dreamed up the story to go with their deception, saying that Violet was her sister’s child. Maya was several years older and was already married by the time Queenie was in grade school.
“Just so you know, Iris, I don’t miss you one bit.” Queenie points her finger at the overhead light fixture. “I don’t miss your bitterness. I don’t miss your constant criticism. Nor do I miss your not-so-subtle reminders, every day of my life, that I was servant stock and not a true Temple. And those errands you used to send me on? What a ridiculous waste of my time. All I’ve got to say is that you sure didn’t trouble your imagination very much.”
Queenie huffs and remembers all the times she was told to mail a letter at the downtown post office, even if their regular postal carrier was expected to deliver and pickup within minutes. Then an hour after Queenie returned from the post office, Iris would decide she needed stamps.