The Black Rose (11 page)

Eagerly, Sarah shook her head. Miss Brown’s story had her mesmerized.

Miss Brown leaned closer, practically whispering in Sarah’s ear. “They started to callin’ me
Miss Brown
rather’n have to say it! Lord’s my witness!” Then she shrieked with laughter, until she had to dab at her eyes to dry them. “I just stuck by the name after that.”

Laughing with Miss Brown, with their voices echoing against the walls in the empty kitchen, Sarah was as happy as she could remember being in a long time. She felt a sudden longing to give the woman a hug, but she didn’t dare.

After a moment, Miss Brown was silent, and she gazed back down at Sarah. Her smile vanished, and she slowly shook her head. “Oh, child, Lord have mercy …” She tugged gently at the plait hanging near Sarah’s face, then she flicked at Sarah’s scalp. Sarah saw a flake of dandruff float down, landing on the tip of her nose. “You’ve got all this dander showing. You don’t go out looking like this. Don’t you know how it shows up? It’s ugly.”

“But it itches me, Miss Brown.”

“So you scratch it
out
. Doesn’t your sister scratch your head out?”

Sarah shook her head. She wanted to say her mama used to sit her on the floor and scratch the itching dandruff out of her head when she had time, since the dryness was so uncomfortable in the hot sun that Sarah had felt like her head was on fire, but that had been a long time ago. And Mama used to braid her hair, too, winding tight braids across her scalp that stayed neat for weeks and weeks. But Sarah felt too embarrassed to open her mouth, as if she were sinking into the floorboards.

Miss Brown went on. “These plaits look like they ain’t been tended to since the days of Methuselah. You’re a right mess, Sarah. It’s a shame. There’s no need for all you colored children to be runnin’ ’round looking so homely. You aren’t monkeys in a tree. Don’t you know you’re gonna be a young lady soon? What man will want to look at this? Put some cornrows in here, or
somethin
’. Don’t you move, hear? I’ll be back.”

But Sarah couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to, hearing Miss Brown’s hurtful words ringing in her ears. A boy at school said hurtful things about her hair all the time, but it was far worse to hear the criticism from Miss Brown. Slowly, Sarah felt her eyes growing hotter until they began to sting. She prayed Miss Brown wouldn’t come back and find her crying.

Sarah heard thumping and then the swishing of Miss Brown’s dress as she made her way back into the kitchen with several small white ribbons in her hand. “My little niece left these here,” Miss Brown said, and she began pulling on Sarah’s braids, grouping them together, then tying them with the ribbon. “Now, this won’t help much, but at least it’s somethin’. My niece is bright-skinned and got that good hair from her Creole daddy, so her hair doesn’t get like this. But that’s no excuse for you not to look neat. Why do you want to look like you got dragged headfirst through a brier patch? You have to work with what God gave you. You hear?”

Sarah nodded, hoping her throat would loosen enough to make a sound. “Yes’m.”

“An’ I don’t want to hear any cryin’ or foolishness, neither. Somebody’s got to teach you or you won’t know any better.”

“Yes’m.”

“See there?” Miss Brown thrust a hand mirror at her, and suddenly Sarah was staring at herself face-to-face. She saw her shame-reddened eyes, her face that looked older than she remembered, and, finally, the white bows Miss Brown had tied in her hair. Although her heart was still smarting, Sarah saw herself begin to smile.

“That’s right,” Miss Brown said. “You’ve got a pretty girl buried down there somewhere. You’re not in the cotton fields anymore, Sarah. Out here in the world, folks try to look nice. An’ even if menfolk don’t, womenfolk
better
.” At that, Miss Brown patted her sharply on her backside. “Now, you better get to that pressin’. An’ don’t expect to leave ’til it’s done, even if you have to stay late. I’m not givin’ you any special favors.”

“No, ma’am,” Sarah said, smiling more widely. Her eyes were still drawn to the image of herself in the little mirror, and the bows Miss Brown herself had placed in her hair.

It was after dark when Sarah got home, and she found Louvenia sitting in their room with their lamp and several candles burning, making the room bright as day. Their room at the boardinghouse wasn’t nearly as nice as any of the rooms in Miss Brown’s house, which were so scrubbed and neat, filled with store-bought furniture and rugs. The furniture in their boardinghouse was ramshackle and dreary, only a table and one chair, shelves for their clothes, and a mattress on the floor hardly big enough for both of them to share. Louvenia called their boardinghouse a
chinchpad
, one of the city words she’d picked up from her beau, although Sarah was glad she’d never encountered a single chinch bug in their bed the way she used to in their Delta cabin. Besides, the roof didn’t leak, their window overlooking the alleyway had glass in it, and they always had plenty of blankets when it was cold.

“How come you got all these lights burnin’?” Sarah asked.

Louvenia grinned, holding up a letter. “They said this was for us, from Missus Anna Burney Long!” she said. “Alex sent us twenty dollars!”

Alex was alive! With a shout of joy, Sarah ran to her sister and gave her a tight hug that nearly pulled Louvenia out of her chair. Twenty dollars would be enough for them to buy new coats and heavy clothes for winter. Maybe even shoes, too!

“He sent a note?” Sarah said eagerly.

“Sho’ did. Can you read this?”

Lou thrust the folded piece of paper into Sarah’s hands. The letter was surprisingly official-looking, written on fancy printed stationery, but the handwriting was small and difficult to make out. Sarah saw the word L-O-U at the top, along with her own name, S-A-R-A.

“It’s to me an’ you,” Sarah said, excited.

“Well, we
know
that, dummy. Who else it gon’ be for? What else it say?”

Your bruther Alex aksed me to write to you. He hopes this letter will
find you well. He is fine. He has setled in Denver Colorado and is a
porter at the Hamilton hotel which he says is bigger then any hotel you
could ever beleive. Denver is very buetiful but he was sick all winter
long and would have starved exept for friends. He is sorry it took him
so long to find work but times are hard and he is geting on his feet at
last. Pleas write back to him at the above adress and let him know if
you are fine too. They say the cotton crop was not good and he sends
this money to help pay rent.

Prayers and love, Alex.

Sarah shook her head, frustrated, as she studied the note in her hands. There were too many words she didn’t know, and the challenge scared her even though she could pick out words here and there—
hhheee, iiissss,
ffffiiiiinnnne
. She felt pressure under Louvenia’s stare.

“He say he doin’ fine,” Sarah said slowly. “He gone out west and say he done made some money. An’ he say he miss us both. An’ he love us, too, an’ think ’bout us every day.”

“He tol’ us how to come where he at?” Lou asked eagerly.

Again Sarah scanned the words to try to recognize anything familiar. Finally she shook her head. “Uh-uh. Not yet, he say. He say he ain’t made enough money to be feedin’ us. ’Sides, he say he fightin’ off Injuns with them Buffalo Soldiers. A tribe o’ Injuns tried to take off his scalp while he was diggin’ for gold.”

“What?” Louvenia said, skeptical. “Sarah, that’s a baldhead lie. You ain’t readin’ that! Bet you can’t read it nohow.”

“Can, too! He said it right here,” Sarah insisted, pointing, feeling guilty for lying but unable to stop herself. It
might
be true, she thought. At school tomorrow, she would ask Miss Dunn to read the letter to her, so she’d know what it really said.

Maybe Alex had found his gold and was sending for them, after all.

Chapter Five

SEPTEMBER 1880

“I
t don’t seem real, do it?” Louvenia said in a hush, smoothing out the lovely fabric of the white dress she’d sewn, which hugged all the burgeoning curves of her body. To Sarah, Louvenia had never looked prettier. Her sister was sixteen, but this was the first time Sarah had really noticed how much she looked like a grown woman. She had a full bust like Mama’s, and rounded hips. Louvenia’s dress was plain cotton, but it still reminded Sarah of the magical white dress Missus Anna had been wearing when she came to their cabin that night because she was afraid of Yellow Jack. Six years ago. The memory made Sarah’s stomach squirm.

“Sho’ don’t seem real,” Sarah said. She’d tried to sound cheerful, but couldn’t.

“Sarah, I’ma be Missus William Powell.
Me
a missus!”

Sarah and Louvenia were in Miss Brown’s bedroom, and Louvenia stared into the mirror over the table Miss Brown had called a
vanity
; the table’s wood was so shiny Sarah had touched it when she first saw it, wondering if some of the shine would come off on her fingertips, but it hadn’t. Miss Brown’s neatly made bed, draped in an intricately sewn quilt that looked old, was built very high off the ground and seemed like it was big enough for four people. Their feet sank into the lovely, plush rug that covered most of her hardwood floor.

“But Lou … you don’t even hardly
know
this man,” Sarah said.

Sarah had met William Powell only twice; once when Lou took her to see him working at the blacksmith shop, and another time when he went with them both to the big summer picnic across the river in Delta, where colored folks from all parts had gone to eat, dance, laugh, and talk about politics. Sarah hadn’t known how many people were there; she stopped counting at two hundred, delighted with watching their loud laughter and dances where they flapped their arms, swaying and bucking to the fiddle players’ music. But Missy Laura had been there, and lots of other croppers she and Lou knew. Sarah had a good time that day, one of her finest times in years—she’d eaten her fill of fried chicken, catfish, pound cake, candied yams, and chitterlings, more food than she could remember eating in a single sitting—but she hadn’t thought very kindly of Mr. William Powell.

First of all, like all the men Louvenia favored, he just seemed
old
. Lou said he was thirty, which was old enough, but he seemed older to her. He had a bushy mustache that grew all the way to his cheeks and nearly covered his lips, and the whites of his eyes looked red and runny. He also had tobacco-yellowed teeth and breath that smelled of smoke, which Sarah didn’t like. Mr. William Powell and his men friends had sat around their jug at the picnic, laughing more and more loudly as the day went on, and by late afternoon the tip of his nose had turned purplish and he was slurring his words. If Sarah hadn’t known he was the one who had paid their fare across the river, she would have forgotten Mr. William Powell was accompanying her and Lou at all that day. Sarah had noticed the way the other “courting” couples danced together and leaned close to each other, and she decided her sister was not being properly courted at all.

She’d been as surprised as Louvenia when, two weeks later, Mr. William Powell had told Lou he wanted to get married. He’d told her the date and the church, as if it were all settled.

“I know enough,” Louvenia answered Sarah, her face unchanged in the mirror except for slightly rigid lines that appeared at her jaw. “I know he got a house, so we won’t be on top o’ each other in that chinchpad no mo’. I know he work hard, which mean we all gon’ have more money. An’ I know I’m full up with worryin’ ’bout how we gon’ get by. I’m tired, Sarah. I’m tired through an’ through.”

Sarah remembered once asking Papa what he had felt when he first met Mama. Colored people didn’t get legal-married in those days, not like Louvenia and Mr. William Powell were going to. Papa had told her jumping the broom was the only way most slaves were allowed to show their love.
Yo’ mama? First day I seen her in the field, I knowed she’d be my wife. I couldn’ sleep the whole night through for thinkin’ ’bout her. She b’longed to a man ’cross the way, an’ Marse Burney axe to buy her special fo’ me.

Sarah was pretty sure her sister had never had a sleepless night thinking about Mr. William Powell, and she felt even more certain he’d never stayed awake thinking about
her
. Still, Louvenia was gazing at her image in the mirror with dancing eyes, admiring her dress she’d made from the fabric Miss Brown had given her as a wedding gift, as if Mr. William Powell had promised her all the world.

“Things gon’ be better fo’ us, Sarah,” Louvenia said, locking her eyes to Sarah’s in their reflection in the mirror. “We gon’ have a good home now.”

And for the barest instant, despite her gnawing reservations about making a life with a stranger, Sarah actually believed her.

By the winter after Sarah and Louvenia began living with Mr. William Powell, Sarah began to think Louvenia’s optimism on her wedding day had been well placed. As the sky filled with dreary gray and the wind began to bite through her clothes, Sarah was grateful for the heavy coat Mr. William Powell had bought for her with his own money, and pleased with the gleaming, sturdy ankle-high shoes on her feet that fit just right. Finally the dark, hard corns she’d grown on her toes from so many years of wearing too-tight shoes throbbed less all the time, and walking was no longer painful. And instead of having a single good dress, she now had three, all of them made of calico, and only one of them handed down from Lou. Sarah cherished her dresses, and she was careful to wear a long apron when she worked at Miss Brown’s so she wouldn’t accidentally stain or tear her precious clothes. Miss Brown even smiled at her when she noticed the hair bows Mr. William Powell had bought for her when he took a train trip to St. Louis, a big red one, a white one, and a sky blue one that brightened up her hair.