The Sweetest Thing (10 page)

“And just like that, we all piled into the different cars, and we drove out to her big ol' plantation house, and everyone pitched in to help her servants, and before you knew it, there was a pig roasting and all kinds of vegetables and corn bread dripping with butter and honey and bubbling peach cobblers served with fresh cream. It was one of the best meals I've ever eaten in my whole entire life! The evening wore on and on, and when we left, everyone was full and laughing and happy.”

“Loaves and fishes, indeed!” Perri exclaimed, delighted.

“Is it true? A true story?” Macon asked.

“I promise it is. You can ask my little sister Coobie when she comes to visit. Coobie always loves to catch me when I exaggerate. Ask her.

“And the best part of the story is that that lady has just kept right on feeding the hungry neighbors now for about two years. Every time Daddy goes back to do his revival, she's there, all dressed up, and the old wrinkled lady is there, but she has a little sparkle in her eyes now, and the mangy dog is still the ugliest dog you've ever seen, but he isn't nearly as skinny.”

The girls got off the bed, some stretching and yawning. Brat threw a pillow at Perri, and Mae Pearl went to the powder room to take off her makeup and get into her nightgown, and each of them smiled at me and said stuff like, “That was some story, Mary Dobbs.” But once again, I had the distinct feeling that I didn't belong.

———

The next morning after we'd eaten pancakes smothered in real maple syrup and fresh blueberries, I stepped outside to look past the cornfields to the Alms Houses. I crossed the wide road and walked to the field where the Negro men and women were working away. I watched one woman, her hair pulled back in a dark blue scarf, lift the hoe over her shoulder and then swing it down to the ground, over and over, a motion that could have lulled me to sleep with its repetitiveness.

Mother visited women prisoners in Chicago. She told me the darkest stories about all kinds of people, colored and white, but mostly so, so poor. One day I asked, “Mother, why isn't God providing for these people,” and she replied, “Honey, it is not up to us to tell God how to provide. The Good Book says to care for the widows and orphans and to visit the prisoner and bring hope to the captives. That's what we're here to do.”

Standing there, my belly filled with pancakes, I prayed out loud, “God, here are the poor and the prisoners. I'd like to help, if you have an idea. I'm willing.”

When I went back across the street, Peggy and Macon and Brat were out in the front yard. “Wherever have you been?” Macon asked me.

“Just looking at the prisoners out working in the fields. Mrs. Chandler's servant, Anna, is there, and I can't imagine how hard it must be for her.”

Peggy lifted her eyebrows, as was her habit, and said, “I imagine it is hard for her, and that's all well and right. She deserves what she got. She stole from the Chandlers, and after they'd been so good to her. I think that Mrs. Chandler should send them away, all of them!”

I started to disagree, but then I considered the girls' faces, and I knew it wasn't worth it. And I knew something else. I wasn't ever going to fit in with them.

———

One day Parthenia and I were in the kitchen canning cherries—there were thousands of them in the Chandlers' orchard—and ‘sweating up a storm,' as Parthenia put it, when we heard the front door open and then slam closed.

“Mother! Mother, where are you?” came a shrill, commanding voice.

Parthenia almost dropped the jar she was holding. Her eyes got big, and she whispered, “Uh-oh. We's in for trouble now.” She went all rigid in her body. “It's Miz Becca come by.”

Becca pranced into the kitchen, carrying her head high. She was tall and slim with the perfect figure to enhance all those gorgeous gowns in her closet. She had lost none of it by having babies—two of them, I'd heard. Her reddish blond hair was coiffed under a fancy hat with a peacock feather sticking out, and she fanned herself as she hurried into the kitchen.

She stared harshly at Parthenia and asked, “Where's Mother?”

“How do you do, Miz Becca?” Parthenia said with a slight curtsy. “Yore mama ain't here right now. Kin I hep you?”

Becca seemed to notice me as an afterthought. I stood up and smiled and said, “Hello, Becca, it's nice to see you again. Goodness, it's been years. You remember me, don't you? I'm Mary Dobbs.”

Becca narrowed her eyes, frowned momentarily, and then her face relaxed. “Well, of course I remember you. Mother said you were here, studying at Washington Seminary. It's nice to see you.”

She turned toward Parthenia again, and her voice became icy. “Do you have any idea when Mother will be back?”

“Shouldn't be long now, Miz Becca.”

“Very well. I'll just be about my business then.” She went down the hall, and we heard her high heels clacking up the stairway.

“She ain't in a good mood today. Somethin's eatin' at her,” Parthenia whispered. “I gotta be awful careful when she's in one of her moods. She'd just as soon have me sent to the Alms Houses to work on the prison farm too, if she could. She's just an ornery and mean person, is all.”

Ten minutes later, Becca rushed back downstairs. Fortunately Aunt Josie arrived at the same time. I tried to keep Parthenia busy with the canning, but we both heard Becca's agitated voice as she talked to Aunt Josie in the foyer.

“It's just what I was afraid of, Mother! More things have been stolen. Grandmother's pearls and her emerald-and-diamond ring and the ruby-and-diamond heart necklace. Priceless jewelry! Gone!”

“Oh my! Are you sure, dear? Positive?”

“I can't think of anywhere else they would be. I was planning to wear Grandmother's pearls to the dinner and dance last night, and I couldn't find them at home, nor the ring and necklace. I hoped I'd find them in the safe. But they aren't here.” Becca's voice rose another decibel.

“Dear me. I certainly hate to hear it.”

“How could Anna do it? I should have suspected something, the way she talked about taking Cornelius to see some speech specialist in New Orleans. I'll bet you anything she's pawned it all off and hidden the money somewhere, and we'll never find it! I'm not gonna let her get away with this!”

“Becca. Please calm down. You'll frighten the child.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Becca asked, “What is it, Mother?”

Aunt Josie lowered her voice so that I had to strain to hear her next words. “Your father said there'd been a hanging down in Columbus last week. A colored woman accused of stealing—no proof either. But they strung her up in a tree right on the property. Can you imagine the horror? So please keep quiet about all this, Becca, you hear? I'll talk to your father about it.”

Evidently Aunt Josie ushered Becca outside, because we heard no more of the conversation. Parthenia grabbed onto me and whimpered, “Are they gonna hang Mama?”

“
Shh
. No. Of course not.”

“She didn't do it.”

I knelt down in front of her and looked her straight in the eyes. “Do you know who did?”

Her little face got tense, and she shook her head back and forth. “I don't know, Miz Mary Dobbs. I just knowed it wasn't Mama.”

I was convinced that Parthenia knew a lot more than she was telling me, but I couldn't force her to talk, not with her trembling and looking just about as pitiful and sad as that poor old lady had on the day she thought she was going to have to eat her dog.

I was out in the darkroom that evening when Cornelius came into the barn. I heard his heavy footsteps and the squeak of the wheelbarrow as he pushed it down the hallway and stopped in front of Dynamite's stall. The mare was out in the pasture, and Cornelius began cleaning her stall with a pitchfork. I heard him grunt and breathe, grunt and breathe. Usually gentle, his movements seemed rushed and angry.

A minute later, Parthenia came into the barn, calling out, “Cornie! Cornie, where are you?”

She found him in Dynamite's stall. “Don't you pay no neva' mind to what Miz Becca says! It ain't yore fault 'bout Mama, and you knowed it. She'd neva' steal nothin'—no matter how much she wants you to learn to talk.”

Cornelius gave a grunt, and I heard again the scrape of the pitchfork through the shavings.

Then Parthenia whispered to her brother, “I'm sorry I told you 'bout it. It's jus' that I's scared. That's all. I's plumb scared.”

Evidently Cornelius set down the pitchfork, because I didn't hear much movement. When I left the darkroom a little while later, tiptoeing away so as not to be noticed, I saw Cornelius Jeffries sitting in the shavings with Parthenia snuggled in his arms. She was sniffing, and he was just rocking her back and forth and making a deep, guttural sound in his throat that I imagined was his way of singing a lullaby.

CHAPTER

8

Perri

I guess Dobbs had been praying about God providing for my family—or at least for me—because one day Mrs. Carnes gave me two developing trays and an enlarger, things she said that Washington Seminary was replacing with newer models. And if that wasn't good enough, a few days later when Jimmy took me over to the Chandlers', I had another surprise.

Red and Dynamite nickered at us as Dobbs and I walked into the barn. I stroked their muzzles and went into the darkroom. When I lit the kerosene lamp, I gasped. The whole room was furnished! The developing trays were sitting on low shelves, the enlarger was beside them, and a light box and a vat were on the other side of the room, along with the basin for dipping the negatives and a bright light and a table. And stacked on a shelf was a whole row of photographic rolled film. I burst into tears as I touched every piece of equipment.

“Isn't it fine?” Dobbs said. “Aunt Josie had Hosea go and get the rest of the supplies. She said it wasn't handing out charity to furnish this room since it was on her property, and she said to tell you she didn't want to hear one word of argument about it.”

Mrs. Chandler knew me well. Just like my father, I was stubborn enough to refuse charity. We were self-made people, having worked long and hard to carve out our place in society. But I smiled at Dobbs and simply said, “Thank you for this—I know it was your idea. And now I can take pictures. Loads of pictures.”

In her intuitive way, Dobbs must have sensed I wanted to be alone in the darkroom and went back to the house. I picked up my Eastman Kodak camera, which I had brought from my house, and thought of Daddy. My education about work had begun as a small child, before Barbara and Irvin were born. Often at the end of a long day, he invited me into his office, and I hopped into his lap. “You work too hard,” I'd say, mimicking Mamma.

“Hard work has gotten us ahead in life, Perri-girl.” Here he produced a penny and said, “Never turn your nose up at a penny—it's our future. Your grandfather didn't have a penny to his name when he was a boy, but he put himself through medical school and became a well-respected physician. And he taught himself how to build things too. When he wasn't with patients, he was building this house for your grandmother, and I was right there beside him, laying bricks and mixing mortar. He was a fine, hardworking man.”

“But I don't want you to work that hard, Daddy. Grandpa wore his body out and died at fifty-three.” Another tidbit I'd overheard from Mamma.

“I know it, Perri-girl, but I'm different. After a long day at the bank, I come home at night to a good meal and a wonderful wife, and if I'm lucky, after supper I get to have an angel sitting in my lap.” Then he'd squeeze me tight. “You can't be tired for long when an angel sits in your lap.”

I remembered those long-ago family days before my siblings arrived, watching my father change into overalls after work and go to the barn or to the garage and tinker. He had a habit of making the practical things of life understandable to a child. So I found myself studying the way he wrote figures on the lavishly lined accounting paper and watching as he repaired the faucet or put oil in the Buick.

In everything he did, his work was meticulous, detailed, perfect—whether at the bank or at home. The physical work, the sawing and hammering and digging, seemed to drive away his dark moods, giving him something else to concentrate on. “You need balance in life, Perri,” he used to tell me. “When things get a bit difficult, you gotta have a way to stop thinking about the hard things for a while.”

When had it all begun to crush him?

Mr. Robinson had given us more bad news recently, all the while fiddling with his glasses. Daddy's insurance policy and stocks were worthless, the savings account nonexistent, and we still owed a sizeable note on the house. I found it hard to believe how terrible our predicament really was, for Daddy was the wisest, most wary of bankers. The stocks had vanished in the crash, but what had happened to all the money he had so carefully saved?

With my Rainbow Hawk-Eye camera sitting in my lap and the smell of fresh hay and shavings wafting in from Dynamite's stall, I closed my eyes and thought of “White Angel Breadline” and how Dorothea Lange had captured the look of despair on that man's face. I wondered if some day I would look through my viewfinder and see straight to the moment when a person stopped believing in all the good things life could bring. I owed it to my father to try.

———

Only two days later, after Barbara and Irvin were in bed, Mamma came into my room, where I was studying history and writing some copy for
Facts and Fancies
. She brushed her lips across the top of my head and sat in my armchair. I'd never seen her look quite so thin. Haggard. I felt a tiny pinprick of fear. What if Mamma came down with pneumonia like Macon Ferguson's mother had after she started working in the bottling factory? She'd developed a terrible chest cough and then been hospitalized and almost died. By the time she recovered, her job had long since been filled by someone else.

“Perri.” She took my hand, and hers was bony and cold, so cold. “I've been talking with Bill—with Mr. Robinson—for the past week, and he and I have had to make a hard decision.”

I immediately wanted to shout,
How dare you make a decision without me? I'm the one who knows what's going on.
But Mamma just continued.

“We're going to have to sell the house.”

“No!”

“There's no other way. We'll find something smaller. If we sell the house, you and Barbara can keep going to Washington Seminary and we can keep the car and Dellareen and Jimmy can keep coming. It'll work out okay.”

“How in the world would you find someone to buy this house in the middle of the Depression?”

“The bank will buy it from us. Mr. Robinson has worked it out—a very fair deal, Perri. Much more than fair. Extravagantly kind.”

“Oh, Mamma. We can't sell our home. We just can't.”

“I know how much it means to you, and does to me as well.” She sniffed and turned her head away, and I noticed how her dark blond hair was filled with gray. “Sometimes you just don't have a choice.”

I didn't want to cry. I needed to be strong for Mamma. But I felt something drain out of me. It struck me that if I could have taken a photograph of myself at that precise moment, I would have represented just what I wanted to capture: the moment when a soul stopped believing in all the good things life could bring.

After Mamma left my bedroom, I stood in front of the four framed photographs of the house. Dobbs had called them artistic and told me I had talent. I looked at them with love. Although smaller than the Chandler residence, our house was every bit as beautiful, in many people's opinion. In fact, often someone would turn up at the house, either walking or driving up the long driveway, just to get a peek at our home. The grounds were landscaped with what Daddy had called
“Jimmy's genius—just making people want to stop and stare and then walk right up the front steps and have a seat on the porch.”
I heard Daddy saying that in my mind, and I began to cry, standing in front of my photographs.

Then I imagined Daddy working beside his father, talking of medicine and construction. Together the two of them, along with the finest professionals, designed and built our house. Later, after my grandfather died and my grandmother moved to an apartment, Daddy and Mamma moved into the house. Daddy tinkered after work, adding a back porch, building the barn on the property, which he filled with five fine Thoroughbreds, and constructing a tool shed where he stored his equipment. I remembered what his friends started calling him when I was a child—
“the banker with a builder's hands.”

If we sold the house, we'd be selling part of Daddy.

Late that night, I got the financial books from downstairs, spread them on my desk, and scrutinized Daddy's small handwriting. I had looked at the numbers many times before, but I had never paid attention to one item. Jimmy and Dellareen's salary. There it was, on the monthly budget page. They earned eleven dollars a week.

Daddy had taught me how to save money, and when I was a little girl, he liked to remind me of something Benjamin Franklin had said—“A penny saved is a penny earned.” He had even given me what he called a Penny Pinching Jar to help me save pennies, which I had faithfully done for years.

As I thought about that, I got on my knees and reached under my bed. Years ago, the glass jar had overflowed with pennies, and I'd replaced it with a deep round tin the size of a hatbox, which at the time I felt I'd never fill. But as I pulled it out from under the bed, I smiled to myself. It was so heavy I could barely move it.

I rolled the big tin on its side, and when I removed the top, copper pennies spilled onto the floor, making the sound of crashing thunder. Several spun under the bed, and one twirled all the way across my room and came to a stop only an inch in front of the heat vent. I quickly rescued it from disappearing into the grate. Heart pounding, I waited to see if the noise had awakened my mother and siblings. When no sounds came from across the hall or downstairs, I breathed a sigh of relief and methodically began counting the pennies—some shiny light copper, others badgered and worn and dull, a few covered in a greenish mold—putting them in piles of a hundred.

Over the years I'd envisioned many different things this money would buy—from a palomino pony when I was nine, to the fanciest Kodak camera last year. But I'd always convinced myself to save the money instead. Now I was thankful.

When I finished counting, I burst into tears. There were 2531 pennies in the tin. That wouldn't even pay Jimmy and Dellareen for a month! All those years of saving pennies and what good would it do?

I sank onto the velvet-covered bench in front of my vanity chest and stared into the gilded oval mirror. My face was flushed from crying. Through clenched teeth I said, “We're going to survive. Daddy bred into me the instinct of survival.” Then I thought of Dobbs's farfetched stories of starving people eating their domestic pets. “No,” I seethed. “We'll do more than survive. I am going to figure out a way for the Singleton family of Atlanta, Georgia, to retain every bit of the position and respect we deserve.”

Then I got up, went to my bed, collapsed on the yellow comforter, and cried again.

We never talked of my family's financial problems at school, although Mae Pearl and Brat and Peggy had probably guessed how bad things were. For heaven's sake, they had all seen horrible financial times. But no one ever breathed a word about her family's struggles. I thought of telling Dobbs but then decided that, although she might be able to sympathize, she'd never be able to understand all that I had lost.

I acted as if I were handling my circumstances well on the occasions Spalding came over to the house, and I made sure that Dellareen served his favorite cake. But I always had a knot in the pit of my stomach, and I wondered if Spalding Smith would still think I was wonderfully fun and wild and pretty if he knew that my family barely had a cent to its name.

Dobbs

One Sunday I went to church with Perri—her family attended St. Luke's, and the Chandlers went to St. Philip's—and went back to her house for Sunday lunch. Sure enough her mother did fix a delicious pot roast, and as I partook of the food, savoring every bite of the roast and the mashed potatoes with gravy and the green beans and the homemade biscuits, I thought about what my family was eating—or not eating, perhaps. I concluded that the Singletons might
feel
poor, but they were actually very well-off. They were rich. They lived in a gorgeous house and had two full-time servants and a stable full of horses. Oh, it was like a museum at their place, and I thought how Mother would ooh and ahh over the antique furniture and the exquisite material on the sofa and armchairs. As I ate that lunch and watched Perri teasing Irvin, and Barbara frowning and just picking at her mashed potatoes smothered in gravy, I imagined my family being rich, and for just a flickering moment, I liked it.

In the afternoon, around two, the boys started stopping by the Singleton residence. Perri begged me to come down and join her, but I refused and spent the afternoon reading and looking out her bedroom window at the scene below. I was incredulous. Sure enough, five young men stood on the front porch, dressed in their Sunday suits, laughing and talking to Perri, who sat on the cushioned bench, wearing a pretty teal dress that set off her eyes. Her cheeks were ablaze with those two dark pink spots, and she nodded and talked, looking like the picture of happiness and health and confidence when I knew inside she was always calculating her family's fragile position in Atlanta society.

When the last boy left, Perri came inside and hurried up to her room. “Dobbs Dillard! If you aren't the rudest thing!” Her eyes flashed, and she had her hands on her hips. “You could have at least had the decency to come down and meet the boys. Heavens, you liked to embarrass me to death!”

“Oh, Perri! You're so smooth and at ease. What do I have to say to all those boys? I told you I have Hank, and I'm just not interested in meeting other young men. Is that so awful?”

Perri gave a sigh and shrugged. “No, I don't suppose so. I just want you to be happy here in Atlanta.”

“I'm happy, Perri. I have a roof over my head and a wonderful room to sleep in and kind relatives and I go to a fine school and I have clothes and food and a dear, dear friend with whom to share adventures. I don't need anything else.”

Perri seemed to acquiesce and was about to say something when Mrs. Singleton called up from below, “Perri! Spalding Smith has just arrived.”

Perri's cheeks turned perfect pink again, and she grabbed my hands. “Please come down and meet Spalding. It'd mean the world to me. Afterwards, we're going for a drive, and he can take you back to the Chandlers'.”