Absalom's Daughters (23 page)

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Outside the big top, a man cranked an organ and a monkey danced, holding out his little red cap for pennies. The midway stretched to her right, crowded and noisy, smelling of fried meat, burned popcorn, sweat, and cigarettes. She heard a lion roar, looked for elephants but didn't see them. She wandered down the midway, surrounded by white people. Tall men in workmen's clothes smoked cigarettes, threw down the butts, and ground them into the dirt with their heels. Babies cried until they were red in the face. Little girls shrieked as little boys stamped on their new shoes. A white man said, “'Scuse me, miss,” when he bumped into her. She didn't see a single colored person, not even hauling boxes behind the food stands. She passed the corn dogs and cotton candy. It was getting darker and cooler, and the lights inside the little sheds made the food look unnatural. It was too chilly for ice cream by the time she found where they were selling it, so there was no line. The white girl behind the counter looked up from a movie magazine, her lipstick-red lips pushed out in surprise.

“Choc'lit er 'nilla?” she said.

The prices were written out in pink chalk on a painted board. Ten cents a scoop.

“We 'bout to close,” said the girl. “I give you a scoop o' each fer a nickel.”

Cassie put her nickel, hot from being clenched in her hand, on the counter. The white girl picked a pointed cone from a neat stack and scooped the ice cream casually, expertly. She squashed the glistening sphere of vanilla into the cone and the chocolate on top of it. She wrapped the cone in a napkin and gave it to Cassie.

“Already seen the show?” she said.

Cassie shook her head.

“Starts in 'bout five minutes,” said the girl. “Gotta ticket?”

“No.”

“You gonna miss it for sure if you doan go now,” said the girl. “You gotta dollar f'the ticket?”

“Yes,” said Cassie.

“Well, look,” said the girl. “I kin give you a ticket half-price. Git you in f'shore, an' you ain't gotta stan' in line.” She reached for a napkin and wrote on it in the same pink chalk as the ice cream prices.

Let this gal in sined Gloria

She held out the signed napkin to Cassie. “Fifty cent. Come on, now. You know we gotta elephant an' a lion an' little dogs does tricks.”

Ice cream drips ran down to catch in the napkin around the cone. Cassie set her purse on the counter, dug in it for the right change, and gave that to Gloria. Gloria gave Cassie the napkin with a friendly smile.

“Enjoy the show,” said Gloria.

Cassie turned back down the midway, which had emptied out. She licked the ice cream, which was good. When she gave Gloria's signed napkin to the man at the big top, he laughed hard and she knew she'd let herself be robbed. She gave him a dollar. He gave her a real ticket. She threw the remaining ice cream in the trash and went in to see the circus.

The circus had already started when she walked in, and all the bleacher seats in front were taken. Little dogs dressed as clowns raced in circles, jumping through hoops while trumpets played. Cassie climbed up to the top of the bleachers. A draft came in from outside, and the canvas smelled of mildew. Below and to her left was the flap in the tent where the animals and performers waited their turn. She didn't have a very good view of the ring, but she could see straight down to the women in glittering costumes sitting on the backs of dappled horses. A colored groom adjusted harnesses and handed up feathered headdresses. A white man in a dusty black jacket and a satin top hat sat on a bench smoking. A long whip was propped up beside him.

Laydeeez and Gentlemen!

Children of allll ages!

Drums rolled. Trumpets blared. The horses snorted, and their glittering passengers stood up on their backs, touching the lower bars of the bleachers for balance. The man in the top hat stamped out his cigarette, grabbed the long whip, and jogged out to the ring, waving to the crowd. The women on the horses followed, and the groom shoveled up horse manure. When most of it was cleared away, he pulled the tent flap wider for the elephant.

The elephant. It had been waiting just outside, visible, Cassie now realized, as a shadow against the canvas. It was enormous. She could have touched its back from where she was sitting. A woman rode the elephant, sitting astride just behind its ears. She wore a low-cut bathing suit made of bright red spangles and a headdress with scarlet feathers as long as Cassie was tall. The elephant smelled of hay and horse manure. The woman took a compact mirror out of her cleavage, checked herself, and dropped it back in. She saw Cassie staring.

“Well, honey,” said the woman, “how do I look?”

“Fine,” said Cassie breathlessly.

“You wanna pat the elephant?”

The way she said it, it sounded like another trick, but Cassie reached through the railing and brushed her fingers along the gray hide. It felt like the bark of a tree.

“Hey!” shouted the woman and Cassie jerked back, but the woman was looking down at the groom. “Get that horse shit off his feet! What the hell is wrong with you?” She straightened and pawed at her headdress. “Damn niggers,” she said to Cassie.

Trumpets rang out. The elephant stepped forward, and the woman on top of him swept past in a flash of red.

Cassie glanced down at the groom. His face was hard to see. In the ring, the elephant strode around and stopped in the middle. The woman posed on his back, on his head. Trumpets tooted merrily. The elephant knelt in front of the man with the whip, and she stepped down. The man raised his whip. The elephant stood and raised one foot. With great drama, the woman lay down and put her head underneath. Drums rolled menacingly. The elephant lowered its foot until it was touching the woman's head, and the three of them held that pose while the audience gasped. Cassie looked down at the groom, watching, his arms crossed. She knew what he was thinking as clearly as he felt her gaze. He looked up, impenetrable. She looked away before he saw right through her.

She left before the lion and the clowns and the high trapeze act. They were lined up in that order outside the tent, and Cassie saw Gloria too. As a white girl, Cassie had the right to beat Gloria to a pulp to get her fifty cents back, but without the ice cream counter between them, Gloria looked spindly and underfed, and Cassie found herself feeling sorry for her the way she sometimes felt sorry for Judith. She kept going, away from the lights of the circus, back to the dense trees in the riverside park, up the hill until she found her suitcase. She took out Lil Ma's shoes and put them on and sat in the cool evening until it was completely dark. She put on one of the sweaters Mrs. Glade had given her and wrapped her legs in another and went to sleep with the suitcase as a pillow. When she dreamed, she saw Lil Ma sitting across a table from Grandmother. Lil Ma was as dark as ever, but Grandmother, dressed in red sequins and a fancy feathered hat, had turned as white as white could be.

In the morning Cassie straightened up as well as she could. The compact the Glades had put in her purse had no mirror; she could only guess at the state of her hair and her face. Her hands looked grimy, especially around the nails, and the fascinating blueness of the veins had turned to an unwashed bluish gray. Her clothes smelled of the damp ground. She needed to use a bathroom. She felt in the pocket of her dress for the tar. It was stuck there, not in any danger of falling out.

She changed back into the ankle socks and the flats that hurt her feet, put Lil Ma's shoes in her suitcase, and made her way out of the park.

She was terribly hungry. She turned down the first big street she came to. Shops were starting to open. She had fixed her hair as well as she could, but she wasn't used to this hair. It hung in tangled clumps and refused to obey her combing fingers. She found a bit of string in the bottom of the purse and tied it back. She felt sure her pale face looked puffy and dirty. For the first time since she and Judith had left Heron-Neck, Cassie felt a weepy desperation. She wiped her eyes, but that only made it worse. She stood where she was, eyes squeezed shut, clenching the suitcase in one hand, her purse in the other. People passed by. She felt them looking at her. A hand touched her arm, and she opened her eyes to see a well-dressed colored woman.

“You cain't be standin' round here with your suitcase and your cryin'. You scarin' away my bizniss.”

Through the plate glass were dresses on hangers, scarves, handbags arranged prettily on shelves. There was a long counter lined with mirrors and fancy hats.

“This my shop,” said the woman. “This our street and this our neighborhood. Y'hear? Now, you need some money?”

Cassie wiped her eyes. “Nome.”

“You know where your side o' town is?”

“Nome.”

The colored woman cocked her head. Other colored people had stopped to see what was going on. All were well dressed—the men in top hats with canes, the women in stylish dresses and beautiful shoes.

The woman pointed at the next intersection, where there was a traffic light. “Turn lef' at that light. That's Third. Walk all the way down the hill, an' you'll find a diner an' a flophouse. I 'spect they'll take care of you.”

Big cars waited at the light, all driven by coloreds. At least one was driven by a colored chauffeur with colored passengers.

What
Community
was this? What
Opportunity
did these people have? Did the Reverend and Mrs. Glade know about them? Did Mister Mallard know? She looked down at the mesmerizing blue veins in her own pale hands.

“Is you witless?” said the woman. “Dincha hear me?”

Cassie walked toward the traffic light. She turned the corner of Third and made her way down the hill past neat brick houses with roses in bloom, azaleas, apple blossoms, and tulips. Her own side of town was just ahead, past a used car lot and a vacant-looking warehouse. She could see the river. The railway station was visible past a jumble of industrial rooftops. Between her and the tracks were thrift stores and boardinghouses. She found a diner, called
Ida's
, where a white waitress served her without a second glance at the state of her hair and clothes, probably because the rest of the white people there looked just as shabby. She sat at a table by the window and ordered coffee, pancakes, hash browns, and sausage. The pancakes and hash browns were good, but the sausage wasn't cooked all the way through. She asked the waitress if she could borrow a pencil. The waitress said, “What fer?” and Cassie told her she needed to write a letter to her mother. The waitress looked around at the rest of the diner and said that since it wasn't crowded, all right, but if anyone came in and wanted Cassie's table, she would have to leave. She gave Cassie the pencil and asked what she was planning to write on. Cassie smoothed her unused napkin. The waitress said, “Wait a minnit,” walked away, and came back with a clean sheet of paper. It had the diner's name and address at the top. “I should write my momma too,” said the waitress.

Cassie wrote:

Dear Lil Ma,

The lead-pencil words lay on the crisp paper. The rest of the letter might as well be on the paper already.
I have found the thing that has made me white.
She could almost see the words. She erased
Lil Ma
and wrote
Dear Grandmother
instead.

Cassie folded the paper with trembling white fingers and put it in her purse without writing any more. She put the pencil in too, without thinking that it belonged to the waitress. She got up to pay at the register, and the waitress asked if she'd gotten her letter all written. Cassie nodded, and the waitress told her there was a post office down a couple of blocks by the train station. She gave Cassie her change, and Cassie remembered the pencil. She dug fruitlessly for it in the gritty bottom of her purse while the waitress watched her in such a way that Cassie was certain she had turned colored again before the woman's eyes. But the waitress took another pencil out of her apron and scribbled an address on the back of a used order slip. She pressed it into Cassie's pale palm.

“If you need somewheres to stay, you come over to my place. It's a hell of a lot safer'n some o' these damn flophouses, y'hear? An' I don't mean I'd charge you rent'r nothin'. You look like you could use a little help.”

“Yessum,” said Cassie. “Thank you, ma'am.” Cassie walked out of the diner and turned left, down the hill. Judith, she thought, would have remarked upon the woman's kindness, but Cassie could only imagine how long it might be before the words
damn nigger
came out of that mouth. When she came to the train station, she wadded up the slip with the waitress's address and threw it in the trash. Then she sat on a bench in the shade, took the paper out of her purse, found the pencil, and finished writing to her grandmother.

I have made it to Richmond, Virginia. I have met some very nice people on the way. One of them gave me this. I think it is what you have been looking for. I have used it myself, but I think it will still work for you. Scrub your hands and your face with it, and you will see. You can't let anyone else know about it, not even Lil Ma, or the black will come right back. You will have to leave Heron-Neck forever if you decide to stay the way it changes you.

Cassie folded the paper in half, then in quarters. She took the tar out of her pocket and squeezed it and pressed it until it was absolutely flat, no bigger than a playing card. She folded it inside the letter to Grandmother and checked her hands. Still white. Would the tar work on Grandmother? Cassie had no doubt that it would. Would Grandmother leave Lil Ma, vanish from Heron-Neck, and make a new life for herself somewhere as a white woman? Where would she go? What if she came to Richmond—to the address on the diner's stationery—expecting to find Cassie living her days and nights as a white girl? Cassie picked up her suitcase and purse and went into the post office. She got an envelope and stamp from the postal clerk, addressed the envelope to Grandmother at the Laundry on Negro Street, and sealed everything inside. Lil Ma would never see it or the tar.