Absalom's Daughters (26 page)

“Ma'am, I reckon I'm progeny too.”

“I reckon she is, ma'am,” said Judith.

“And I ‘reckon' she is, even without you saying so,” said Miz Eula. She put the book on the small table beside her. “Are you supposed to be working right now?”

“We're off for the night, ma'am,” said Cassie. “We saw you in the salon with Judith's—our daddy, I mean—and we thought we better come up and introduce ourselves.”

“We 'fraid he's done gone an' spent all our inher'tince,” said Judith. “Do you know if it's true?”

“Sit down,” said Miz Eula. She pointed them to the foot of the bed and a threadbare quilt. “Let me tell you about your family.”

 

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

Miz Eula Bonhomme rose from her chair, her brittle black clothing crackling around her. She opened the room's only closet and took out a large, stiff folder made of some animal's scaly hide. She untied the silky ribbons that held it shut and opened it on the bed. Inside were newspaper clippings and pages from old magazines, each separated from the other by a sheet of onionskin. All the paper except the onionskin had turned brown, giving the contents of the portfolio a layered look, fawn-colored ruffles alternating with white, like some old party dress, once flounced, now flat.

“What's important is the past,” said Miz Eula. “Since William is father to you both, this portfolio contains his past, my past, and yours as well, your
begats
if you wish.” She turned the layers of paper and onionskin to a yellowed page of poetry. “This, for example, was written by a great-great-great-aunt of yours, a southern woman who, while northern soldiers devastated the countryside around her, wrote poems to honor the Confederate dead. Did anyone in your family ever tell you about the ghosts?”

“My momma tol' me my great-grandmomma had to shoot her husband with his own horse pistol,” said Judith, “but she never said anything about no ghosts.”

Miz Eula turned to Cassie. “What about you?”

“My grandmother told me I was named for my great-great-grandmother Cassandra. She said Judith and I were probably sisters and cousins both because our white great-great-great-grandfather and his white son had gone around sowing their wild oats.”

Miz Eula turned over another layer to expose a second, smaller portfolio, this one made of fragile cardboard. “Let me show you the ghosts.” She opened the smaller portfolio with even greater care. Inside were three silvery black rectangular glass plates, each wrapped in fine white cotton cloth. “These are called daguerreotypes,” she said. As she unwrapped them, Miz Eula laid them on the faded quilt. The images were impossible to make out without better light, but Miz Eula spoke as if they were paintings in plain sight upon a wall. “The first one is William, my husband, your father's great-great-grandfather. Your father was named for him.”

“You were married to our great-grandfather?” said Judith.

“Your
great
-great-great-grandfather,” Miz Eula corrected. “My faithless William who came from poverty in the foothills of Virginia and built the mansion here in Remington starting from nothing but a swamp and a crew of wild slaves. His vision was to start his own dynasty. He is the thread that connects us. I am no actual blood relation to either of you. I am the abandoned wife, like Sarah in the Bible, who came from the desert to be the vessel for a great and noble line. But I became wrong.” She touched her iron-colored hair self-consciously. “Too black, though you two are the only ones who know that, and I rely on your discretion. And then my William, no Abraham to be sure, chose his own Hagar—your great-great-great-grandmother, whose name was Helen.”

She held the picture out to them, and Cassie took it carefully, turning it to the light. A man stood in front of a columned veranda, hands on his hips, hat cocked on his head. He looked for all the world like William Forrest—the current one. “This is our great-great-great-grandfather?” she said. “The one whose mansion's going to be auctioned off?”

“Him indeed,” said Miz Eula. “And look here at the second ghost. My son, Charles. See how handsome he is, how finely he sits on his horse, how strong the line of his jaw, how white he is, just like his father. Yet this is the son William claimed was tainted with black blood and so disowned.”

“He disowned his own son?” said Cassie.

“Not just his son,” said Miz Eula. She picked up the third daguerreotype. “His grandson, too. Here is your discarded cousin. My only grandchild. Look how fair he is, how pure, and still ruined by the drop, the single drop of black blood.” She took a ragged breath. “I gave William a
good
son
.
And he repudiated us, left
us
in wrack and ruin, forced us out as though
his son
was only a mule. He considered our marriage null, void, to mount a different mare more fitted for his
dynasty
. That's why I wrote the letter to your mother, Judith. So that her William, your father, doesn't abandon his family the way my William abandoned me.” She turned to Cassie. “But you—
you
are most like my son. Too black to be bothered with. I had no idea you even existed.” She stood by the bed straight as a rod. Tears came down her parchment cheeks.

Judith touched her arm. Miz Eula just stood there. “Go,” she said. “Take the portfolio with you. Take everything, even the ghosts. They're yours now.”

*   *   *

In the basement room beside the furnace, Cassie and Judith sat on the bed with the contents of the portfolio spread between them. It was warm and late, and they had undressed to their underwear. Judith, cross-legged on the coverlet, smoothed a newspaper clipping dated 1861.

“How old you think that ol' lady is?” said Judith. “An' she don't look colored to me.”

“Not as old as she thinks she is, and she's white enough to pass.” Cassie held one of the daguerreotypes at an angle to the tented bulb. “I never seen a picture like this on glass. Look at this man with his mustache and fine hat and short little horsewhip. This her son, Charles. But it can't be. She can't be that old.”

“Mistah Legabee was. Them Mallard boys said he was a hunnert and twenty-five.”

Mister Legabee's widow had given Cassie the tar. “You believed that?”

Judith came to peer over Cassie's shoulder at the black glass. “His daddy left him, like my daddy left me—our daddy, and us. He sure don't look poor, though. I mean he got some nice clothes an' a pistol, an' this horse must be worth a bundle.” Judith picked up the next bit of shadowed glass and held it like a mirror to the light. “This her grandson? He fair, sure enough.” Judith put her bit of black glass down and shuffled through the papers in the portfolio. “Look a' this,” she said. “It's one of them poems by that southern lady aunt. Kin you read it?”

Cassie read aloud.

Then God bless him the soldier,

And God nerve him for the fight,

May he lend his arm new prowess

    
To do battle for the right;

Let him feel that while he's dreaming

    
In his fitful slumber bound,

That we're praying—God watch o'er him

    
In his blanket on the ground.

Judith sat cross-legged on the bed. “She wrote this kinda thing with shootin' all round? I think I'd be tryna find a way outta there.”

Cassie put the poem back on its bed of onionskin. What had she, Cassie, said when Judith told Miz Eula who they were? She had said, “Ma'am, I reckon I'm progeny too.” And Judith had said, “I reckon she is, ma'am,” and Miz Eula had said, “And I ‘reckon' she is, even without you saying so.” Cassie pressed her tongue against her teeth and to her surprise, tasted tar. That was why William had left Miz Eula and her son behind. He'd discovered the taint, the way the blood divided out into halves and halves and halves again, until it was down to one half a drop, and that was still too much. No matter how finely divided, it would never disappear. The taste of tar. Had always been there? Did Miz Eula have this taste in her mouth, too? Did Grandmother have it?

The contents of the portfolio lay spread out across the coverlet. Newspapers and photos and clippings from a hundred years ago that might as well have been pasted to the kitchen wall back home in Heron-Neck to keep the drafts from coming in.

My Dearest Sister, I am sorry to tell you that our father is dead.

What did any of this mean for her? Would she be wealthy from her part of the inheritance and live the rest of her life in ease? Not likely.

“What's important is the past,” Miz Eula had said, and she was right to a point, but, Cassie thought, put a yam and a sweet potato in front of the old woman, and she would not know one from the other. Cassie looked up at the ceiling as if she could see through the layers of floors in the hotel, all the way up to the fourth, where Miz Eula wept over her family history. She pictured Miz Eula's hair, coarse as braided wire, wrapped up tight as a spring. And why? Yams from sweet potatoes. Without restraints, that hair would escape into its natural billow and reveal the drop of blood it came from.

Miz Eula and Grandmother would've had a lot to talk about. Both would've jumped at the chance to meet the widow Legabee's sticky grandbaby and erase themselves without a second thought.

“I'm tired,” said Cassie. “We got to work in the mornin'.”

“You sleep,” said Judith. “I'm a keep lookin' at all this fam'ly history.”

Except for William, though, Cassie thought, it was the colored side of the family Judith was looking at. The daguerreotypes, the poetry, the stories Miz Eula was so distraught about had nothing to do with Judith. They were Cassie's history. Cassie lay back on the bed, too warm. The dryers thrummed behind the walls. What if all she and Judith had in common was a father and a distant great-great-great-grandfather? It didn't really change anything. She thought back to the day she'd defied Lil Ma and helped Judith pull the wagons up the hill. That was the day her life had changed. That had put her on this track. Otherwise she would be back home now, struggling with Grandmother over the albino boy. Cassie turned over and hugged the pillow. She missed Lil Ma. The first thing she would do, when she was sure Grandmother had used the tar and was clear of town, would be to send the Boston money to Lil Ma and get her out of Heron-Neck for good.

 

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

In the morning somebody banged hard on the door, and a woman's shrill voice sawed into their sleep.
“Ain't you up yet? You hear me in there, Judith Forrest? It five thutty! You hear me, gal?”

Cassie jerked awake, thinking she had somehow fallen asleep at Judith's house in Heron-Neck. Judith practically leaped out from under the sheets, shouting, “Yessum! Yessum!” She grabbed her wrinkled uniform dress from the foot of the bed, gave it a huge shake, as though that would take care of the wrinkles, and dragged it over her skinny shoulders. She raked her fingers through her hair, jumped into her shoes, slammed the door, and was gone.

Cassie sat up and rubbed her eyes. Eden Pomeroy had told her to be in the laundry room by six. She reached up to turn on the light and saw Miz Eula's newspaper clippings scattered on the floor. Judith might have left them in some kind of order, but the wind from her exit had blown them all over the place. Cassie gathered up the clippings, poems, papers and put them back between their onionskin layers and wrapped the daguerreotypes in their swaddle. She put everything back into the ancient portfolio and slid it under the bed.

*   *   *

Eden Pomeroy and morning work were waiting for Cassie in the laundry room. Three brittle black dresses in a heap. Black underthings, including three pairs of silk stockings and a garter belt so narrow, it would have fit a ten-year-old girl.

“You know anything 'bout this fabric?” said Eden Pomeroy.

Cassie rubbed the hem of one dress between her fingers. “Taffeta?”

“And lace,” said Eden Pomeroy. “This lady act like these dresses her most prize possessions. She send 'em down here all at once and 'spect to get 'em back the same day. I ain't got the hands t'do it. So, you know anything 'bout taffeta?”

“You got to be gentle with it.”

“Ain't no shortcuts with taffeta. And them stockings, them dainties—”

“They ain't all that dainty if you ask me!” said Bethesda from where she was ironing sheets. Iris was folding towels with mechanical precision.

“Lawyers is comin' to see her tomorrow,” Eden Pomeroy said to Cassie. “She got to look right. You think you kin do this?”

“I kin,” Cassie said.

The laundry sink, where the luckless were sent to wash by hand, wasn't far from Bethesda's ironing and Iris's folding. Cassie filled the sink with warm water and three or four shakes of Borax powder. She sank the tired dresses into a pillow of suds and guided them gently back and forth. “Why this ol' lady got to see lawyers? She a big criminal?”

Iris and Bethesda laughed in great snorts.

“She only about a hundred year old,” said Iris, rapidly folding towel after towel.

“She been here for months,” said Bethesda, “waitin' on the settlin' of the estate.”

“The contestation of the will,” said Iris.

“All I know,” Bethesda said to Cassie, “is this old white fella useter live in a big ol' mansion out a ways from town, and he died las' fall, and suddenly, he got relatives crawlin' out the woodwork.” She flicked a drop of water on the iron, and it sizzled. “He got cousins and uncles and nephews and nieces, first, second, third removes.”

“There was some
philanderin'
in the fam'ly,” said Iris, “if you know what I mean, but they blood jus' the same, and they think they owed some piece of the pie.”