Sapphire's Grave (9 page)

WARRENTON, NORTH CAROLINA

JULY, 1902

Lilly had begged her husband, borrowed, and considered stealing to buy Vyda Rose’s train ticket to Brooklyn, while Vyda Rose, working steadily and saving every penny she could, spent hours at the St. Augustine’s library learning what she could about Brooklyn. It seemed a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah to Vyda Rose, who had never been farther than to Charlotte by wagon cart as a child, and even then, had sat frightened by her surroundings as Fields had negotiated the prices of whiskey and cigars. She would be a stranger in a paradise of sorts in that vast city, and an angel in the utmost depths of hell.

She had gone to visit Queen Marie, to make peace with her for years of deception; to tell her that she understood, and what she had to do for her own child. Queen Marie had cried and kissed her, and told her that she was brave. But Vyda Rose felt no pride in what she was doing, only the urgency and necessity of doing it.

So it was without misgiving that she canceled her standing appointments indefinitely, knowing that she risked losing loyal clients by abandoning them to her competitors, but also knowing that she needed to take as much time as was called for. Brooklyn was a great big town, and hers was a mammoth mission.

As she boarded the great black train that would begin her journey to Brooklyn, a tearful Lilly wishing her well, Vyda Rose did not look back. She would be back. No point in getting teary and sentimental. She would be back.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

JULY, 1902

Brooklyn bustled. It danced. It leapt and spun in a whirlwind of perpetual activity, and Vyda Rose was both frightened and mesmerized by its vibrance. She sat on a bench at the train station for several minutes, her bags arranged around her feet, gathering the nerve to ask someone, any one of the people rushing past her in all directions to point her toward the nearest lodgings. She noted that the ladies wore hats—most of them. She would buy one at her earliest opportunity. It was important that she look presentable while carrying out her difficult task.

A young man in an elegant suit watched her from a distance. He saw a young woman in her early twenties, sitting on a bench, watching her surroundings with increasing dismay. She was very tired—and hot. Her shoulders slumped, and she fanned herself with her hand. He noted the bags arranged around her feet. She had no doubt traveled very far, and was probably here to stay. The young man had seen many young ladies come from the South, alone and easily daunted, easy game for predators like himself. He began walking toward her, noting her slender arms and upstanding breasts as she raised a hand to lift her hair, damp from humidity and perspiration, from the back of her neck. She surprised him by turning suddenly to face him. Her eyes—sleepy, seductive eyes—widened when she saw him. He felt caught, as if he had been sneaking upon his prey. He thought he discerned a slight upturning of the corners of her lips before she caught herself and fixed a cool stare upon him.

It was a practiced, confident stare. This was no guileless country hick. This was a woman aware of her own allure, and accustomed to using it to her advantage. She stood, as if she had been waiting for him, nearly his height, and poised as if balancing a pitcher of ice water on her head. But the stance was clearly natural to her. She was a proud woman, the young man thought, and streetwise, perhaps even cunning.

Vyda Rose had been warned of city men on the prowl for ladies traveling alone. This one had the look of a gigolo. She noted the handsome suit and gold watch, and wondered how many women took care of him.

She needed help at the moment—from anyone. But she wanted him to know from the start that she was no dupe, but a woman neither cheap nor easy.

“So . . . you new in town?” he asked. Vyda Rose glanced downward at the luggage surrounding her. He blushed. “Can I—can I help you get somewheres?” he stammered. Vyda Rose arched an eyebrow and smiled teasingly. She was having the effect on him that she had hoped for.

“Yessir,” she replied. “I’d shore ’preciate your tellin’ me how to get myself to the nearest hotel.”

He eyed her several bags as he noted the Southern accent—not the twang of Georgia or Alabama, but the flat, less melodic speech of Negroes from North Carolina or Virginia. But she had traveled far, as he had suspected, and not for naught. “How long you stayin’? If you don’t mind me askin’.”

Vyda Rose hesitated. “I really don’t know,” she replied. He waited. She did not explain.

His eyes fell upon her bags again. “Well. Look to me like you’ll be around for a while. You oughta try to get in a boardin’house. Cost you a lot less money, Miss—”

“Vyda Rose. Vyda Rose Alston. An’ a boardin’house will do jes fine. Anywhere outa dis heat.” She fanned herself again, looking around the station, emptying now as passengers found their loved ones and drivers.

He knew of several places, but had no idea of this lady’s means. Lacking the daring to ask, he lifted two of her bags without further comment.

On the street, Vyda Rose saw more white people in one place than she had seen in all her life. Colored men in tasseled uniforms tipped their hats and greeted her respectfully as she passed with her companion. They nodded to him their appreciation of Vyda Rose’s comeliness and grace. She felt the eyes of these men on her back as she passed them.

“Did you say your name?” she asked.

“Hiram,” he answered as he touched her elbow, steering her to an automobile parked in front of the canopied entrance to a limestone building much like the others they had passed. “Hiram Stokes.” He opened the door. Vyda Rose hesitated. She had never seen an automobile before, much less ridden in one.

“Is this yo’s?” she asked, her naïveté showing for the first time.

“No, Ma’am,” he told her honestly, though he did not know why. “This belong to Mister Gresham Hayes. I am his chauffeur.” He bowed ceremoniously, extending his arm toward the open door. Vyda Rose climbed in, her long legs awkward. Hiram climbed in on the other side, sweeping a cap the color of his suit from the seat onto his head. With exaggerated gestures, he steered the car into the mixed traffic of buggies, horses, and occasional automobiles. He could see that she was impressed.

They were quiet for a time as she stared out the window, taking in the buildings and diversity of people. She wondered where she should begin, in a city so vast, so fast-moving, and so crowded, her search for the man she had traveled so far to find. They crossed a bridge—Vyda Rose had never seen a bridge so large and majestic—and she began to worry about where this stranger was taking her. She noticed that he kept glancing at his watch. “Are we still in Brooklyn? I hope I’m not takin’ you too far out de way . . .”

“Brooklyn?” he turned to look at her. “No, Ma’am. We bound for Hun’ Seventeenth Street. I thought you wanted to stay near some colored folks. Ain’t too much happenin’ in Brooklyn. Unless you—” He realized that he had assumed too much. “You ain’t say nothin’ ’bout stayin’ in Brooklyn.”

Vyda Rose did not know what to say. Was there something
wrong
with Brooklyn? Were colored people not welcome there? What else did she
not
know that she
should?
Vyda Rose sighed. It was time to confess complete ignorance, as she should have at the train station.

“I need to find a place to stay in Brooklyn. I’m lookin’ for my cou’in, an’ it’s real important that I find him. I have no idea where to start. All I know is he in Brooklyn, an’ dass where I need to be.”

Hiram removed his cap and scratched his head. She hoped he did not think her stupid. “You mean you come all this way, to find somebody you don’t know where in Brooklyn?”

Vyda Rose flushed. “It’s very, very important,” she repeated, her eyes downcast. He ventured a glance at her, dejected and humbled and as cute as a button, and he thought for a moment.

“I don’t know no colored people in Brooklyn.” Hiram glanced at his watch. “But if you got a little time, I might be able to find somebody who does.” He turned the car around. “Right now, if you don’t mind, I got to get back to the train station and get Miss Virginia home. We might need to get your bags out the back, too, so I can put hers in there. I’ll be back to get you after I take her home.”

Vyda Rose blinked. “You be
back where
to get me?”

“Back to the train station. I’m supposed to get Miss Virginia around three. She comin’ back this afternoon. Won’t take me long.”

“You mean you takin’ me all the way
back
to the train station, and I got to wait there while you take somebody home?”

Hiram blushed deeply. “Won’t nobody bother you. I’ll just be a little while.”

Vyda Rose was speechless. Exhausted, lost, and confused, in a city whose vastness and strangeness she had not been prepared for, she felt, to her horror, tears of frustration welling in her eyes. She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes as the tears began to fall. She wanted to go home.

Horrified and embarrassed, Hiram sputtered. “I’m sorry,” he pleaded. “I didn’t know you wanted to stay in Brooklyn. I just thought you—” He glanced again at Vyda Rose, and a thought occurred to him. He turned the car around again. “Tell you what. I’ll take you to Connie’s now. You can stay with her ’til I come back, and we’ll see ’bout gittin’ you to Brooklyn.”

“I don’ wanna be no trouble,” Vyda Rose managed to sob. “You can jes let me out here.” She could not, Vyda Rose reasoned, become any more lost.

“Aw, shucks,” he waved his hand. “I can’t put you out here. Now I said I would get you to a boardin’house, and I’m gonna get you to a boardin’house—in Brooklyn.” He might, Hiram thought, even find her a nice family to stay with, so he would always know that she was safe, and where to find her.

Vyda Rose continued to sob. Awkwardly, Hiram tried to console her. “Aw, don’t cry now. Here, take my handkerchief.” Finally, not knowing what else to do, he grasped her hand in one of his. She stopped sobbing abruptly, and looked up at him in surprise, her nose red, her eyes wet. Hiram blushed again, but stopped the car and closed both of his hands around hers.

“Miss Vyda Rose,” he said, looking at her squarely. “Now you hush up. Everything is gonna be just fine. Hiram will see to it. Okay?”

Vyda Rose nodded and straightened in her seat, staring straight ahead as Hiram maneuvered the car along the crowded street.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

SEPTEMBER, 1902

Winter was going to be difficult for Vyda Rose. “I seen snow before,” she had said, defensively and with a touch of indignation, each time someone advised that she should go back home before winter. But Vyda Rose had not expected the chill that sneaked beneath the door and around the windows of her room on the seventh floor of a Brooklyn boardinghouse. She bought extra blankets and flannel gowns, and as her pregnancy progressed, neighbors offered warm clothing and baby things.

Vyda Rose did not like accepting charity. But she had no choice. Advised by a doctor to rest as much as possible, she was barely working a part-time schedule, doing hair at Connie’s Beauty Parlor on Sixteenth Street in Manhattan. Hiram did what he could, helping her with groceries, rent, and other necessities. A blessing to Vyda Rose of the sort that could not be attributed to luck, Hiram also continued to ask around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. But it seemed no one recognized the name of Vyda Rose’s “cousin,” a stocky colored railroad worker from Brooklyn.

At first, Vyda Rose had wandered the streets of Brooklyn alone, stopping at businesses and subway stations, dressed like the finest of ladies in the city—so people would
want
to talk to her. Before long, she had discarded her fashionable shoes for comfortable flats, visiting churches and bars, restaurants and theaters. When she decided to venture outside the colored community, Hiram had insisted upon accompanying her, driving her across the boroughs in his borrowed automobile, between his duties as the colored chauffeur of Mister Gresham Hayes.

Always in good spirits, he made Vyda Rose laugh, and at times, forget the futility of her search, a futility becoming clearer each day. And he did not make her feel foolish by asking of a link between her advancing pregnancy and her “cousin.” They became good friends, but theirs was a friendship predicated upon boundaries—he did not make certain inquiries. Vyda Rose did not offer details of her past.

She wrote letters to her mother, and to Lilly, whose letters kept Vyda Rose entertained with stories of her slightly offbeat mother, Sister, and of Prince Junior and Suzanne, and their growing family.

Sister, whom Vyda Rose had never met, had a boyfriend—a preacher, no less—trying to save her soul. And Sister was giving him a run for his money! And Suzanne had just lost a baby—gone into labor at least three months early and lost that child in the tobacco fields.

But Vyda Rose could not care less about Suzanne, who had snubbed her because of her status as both fallen woman and bastard child. Suzanne was due a miscarriage, as far as Vyda Rose was concerned. But she did feel badly for Prince Junior, who had accepted her, if not with open arms, at least in his own reserved manner, as his sister. Vyda Rose made mental note to send him a note of sympathy. As far as the rest of Warren County—well, Lilly reported, things were still the same.

Lilly was tactful enough not to ask Vyda Rose if she had found him. She knew that Vyda Rose would have said so if she had. But by September, Lilly was asking, at the end of each letter, when Vyda Rose was coming home; and didn’t she want to have her baby among her family; and whether Vyda Rose had anyone “up there in New York to take care of” her.

Vyda Rose was not offended by these not-so-subtle inquiries into her intimacies, or more accurately, these references to her lack thereof; but Vyda Rose had not completed her mission, and she fully intended to—if she could. And then she had begun to grow large, and to feel vulnerable. A train ride to North Carolina sounded unbearable. By all appearances, she wrote Lilly, she would be having her baby in New York.

She was getting around a bit, learning the city and its people as Hiram shepherded her from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan to Harlem. Unashamed to be gallivanting about town with a pregnant woman, a grotesquely pregnant woman, in Vyda Rose’s opinion, he offered no explanations and no answers to the unasked questions, communicated through raised eyebrows and open-mouthed stares.

Vyda Rose had become conscious of her Southern speech and manners, discovering quickly that she could not hide them. But these people were themselves, for all their feigned city sophistication, only one generation removed from sharecroppers’ shanties, and Vyda Rose was quick to remind them of this. She earned a reputation for having a sharp tongue; and when people asked her of her past or of whereabouts she was from, she gave them curt responses and changed the subject.

No one asked her directly who her baby’s father was. They asked Hiram, and he laughed and said, “I don’t ask no questions. I’m just helpin’ out a friend.” Sometimes he added: “It’s the Christian thing to do,” and threw back his head in laughter; for everyone understood that Hiram Stokes was no Christian. Son of an evangelist mother and an apathetic father, he had departed the church at as early an age as he could, in search of adventure. He was, of course, harmless, “except to pretty women,” he would cackle with his infectious laugh. But his relationship to Vyda Rose and, of greater interest, Vyda Rose’s child, remained a mystery to all but himself and Vyda Rose.

Hiram found her a midwife when she could no longer afford the services of a doctor; and in December, her baby was born, brown and already stocky like her father, strong and insistent with an earsplitting cry. She would bring her Jewell home, Vyda Rose wrote Lilly, in the spring.

But by winter’s end, Vyda Rose had a good job, as a hostess at the Turkish baths in Harlem. Soon, its clients became her personal clients, and she began inviting them home to the Brooklyn boardinghouse.

At first, the building supervisor, or super, as he was called, would look the other way, allowing the slow trickle of men in and out of the vestibule and up and down the stairs to escape his attention. Tenants paid their rent. He attended to his own affairs. That was the arrangement.

But soon, he noticed that the tall Negro girl no longer rose in the mornings to walk to the train. He had assumed that she worked in Harlem, perhaps cooking or doing hair. She had begun to develop the polished appearance and manner of a cosmopolitan girl, and Harlem, he had been told, was becoming the fashionable venue for sophisticated Negroes.

The young man in the handsome suit still came some evenings to whisk her away in his borrowed car. But most weekends she entertained men at home, and sometimes, well into the morning, he could hear them whispering, or her laughing indulgently, as he passed the insubstantial door of her room, and he imagined her lying naked on her back, the heavy-lidded eyes closed in contentment, the sound of her laughter drifting upward like smoke from a chimney, suggestive of a warmth and comfort within.

She did not look at him as she passed him in the hall, or when she came to his apartment to pay her rent. In deference—or indifference, he finally decided—her eyes slid past him, around him, and over his head, then downward as he counted the bills on the massive oak table that dominated his living room, a room where not much living was accomplished, he thought ruefully, recalling the sounds of living that regularly emanated from the tall girl’s room.

He wanted her to look at him. He wanted to ask her the source of her income now that she no longer went to work in the mornings. That, he considered, might startle her into a direct glance, perhaps of trepidation—she was either the kept woman of the young man in the handsome suit, or the lover of many for a price. Perhaps she was both. In any event, she would realize, her errant doings had not gone undetected. Perhaps, he thought, she would feel no fear or shame, but stare at him defiantly before turning on her heels to stalk from the room. Or perhaps she would smile slyly, and raise her thick, kohled lashes slowly to meet his eyes above the oak table, then turn to saunter away, her hips swaying an invitation as she turned to close the door behind herself and cast upon him one last meaningful look. She would not answer his question. He would not care. He only wanted her to look at him.

“Cop-per came by,” he surprised himself by saying one day as he counted bills on the oak table. Conscious of his Irish brogue, he did not talk much to anyone. In particular, he minimized his conversation with the fully Negro occupancy of this boardinghouse that he had “supervised” loosely since the Negroes had converged upon this part of town. He needed to maintain, he felt, a certain authority, and this goal would not be advanced by opening his mouth to reveal himself but one step removed from their own status.

But the locale of authority could be a lonely place to inhabit, he had discovered. He needed, at least, an acknowledgment of human kinship, a recognition of his
being.

He needed her to look at him.

He glanced up at her as he spoke, surprised at hearing his own voice, and hoping to catch the girl’s reaction. She was standing in front of him, across the table and staring at it as he sat counting and placing each bill face downward as he counted. She did not look up or react. He wondered if she had heard or understood.

Then, she raised her eyes to look at his face.

Her own face was motionless. She simply looked at him, making him swallow with discomfort. He lost count, gathered up the bills, and began counting again. The girl continued to stare at him, her face unreadable, and he wondered what she saw: a middle-aged immigrant, unattractive and unskilled, hiding his inadequacy behind a mask of superiority and power? A lonely man, and minor despot of a makeshift domain, desperate for validation from his subjects? A longing man, longing for veneration but finding none, aspiring instead to mastery, pathetic prisoner of his own arrogance?

He stacked the bills, finally, at the corner of the table, uncounted. “They was askin’ ’bout your, er, visitors,
and how you was payin’ your rent.
” He paused. She did not respond. “They said they would be a-watchin’,” he continued, his words slow and measured. Still, the girl did not answer or move. He wondered again if she understood the implications of his words. He sighed.

“Prostitution is ’gainst the law. If you are caught, you could be fined or sent to jail.” Her eyes seemed to widen slightly, he thought. He had her attention. He licked his lips. His eyes traveled down to the hollow at the base of her throat. “Of course, I may be able to, er,
protect
you. That is, if yer nice.”

The girl’s eyes narrowed perceptibly, and her mouth seemed to take on a sardonic set. She shifted her weight to one foot, staring at him thoughtfully now. He noted the slight bulk of her hips, barely discernible beneath her loose cotton dress. Finally—“Thank you—” she said in a near-whisper, her voice sweetly husky and sultry. “But I can do ’thout yo’
protection.
” And her eyes slid past him, around him, and over his head, then down to the pile of bills on the table. He felt insignificant, belittled, dismissed. Without another word, she turned and left the lonely man in the lifeless room.

When he saw her next, she was coming into the house, arm in arm with the young man in the handsome suit. Neither of them seemed to see him, much less acknowledge him, even though they had to step around him to pass through the vestibule; even though he bowed his head and uttered a grudging greeting, barely audible, as they passed. Their laughter drifted down the stairs as they ascended to her room, mocking and reducing him to nothingness.

She would scramble across the room on hands and knees, he imagined, when he slapped her and made her bleed, knocking her to the floor. She would crawl toward the door, and rise with effort to her knees to open it. But he would slam it shut and kick her in her mirthful mouth, no longer laughing. It would widen in pain as the somnolent eyes swelled with tears; and he, moved with compassion, would stand before her, allowing her to kiss his boots, to wash them with her tears and with her hair.

And then he would have her, gently but assertively; and she would submit herself to him, offering oblation for having mocked and disregarded him. From then on, she would be his servant. He consoled himself now, each time the Negro girl passed his open door en route with some new stranger to her room on the seventh floor, with this figment of his mind’s concoction; each time she laughed at him behind her firmly shut but ineffectual door. She would pay for this. He would make her pay, reduce her to the humble status nature had conferred upon her kind.