The Black Rose (19 page)

SEPTEMBER 1892

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

As Sarah pulled her wooden cart over the ridges on Eads Bridge with a rhythmic
chunk-chunk
sound, the monotone note Lelia was holding with her voice wavered with every bump. Lelia’s mouth was open in a yawning “O” to amuse herself as she rode in the cart. The Sunday morning light was faint, the air still hadn’t lost its night chill, and only a handful of horse-drawn carriages made their way across the bridge alongside them, easily passing their pace. “Mama, you hear how funny that sounds?”

Seven-year-old Lelia was wrapped up in a thin coat and hat, sitting atop the covered crate of freshly pressed clothes Sarah had promised she would deliver to the home of Mrs. Elise Wainwright, who was hosting a breakfast and needed her tablecloths right away. Usually Sarah delivered Mrs. Wainwright’s laundry in the afternoons, once church was finished, but the woman had insisted on having the clothes early today. She was one of Sarah’s best customers, so Sarah didn’t dare argue with her even though it would take her two hours to deliver the clothes, then walk back across the six-thousand-foot length of the bridge to St. Paul AME Church in time for the eight
A
.
M
. service. Never mind that she’d have to make the trip all over again to bring out her other Sunday-delivery clothes after church, once she finished pressing them. If Mrs. Wainwright had planned better and sent the tablecloths out for washing earlier, Sarah thought, she wouldn’t have to do all this extra running around on the Lord’s day.

“Wait, I’ma do it again!” Lelia said, and raised her voice into a droning
oooooooohhhhhh
before Sarah could respond. As before, the bumps from the cart sliced into Lelia’s voice, chopping it up. Sarah longed to tell Lelia to hush up, but she didn’t. Why not let the child have some fun? No sense in both of them feeling miserable today. Besides, Sarah could remember the time when her own playful spirit struggled to find distraction in the monotony of a long working day.
Like playin’ slave-kitcher with Lou
, she thought, and smiled.

The smile didn’t stay on Sarah’s lips long. Sarah hadn’t seen her sister once in the five years since she’d left Vicksburg, and she missed her. The only responses Sarah received from the crudely written letters she sent to Lou were even more crudely written responses from Mr. William Powell, accusing her of owing him money. She crumpled his letters and tossed them away as soon as they reached her mailbox. The nerve of him! If he was going to take the time to write, at the very least he could bother to mention whether her sister and nephew were well.

Strangely enough, it was
Alex
Sarah had been in most contact with in the past few years. He was married now, with his own children, and he’d even visited her for three days last year with his young daughter, Anjetta, in tow. Sarah knew time had changed her appearance, too, but she’d still been shocked to see Alex for the first time since his departure when she was eight. He’d been little more than a boy when he left, but when he came to see her he’d been a thirty-three-year-old man with a slight paunch, a weathered face, and a recurring cough he blamed on the pipe smoking he’d taken up in Denver. Seeing his eyes reminded her of Papa for an eerie instant, but when she blinked he was only Alex again. He was still a porter and said he made a livable wage; they both laughed over his boyhood dreams of digging for gold in Indian country.

Alex’s visit had been a blessing—and little Anjetta, who was younger than Lelia, had been a pure delight—but Sarah had felt a deep sense of sadness after she rode a streetcar with her brother to the train station and then watched him wave good-bye, feeling as if she no longer knew him. Would she ever see him again? Desperation had scattered all three of the Breedloves, and they had gone their own ways. Sarah felt the growing fear that time would keep pulling her and her sister apart until they could no longer remember facing the world together, on their own.
Maybe that’s jus’
what growin’ up feels like
, Sarah thought, reflecting on her sister. But it gave her heart a dull ache just the same. No one was left. In some ways, she realized, Lelia was the only true family she had.

Riding behind Sarah in the cart, Lelia was laughing again in shrieks that seemed to bounce down to the water of the Mississippi River flowing wide beneath them. The sound of her daughter’s mirth lifted Sarah’s spirits, as it always did.

The Wainwrights lived in a two-story colonial-style house with regal columns at the end of a long block on a street in the midst of an affluent all-white area. The only Negroes who ventured into this neighborhood were domestics, like Sarah, easily recognizable from their maid uniforms, carriage-driver’s caps, or baskets of laundry balancing on their heads. Today, dressed in a Sunday hat and her best gray fall church dress, with a real lace collar, Sarah felt like less of an intruder as she made her way along the well-kept street. She’d saved for eight months to buy the dress, and she felt reborn every time she wore it. In fact, she wouldn’t be surprised if she was dressed better than Mrs. Wainwright herself this morning, which would be a rare pleasure.

Leaving Lelia in the cart at the end of the walkway, Sarah took the crate and carried it the last few feet to the steps leading to the Wainwrights’ glossy-painted white double doors. Standing at her full height, Sarah knocked loudly to announce her arrival. Wouldn’t Mrs. Wainwright think she was a sight!

But when Mrs. Wainwright opened the door and peered down at Sarah, she registered no notice of Sarah’s Sunday dress. Her hair a bit unkempt, the woman barely looked at Sarah, hurriedly taking the crate. “Yes, it’s about time. The guests will be here in two hours, you know,” she snapped. “They’re all pressed?”

“Yes’m,” Sarah said.

Mrs. Wainwright opened the crate, peering down at the fabrics, and Sarah felt no nervousness about the inspection. She’d worked hard on these clothes, staying up half the night to have them finished, and she prided herself on doing good work, just as Miss Brown had taught her back in Vicksburg. Happy customers were loyal customers, she’d learned. They were also willing to pay a little more for the peace of mind that came from hiring a reliable worker.

Miss Wainwright’s thin, pointed nose drew more closely to the pile of clothes. “What in heaven’s name … ?” She flicked at the fabric with her finger, then gazed up at Sarah with unblinking eyes. “Is that
blood
?”

Sarah’s heart stood still. Even Lelia, who had been chattering to herself in the cart on the walkway behind Sarah, fell silent.

“I’m talking to you, Sarah. Tell me what this is!”

Nervous and puzzled, Sarah took a step forward to gaze at the fabric Mrs. Wainwright was thrusting at her to examine. As Sarah moved closer to her, Mrs. Wainwright pulled her face back slightly, as if she expected Sarah to smell bad. Sarah’s eyes studied a crescent-shaped dark spot that had been invisible to her from a greater distance; sure enough, it was brownish red, the color of blood, almost like a fingerprint.

Then, with a start, Sarah gazed at her fingernails. On her right hand, four fingernails were stained red beneath the nails. She tentatively sniffed at them, and the sharp scent
did
smell like blood! Then a flaring soreness on top of Sarah’s scalp reminded her of where the blood had come from: Her head had been itching like the devil all night, and she must have scratched it while she slept until it bled. Why hadn’t she noticed the blood before now? And how could she have allowed herself to muss Mrs. Wainwright’s tablecloth? She must have been in such a hurry to finish, she hadn’t washed her hands the way she usually did before folding the clothes!

To Sarah, it felt as if all color was draining from her face. Her ears were afire.

“Oh, Missus, I can ’splain …” she said, so mortified that her voice was whisper-soft.

“Explain?”
Mrs. Wainwright repeated, staring at her with venom that made her eyes flare. “I have guests on the way as we speak, and you can
explain
? Yes, I’d like very much to know how I should explain how my nigger washerwoman wiped blood on my best tablecloth.” Mrs. Wainwright’s bottom lip was trembling from rage. Suddenly, as if something new occurred to her, she dropped the crate, spilling the folded clothes to the ground. “Oh, my— Does someone in your house have tuberculosis or cholera? Did they spit up on this?”

“N-no, ma’am,” Sarah said earnestly, shaking her head. “It ain’t like that. Ain’t nobody sick in my house!”

At that, Mrs. Wainwright’s eyelids fluttered and she let out a sound that resembled a startled scream. Frantically, she began to wipe her hands on her skirt. “I should have known better! You seemed so neat, not like the rest, but it’s all in the papers how
filthy
niggers are. We’re inviting nigger diseases right into our homes. And we were going to
eat
on that!” Tears sprang to her eyes. “Oh, my Lord, I think I’m going to faint!”

“I’se so sorry, M-Missus,” Sarah said, flooded by equal parts of shame and outrage. “My head was itching me, that’s all. Ain’t no disease! Ain’t n-nothin’ like that—”

Suddenly Mrs. Wainwright’s face contorted so severely that Sarah could barely recognize the woman standing before her as the polite, quiet client whose clothes she had washed for more than two years. “Get away from this house, you filthy nigger bitch!” she shrieked. Her features were pale from what looked like genuine terror.

In twenty-five years, Sarah didn’t think she had ever hated herself and her life as much as she did at that instant. Why hadn’t she washed her hands and checked her fingernails that morning? She had no one to blame but herself, and yet Mrs. Wainwright’s words felt so unjust that she wanted to spring at her and choke the air from her lungs. She knew whites didn’t care for colored folks much at all, except a select few, but she’d tried to convince herself she would change at least a handful of opinions if she conducted herself honestly and well. The Wainwrights had given her two extra dollars at Christmas, and had never given her a cross word. Had Mrs. Wainwright always considered her nothing more than a nigger who washed her clothes?

Sarah’s heart ripped even further when she heard the sound of Lelia’s muffled sob behind her. In these horrible moments, she had forgotten her daughter was there.

“Missus,” Sarah said quickly, “I’se sorry ’bout that blood. My head was bleedin’ las’ night from where I itched it, an’ I didn’t know it. It’s the worse thing I ever done since I been washin’. You know you been washin’ with me all this time, an’ ain’t nothin’ like this happen before. I own up when I done wrong.” Sarah took a deep, trembling breath. “But you ain’t got no call to talk to me like this in front of my li’l girl. You got no call.”

Mrs. Wainwright’s eyes narrowed as she stared at Sarah with disbelief. “What did you—”

“Axe yo’self how you would feel if I was you and you was me,” Sarah said. “White or colored, you got young’uns, too, an’ you know that ain’t right.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Sarah saw the woman’s hand lash toward her, and Sarah caught her tiny wrist before her palm could reach her face. Sarah was
not
going to allow Lelia to see her mother’s face slapped by this white woman, even if it meant going to jail. Sarah was strong enough to break Mrs. Wainwright’s wrist in two if she wanted to; and from Mrs. Wainwright’s eyes, she must have known that, too.

A man’s voice came from one of the upstairs windows. “Elise … ? What’s wrong?”

“Get your goddamn hands off me,” the woman said, spittle flying from her mouth. Then she turned over her shoulder to shout for her husband, and Sarah instantly dropped the woman’s shaking wrist. Leaving the pile of spilled-over clothes on the porch, Sarah walked quickly to her cart, took the rope she pulled it by, and began tugging her daughter away from the house. She was actually
fleeing
, she realized. Just like a criminal.

She could never come near this house again, she knew. She had been making at least six dollars a month washing clothes for the Wainwrights; through her own stupidity, she had just lost a quarter of her income, and with winter right around the corner. Despite her efforts to keep her emotions hidden for Lelia’s sake, Sarah felt herself sobbing in a way she hadn’t since Moses died. She could barely see through her tears.

“Mama, don’t cry,” Lelia begged after a moment, swallowing back her own tears for her mother’s sake. “That’s a stupid lady. You don’t need her stinky clothes nohow.”

This time, crossing the huge bridge to go back toward home, Lelia didn’t sing a peep as the cart bumped across the cracks.

Sarah almost decided she wanted to go straight home, but as she hurried along Chestnut Street and approached Leffingwell, every step she took seemed to pull her closer to St. Paul A.M.E. Church. She’d had enough money to ride a streetcar up to the bridge on her way to Mrs. Wainwright’s, but without her pay she didn’t have enough to ride back, so she had no choice but to walk. Instead of feeling tired after walking more than twenty blocks just since crossing the bridge, Sarah felt herself waking up. She needed something at church today. She couldn’t put what she needed into words, but the need was as real as the hot breath wheezing through her lungs. It wouldn’t matter if her face was puffy from tears or if she was winded and sweating when she walked through those doors, she decided. She was going to church exactly as she’d planned.

When Sarah passed within a block of the grand stone structure of Union Station on Eighteenth Street, which was already hissing and clanging with life from arriving and departing trains, Sarah knew she had only about eight blocks more to go. Her face set in determination, she ignored the cramp in her arm from pulling Lelia behind her and walked faster, passing piles of barrels and large sacks on the sidewalk awaiting delivery, nodding at the colored hostlers tending the horses who pulled dray wagons and trolley cars along the city’s streets, and avoiding muddy puddles that had gathered at dips in the road. Lelia, who was ordinarily full of excited observations during journeys through the city, remained noticeably silent.