The Black Rose (24 page)

All night long, as Sarah thanked God she and Lelia still had their lives and a roof above their heads, she worried about her friend and prayed for her safety. After so many years of friendship, why couldn’t she have just accepted Etta’s apology?

Sarah never saw Etta again.

Chapter Twelve

SPRING 1902

(SIX YEARS LATER)

“Lemme see, Mama,” Lelia said, lifting Sarah’s chin with her hand so she could study Sarah’s hairline as she did each morning. Sarah had to look
up
at Lelia. No doubt because of Moses’ influence in her blood, Lelia now stood four or five inches taller than her mother. At sixteen, Lelia was becoming stately, growing out of the gangly limbs that had troubled her so much when her growth spurt first began. She looked like a woman, all right, but Sarah knew better; Lela was still as much a child as ever, in some ways.

Lela washed clothes with Sarah to fulfill her obligations so she could keep the extra room to herself, but that hadn’t taught her a bit of independence, as far as Sarah could tell. Lela had no fondness for working around the house; she wanted her food cooked for her, her clothes mended, her hair combed. Sarah was amazed by Lela’s lack of maturity; her daughter needed constant reminders to complete her chores and tasks. The womanchild who was her daughter made Sarah marvel at the idea that women had routinely married long before Lela’s age when she was growing up. Why, Lela was no more ready to marry than she or Lou would have been at ten! Lela was fascinated by the menfolk, all right, but Sarah didn’t think her easily impressed daughter had nearly enough common sense even to begin supervised courting, which she’d been begging to do since she first started attending Sumner High School. She was likely to attach her heart to the first fool who beckoned her, Sarah thought.

Maybe next year, Sarah always told her. But the truth was, she didn’t want Lela’s immature heart swept away by any young man, not yet. Lela was going to college, and that was that. In college, Lela could meet a man of real standing, not these little pups with few prospects to improve their lives, or hers. Lela had never experienced
real
hardship, not like she and Moses had faced, and Sarah seriously doubted that her daughter had any talent for it.

Watching her daughter’s face that morning, Sarah saw the telltale pity and concern in Lelia’s eyes as she gazed at the frayed hairs at Sarah’s temples. “Worse?” Sarah asked her. There was a time she might have said
worser
, but her grammar lessons at night school hadn’t been completely wasted on her. Words like
ain’t
still felt as comfortable as old shoes, and Sarah doubted she’d ever really learn to say
isn’t
or
aren’t
except by reminding herself first. Attending classes so sporadically, she probably still couldn’t boast much more than a third-grade education, she thought. But she could read the
St. Louis Argus
every week to follow social events and news from the Negro community, and that was better than where she’d been.

Lela shrugged. “A little worse. But it’s not too bad, Mama.”

“That’s a lie and you know it, girl. Now go on to school ’fore you’re late.”

Lela grinned, and her face looked so lovely that the minor irritations that had been growing between them as Lela got older melted from Sarah’s mind, and she gave her daughter a lingering hug. They had their arguments, all right, but Sarah loved this girl like she hadn’t known she could love anyone. Maybe it was good Lela was still so childish, because it would be a few more years before she had her own life and family.

Sixteen! Could it really be?

Once Sarah was alone with her work, her mind went back to her other troubles, which occupied her thoughts day and night. For the first time in a long time, it wasn’t rent money or loads of wash that concerned Sarah. This time it was her hair.

Sarah’s hair and scalp had given her small degrees of grief almost as long as she could remember—and even now, her memory of accidentally bloodying her prize customer’s tablecloth still made her cringe—but it was only with the arrival of the new century that Sarah’s misery had begun to take over her life.

First, as always, there was the itching. Each night as she tried to sleep, she felt as if the chinch bugs she’d hated so much as a child were crawling beneath her scalp, leaving trails of stinging fire. When she scratched at one spot, the fire moved to another, then came back with renewed pain aggravated by the rawness from her scratching. The back of her head was the worst, to the point where she could sleep comfortably only on her stomach. When her itching woke her up, she scratched as gently as she could, but she could steadily feel her tender skin giving way until her fingertips grew moist with familiar spots of blood. She tried to let the thin scabs heal over time, even sleeping with her hands wrapped in rags to discourage the scratching, but by morning she often discovered that she’d wriggled one of her hands free and scratched herself sore while she’d slept. Sometimes she found thin pricks of blood on her pillowcase. More often she found the dried evidence beneath her nails.

She didn’t itch only at night, but that was the one time she wasn’t preoccupied with the business of her life, so it always seemed worse then. Sometimes, no matter what the time, she bundled herself up, climbed out of bed, and went to the kitchen to heat a pot of water so she could soak her head and massage soapsuds through her hair and scalp; warm water gave her small relief, and she hoped fervently that keeping her scalp clean would stop the itching. But it never did for long. More often, the latenight washings gave Sarah a runny nose and sore throat from going to bed with wet hair, especially when it was cold.

Even the rod wax Etta had introduced her to, which Sarah now bought for herself at the pharmacy not far from her house (there, it was labeled
petroleum jelly
instead), didn’t fulfill her hopes for her itching scalp. Sarah had believed she was itching simply because her scalp was
dry
, so she’d hoped the rod wax would provide much-needed oil. But although Sarah had been using rod wax and a hot fork or hot cloth for years to make her and Lela’s hair less bushy and easier to braid, it did not help the itching.

Neither did lanolin, nor honey, nor oil from chamomile flowers, nor any number of remedies Sarah used to try to ease her suffering. Sarah and Lela began mixing her purchases together in a bowl in the kitchen, hoping they would luck into a combination that would be more powerful than any of the other ingredients alone, but all they’d made so far was a mess. Her scalp itched on.

To make things worse, Sarah now faced a new horror with her hair: It was falling out. Her hair had never been long, growing with a strawlike spikiness that was hard to pull into a ribbon or rubber band the way Lela wore hers after it had been softened and heated. But lately Sarah’s hair looked more blunt than ever. Now, when she ran her hand through her hair, wiry strands of it came out easily on her fingers. She could feel coin-size patches of bare scalp on the spots that itched the worst. And when she glanced at herself in a mirror, which was rare, she saw how drastically her hair had thinned at her temples, drawing high away from her face.

Sarah could barely recognize herself. She had never considered herself
pretty
, not in the way Etta had looked so delicate and comely, because the hardship of Sarah’s life had always made the notion of delicacy somewhat of a mystery to her; besides, she was just a little thick in her middle, a little too wide in the face, and a little too sluggish in her gait to draw gazes from the sort of striking, fine-featured colored men she noticed on St. Louis’s streets, walking with breezy confidence. Sarah didn’t know what sort of women those men pursued, but she knew it had never been
her
.

And she was older now, too; she couldn’t forget that. The sassy, slender fourteen-year-old Moses had fallen in love with was a memory nearly as shadowy as her Delta cabin and her long-dead parents. Moses had been twice the man the ones who paid attention to Sarah these days were; grimy laborers with missing teeth, polite widowers with gray hair and frail bones she met at church, and crude-looking roustabouts who swarmed the levee, jockeying for any glance from someone of the female sex. Nearing thirty-five, almost past childbearing age, Sarah had begun seeing herself as she was sure the outside world did—matronly and staid—and she was just grateful she still had a reasonably high bustline and she hadn’t let her face fall prey to the ugly creases that so many women her age wore from too many frowns and too little affection.

But this was different. Week by week, month by month, as Sarah’s hair rebelled against her and became thinner and patchier, she watched herself growing slowly more hideous, less like a woman at all. Sadie and Lela constantly tried to reassure her that she looked fine as ever, but Sarah knew she’d be a fool to believe them. They were either blind or liars, she decided, and they might even be both. As much as she tried to ignore it, her vanishing hair began to touch a misery in her soul that felt like a bottomless well.

Nappy-head country pickaninny
.

She could hear the mean-spirited taunt as clear as yesterday whenever she glanced at herself in a mirror. Hadn’t even her beloved Miss Brown, who had taught her much more about washing as a business than even the courses she’d taken at night school (and who, Louvenia had written to her, had died suddenly last winter), told her pointedly once that she looked like a little monkey?
Like you been dragged headfirst through a brier patch
.

Ugly, awful words. But true, every one of them. These days, anyway.

In Sarah’s mind, it was bad enough her female organs had been untouched, except by her own hand, in the fourteen years since Moses had died. (She’d discovered, quite by accident, that residual rod wax had a very pleasant slippery effect on her fingers when she ventured to rub them between her thighs.) She’d once felt like a fountain of passion, but now she felt dried, shriveled, and useless. She’d loved Moses, and felt his gazes from heaven every single day, but she’d never intended to keep her body sacred to him. After the first two years of shock and grief, she’d hoped to find another worthy man to marry. But Sadie always complained that Sarah suffered too much from the memory of Moses’ good qualities—his hard work, his sly wit, and his serious-mindedness about political ideas—and Sarah had met no man yet who seemed even remotely cut from the same cloth. Sadie had tried her best to interest Sarah in her cousin, a well-built man named John who worked at a brick kiln in East St. Louis, but Sarah could barely talk to the man for the stink of whiskey on his breath.

Still, part of her, at least, had taken for granted that
if
a suitable man passed her way, she could catch his eye. No more. Now, if anything, Sarah felt herself wanting to cringe and hide from the gazes of men, strangers and neighbors alike. No matter how hot it was, she rarely left her house with her head uncovered anymore. She had a collection of white and red kerchiefs she kept clean so dirt wouldn’t aggravate her scalp, but even when she wore head-wraps, Sarah felt naked to scrutiny, believing everyone must surely know what she was hiding beneath them.

One day, however, she took off her kerchief because it was damp with perspiration and the itching had become unbearable. Besides, she was hanging freshly washed clothes in her backyard, with a fence and tall papaw shrubs leaving her only slightly visible from the sidewalk that passed behind her house. Sarah rarely paid mind to anyone who passed her while she was working, unless they called out to her. But that day, a young man’s voice caught her ear. She was hanging a bedsheet, and she noticed the candy-sweet, lulling voice of a stranger somewhere behind her. He was keeping his voice low, probably deliberately, Sarah thought. He couldn’t be more than a few yards away, hidden behind the bush.

“… as pretty as you should have a beau. Don’t you know that?”

A giggle. “You don’t really think I’m pretty.”

That was Lela! And who was this man talking to her who sounded like he was grown, in his twenties? Sarah bit her lip, fuming.

“Tell you what, if I put you on my arm and brought you down to the Silver Dollar, where I play, there wouldn’t be a nigger in there who wouldn’t wish he was in my shoes. You ever heard any ragtime?”

The Silver Dollar? Was this a musician? Where the hell had Lela met a musician?

“Oh, I like it fine,” Lela’s voice said, purring.

“Well, you ain’t heard rag ’til you’ve heard me play, an’ I can’t think of nothing sweeter than a dance with you. Now, where do you live at? Why don’t you march me right on in so’s I can meet your mama and daddy?”

“Not-uh,” Lela said, the purr gone. She sounded closer to her age again. “I can’t do that. I’m not allowed.”

“Are you allowed to do this?” the man said in a throaty voice, and then there was silence.

Sarah forgot the bedsheet, casting it to the top of her pile, and whirled around to see what that disturbing silence meant. Over the tall bush, she could see the top of a man’s black derby, angled downward.
Does he think this child is one o’ his loose little Chestnut Valley tramps? He better think again
, Sarah thought, her face set in anger. She began striding toward the fence, her feet crunching in the grass. Just then, as if he sensed her approach, the man’s hat popped up again.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“I can’t do that, Johnny,” Lela hissed. “Someone might see… .”

His voice grew more hushed, urgent. “Who’s gonna see? Ain’t nobody ’round here but that baldhead washerwoman over the fence. She don’t know you, does she?”

Sarah’s heart rocked to a halt in her chest.
Baldhead washerwoman
.

There was another silence, then: “No, I don’t know her, but …”

Crazily, Sarah was suddenly convinced she must have mistaken someone else’s voice for her daughter’s. That would explain the musician, wouldn’t it? But she’d been so sure! Did another girl really sound so much like Lela? She
had
to, because—