The Black Rose (26 page)

“A-men,” Rosetta said.

“That’s the truth,” Sadie said.

“My daddy says he’s an Uncle Tom,” Hazel spoke up in her prim, practiced way, breaking up their reverie. Her father was a highly respected schoolteacher at Sumner, Lela’s former accounting teacher, who had a reputation as a radical.

“Well, I met your daddy, and he’s a right smart man, Hazel,” Sarah said, vowing to keep her temper although she found Hazel’s statement offensive and inappropriate, “so I ain’t gonna say nothin’ against him. But if y’all didn’t come to hear Booker T. Washington, you should’ve stayed home.” It was her end-of-subject voice, which Lela knew better than to argue with.

“Amen,” Rosetta said again. Then she grimaced, scratching herself beneath her Sunday hat, which she was wearing a day early in honor of Dr. Washington’s visit. “Ooh, Sarah, this sun is ’bout to tear my head up. I thought that Poro was helpin’, but not today. You itchin’ too?”

For the first time, Sarah realized she’d been so excited that she hadn’t thought about her head once all day. A month ago she’d heard women at church raving about a product called Poro Wonderful Hair Grower being sold by a woman right in St. Louis who advertised in the papers, a former washerwoman named Miss Annie T. Malone. In fact, Sarah had begun noticing more and more ads for hair products, but she dismissed them when they disappointed her. Would Poro be different? Sarah’s own efforts to make an itch reliever with Lela weren’t working, so she’d decided to try the Poro, applying the thick, slippery substance to her scalp each morning.
Was
the itching improving? Sometimes she thought so, but she couldn’t be sure. Her hair wasn’t growing back, though; that much was certain. As usual, Sarah’s patchwork of hair was covered in a scarf, and her scalp was perspiring in the eighty-degree summer sun.

“Ain’t nothin’ troublin’ me today, Rosetta,” Sarah said, and she meant it. Her mind was in a fever of anticipation. Most of it, she was sure, was because of Dr. Washington’s appearance, and some of it was the hum of the fair itself, with its smells and noises and thronging people. Everyone seemed to be carrying those new little box-shaped Kodak cameras to take photographs, and Sarah understood why. So many sights! The grass on the grounds was greener and more lush than any she could remember seeing, the water in the fountain was sparkling like liquid diamonds, not like the usual brown sludge that passed for water in St. Louis, and the buildings that had been constructed for the fair were so exquisite that it was hard to imagine they’d all been built in three short years. Even the food at the fair was odd; she stared at fairgoers eating tube-shaped sandwiches billed as
hot
dogs
and licking ice cream from edible cones.

But there was also something else that crackled in the air, something that felt very much like magic. Whatever it was, Sarah felt a bounce in her step she hadn’t enjoyed in years, making her weave through the crowd as purposefully as a hound following a scent in the underbrush. The rest of her party had to walk fast to keep up with her, protesting her pace.

After asking directions from one of the fair’s uniformed Jefferson Guardsmen and hurrying past the magnificent statues in the sprawling Plaza of St. Louis, then around the edges of the huge man-made lagoon named the Grand Basin, they saw Festival Hall. Both fatigue and wonderment stopped them as they neared the great hall, which stood before them like a majestic palace from a foreign land, with its columns, statues, and ornate shapes carved into its domed exterior. The dome gleamed brightly in gold leaf, burning like a miniature sun. The gold was mesmerizing.

“It looks like something from a dream,” Sadie murmured, wide-eyed.

“This
mus’
be a dream. They lettin’ a colored man speak in there?” Hazel asked dubiously, shielding her eyes from the glare. “What about the Colored Pavilion?”

“Come on, y’all. We’re ’bout to be late,” Sarah said. She’d caught her breath, and now it was time to keep going. She wanted to be close enough to
hear
the man, after all. She was sure she would be more dazzled by what was waiting inside than by anything she could see now.

Inside, the vast hall splintered into several directions, and Sarah was about to ask another uniformed officer where the address would take place when she noticed a stream of well-dressed Negroes making their way toward open double doors she guessed led to an auditorium. Motioning to the others, Sarah followed the group, which began to grow larger in number until they were in the midst of at least two hundred Negroes simply trying to make their way inside. “Is this where Dr. Booker T. Washington is gonna speak?” Sarah asked a woman she recognized from St. Paul, Mrs. Jessie Robinson, whose husband, C.K. Robinson, was a well-known colored printer rumored to own his very own automobile. For an instant, noting Jessie Robinson’s wide, regal hat and matching pink chiffon dress, Sarah felt a pang of regret that she hadn’t had enough money to buy something she hadn’t already worn half to death for this affair. And why had she worn a scarf instead of a hat? But Sarah dismissed the thought when she saw the joyful recognition on Mrs. Robinson’s face; she’d taken no notice of Sarah’s plain clothes.

“Oh, yes, Mrs. McWilliams, this is the place, all right. What a thrill! Are you going to the National Association of Colored Women meeting later this month?
Mrs
. Washington is speaking.”

Sarah clearly heard Lela click her teeth in bored disgust behind her, but she ignored it and prayed her daughter’s insolence hadn’t reached Mrs. Robinson’s ears. “Yes, ma’am,” Sarah said. “I planned on ’em both. I sure hope they’ve got room inside for all these folks.”

“Room?” boomed a man’s voice from over Sarah’s shoulder. He was a pleasant-featured colored man in middle age with a thick mustache and a wide belly. “I hear there’s room enough to seat thirty-five hundred inside here. Even Booker T. Washington can’t fill that many seats!”

Sarah savored the feeling of fellowship with so many other Negroes who shared her excitement about the day; the sense of magic was even stronger in here, in the smiles of anticipation on the lips of the people surrounding her. As the crowd grew thicker by the door, Sarah realized this group had
power
. She and her friends were only washerwomen, but surely some of these Negroes, like the Robinsons, had education and their own businesses; and here they were together, all of them bound by their desire for uplift.

Sadie felt it, too, because she was bouncing on the balls of her feet beside Sarah. “Do you
believe
it, Sarah? We’re here. We’re sure enough here.”

We’re here
. Sarah knew Sadie meant only that they had finally made it to the auditorium, but in her mind it sounded as if her friend were talking about all members of the Negro race. Would she have imagined a day like this for Negroes when she was back in Delta? Or, for that matter, when she was living with Lou in Vicksburg?
Here
meant that they were no longer helpless and pitiful, that they had reached some sort of resting place. No, not a resting place—a
building
place, Sarah thought, and she felt such a tingle that her arms turned to gooseflesh. Sarah yearned to share her thoughts with her friend, but the ideas were too big and muddy in her head. She only squeezed Sadie’s arm and she didn’t let go.

The auditorium, as promised, was breathtaking. Sarah had never seen a room and a stage so big, designed with the same stately air as the building’s architecture. Walking inside, she felt as if she were being swallowed by the room, but she didn’t mind. Lela, intimidated, clasped her hand. “Look at all these people, Mama …” Lela whispered.

The room was large, all right, but the seats toward the front looked as if they had filled long ago, and the crowd spilled far past the middle rows, nearly to the back. There were mostly Negroes, but Sarah noted with surprise that there were a good number of whites here, too. Sarah motioned once again to her group, pointing toward a row of empty seats closest to them. The seats were much farther back than she’d hoped, but she realized that if they’d arrived any later they might not have found a place to sit at all.

“You’d think it was the president himself come to speak,” Sarah said, half to herself.

Soon a white man walked to the stage and said he would introduce the speaker, Booker T. Washington. Sarah ventured a glance down the row at her daughter, and she was glad to see that Lela’s spirited conversation with Hazel had come to a halt; her daughter looked riveted.

Despite very good acoustics, which made sound from the stage bounce throughout the room, the man’s voice sounded far-off and hollow, and Sarah scooted to the edge of her chair to try to hear him better. He spoke quickly, and Sarah heard only snatches of his words:
Founding principal of
Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Author of
Up from Slavery
. Founder of the
National Negro Business League. Honorary degree from Harvard University
.

Then, at long last, he called the name
Booker T. Washington
.

The applause began as a smattering, then grew louder in waves throughout the rows as a second man, with pale brown skin and small in stature, walked to the podium. His head was erect, and Sarah liked his deliberate strides; it was easy to tell he had taken the stage many times before today, and he knew it was a home that suited him well. A shiver of excitement made its way across Sarah’s neck. While the audience applauded, the man slipped his hands behind his back and stared toward the floor as if waiting for silence; yes, he was
commanding
them to be silent without speaking a word. Slowly the applause subsided.

When Booker T. Washington began to speak, his voice taking over the room, Sarah forgot everything else. The world, to her, had narrowed to only this man and the words that poured from his mouth in sweeping, dramatic cadences. He was speaking to her and her alone.

“I am sure there are those who thought the planning of this great fair was folly, who insisted a feat such as this could not be done in this great city,” Booker T. Washington said. “These are the same voices of pessimism who insist the races cannot live together, or that the Negro will always be cursed to subservience and poverty. But if a world can be built before your very eyes, how difficult is it to then envision something so small as a better way of life?”

Yes
, Sarah thought as gently as a sigh, and joined the audience in applauding him.

“Good people, the grandness of this fair brings to mind a story I told at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition in 1895, and it is no less true for this audience. My simple story is this: A ship lost at sea many days sighted a friendly vessel,” Booker T. Washington said, and his voice painted the lost ship in Sarah’s imagination so clearly she could see it tossing in the waves. “From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal: ‘Water, water, we die of thirst.’ ”

Yes
, Sarah thought again. She knew that feeling as well as she knew her own soul.

“The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ A second time the signal, ‘Water, water, send us water,’ ran up from the distressed vessel and was answered, ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket… .”

What good’s a bucket o’ seawater to folks who’s thirsty?
Sarah wondered, frustrated.

Booker T. Washington’s eyes seemed to sweep across the room before he finished, as if he meant to share his conclusion with each member of the audience personally. “And it came up full of
fresh
, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River,” he said, and repeated the rescuing ship’s instructions with a tremor in his voice: “
Cast down your bucket where you
are
.” He said it four times, five times, and Sarah felt herself trembling where she sat, moved to tears.

Booker T. Washington said many things to his audience that afternoon about education, self-reliance, farming, and family, but to Sarah the pearl of his message was in the image of that lost ship full of thirsty, dying crewmen, who’d been floating in enough fresh water to last beyond their lifetimes and hadn’t even known it was there.

Nearly two weeks later, meeting at St. Paul for the National Association of Colored Women, Sarah and her friends were still dazed and enthralled by the way the audience had leaped to its feet after Booker T. Washington’s speech, Negro and white alike, and how even whites had waited at the edge of the stage to try to shake his hand. Sarah had watched the well-wishers from the back of the auditorium with envy, wishing she could tell Dr. Washington herself how much she had appreciated his message. But how would she have even put her feelings into words?

Wonder what he feels like up on that stage
, she thought.
Makin’ folks feel
so good, like they’s standin’ in the presence of greatness
.

“The wife of Booker T. Washington must be somethin’, too,” Sarah said, checking her program. There were several delegates scheduled to speak that day, she noted as she glanced at the clusters of words, so she’d have a fairly long wait before she could hear Mrs. Margaret Murray Washington. “Imagine bein’ married to a man like
that
.”

Between her excitement over Booker T. Washington’s speech and her anticipation of his wife’s, Sarah’s head was so full that she could barely listen to the speakers who took the podium that afternoon. She didn’t even reach over to nudge Lela when she noticed her daughter’s head had slumped forward slightly, betraying that she had dozed to sleep. As soon as Mrs. Washington spoke, Sarah thought, she could take Lela home.

But first another speaker took the floor. The first thing Sarah noticed about the young woman who stood up in the front of the room was the thick, neat plaits across her scalp, which Sarah was sure had taken a long time to fix. Speaking in a clear, steady voice thick with the twang of her Southern upbringing, the woman said her name was Cornelia Brown. She was from a school named Mt. Miegs in Alabama, she said. “I agree with Sister Jackson’s very moving words about the growing problem of ragtime and coon music among our people,” she began, “but I wish to discuss a problem I believe is also as grave for Negro womanhood—and that is the problem of hair-wrapping.”