The Black Rose (28 page)

Then, slowly, another image surfaced: Alex hugging her and Lou over the grave site, looking so tall in Papa’s hat, betraying no evidence of tears because he was trying so hard to show his sisters that he was man enough to provide for them. Oh, yes, she remembered that!

Today, news of Alex’s death seemed far away and long ago, as if it had nothing to do with her or that family of dazed children huddled over their parents’ graves. And there would be no hug between her and Lou to mourn Alex, either. That, in some ways, hurt Sarah almost as much as the passing of her brother, her Papa’s only son. Almost.

Sarah sighed from her deepest places, but she still didn’t shed any tears.

Her thoughts were interrupted when she felt Lelia wrap her arms around her neck from behind, leaning close to her. Lelia stayed there, hugging her mother’s neck, for a long, comforting minute, perhaps even two. She didn’t say anything, probably because she was old enough to understand that she didn’t need to. Sarah grasped her daughter’s hand, squeezing tight. In that instant, Sarah was so grateful to have Lela with her that her entire frame gave a violent shudder.

“It’s all right, Mama,” Lela said softly, at last. “I’ll go mail the letter for you. I could’ve written it, too, if you wanted.”

Sarah shook her head. She almost said,
Mama would’ve wanted me to do
it my own self
, but she didn’t. Lela wouldn’t understand that, and she couldn’t even begin to explain.

That night, in the midst of her sadness, Sarah had the most vivid dream of her life.

In her dream, she was standing near her family’s cabin in Delta, kneedeep in crabgrass, alongside the rutted muddy roads she’d traveled so often as a child. She even thought she could smell the sweet scent of elderberries in her nostrils, and hear the currents of the Mississippi River rushing just beyond the knoll behind the cabin, the way it had before her parents died.
The river ain’t changed course yet,
she thought to herself with amazement, forgetting she was dreaming.

As she gazed toward her cabin, her father suddenly appeared in his rocking chair, gazing toward the sky. Then Mama and Alex were there, too, sitting on the wooden step beside him, telling each other stories as they swatted flies from their faces. Sarah wanted to go hear their stories, but every time she took a step toward them, she felt herself drawing farther away, and a mist began to float in front of the cabin, obscuring their faces.

“Papa!” Sarah shouted.

“Right here, Li’l Bit,” her father yelled back, sounding as if he were calling to her from a distant part of a cotton field the way croppers used to shout to each other on the wind to carry their voices.
Calling the wind
, Papa had called it. Sarah could barely hear him. She wanted to tell him to speak more loudly, but then he called out again, faintly: “Go on, now, Sarah. It’s time!”

Yes, Sarah realized, Papa was right. It
was
time.

Then, as much as Sarah wanted to join her family at the cabin, she found herself turning away from them, walking the familiar path toward the shallow bathing creek. This was why she had come, she realized.

A black-skinned man was sitting naked in the creek, his arms folded around his knees. He looked as tall as Moses, but also much broader, built with thick, solid muscles across his chest and arms. His bald head gleamed. In fact, his whole
body
seemed to glisten, either from the creek’s water or his own perspiration. He was beautiful. Sarah had never attached the word
beautiful
to a man, but this one was. His skin was the color of midnight. She felt her body glowing warm, drawn to this dark man she realized must certainly be an African.

The man raised his hand, beckoning her slowly with one finger. At first, startled, Sarah shook her head. She couldn’t go to him!

What are you afraid of?
he asked her, except that he somehow spoke to her without moving his lips. His white teeth were shining at her from his beautiful black face. His teeth were nearly blinding. Suddenly Sarah couldn’t think of a thing she was afraid of, not a single thing. Tentatively Sarah took a step toward the creek—and suddenly the creek drew right up to her and she was standing on the bank. Here, standing over the clear water, she could see the man’s naked manhood, and her face grew warm, too.

“I know what you seek,” the man said, and this time he
did
speak aloud.

“How do you know?” she asked him. Her own voice sounded melodic to her.

“You told me,” he said.

Sarah knelt alongside the creek and let her hand slip into the cool water. Sure enough, she felt her hand begin to tingle, and the tingle traveled throughout her entire frame. She shuddered, grateful, relieved, ecstatic. She longed to dive in beside the African and luxuriate in the water with him, but she didn’t dare leave the bank. Sarah realized she could no longer see the features of the man’s face, only his mesmerizing smile. She had never seen teeth so perfect.

“This is for you, my princess,” the man said, and he held between his fingers the thorny stem of a rose. But Sarah had never seen a rose like this one; unlike the red and yellow roses Lou used to grow in Vicksburg to decorate her table, this one was shiny and a deep violet color, almost black. Yes, she realized with wonder, it
was
black. It gleamed like the man’s skin.

The mere sight of the extraordinary rose brought tears to Sarah’s eyes.

“Look around you,” the man told her. His voice was brother, father, lover. “Look all around you, Sarah.”

So she did. She lifted her eyes, and her family’s little cabin was gone. Instead, stretching as far as she could see, there was a field of roses in full bloom, all of them as black as the one in the African man’s hand. They swayed gently in rolling waves, a black ocean, their lovely buds swollen open toward the sky. There must have been thousands! More than Sarah could begin to count.

“Where did they come from?” Sarah asked the man, amazed.

“Come from?” The man laughed, extending the single rose in his hand toward her. “Where do you think they come from? They’ve always been here.”

But I’ve never seen all these flowers here
, Sarah thought in her dream, puzzled.
There was only cotton in this field before. How come I ain’t never
seen them?

Then, suddenly, Sarah was awake. The last thing she remembered was taking the stem to raise the flower to her nose and smell it. But then she’d pricked her finger, and the sharp sensation had awakened her with a gasp and a start.

Inexplicably, she was only in her bedroom, and a muted morning light was shining through her curtains, across her bed. Sarah’s heart was racing from a quenching exhilaration instead of the awful grief she’d gone to bed with. Feeling groggy, she looked at her hand and blinked rapidly, honestly expecting to find the strange rose in her palm. But it was not there. No prick on her fingertip, either.

“Course not,” she said aloud, her voice scratchy. “It was jus’ a dream. But they were growin’ everywhere, jus’ growin’ so pretty an’ tall… .”

Her words sounded like nonsense to her ears, spoken in the delirium that comes from dreams. But even after she was wide awake and working, Sarah kept remembering the startling image of that lovely black rose in the hand of the African man. All day long it flitted back to her mind and made her smile.

Chapter Fifteen

OCTOBER 1904

THREE MONTHS LATER

“You listen to this,” Sarah said as she and Lelia made their way from the market with baskets of fruit and dried goods. She began to read from the newspaper in her hand. “Her name is Madam Mary McLeod Bethune, she’s down in Florida, and she just opened her own school … the Day-tona Normal and In-dus-trial In-sti-tute for Girls …” she read, hesitating with the more difficult words as she always did.

The fall wind whipped Lelia’s scarf around her face. “Mama, I’ll finish reading that to you when we get home. You’re going to run into someone if you don’t look where you’re going.”

“Just hush,” Sarah said, enthralled. The headline
NEGRO WOMAN
OPENS OWN SCHOOL
had caught her eye, and she was too excited to wait three more blocks. “See here? She opened that school with a dollar and fifty cents and five students. And she raises money selling sweet-potato pies! You just imagine that, Lelia. After you go on to college next year, you could start your own school someday, too. I’m puttin’ this newspaper right up on the Wish Board.”

But Sarah’s excitement was forgotten as soon as their house was in sight. Her feet stumbled to a halt, and Lelia stood frozen beside her. Their front door was wide open, and even from where they stood, Sarah could see through the doorway that something inside was amiss. One of her pine chairs was overturned.

“Somebody been in the house!” Lelia gasped, holding tight to Sarah’s arm.

Sarah’s heart galloped. She dropped her basket to the ground, unaware of the apples rolling around her feet on the sidewalk. Her mind had been stripped of everything except one thought:
Lelia’s college money!

“St-stay here, Lelia …” Sarah said, pulling herself free.

Despite Lelia’s pleas, Sarah rushed up the steps to the front porch and ran through the open doorway. As she’d feared, the front room was in disarray; small items, including her clock, had been knocked from the fireplace, and there were newspapers strewn on the floor. Sarah didn’t even glance toward her kitchen. Instead she ran straight to her bedroom.

Her father’s framed photograph was on the floor, the glass cracked. Her mattress had been pulled askew. And all of the drawers of her desk were open—including the one where she kept her mason jar. With a whimpered prayer, hoping for a miracle, Sarah peered inside the drawer to see if the money had somehow been kept safe from the thieves’ eyes.

It was simply gone. No money, no jar. Nothing.

The room seemed to wheel around Sarah, nearly making her lose her balance. She leaned on the desk for support, breathing hard, trying to make some sense of it. They had not been gone even an hour, and the money had been here when they left. She had counted it only the night before, as she sometimes did to raise her spirits; she’d had exactly three hundred dollars. They’d gone without clothes, without treats, without leisure, so she could save that money. That would have been enough money to buy a house of her own, or enough to buy a piano and suites of furniture for every room, or enough to buy her own horse and buggy. She could have used that money in countless ways, but it had always been set aside for only one thing—so Lelia could go to college. That was all Sarah had been working for since she’d brought Lelia to St. Louis.

Now it was gone. Someone had come into Sarah’s home and stolen her heart. Her violated house no longer seemed to belong to her. Her life no longer belonged to her. Sarah was too stricken, shocked, and despairing even to cry. She stood stock-still in her bedroom for several minutes, listening to her labored breathing, wondering when she would awaken from this cruel, unexpected nightmare.

“Mama?” Sarah barely heard Lelia’s voice when her daughter ventured into the room. “Who would do this, Mama? Wh-who would do something like this?” Lelia kept repeating as she walked through their house, gazing at the intruder’s careless damage. Her eyes were also free of tears, but they were bloodred. “I d-didn’t know people did this.”

Sarah felt her insides heaving, and she ran for the back door. As soon as she was standing over the grass in her backyard, she vomited. Hot claws raked through her trembling body.

She felt Lelia stroking her back. “Mama, don’t you worry. It’s all right, hear? We don’t need that money. I’ll just wait and go to school when it’s saved up again, or maybe I’ll marry and I won’t need to go at all. We’ll be fine, Mama. You and me both, we’ll be just fine.”

Lelia’s cheerful encouragement sounded painfully naive to Sarah’s ear, and she retched again. Didn’t Lelia understand? If something happened to Sarah tomorrow—if she got kicked by a horse, if she slipped and hit her head, if she choked on her food, if the Lord called her home while she slept—Lelia would have
nothing
. Sarah wouldn’t leave her daughter anything more than Moses had been able to leave her when he was killed, or any more than her own parents had been able to leave when Yellow Jack took them.
Mosquitoes. They’re sayin’ in the papers how the fever ain’t carried
by nothin’ but those li’l ol’ mosquitoes. My mama and papa didn’t live long
enough to give me nothin’ ’cause of damned mosquitoes. And now it’s the same
with me.

“Mama, it’s all right. Stop shaking. It’s all right,” Lelia said soothingly. “I don’t care anything about that money. I don’t care one whit.”

Even Lelia’s lies couldn’t make Sarah’s shaking go away.

For the first few days, Sarah avoided even Sadie and Rosetta, since her two best friends were among the barest few people who’d even known the money was in the house. Together she and Lelia made a list of everyone they could think of who might have known—people from church, people from school, people who lived on their street—and they could not find a single suspect they believed could actually have done such a thing.

“After this, I’ve gotten so I’m thinkin’ I better lock my door when I leave my house. But my door in back ain’t got no locks nohow,” Rosetta said, shaking her head. “ ’Fore long, I guess we’ll all be locked up tight like the whole street’s nothin’ but a row o’ prison cells.”

Sarah never found out who took the money.

But not even a week after the theft, another shock made Sarah nearly forget their loss. She and Lelia were washing in the kitchen in a despondent silence. Out of the corner of her eye, Sarah saw Lelia reach across the stove. The next thing she saw was a startling flash of flame, and suddenly the sleeve of Lelia’s dress was on fire.

Lelia shrieked, flapping her arm in the air to try to extinguish the flames. Instead the fire seemed to celebrate, growing brighter.
“Mama!”