The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (15 page)

“What is it, Mama?” Liz said.

I went to the edge of the porch. The clouds were flat and stretched out, and along their bottom edges there was a faint orange glow. Isaac had said there was rain in the Black Hills. Maybe he was right; maybe it was coming this way. I shaded my eyes. The sun was as brassy as ever.

“Weather,” I said to the girls, fighting down a wave of hope. “‘Just weather.”

I went to the side porch and stepped down, startling the vulture. It hopped a few steps, its bold black eyes watching me. I hated vultures, and I clapped my hands to get rid of it. Giving me one last hard look, it stretched its wings, stuck out its breast, and beat the still air. It gave a skip and then took off, but only to the barn. It landed on the roof and looked back at me. My skin prickled.

The air was steamy, and my face was damp around the sides of my hair kerchief. Jerseybell, tethered in a patch of shade thrown by the house, moved her head slowly from side to side trying to shake away the flies. Slobber hung in thick strings from her mouth. I looked north. The sky was clear that way.

That was where Isaac was, and I was glad for it. It was better to have him gone than to face the uneasy feeling that stretched between us. We hadn’t had much to say to each other. Both of us, I believed, were still smarting from Mrs. Fills the Pipe’s visit. When I woke up that morning, Isaac was sitting on his side of the bed, his back to me as he pulled on his boots. I watched him, the ache in my heart coming back fresh. I saw Isaac in a new way. He was a man what hated Indians, and yet I believed he had laid with a squaw. He was a man what had turned his back on a child I believed might be his. There was all this and still he was Isaac DuPree. My husband. I reached out and put my fingertips on his back.

He tensed for a moment and then went back to his boots, grunting some as he worked the left one over his foot. “I’m moving cattle first thing, taking them some feed too,” he said. He didn’t look at me. “John and Mary’ll help. We’ll need a packed dinner.”

That meant Isaac was taking all four horses and the wagon. It also meant he’d be gone all day.

“All right.”

That was all we said.

On the porch, I looked north once again where the White River still had a trickle of water. I scanned the sky. It felt like a storm—the air was thick as if it held rain. I lifted my arms a little, my sides sticky. It might have felt like a storm, but that didn’t mean anything. The weather liked to tease. I remembered times when big splinters of lightning split open the sky, making the ground shake and roll from the thunder, sending the children crying to me. Curtains of rain would surround the ranch, and yet not a drop would come our way. Other times it would rain for days on end, making me and Isaac fret about the crops and root rot. Then from out of nowhere, right in the middle of a downpour, the sun would show itself, lifting our spirits, making us think that the crops might just be all right after all. But it would keep on raining, us worrying about rot, the sky bright with a rainbow.

All the same, the orange-tinted clouds off to the west raised my hopes. “Come on,” I said to the girls. “Those pans aren’t cleaning themselves.”

Back in the kitchen, me and Liz finished scraping the bread pans. I put some beans in my small pot to soak in the littlest amount of water possible. From the window, I saw how a shimmering haze had risen up from the earth, reminding me of Louisiana swamplands. I got a pot of mush going, and it didn’t take long before the hot cookstove turned the kitchen small and close. My feet swelled up, and I had to use the bootjack to get my boots off. The skin on my swollen toes had a peculiar shine to it, and that unsettled me. Horseflies found their way in through the open front door, and the girls got to crying from the bites that made their skin rise up into welts. I lit three smudge pots, and that helped drive the flies back some.

All that and I couldn’t keep from thinking about Isaac. I had aimed for a man with ambition, and I had gotten him. I had been willing to strike a bargain: a hundred and sixty acres for a chance to be his wife for a year. That year slid into fourteen. It happened because I closed my mind to the idea that an ambitious man cared mostly about what he wanted. I helped Isaac get his land, and I helped him keep it. Like putting Liz in the well; I was a part of that too. But Isaac wasn’t the only one what wanted something. I did too. Our children. Our wood house. Isaac himself. I had gotten what I had bargained for. It was too late to wish it had come about a different way.

I stirred the mush and poured a few teaspoons of water in it to keep it from sticking. I looked out the window. The clouds still glowed orange, but that wasn’t good enough. They needed to be dark. The whole sky needed to be black.

The water that Isaac brought home yesterday from Scenic was getting used up fast. Maybe he’d bring some back from the White River. Or maybe the cattle would drink the river dry, leaving nothing for us. Liz was in the parlor wiping dust from the windowsill. I wondered if she was worrying and hoping for rain the same way I was.

I snapped my dishcloth at the flies crawling over the countertop.

All at once a pushed-away memory rose up in my mind. I stared out the kitchen window as the memory took shape. The squaw and her half-breed boy came back the day after Isaac had sent them away. I had nearly forgotten that. When Isaac saw her coming back on the road, heading our way, he told me to stay by the barn. Cursing to himself, he got something from his knapsack—I couldn’t see what—but I saw the tight-pressed look on his face. Without another word, he went to meet her, and that scared me. I gripped the shovel with both hands and watched. Something was said; I couldn’t hear what. But not long after, she turned around and walked off, pulling her handcart with the boy sitting in it. I was so relieved that tears came to my eyes. I never saw her again. Or the boy. But six weeks later when Isaac bought his first head of cattle, he brought home only eighteen. That surprised me. On our train trip from Chicago to Interior he had talked about buying twenty, his eyes lit up just from the telling of it. Anything less, he had told me as we sat side by side on our cushioned train seats, would make him look like a greenhorn.

“What happened to the other two?” I had asked Isaac when he brought the herd home.

“Cost more than I figured,” he said, not meeting my eyes. I thought he was ashamed. I believed he was worried that I might think less of him, that I’d think he wasn’t a real rancher. I looked at my gold wedding band. That was where the money had gone. I took it off. “Here,” I said, holding it out.

“No. Put it back on. No wife of mine goes bare handed.”

I snapped my kitchen towel again at a cluster of flies, my wedding band flashing.

Isaac had given money to that squaw. That was what was in his knapsack; that was how he got rid of her. At the time I didn’t let myself think about it. Now it made me sick.

Under the kitchen table, Alise chattered as she played with her rag doll. Nearby, Emma was on her side, her thumb in her mouth, half asleep but fighting to keep her eyes open so she could watch her sister. Earlier she had been fussy, her gums suddenly sore and bright pink from teething. To ease her hurt, I had given her a teaspoon of children’s soothing syrup.

What else could Isaac have done? Take the squaw in? Have her live in the barn? Or take just the boy and expect me to raise him?
Don’t think about it,
I told myself. It happened a long time ago, long before Isaac knew me. Think about something else.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead, then sifted flour for soda biscuits. In a few months, I’d be grateful for the oven’s heat. A nervous chill swept through me. In a month, there’d be nothing to cook.

Don’t think about winter, either. Put your mind on your soda biscuits. Resolving to do that, I measured out the baking soda, the sugar, and the salt with measuring spoons instead of guessing. I spooned the batter onto the baking sheet, paying special mind to make sure that each biscuit would turn out the same size. I spaced them just right. I did all this as if I were new to cooking, as if I had not been cooking since I was six, Liz’s age.

How many biscuits,
I asked myself,
do you suppose you’ve made? Hundreds? No, more than that. More like thousands.
I’d probably made that many cookies too. Before the drought set in so hard, every Saturday I made two batches of cookies. I did that to please Isaac. He had a sweet tooth.

He got that from his mother. Mrs. DuPree loved her sweets. And didn’t it show, Trudy the housemaid was prone to pointing out. I could fill my kitchen clear to the ceiling with the cookies I used to bake at Mrs. DuPree’s boardinghouse. There, I baked cookies with sugary white icing and cookies with big fat raisins. I made molasses cookies, lemon cookies, and oatmeal cookies. Sometimes they were for the boarders, but most times they were for Mrs. DuPree. At Christmas they were for her friends. Cakes too. I baked chocolate cakes with vanilla icing, and pound cakes with just enough brandy to bring out the flavor.

I licked my lips, tasting it all. I put the sheet of soda biscuits in the cookstove and checked the heat. I recalled another hot and sticky day when I had baked two devil’s food cakes. I hadn’t been working for Mrs. DuPree all that long, maybe four or five months. It was 1896. I had just turned eighteen, and I was talking to myself about how mean Mrs. DuPree was for not letting me open the kitchen window to catch a bit of air.

An open window meant flies, and even with the house closed up, the flies were thick that day. Of course, flies were nothing new in Chicago, especially as close to the slaughterhouse district as we were. But that day the flies were a personal insult to Mrs. DuPree. She was entertaining. Her literary club, the Circle of Eight, was meeting that afternoon in the parlor. This meeting, though, was not the usual book discussion followed by coffee and one of my fancy desserts. Far from it. Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, writer and owner of Chicago’s Negro newspaper, was coming to talk about her recent travels to England.

As soon as the boarders had left that morning for work, I started in on making fresh bread and a spread of olives, nuts, and creamed cheese for tea sandwiches. That finished, I baked the Circle of Eight’s favorite: two devil’s food cakes, chocolate rich, with sprinkles of coconut on top. I was starting to ice the cakes when I heard Mrs. DuPree in the dining room just outside the kitchen door. She was talking to Trudy.

“Flies,” Mrs. DuPree said. “They’re the bane of my life. Today of all days. Why me?”

“Flies are the devil himself,” Trudy said.

Mrs. DuPree clicked her tongue in a disapproving way. Then, “Of all days. Trudy, I’m warning you. Do not let go of that fan, I don’t care how tired your arms get. I don’t want the first fly to even think about landing on Mrs. Barnett. Or on her plate. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I want it so the ladies see nothing but a wicker leaf fan floating in the air, keeping the flies off, keeping us cool. Do not even let us get close to perspiring.”

“Perspiring?” Trudy stumbled over the word.

There was another disapproving click of the tongue. “Sweating.”

This was my chance. I went to the kitchen door. “Mrs. DuPree, I’ll do the fanning. My arms are good and strong.”

“Your place is in the kitchen.”

I knew that, but that didn’t stop the disappointment. There was nothing more in this world that I wanted than to meet Ida B. Wells-Barnett. I admired her; every Negro alive admired her. Her newspaper columns were bold and blunt, and she wasn’t scared of anybody. Whenever there was a lynching, even in the Deep South, Mrs. Wells-Barnett was the first one there, searching for the truth with her notebook and pen. That was why she had gone to England. In London she spoke out against lynching—she had said so in her newspaper. She wanted to embarrass the people of America. She wanted to shame President Cleveland into punishing the killers.

If Mrs. Wells-Barnett could go to England, if she could face Southern white sheriffs, I could stand up to Mrs. DuPree.

“Please,” I said. “Could I just say hello to her? Tell her how me and my family read the
Conservator
every Sunday after dinner? Please, ma’am?”

“Most certainly not. Mrs. Barnett has been invited to speak to the Circle of Eight. She does not expect to mingle with the help.”

That stung.

Later that day, Rose Douglas, Mrs. DuPree’s cousin on her mother’s side, arrived first. Rose wasn’t a member of the Circle of Eight. Her husband was an uneducated bricklayer. On special occasions, though, Mrs. DuPree invited her to help serve. It was her way, Mrs. DuPree once told me, of allowing Rose to stay in touch with the finer things in life.

“Rose married down, darker too,” Mrs. DuPree had told me then. “Jim Douglas was nothing but a field hand fresh off the train from some plantation in South Carolina. He came here looking for a job; he had heard men were needed to build the World’s Fair. My aunt nearly died from the shame of it when Rose married him.” Mrs. DuPree sniffed. “I don’t even want to think how Rose met him.” Then she turned her eye on me and I could see what she was thinking. I was from a plantation. I was from the South. Worst of all, I was dark.

She said, “Your father . . . didn’t you say he came out of the fields? In Mississippi?”

I wanted to tell her that my mother had once been a housemaid. I wanted to say that my mother could read and write, and that my mother did not think she had married down when she married my father. Instead, I had said, “Louisiana. We’re from Louisiana.”

The Circle of Eight ladies arrived a few minutes early that day; most of them brought their mothers, aunts, or daughters as invited guests. Mrs. DuPree’s friends, members of Chicago’s high Negro society, were at least four generations removed from slavery. They were smooth and their voices were like music. Their gloved hands fluttered while they made parlor-room talk. Some of them had gone to what Mrs. DuPree called finishing schools. The ladies were proud of their husbands what were doctors, lawyers, or merchants. They were a cut above the rest of us, and I had overheard enough to know that the ladies didn’t approve of Southern Negroes. Southern Negroes’ grammar left something to be desired, and they shuffled their feet and bobbed their heads when in the presence of white people. The ladies did not appreciate Southern Negroes coming to Chicago and embarrassing them this way. But since they were there—and the ladies really wished they weren’t—it was their responsibility to set an uplifting example.