The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (28 page)

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And it’s all right if you get to feeling puny. Just go outside and get yourself some fresh air. Come on back when you’re feeling like yourself again. But come back. I’m counting on you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Remember this. No matter how I get to looking, I’m still Mama. I’ll be there the whole time telling you what to do. Now say it all back to me.” They did, and between the two of them, they got most of it right. I made them say it again.

That done, Mary and John pressed even closer to me, and we stayed like that, holding hands. Together we listened to the night sounds of crickets and locusts calling for their mates as prairie grass rustled in the wind.

I didn’t tell Mary and John that the baby hadn’t kicked for a few days. I didn’t tell them I’d been bleeding off and on. Saying anything more would only scare them worse. Scare me worse too. I had to buck them up. “You’re going to have a new brother or sister,” I said. “Won’t that be something fine?”

They nodded and I wondered if they heard the hollowness behind my words. “Mama?” John said.

“What?”

“Think we could get ourselves a boy this time?”

That made me smile. “We’ll see.”

I
got ready for the birthing after the children were asleep. John had gotten two buckets of water like I had told him and had put them on the kitchen table. The small butcher knife was clean, but I washed it anyway. In the bedroom, I hung a lantern from a nail on the wall and put the knife on top of the pine dresser beside the white porcelain basin. Before going to bed, Mary had crawled under my bed to get the basin, the one used only for afterbirth. Without me asking, she washed out the layers of white dust that had pooled in it.

Mary had also gotten out the soft cotton rags, stained from birthings, from my bottom dresser drawer. I had washed, ironed, and folded them into small squares after Emma’s birth two years ago. I put the rags beside the basin and as I did, I knew that this was the last time I’d ever need them.

It would be a comfort to have Isaac’s gold pocket watch with me. Its ticking would fill the quiet and I could count along with it. The watch had belonged to Isaac’s father, and inside the cover was a miniature of Mrs. DuPree and Isaac made when he was six months old or so. He wore a long white gown and sat on his mama’s lap—a young, thin, soft Mrs. DuPree what I had never known.

The pocket watch, like Isaac, had been with me through all my birthings. Isaac liked timing my pains; it gave him something to do when there was nothing to do but wait. But today the watch was with him. He always carried it when he left home, even to go to Al McKee’s. A man, Isaac believed, needed to have a precise awareness of time when he was conducting business.

Good Lord,
I thought,
I forgot to have Mary get my birthing gown.
It was in the bottom drawer of the dresser. Groaning, I bent down and ran my hand inside the drawer looking for it. Instead, my hand brushed against buttons. Like a blind woman, I traced the buttons to the broad lace collar that circled a neckline. It was my wedding dress, folded into a perfect square more than a foot tall. It’d been years since I’d last admired it; I couldn’t remember when. With care, I lifted it out of the drawer and put it on the bed.

I found my birthing gown pushed back into the far corner of the drawer. I shook it out and white dust flew everywhere, making me sneeze. I expected that to bring on a pain, but it didn’t.

I put the birthing gown to my nose. It smelled of soap and sunshine and grit. After each birth, I soaked it a day and a night to get out the worst of the stains. When I wore it for Mary, it scratched my skin so bad that I carried sores on my shoulder blades for a handful of days. But seven births later, the gown was soft from all the washings, even though faint brown stains still showed the birthing of every one of my children.

I put the gown on the bed beside my wedding dress. Taking a rag, I went to the kitchen and dipped it in a water bucket. Back in the bedroom, I got undressed.

The baby heaved as I washed between my legs. I gripped the bedpost and counted until I lost track.

When it was over, I put on the birthing gown and sat in the rocker. Rounder came into the room and with a grunt, settled down on the floor beside me.

“John’ll mind if he wakes up and finds you gone,” I said. “But I’m glad for the company.” He thumped his tail. “You’re a good dog. Should’ve named you Faithful.” And then I thought about Isaac being gone when I needed him home. I thought about his plans to leave us this winter, and how I’d be doing my own leaving too.

With my foot, I pushed the rocker back and forth, trying to ease the ache in my back. Things could go bad if Mary had to deliver the baby. She had a steady hand and a stout heart, but all the same, she was just a child. Grown women had been known to panic if a birthing went wrong. If something bad happened, it’d go rough on Mary. It’d be the kind of thing she’d never forget. Or forgive herself for.

Through watery eyes, I saw my wedding dress that I’d left on the bed. I got up, picked it up, and sat back down. I blew the thin layer of gray dust that coated it. The white scalloped lace collar was so pretty, I’d nearly forgotten. And it hadn’t yellowed at all. That would please Mama no end. She had made the lace.

My back throbbed. I shifted my weight some, grateful that the labor pains had stopped.
Everything is all right,
I told myself. The baby was waiting on Isaac.

I fingered the lace collar, following the scalloped edging. On the very first Saturday afternoon after Isaac had agreed to marry me, I had met Mama and Sue on the corner across the street from the Palmer Hotel. They laughed when they saw me coming. Like them, I had just gotten off work and I was nearly running with excitement, darting around knots of slow-moving people, the cloth handbag with my weekly pay in it pressed to my bosom. I smiled to think what Mrs. DuPree would do if she knew how I planned to spend the money. At the street corner, the three of us caught the trolley that carried us to Green’s Fine Fabrics. There we studied books of dress patterns and fingered bolts of material.

I wanted my wedding dress to be a light blue, and Sue thought I looked best in yellow. It was Mama what settled the matter. “You’ll want something dark for the train ride,” she said. “The soot will be something awful, going all that way.” After a while, the three of us settled on a plum-colored satin.

Every Sunday afternoon for five weeks we sewed in the front room of our two-bedroom rented house. Mama did the lace work while Sue worked the Singer machine making the skirt. I stitched by hand the bodice with its full, pleated sleeves and made the buttonholes that ran down the back. While we worked, we talked about that morning’s preaching, and who was in church and who wasn’t. We talked about who had the fanciest hat with the most feathers, and who was making eyes at who. We talked about the people at our jobs, and we talked about all of Sue’s suitors and how Paul Anders kept asking her to marry him. We talked about what I needed for my own kitchen. But the one thing we didn’t talk about was how far away I was going or how lonesome it’d be for those left behind.

On my wedding day—a Wednesday—Mama and Sue helped me get into my dress. “Just look at you,” Mama told me. “You’re as pretty as a picture.”

“Prettier,” Sue said.

They kissed me good-bye; we told each other again that we’d write every Sunday. Mama cried some, and then they went on to work at the hotel. That left just me and Dad in the kitchen, with neither of us having much to say. My traveling trunk filled with clothes, linens, dishes, and pans sat by the back door. I was too nervous to eat the breakfast I’d cooked, but Dad’s appetite was good and he ate in a hurry. After he mopped up the last of his eggs with a crust of bread, he left without saying a word and limped back to his bedroom. I washed up the dishes, wearing my apron to cover my dress. I got weepy thinking how it was the last time I’d wash Mama’s dishes. I was drying the last one when Dad came in wearing his Sunday suit, his gray hair combed. “What’re you looking at?” he said.

“Nothing.” I swallowed. Then, “You.”

“Isn’t this your wedding day?” I nodded, all at once smiling, happy, not minding his gruffness. I hadn’t figured on Dad coming to the wedding. He hadn’t wanted me to marry Isaac DuPree. He disapproved of me going off with a man he hadn’t met.

But on my wedding day Dad limped two blocks down to the main corner and hailed a horse cab to come to the house. “I’m not having my daughter meeting her groom with mud on her shoes,” he said while the driver loaded my trunk. “New, too, aren’t they?”

It was grand riding in that horse cab with Dad in his Sunday suit beside me. When we pulled up at the church, Isaac stood on the gravel sidewalk looking down the street like he expected me to be on foot. My breath caught as I watched him from the cab window. He wore his army uniform and was fresh shaved. He could have had any woman in Chicago. I could hardly believe he was willing to settle for me.

The cab driver opened the door, and when I got out, Isaac took a step back. It was like he didn’t know me in my satin dress, my waist pinched narrow by my corset, my face half covered by the wide-brimmed plum felt hat. The shock on his face showed that he had never thought of me in anything but patched-over dresses and aprons.

Isaac recovered enough of his wits to introduce himself to Dad, saying how pleased he was to finally meet the father of his bride. Dad only grunted. Then, still looking at me like he didn’t know me, Isaac offered his arm. “No,” Dad said. “She’s still mine.”

“Yes, sir,” Isaac said. “That she is.”

He followed us into the church. I felt his eyes on me, and the secret pleasure of it made heat rise to my cheeks. During the ceremony, with Dad and my brother Johnny nearby, Preacher Teller told me and Isaac to stay on Jesus’ path and to always look to the Lord in times of trouble.
I will,
I told myself. And then I heard the words “for better for worse, for richer for poorer” and “till death us do part,” and all I could think was,
Please, Lord, let death do the parting. Don’t let it be our bargain.

Now, sitting in my rocker, I touched the lace collar on my wedding dress. There were thirty-four pearl-shaped buttons that ran from the back of the collar clear down to the waist. Mama had paid for the buttons. They were her gift to me.

I wore the plum satin dress on the train. It had been a long trip; sitting together on the train as man and wife changed everything. We didn’t know what to say. There was no boardinghouse kitchen to sit in, no dishes to wash, nothing to help us talk. There was only the pleasure of our arms side by side, sharing the same armrest, our fingertips meeting by accident from time to time. But it was a pleasure so deep that there were moments when I was faint with wooziness.

The trip, a dusty journey with many stops and starts, took the day and the following night. We rode it sitting up, and we changed trains once in Omaha long after dark. On the first train, when we walked into the dining car, the other passengers stopped eating and stared. Maybe those white people were surprised that Negroes could afford the dining car. Or maybe they had never seen a Negro in an army uniform and his wife in such a fine dress. The man who took the diners to their tables gave us a peculiar look. He pursed his lips and pointed to the table closest to the kitchen. I didn’t think a thing of it, but when I saw the tight look on Isaac’s face, I said, “My, isn’t this something? Our food’ll be good and hot coming directly from the kitchen.” The tightness in Isaac’s face faded, and then he smiled some, making everything all right again.

We got to Sioux Falls as the sun was coming up, less than twenty-four hours since the wedding. The next train to Interior didn’t leave until late evening. Zeb Butler, from Isaac’s army days, met us with his buggy at the train station. Glad to see each other, Isaac and Zeb laughed and slapped each other’s backs. I stood off to the side, my black cloth purse in my gloved hands as the two of them joshed. There were white people everywhere on the station platform, and I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I made like I was taking in the sights.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Isaac had said it was the last big town east of the Missouri, and so I had pictured it the size of Chicago. But there wasn’t much to the station, only four tracks, and I didn’t see the first skyscraper anywhere, just low wooden buildings. There weren’t any Negroes either, other than us, and that gave me a feeling of uneasiness.

Zeb said something, Isaac laughed, and then he turned to me and took my arm. “Rachel,” he said to Zeb.

Zeb put his hand to his heart and bowed. “How do you do?” he said. He was older than Isaac; there was gray in his hair and he hadn’t shaved in four or five days. He was almost as dark as me. His belly hung over his belt, and I thought I smelled drink on him.

“My wife can’t wait to meet the bride,” Zeb told me as we started toward his horses and buggy, picking our way over the dirt road. He took my hand to help me up into the buggy, and I believed that he held it longer than what was needed. I sat in the front and waited as the men strapped my trunk and Isaac’s bag to the back of the buggy. Zeb Butler climbed up beside me then, and Isaac got in the backseat. I didn’t like how Zeb let the side of his leg rest beside mine. I tried to make myself small.

“Yep,” Zeb said after he cracked the reins and the buggy began to roll. “My wife wants to meet the woman that finally caught Isaac DuPree.”

That got me to wondering just how many others had tried.

The Butler house was on the edge of town, not all that far from the train station. It was a faint yellow, it wanted fresh paint, and the yard needed trimming. The house beside it was empty and boarded up. Iris Butler, thinner and taller than her husband, came out to the alley to greet us. Her apron, I saw, was fresh, and that cheered me. She hugged Isaac and then me. “You got yourself a wild one,” she whispered into my ear. “But you’ll tame him. Like I did Zeb.”