The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (15 page)

All things considered, her hair was holding up pretty well. They had already driven through two states, and the weather had been changeable. Still, she thought, I could touch up the roots a bit. Her nose was a little shiny too, so she dabbed it with the rose-scented powder from her compact. Roses always lifted Pearl’s spirits; she resolved to apply the powder every hour or so, to fight melancholy. After all, this trip ought to be a joyous occasion.

Benny frowned into the afternoon sun coming in through the windshield. Pearl noticed that his hands were curled so tightly around the steering wheel that the tendons stood out. He made a snuffling sound, a half sneeze, and said, “What’s that?’

“It’s my face powder. It’s nice, don’t you think?”

“It’s bothering my sinuses,” Benny said.

“I apologize. I don’t, however, recall it bothering your sinuses on any of the other occasions that I have worn it in the last ten years.”

Benny glowered. He rolled the window down and pressed the accelerator.

“Benny!” Pearl said reaching up to keep her hair from blowing out of its coiffure. A sandy-brown strand escaped and whipped across her forehead. “Benny! The window!” she said again. But he ignored her, and they rode on for some time with the wind blowing Pearl’s hair into a mess.

After a time Benny said he was hungry, and they looked for a rest stop. An hour later, they spotted a small weather-beaten sign hanging askew from a wooden post. The lettering was faded, but they could just make out the words,
NEGRO REST STOP
. Benny pulled off the road and drove a few feet down a gravel road to a clearing next to a pine forest. The evening was warm, there would be mosquitoes. A whiff of wildflowers gave the air a freshness that made Pearl want to breathe great lungfuls of it. It brought to mind the hint of scent left on a woman’s wrist once her perfume has faded. The sun was low behind the pines, and the clearing was infused with lavender light.

There was promise in that evening. The next day Pearl would have Ella and she would take her back to Georgia and raise her as if she had been born to her. She had prayed. How she had prayed. Despite her disappointments and her illness, despite exhaustion and a depression so deep she had let her yard go to weeds and couldn’t leave her bedroom, Pearl made it to the church every evening to ask the Lord to bless her with children. The women in the congregation pitied her, reduced as she was to taking her sister’s child. Pearl led them to believe that taking Ella was an act of charity, though she knew it was desperation.

Pearl took the tablecloth from the backseat, and Benny lifted the wicker picnic basket out of the trunk. The silverware clanked in the bottom. It seemed to Pearl that if the two of them sat at the picnic table and ate the supper she had packed, they would have to be genial with each other. They couldn’t sit in that pretty twilight—years ago she would have thought the evening romantic—and not be civil. And wasn’t it true that she and Benny were on a kind of pilgrimage together and that the magnitude of their errand ought to overshadow their bickering and resentments?

Benny peeked into the basket. He took a deep breath of evening air and his shoulders relaxed. Pearl unpacked the white china plates, the forks and knives and the white cloth napkins. She brought out a covered dish with fried chicken and another with tomato salad and another piled with biscuits. She set their places side by side and put a peach cobbler on the table next to her husband so he could admire it. Benny chuckled at Pearl trying to find a ladylike way to straddle the picnic bench.

Pearl said grace: “Dear Lord, thank you for this wonderful repast and for our safe journey. We thank you too.” She hesitated and looked at Benny. “For the new addition coming to our family.”

Benny cleared his throat. “Amen,” he said. There was no anger in his voice.

She served him first. It must have been the good air and the day’s journey that gave them such appetites. Pearl’s chicken had never been so tender and her tomatoes had never tasted so sweet. Benny ate three biscuits before Pearl had the chance to blink. They reached for the tomato salad at the same time and their hands brushed. Pearl smiled down at her plate and Benny shifted his body, ever so slightly, toward hers.

“It’s not every woman that can make a roadside dinner into a special affair,” Benny said. He had not paid her a compliment in a long time.

In the waning light they couldn’t see the figures in the car rolling down the gravel path toward them. They had just heaped their plates with seconds when the driver turned on the high beams, though it was not dark enough for them, and with that Benny knew he and Pearl were not welcome. He wiped his fingers one by one on Pearl’s cloth napkin and patted his lips, taking care not to leave crumbs in the corner of his mouth. It was only then that he stood and faced the headlights, one hand over his eyes to shield them from the glare. Pearl wondered if the owner of the car had jerry-rigged the lights to make them shine more powerfully. Pearl and Benny were trapped, like prisoners caught in a searchlight.

Pearl stayed seated. She stacked Benny’s plate on top of her own. The clink of the china hung in the air with the sound of the car’s idling engine. Benny put his hand on Pearl’s forearm to signal her to be still. She sat up taller and squared her shoulders, though her palms were clammy and her stomach had soured.

The headlights went out and all of the car’s doors opened at once. Benny appraised the four men that got out. They were of average build, on the skinny side, except for the driver, who was bigger than the others. No bigger than Benny himself, but he looked strong. If the picnic bench could be lifted and swung, that would take care of two of them. He could throw the tablecloth over them, blinding them temporarily while he jabbed a fork into the sides of their faces or into their backs. Or he could break a plate and stab one in the gut with the shards. He could drive his fingers into their eye sockets, punch one in the throat and feel his Adam’s apple give under his fist. Benny thought, as he often did when confronted with white men, how they would look laid on the embalming table of his funeral parlor. The men walked slowly toward him, purposefully menacing, the biggest in the lead. This too was a mockery—they all knew there was no need for a show of strength by four white men on a deserted stretch of Virginia highway. They all knew there was nothing Benny could do.

The big man took in Benny’s leather loafers and shining cufflinks and his cotton shirt with the pressed collar. His lips set in a thin line, hard and emphatic as a dash.

“Y’all lost?” he drawled. Before Benny could say anything, one of the other men said, “Answer the man. You ain’t heard him ask you a question?”

“Nossuh. I mean yessuh, I heard the question, but nossuh, we ain’t lost. Just havin’ a bite on this here bench.”

Nossuh? Yessuh? Pearl had never heard Benny talk that way.

“If there ain’t no sign says colored, that means white only, don’t it?” the big man said.

“And if it is one says colored, that means white too, if we say it does,” the other man said.

“Well, suh, then I surely was mistaken. Me and my missus was hongry. We ain’t meant no harm.”

“Y’all don’t know that in the state of Virginia we keep our nice places for white folks? You think we built this nice bench for you to sit on?” He paused. “Where you come from?”

“You right. You right. We from Georgia, ain’t never been on no highway trip before.” He grinned. “We ain’t familiar with the rules a the road, yuh see.”

“Out of state, is you?”

“Yessuh, yes we is.”

Pearl’s eyes stung. She knew that when those men looked at her, they’d see her eyes glassy with tears and they would think it was because she was afraid. And she was afraid, they could kill her husband right there and do who knows what to her, but God help her, she was angry too. Her knees knocked with rage, her toes curled with it. She wanted to take her shoes off and hurl them. Mangy, half-starved white trash. Ruddy in the face. Liquor red was what it was, she thought. Calloused paws for hands and swollen knuckles.

One of the men stepped closer to Pearl. Her bowels dropped. He reached out and put the tips of his fingers on the edge of the picnic basket. Trash, Pearl thought again. How they must hate us! Look at my china and my good cutlery, she wanted to say. I live in a big house with a wraparound porch and fruit trees in the yard. She wanted the men to feel low and poor when they went home to their shacks and haggard wives.

He said, “Look like your missus been up to some cooking. She a good cook, boy?”

“Yessuh,” Benny replied. “Yessuh, she sho’ is.”

The big man looked at the other one, then looked again at Benny and said, “Y’all better clear out.”

“Thank you, suh. We get our things and we be going presently.”

“I ain’t said to take nothin’ with you. I said to clear out.”

Benny paused. His hands balled into fists at his side. The blood vessels in his temples jumped.

The big man continued, “Y’all done put yer stuff on white folks’ table and now you gon’ have to leave it here. It’s a tax. Y’all pay taxes?”

Benny didn’t respond. The big man stepped toward him.

“I asked you a question. You pay taxes?”

Benny swallowed hard. “Yes, we do.”

“Yes what?”

Again Benny didn’t answer.

The big man put his hand on Benny’s chest and shoved. Benny staggered but did not fall. The cricket song roared. One of the men’s boots scuffed against the gravel. Tension tightened around them like hands around a throat.

“Yessuh,” Benny said. “Yessuh, we pay our taxes.”

“Well, you got to pay another one. Now get, ’fore I change my mind.”

Pearl put her palms on the table and pushed herself to standing. She paused, realizing she’d have to lift her leg over the bench and that trash would see her slip. She couldn’t move. She shifted to the left, then the right, trying to figure the best way to maneuver off of the bench.

The big man said, “Yer missus want to stay here with us?” They laughed.

Pearl, trembling, lifted her leg; she felt the cool air against the inside of her thigh. She turned quickly so they would not see the tears on her cheeks. As she walked to the car, unsteady in her heels on the gravel, one of them said, “Maybe she ought to stay here.” She heard Benny walking slowly behind her, the way one creeps away from an animal that might attack.

In the car they did not speak or look at each other for a long time. Both glanced repeatedly at the rearview mirror to check for the overbright headlights. The night purpled into complete darkness. Theirs was the only car on the road. Pearl sat with her hands clasped in her lap, unfolding them to smooth her skirt over her thighs and pull at the hem. She felt a draft whose source she could not pinpoint, and she tugged at the hand crank that controlled the window.

“Would you please stop all that fidgeting!” Benny said. “You make me want to jump out of my skin.”

“You make me want to peel mine off and throw it away,” Pearl muttered.

“What’s that?” Benny asked. “If you have something to say, then say it out loud.”

“All of that shucking and shuffling!” she cried.

“What did you want me to do? You tell me, what else could I have done?”

“You didn’t have to stoop so low. You could have kept your dignity! I’ve never been so humiliated!”

“Oh, yes you have. Yes you have and you know it. You’ve been in the house with your afternoon teas and garden club so long you think you can pretend we’re not who we are, but you know just as well as I do that my dignity, my goddamned dignity, would have had us swinging from a tree.”

“Those men weren’t worth the dirt under my feet. I couldn’t stand the satisfaction in their eyes, Benny. I couldn’t stand it.”

“And you think I could?”

MISS PRISBY,
rude woman, monstrous woman, slammed the door on her way out of Wayne Street. The relief office sent her every week. Home assessments, they called them, to ensure that Hattie continued to be a suitable candidate for the benefits she received each month. Hattie thought she’d rather starve than see her again. Maybe she’d go to the relief office that very afternoon and cancel her benefits. It hardly mattered anymore, in less than two hours she would give her child away as if she were a dog. Her old-age baby, her blessing, gone away with Pearl. When Hattie saw Ella again, after three years or five, they would be strangers. Her daughter would call her Aunt Hattie or ma’am. Hattie would look into Ella’s face and try not to love her. She’d have to convince herself all over again that she’d done what was necessary, that she’d saved Ella from the half-empty icebox and winters with no coal for the furnace. She could keep her, she still could. But. Ella was going to a bedroom of her own and hydrangeas, wide lawns and ice cream in summer and no handed-down Mary Janes. No Miss Prisby.

Miss Prisby had come for the first time four months earlier, and though Hattie hadn’t told anyone—the dole was not a thing that could be told—word spread on the block. By the next morning, the neighbors, women with the same rotating pairs of handed-down shoes and mended shirts and cupboards full of canned butter beans, refused to speak to her. They greeted her with a quick nod and walked by her house as though there were a plague on it. It was acceptable not to have any money, none of them had any money, but it was quite another thing to go down to the relief office and fill out papers saying as much. The dole was too shameful, too public an admission of failure. But Hattie couldn’t stand the hungry look her children had, and Ella got croup and wouldn’t get better because there wasn’t any money for the doctor. Marion began relaying messages from Pearl about how sorry she was to hear that things weren’t going well and how much she wanted to help. Then Marion told Pearl about the dole, and Pearl wrote.