The Undertaker's Daughter (27 page)

“Now over here we have the embalming room, which I’m afraid is closed to the public today. But just next door, the casket
room is available for viewing—we call this room the showroom.” Not a hit with girls whose dolls waited for them at home, and I confess that an invitation to join me in the cemetery for a little monument reading was hardly tempting. I could easily spend hours in the cemetery. I read the tombstones and wondered why so many people who lived in the nineteenth century died at alarmingly young ages. I searched for the oldest grave, delighted that an even older one could be found on my next visit. I marveled at the names; Eliza, Obadiah, Marston, and Bridie, names foreign to our town now.

Then Jo moved to Jubilee. She and her family arrived with a huge moving truck, and I stood on the sidewalk and watched as the moving men made umpteen trips into a house just two doors down from the funeral home. Jo was the same age as me and I didn’t see how we could not be friends. That summer our first and foremost pastime was to run to the library, where we checked out two or three books, then raced home to see who could read them quickest. Her reading skills were phenomenal and she always won.

Jo wasn’t afraid to come to the funeral home and was brave enough to sleep over. I think her lack of fear had something to do with her intelligence and disinterest in superstition. She had wavy, unruly hair, pasty skin, wore thick glasses, and had a mouth full of metal. Jo knew she wasn’t pretty and I guessed she hid behind her big brain. When she laughed, her snobbishness melted away, so my daily goal was to make her laugh at least once. We ate banana splits at the dime store, climbed a mimosa tree in a neighbor’s yard, and listened to records. Jo was particularly interested in the lyrics, and I was interested in singing them. She had a stack of spiral notebooks in which she painstakingly recorded every lyric to every record she owned. I never knew what she did with the notebooks. I practiced singing in the funeral home upstairs in the
bathroom with the door closed so that no one would hear me. The silence rule demanded that I not sing in full voice so I whispered, my face contorted with the passion of the song and the frustration of not being able to belt it out. Occasionally I tapped out a Motown tune on the organ downstairs but it sounded wrong in every possible way; hymns, possibly Rodgers and Hammerstein, but never Motown on the Hammond.

Jo and I listened to the Beatles and anything on the Motown label. Then one day we made a discovery. We were walking down one of Jubilee’s tree-lined streets when we happened upon a yard sale.

“Look at this,” she said. “Here’s a whole box of albums.”

“Look,” I said, “they’re only fifty cents.”

“I don’t know any of these, do you?”

“Never heard of them.”

I picked up an album,
Mingus: The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
. We had never heard of
Charles Mingus.

“What do you think this is? I like the title.”

“Yes. It’s very evocative.” Jo tried out new words every day.

“A quarter each?”

“Deal.”

Jo’s room was upstairs in the back of her house, where we could listen to records and not bother the dead people’s relatives who filled my house. She took out her notebook and pen and then put the needle on the record. When the music began, we looked at each other, waiting for someone to begin singing, to no avail.

“Jo, I think this is something different. I don’t think you’re going to be writing down any lyrics.”

“No shit.”

We listened for a while, and then I thought I’d had a breakthrough.

“Okay, okay.
You just have to think about New York City, or maybe Paris. This is Greenwich Village stuff. You have to close your eyes and put yourself in a smoky room with people wearing strange clothes and berets.”

“Actually, I prefer San Francisco.” Jo knew her own mind.

We then became silent, arrested by music so completely foreign to us. A great yearning took hold of me. Again I thought that I would perhaps someday visit and maybe even live in a place far from Jubilee, and that perhaps Jo would, too. A place where music like this might be an everyday occurrence and not an accidental discovery.

On Sundays our twosome was torn apart when her parents marched her to the Presbyterian church while I sat in the back pew at First Baptist.

My mother disapproved whenever I asked permission to visit Jo’s church. “You need to go to your own church. I don’t know what they’re teaching over there.

Was she concerned that I would be branded a traitor to the First Baptist tribe? Was there a particular doctrine she was set against? No reason was offered. But I knew in my bones it had something to do with appearances. Because when I was permitted to go and afterward offered to describe the differences in the services, she wasn’t interested.

I decided that Jo was the only person in the world in whom I could confide. I had a terrible, nerve-wracking secret and it was becoming a burden to keep it. I can’t say that it began innocently because I knew exactly what I was getting into. Such is the law of attraction. I didn’t know of anyone, nor had I heard of anyone, who had crossed over into this forbidden territory. So I approached the boundary line alone.

I was twelve, close to thirteen, when my eye fell upon a boy in my class. Already he was handsome. His skin was the color of
coffee with cream. Even though most black boys were beginning to wear Afros, his hair was short, and the style complemented his chiseled features, devoid of any childish plumpness. When he smiled, his face opened up and displayed perfect, sparkling white teeth. He was friendly and funny and seemed to be more accepted by the white boys than any of the other black boys. Not that it would have mattered to me. I was captivated. I wanted to talk to him, alone.

One day I gathered the courage to pass him a note: “Meet me in the coatroom at recess when everyone else is gone.” I thought the coatroom would be safe because it had two doors of entry and we could easily slip out. Nevertheless, I stood shaking from the adrenaline as I waited for him. Not only was friendship with our black schoolmates not encouraged, if we were caught alone in the coatroom doing absolutely nothing but talking, it would be tantamount to a crime. He was brave, he showed up.

I had a pencil and paper in my hand. “Hi.”

“Hi.” He didn’t look frightened, only curious.

“We don’t have much time. What would you think about giving me a call tonight? No, maybe I should call you. Would that be all right? Can I call you tonight?” I blurted out.

“Yeah.” He smiled.

“Good, what time is good?” I thought again. “Exactly. What time exactly?”

“How about seven o’clock?” He smiled again.

“Okay. Well, good. Okay, then. Okay.”

Now I was really nervous. He was on his way out of the room when I remembered the pencil and paper and realized I hadn’t taken his number. Too late. I heard footsteps approaching, so I grabbed my coat and ran out the opposite door. He bumped right into Mrs. Mills.

“Hi, Noah. You better run along, you’ll miss the break.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Thank God for that second door—she never saw me slip out.

That night I looked up his family’s name in the phone book. There were two listings for his last name and only initials for the first names. Damn, I didn’t know his father’s name. It was hard enough to make the call at all. The thought of calling two different numbers was almost too much for me. With no small amount of anxiety, I finally dialed a number. A woman answered the phone.

“Hello, is Noah there, please?” I wondered if I sounded white.

“Yes, hold on, please.”

For God’s sake, his mother had answered! I believe I spent the first five minutes of the conversation explaining to him that it would be better if he could answer the phone when he knew I was calling. Noah was calm and told me that his mother wouldn’t mind if I called. Somehow I found that hard to believe. We talked on the phone several times a week. He liked books and movies and had more of a brain in his head than many others I had encountered from our young male pool. Noah was more mature than most of the whiny mama’s boys who surrounded me daily. I asked him about his family life and told him I heard his father was a bootlegger. He said he couldn’t talk about that, so I took that to mean he was.

Then I read in the paper that the police raided his father’s store in the Bottom. “Did your father get into any trouble?”

“Naw, it’s just something they have to do ever so often.”

“They won’t arrest him?”

He laughed. “No, they give the stuff back to him after the newspaper prints the story.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Where do you think the police get their booze?”

One day in my English class, Noah’s long, lean legs were stretched out into the aisle close to my desk. Our teacher stood at a podium right in front of my desk reading from “Casey at the Bat.” I don’t know what possessed me. I tapped Noah’s foot with mine right under the teacher’s nose. He tapped mine back. It was a terrifically stupid thing to do because of course she saw us. Her eyes glanced from her book to our feet and back to the book again without ever missing a beat as she continued to read about Mudville. When she didn’t confront me about the incident, I forgot all about our toe tapping until two days later. As I walked through the hall during a break in classes, I saw my mother enter the school. She walked right by me without saying a word and gave me the most searing stare I had ever received. I couldn’t imagine why she looked at me with such venom. I always walked home from school, but when I stepped out in the afternoon’s late-autumn air, she was waiting for me in the car.

“Get in this car.”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“Get in this car and shut up!”

I closed the door and sat in silence until she was ready to speak.

“They called me and told me to come to the school today. I had to go the principal’s office.”

“What for?”

“Shut up. I’ve been told that you’re being too friendly with the colored kids.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Well? What
in the hell
do you think you’re doing?”

As ordered, I said nothing.

“Answer me!”

“Nothing, I’m not doing anything.”

“Don’t you know how people talk in this town?”

“I don’t really care.”

She slapped me in the face with the full force of her anger. Her wedding band made a thudding sound against my cheekbone. “Well, you better care!” she shrieked. “You better care!”

I caught my breath and wondered if she’d marked my face.

“Who do you think puts food on the table? The people of this town, that’s who. Do you have any idea what this could do to your daddy’s business?”

No, at that point, I didn’t. I was stupefied by her words. I didn’t see what talking to a black boy had to do with my father’s business. But I certainly wasn’t going to say so. I’d never seen my mother so angry. She looked straight ahead as she drove and ranted. Never before had I been so acutely aware of her rules: Nothing was discussed. Obey without question. No opinions were allowed.

“You’re not going anywhere or doing anything until you straighten up and fly right. You’re grounded. You’re not talking on the phone or seeing friends. You’ll go to school and come straight home. You’ll go to church whenever the doors are open. You’re going to walk the chalk, young lady. You’ve had it too easy.”

When I faced my father, I waited for the ball of his anger to drop. He had few words for me. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but it’s wrong and if you don’t stop . . . Maybe you’d be better off in a girls’ school somewhere, out in the middle of nowhere. I will send you away faster than you can breathe.”

We were already in the middle of nowhere, and in trying to find somewhere, I had embraced the beginning of trouble. I didn’t believe that my father would send me away, but it crushed me that he said it and he wanted me to believe it. It took my breath away. I thought when this trouble began the door to redemption was slightly ajar. My mother could possibly have steered me in some
other direction, but her threats and punishments only made me dig my heels in. Perhaps if I had been approached with less wrath of judgment, less searing criticism, I might have been receptive to a better understanding of the consequences of my actions. I don’t know. I was fighting for something, maybe for an inch of freedom, maybe just a touch of individuality, but she stamped on it with a big and furious foot. I wondered if she had ever been this hateful toward my father. Had she driven him toward a woman with a softer attitude? Or, had he driven her to this angry life?

I was met with a cool breeze from my father, but he was boiling underneath. I felt dismissed. His disappointment—and maybe even fear of what was to become of me—was worn like an undershirt, out of sight, except for a faint shadow.

I didn’t want to do anything to hurt my father’s business, and I was not strong enough to face ostracism, yet I felt so compelled to continue to explore this irregular path that I did not stop or even slow down. I’d been stupid. If I was sorry for anything, it was that. I should have controlled myself at school in front of the teacher. When I told Jo why I was grounded, she was impressed.

“I have a black boyfriend,” I confessed.

“Damn. That’s very cool of you. I didn’t know you had enough guts to do something like that.”

“I don’t think anyone else will think it’s cool. You have to swear you won’t tell a soul.”

Jo promised to take my secret to her grave. She checked out extra books at the library and brought them to school so that I could smuggle them home. I wasn’t allowed to go to the library or read anything except schoolbooks until the punishment concluded.

It felt like prison, and the seriousness of my crime was not to be underestimated. The mixing of races was a great taboo. Perhaps in
some large Northern city one could walk along the street without incident, but not here; Jubilee would not tolerate it. Only in 1967 had antimiscegenation laws, the laws to “protect my white womanhood,” been thrown out. Young black men had been lynched for far less serious crimes than whistling at a white woman. And what of me? I could never publicly step over the wrong side of the tracks, for if I did, I’d never be allowed to come back. The 1970s had brought little change.