The Wilful Daughter (25 page)

June swallowed. Bira was standing over her, her tiny body shaking in anger. “No Mama. I would never do anything like that. I loved him. I really just loved him.” She cried because she could never say that the Piano Man was the wrong man for her sister without destroying Minnelsa’s life again. She didn’t want to see her oldest sister hurt again. Her mother hugged her then tucked her in like a small child.

“
Mama,” she asked as Bira turned to put out the lamp and leave her to sleep, “Mama, is Peter the right man for Minnelsa? Are you and papa sure?”

Bira kissed her baby’s soft hands. “He’s good for her, June. She hasn’t been happy in a long time and look at her now. But that’s not for you to worry about. You have a baby coming and you must do all you can to take care of yourself. Just rest. Everything will work out fine.”

“
But Mama. . .”

“
You’ll like it here. And it won’t be so long. You’ll see. It won’t be long at all.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

On the Saturday before the wedding, William Brown had taken leave of his lovely wife and busy daughters as they raced through last minute preparations and had gone and done something he seldom did anymore: he went to look at his land. He had to pick out the fifty acres he was to give the Piano Man. That was his job as father of the bride. He knew that Bira was making sure that Minnelsa’s household would have nice things, things that they had all grown accustomed to. That was her job as the mother of the bride. That was how the Blacksmith wanted it.

The things he bought for his home he got for Bira. She had never asked for them but he wanted her to have the best. Not just the best for a colored woman whose husband made a little money, but the best that money could buy. The best for any woman of any color. Always the best for his Bira.

As he looked at the land he remembered that wanting the best for Bira had started with a porcelain wash bowl his mother had given them when they left Alabama. It was something Bira had admired; a white bowl with no cracks or chips like the ones she was used to. There were birds painted and fired (he learned that term later as he read more and more books) in trees around the bowl that wouldn’t fade with washing. The rim was trimmed in gold. He wasn’t sure where or how his mother had come to get this bowl but whenever Bira was with him she touched it, fingered it and called it: “Beautiful, just beautiful.”

So when he left Alabama he vowed to do two things: buy the land that Bira had once called home and give her lots of beautiful things.

The first piece of land he bought was that track of land in Alabama. As he stood admiring the pine tree on the property in Atlanta he was thinking about giving to the Piano Man, he recalled how he had acquired the land of Bira’s former home.

He laughed out loud as he leaned against a big pine tree and then, embarrassed by his unusual outburst, turned to see if anyone was around to hear.

He had Fannie go tell the owner, a white man so broke he was dying to sell, that she knew somebody in Atlanta that wanted to buy that land. Somebody who had seen it and admired it. She talked about the property like it was something straight out of heaven and the owner was proud that somebody wanted what he had. The “Mr. Brown of Atlanta” who wanted to buy it was not available to come to purchase the land himself. He could do it through Fannie, who had worked with him before, or he could get a lawyer, but that would take more time and money.

Greed, of course, got the best of the owner and he never questioned the race of the intended buyer. He just told Fannie that a lawyer wasn’t necessary between friends. Fannie had laughed. She had saved his butt many times by buying old family treasures when he and his wife and four sons didn’t have enough money for food. Besides no one in Alabama wanted to believe a colored man was rich enough or smart enough to arrange such a purchase of land.

But the Blacksmith was. He got a colored lawyer Fannie knew to look at the papers, and once everything was in place, the deed changed hands quickly without ever changing faces. Since the Blacksmith paid him more than a fair amount, he did not question the part of the agreement that made him vacate in thirty days. He and his wife were gonna move to Montgomery to be with her family since his kin were all dead.

They never knew that the land they once called theirs became a small, all colored community. Or that property near Tuskegee that his uncle had won in a card game after Bira’s father was killed was to be the home to that man’s granddaughter.

Most of the Blacksmith’s other land was acquired from colored men who couldn’t make it farming or whose desire was to move north or go into business. Some sold because they said they were too good to live as their fathers did on a farm. Although he found the latter lazy men who didn’t understand their destinies, he respected them for one reason: their parents told them never to sell to a white man and they hadn’t. For that he always gave them a more than fair price when they sold to him. When all else failed they sought the Blacksmith, a man who didn’t drink or gamble and who always had money because he worked hard six days a week.

Some of the land he purchased he didn’t change. He allowed the owners to become tenant farmers, then he took a few acres and developed them into an area where little one or two room houses were rented to railroad workers, maids, butlers, anybody who didn’t have the money, not yet most of them told him-to buy their own place. They just didn’t want to live in back of someone’s kitchen.

When the money came in he would buy some more land, and divide it the same way. By the time Jewel was born he owned more than a thousand acres in and outside of Atlanta. Land that most of the white people didn’t want, lots that the white people couldn’t get.

This land he was standing on had once belonged to a proud black family. The father had died young, and the mother had sold him the land but asked him to let her stay on until the children were grown. She had worked for some rich white folks cooking cleaning and almost every night she got to come home. To her own home.

The house was no shotgun deal with one room for everybody. There were a few bedrooms, an airy parlor and a wide porch. The father had a dream, just like the Blacksmith’s, but maybe not as ambitious. He had built this house himself. It was sturdy and in need of new plumbing and a paint job, but by the time Minnelsa and the Piano Man returned with June’s baby, the house would be ready for them.

The woman’s children were now all grown and she had moved to Chicago with a man she met. The house was now free, the land being farmed by someone the Blacksmith hired years ago. Replenished with lots of new things-nice china, crystal glasses, the best furniture and rugs, this would be his daughter’s new home.

Inside the Blacksmith checked the floor boards to see if any of them needed to be replaced. All the furniture was gone except for an old wash stand. He fingered it. Too old to salvage, it needed to be thrown out.

That made him think more of Bira and all the things that he had bought her.

He got the first set of dishes, blue and white with a hunting scene in the middle, from a man that had been given the box they arrived in and told to throw them out. The rich, white woman’s husband had been caught cheating by his wife. She had wanted new china for a long while - Spode china from London - and he had bought home this set from New York along with candy and flowers to beg forgiveness.

She threw them all out along with him. A colored man that cleaned for them found the treasures and brought them to Brown.

“
What would I look like throwing this good looking stuff out, eh, Brown?” They both investigated the wooden crate. “Spose I could keep it. But I ain’t got no wife, so what I need fancy china for? Just something more to take care of and clean. Since they brand new and ain’t never been touched I ‘spose I could sell them.”

The Blacksmith looked at him. “Now be smart. I know you ain’t gonna sell them to white folks. . .”

“
Hell no!” the man said and covered the box with its lid and a heavy horse-hair blanket. “They wouldn’t buy. They’d have me hauled in and say I stole all of this.”

Brown went back to work on preparing the seat on the wagon. He wanted those dishes for Bira but he wanted them at a fair price.

And what was fair? He had never priced anything like this. What should he give the man?

“
How much you think this stuff is worth?” he asked, then added: “If you’re gonna sell to a colored family you can’t set your price too high.”

The man nodded in agreement. “Brown, you got a point. I ain’t got no idea how much something like this would run. I might as well have thrown them in the Chattahoochee River like she told me.”

The man didn’t speak for a while but Brown was calculating. Samuel Wasselman was coming over that afternoon to have some work done on his carriage. He was the local pawn broker and would know how much to charge. “Why don’t you leave them with me? I’ll find out how much they’re worth and give you a fair deal. Maybe in trade. Your wagon needs a lot of work.”

A handshake signed the deal and the Blacksmith hid the box in the shop away from prying eyes.

Wasselman was a tiny man, barely bigger than Bira, with a head for money and the good sense for business. He didn’t deny people his services because of their color. He went into the colored community, that way there was never any problem with the whites who were always in his pawn shop. The Blacksmith found him to be a strange white man because unlike most of his color, he never talked about his being white.

He talked only about him being Jewish. If you asked him, he would tell you he was Jewish. And when he talked about God, man and religion, he wasn’t Baptist, he wasn’t Methodist or Catholic. He was Jewish.

In church the Blacksmith had been taught: Jews killed Jesus. Wasselman said he wasn’t sure who killed Christ but it wasn’t the Jews. Then he added after much thought and a little deliberation: “It was the world.”

Brown figured this was something that somebody who descended from Christ killers would say. But then again he also understood the little man’s point. “God said the Jews were his chosen people,” Wasselman told him once as the Blacksmith repaired his wagon. “Why would we kill his only son?”

So when Wasselman saw the dishes he told the Blacksmith: “Brand new, nice china. Make your wife a fine present.” He told him how much to offer the man. Then he added: “Dishes like that deserve crystal drinking goblets on the table next to them and the best silver.”

The Blacksmith had looked at the little man. “Where am I supposed to get stuff like that? They’re not going to let me go downtown to their shops and purchase what I want no matter how much money I got.”

Wasselman shrugged. “Truth be told, they don’t want me in their shops either. But I can get them for you. I can get you anything you want.”

The Blacksmith listened to the little man. “China like this, on a table in London would be set with crystal goblets and silver serving pieces.”

And so it had started. Wasselman would order the pieces from his cousin Ira in New York and have them shipped to his store. Then he would bring them to the Blacksmith, his best customer, he told him.

When Ira got catalogs from England, fancy books with pictures of the things one could buy, he would send them on to his cousin in the South for this mysterious customer. Wasselman never told him about the Blacksmith, and Wasselman never tried to get others interested in buying these things from him. His prices would have been cheaper than the stores, but, like he told his friend the Blacksmith, they didn’t want him in there either.

It saddened him when Wasselman stopped coming around because he had bought a car. Once he drove over to the Blacksmith’s shop and told him: “You got to catch up with the times. Soon everybody is going to have one of these.” He rubbed the side of his flashy black automobile like he was a pimp trying to sell a woman.

Two nights later they found the car near the Chattahoochee River, the words “Kill all the Jews” painted on the side of it and Wasselman nowhere to be found. Ira, he was told, came to Atlanta to close down the business but he never found the rich southern gentleman who purchased over a period of fifteen years, enough china, silver and porcelain to fill a mansion.

Inside the house that would be his daughter’s, the Blacksmith imagined a fine oak table with a lace table cloth from Ireland and a set of dishes that only the best money could buy. Bira would see to that, see to the nice things. She had loved looking at the catalogs with him, but when Wasselman had died, she had stopped. He had then hidden the catalogs in his study, afraid someone would find out about the probably dead Wasselman’s kindness.

But standing in this house, this room, he rubbed his hard hands together and said to the walls: “This is what I worked for. To show the world I can do it. This is why I only wanted the best for my daughters.”

* * *

At the wedding the Blacksmith had been the best dressed man and a sight to see. The suit had been custom made in a short period of time but it fit his physic perfectly. With four other daughters, someone whispered, it wasn’t going to go to waste. His steps, much practiced with each daughter, seemed easy reminders of the hammer hitting the anvil although you never heard his feet touch the floor. The big man was as light as a feather.

He was the same as he danced with his wife and all his daughters at the reception at the Mason’s hall.