TAMAR PUSHES THE SAUCER OF lemon cookies I brought for her toward me. It’s cut to resemble an upturned flower—a rose, maybe. It’s so thin it rattles a little on the tray but falls silent after a moment. My pleased reflection beams back at me from the polished table. Everything gleams here. From the wine-colored velvet bench seats to the chandeliers that hang in the private cars. Even the towels are embroidered with silk thread. I hadn’t spotted that before.
“What?” she asks.
“I was just noticing how this suits you. The train, I mean.” I bite back the compliment, not wanting to offend her.
“You’re new. How do you like being a porter?” she asks, changing the topic of conversation.
“I’m not sure yet. It’s very different from my last job. But I hear the work is steady, and it beats the steel mill. Even if I decide to stick with it, it won’t be permanent,” I say.
“Why not? What did you do before?” she prods, genuinely interested.
“I ran numbers,” I admit. There’s no sense in lying to her about who I am. Besides, it’s clean work, and the only people who don’t think so are the folks who want you to wash their drawers for a nickel and be proud about it.
She chokes a bit on her sandwich at my admission and I pour her a bit more tea from the carafe.
“Oh my. Went down the wrong pipe,” she says quickly. Her voice is laced with a laugh but still harsh and ragged. She’s got a smile on her face. “Do you think that’s something you should be telling people?”
“I’m not telling people. I’m telling you. You’ve got an honest face,” I say. She doesn’t seem like the type of girl who judges people, but I could be wrong.
She sits up a bit and straightens her back like the class pet on the first day of school. “Actually, I lie quite convincingly.”
“Really?” I say, fighting the urge to smile.
“Yes. For example, I was only being polite when I asked you to sit for lunch. I didn’t think you would accept the invitation, given our obvious difference in position,” she says in a level tone, her face inscrutable. There is a slight smile, but it’s the same smile the milkman gives you when he’s making his rounds: impersonal.
I fidget a bit trying to find the hint of a joke on her face, but I can’t find one. In a last-ditch effort, I start to laugh, waiting for her to join me, but she doesn’t. Her smile remains polite and unreadable. My face heats up and my skin starts to feel too tight, like the hair on my arms can transmit the electricity in the air. How could I be this stupid?
“My apologies, Miss Williams. I’ve been, uh… My apologies,” I say as I move to slide out of my place at the table. I keep my eyes down, trying to look anywhere but at her face. When she places her petal-soft hand on mine, I’m forced to look up. Tears are in her eyes, and a silent laugh is choking its way out of her throat.
“I got you so good.”
I nearly fall backward into the seat with relief.
“Damn, you’re good. Oh, I mean… darn. Forgive my language,” I add with a slight sigh. I need to try harder not to slip up when I speak.
“No, no, curse all you want. I prefer it. People choose their words too carefully around me and I hate it.”
“You really are a good liar,” I say in disbelief.
“I know. I’ve had lots of practice. Are you the brutally honest type?” she asks.
“My job required it. On the street, you’re nothing without your word. People play their last dime for a chance at a win. You can’t play games with people’s dreams. They got to know that if they tell you a number, you gonna be straight with them and bring them their payout. Any runner can lie and say they don’t remember what you told them, keep the money themselves. But then you’re taking food out of babies’ mouths, rent from some poor mother whose old man left her. People are real funny about who they trust. They should be. There are a lot of sharks out there.”
“So you’d rather be a dream maker than a shark?”
“I would. As long as the money is good,” I reply.
“Money isn’t everything,” she says.
“Sounds like something somebody who’s always had it would say,” I add, trying to keep the judgment out of my voice.
She frowns and looks out the window at the cornfields whipping by. “I don’t have money. My father has money,” she says, like her father is a stranger she’s spouting facts about.
“Don’t daddies spend the bulk of their money on their daughters? I’ve only met a few who didn’t, and they were garbage in a hundred ways than that.”
“Let’s not talk about fathers,” she says quietly.
Her mouth is set in a line, and I’m missing the smile on her face from a few minutes ago. “Sure. Tell me where you’re headed. Got a fella in Atlanta?”
“Do you know what Morehouse is?” she asks.
“Tell me,” I say, more for the need to hear her voice and watch her lips move than for the information.
“It is the premier men’s college for Negro scholars. Founded in 1867, it is responsible for more Negro doctors, lawyers, and theologians than any other institution.”
“La-di-da,” I reply in an airy tone.
Her words stir something deep inside, and a memory floats to my consciousness. Mama’s face appears before my eyes. She’s weak, but she could still walk then. I’d just won the recitation contest for my class. I was thirteen and no one clapped harder than she did. Mr. Loudermilk had told her I was his brightest student. He suggested an alternate course of study to prepare me for college. He even offered to find me a sponsor because “a mind like his should not be wasted.” A week later Mama collapsed on the way home from the market. Two weeks after that I went to work for Fats.
Tamar’s voice slices through my memory as she peels the rind from an orange slice and pops the flesh into her mouth. “You don’t seem impressed.”
“I’m not. Is this where you’re husband fishing? The smoking lobby of some sissy college where they recite Plutarch and Lord Byron after tea,” I say, trying hard to cover a kernel of jealousy with heaps of disdain.
She gives me a funny look. Surprise? Irritation?
“Plutarch, huh? And you said you didn’t know what Morehouse was.”
“Didn’t say that. I just told you to tell me more. I like to hear you talk.”
She draws a deep breath in and holds it, eyes pinning me to the spot, but then she blows it out slow and wiggles in her seat a bit, her private thoughts a mystery to me.
“Who said that I was going there to find a husband? I may not marry at all. No, I’m going to Atlanta to attend an all-girls’ school, Spelman College.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing. Why would a woman need college?” I ask, amazed.
“To be a teacher. To be a doctor. To be whatever she chooses besides a wife and mother.” Her nose wrinkles a bit as she stabs a strawberry with her fork.
I hold up both my hands in surrender. “I don’t mean to offend. It’s just most girls I know can’t wait to get married. If I had my choice, I’d love to be a girl. I wouldn’t have to worry about nothing but staying pretty and finding some sick dope to take care of me.”
“You’d rather be told where to live, where to go, and what to do your entire life?” she asks, incredulously. “You would trade your freedom for a life of servitude and imprisonment, where your father and then your husband will be in charge of everything—from how much money you can spend on groceries for the week to what color dress you’re allowed to wear to church on Sunday?” She tilts her head, waiting for me to respond.
“All a decent woman needs to worry about is how to make good cornbread and where to find decent cigars,” I reply. “You’d rather wonder where your next meal was coming from? You’d rather break your back on the docks for bread or troll the streets doin’ everything the devil likes doin’ just so the lights stay on at home?” I add. “No, you want to get your head cracked open in a card game some night ’cause a fella don’t like how you looked at him. A wife isn’t a prisoner; she’s a refuge. A mother ain’t a slave; she’s a saint. Men make it possible for girls like you to keep they souls clean,” I say, memories of my past rising to the surface.
“Oh, sing me the song of the virtuous woman!” she cries with passion. “I’m not most girls. I won’t have my life defined by a man. I’d rather be free,” she says defiantly, and then finishes her sandwich in three quick bites. Gotta love a girl with a healthy appetite.
“To be a doctor?”
“Uh, no,” she says. “There are very few Negro women doctors. Even Daddy has trouble retaining work… at times. There aren’t that many colored hospitals, and if it weren’t for Grandmother Dawson, he might never have gotten placed at Mercy. I don’t want that kind of uncertainty. I could be anything.”
At that I have to chuckle. “Anything? Girl, nobody gets to choose anything. Life doesn’t work that way. I think your pretty surroundings and that full belly got you a little blind to the real world. In the real world, a colored boy has three choices. One: scrape for white folks for big money, like the post office or what I’m doin’ now. I got a boss who might as well be my master, and if I don’t smile, I don’t have a job. Two: scrape for white folks for little money—that’s all the folks in the mills or on the docks breaking they back every day. And there’s three: do for yourself with a little hustle and probably get killed in the doing.”
“That’s just not true,” she says, and starts in on the work of that Randolph guy trying to start a union with the porters, then something else I can’t catch.
“Do you have to stare at me so?” she asks, a bit flustered. Tamar blinks hard and turns her head to the window again.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was staring. I’m just listening. Really.” She turns back to face me.
I’m lying. I’m half listening. I’m so taken by the way this tiny hidden dimple appears and disappears when she smiles real wide, how her lashes curl back on themselves, fluttering like bird wings when she’s excited. Even when she’s irritated, she’s beautiful, maybe more so. She’s got some funny ideas about men and women, but I can’t begrudge her a dream. Fats says all the women have been dreaming a bit high for themselves since the war.
“You’re not listening at all,” she says, calling my bluff.
“I am,” I say, forcing myself to pay attention to her words and not her mouth.
“Then what did I just say?”
“Uh-uh…,” I stammer.
“Exactly, you’re just like…” She’s scrambling to find the right word.
“Your last boyfriend,” I finish for her.
Her head snaps back in surprise. I’m finding I like to surprise her.
“I-I’ve never had a boyfriend, not that it’s any of your business,” she replies tersely.
“Daddy keeps tight control, then?” I ask.
“Daddy doesn’t run my life. I already told you that. Have you considered that there is no one I’ve found to be worth my time?”
“I have. I just thought it would be hard to turn down proposals from every man you meet. A girl as beautiful as you? I’m surprised you make it home every day,” I say, trying to sound sincere instead of unsavory.
She laughs. “I enjoy compliments just like anybody else, but you’re being a bit ridiculous.”
“No, I’m not. Skin smooth as velvet and dark as twilight. Smile as bright as fresh snow. Hair—I haven’t gotten a chance to touch, but I assume it’s soft, too. Not to mention…” I let my fingers follow the outline of her body from shoulder to hip to thigh.
“Now you’re making fun of me?” she says, hurt.
“What? I’m not!” I backpedal, trying to figure out what I said wrong.
She slides her plate across the table and stands in a rush to get out of her seat. “Mr. Fayard, I think I am quite full,” she says formally, and snatches a book she’d set to the side of her that I hadn’t noticed: There Is Confusion by Jessie Redmon Fauset.
“I—I apologize, Tam—” She fixes me with an icy glare, her fingers nearly vibrating with rage. “Miss Tamar. I am sorry if I offended you.”
“Thank you for lunch. I’m retiring for the day. Please allow my father to make my dinner request.”
And with that she’s gone.
Stupid. I pushed too hard, and now I don’t know what I said.
I jump up and rush the few steps it takes to knock softly on her door.
“Miss Tamar?”
Nothing.
“Miss Tamar?”
“Go away. I am reading and wish not to be disturbed. Isn’t it your job to follow orders?” she snaps.
The way she says “job” stings in a place I usually don’t allow people to reach. Light spills from under the frame, and I can see she’s standing on the other side, my mirror image.
“Please see that this is dropped in the post,” she says, so quietly I’m not sure I hear her correctly, until she slides an envelope under the door frame. Her feet disappear.
I’ve been dismissed. Discounted. I want to knock again, plead my case, but I can’t.
In the space of a breath, there is her father, returned from his work, dishes that must be removed, and a smile that I can’t let fade.