At first Maze thought Berea College might be the way Sister Georgia remembered it—a place to read and study and weave amid the towering oak trees. Solid brick buildings filled with books and music in the middle of a land of hardscrabble farms and sharecroppers’ shacks. A kind of island at the smoothed-out edges of Kentucky’s eastern knobs, not yet given over to horses and their wealthy owners. Someplace different from the rest of the state.
At first she’d thought that. Here, for instance, was her roommate, Mary Elizabeth Cox—a Negro girl. Shy and prickly, eyeing Maze warily, not ready to trust her, assuming the worst. But that was all right with Maze; edgy, mistrustful women were about the only kind she’d known. Sister Georgia, the woman Maze’s mama, Vista, cared for, was “a mountain of mistrust,” Vista said. Took one to know one, Maze might have told her mama. Now the two of them were back in Shakertown without her. Who would protect Vista and Georgia from each other? Maze had wondered many times since she’d agreed to enroll at Berea College in the fall of 1961. That was for them to figure out now. Two mountains facing off.
Most of Maze’s first day at Berea had in fact been ridiculous. Miserable and ridiculous. Everyone—her mama, Mary Elizabeth’s parents—so nervous and polite. It will be better when they’re gone, Maze thought, and it was. Mary Elizabeth’s mama and daddy left first, and after Maze finally walked Vista back to her car, she came back into their room and met her roommate’s uncertain eyes with a roll of her own, and then they both laughed with relief. And Maze thought—in fact, she said—“Well, that’s better.” And Mary Elizabeth laughed again.
Not that it was easy at first. Over and over Maze tried to remind herself, you don’t have to speak aloud every little thought you’re thinkin’, girl. Lord.
But it seemed she couldn’t stop herself. When Mary Elizabeth played something classical and unfamiliar on the piano for her that evening, Maze asked to hear some hymns, saying, “You don’t have to work so hard to impress me.” Then later, back in their room: “Your mama is a beautiful woman. I love the name Sarah.” And when this brought no response: “You look like her, but your eyes aren’t near as sad.”
Too much news too fast from the mind and heart of Miss Maze Jansen, she heard in her head then. “You need to put a lid on it once in a while, Maze,” her mama had told her more than once.
But Mary Elizabeth surprised her that evening when she finally turned to answer her. “How do you know I’m not just as sad?”
That was all she needed. “Well, I’m not sayin’ you aren’t sad. That’s somethin’ I wouldn’t know yet, of course. I’m just sayin’ your eyes don’t have the same sad look your mama’s eyes do. All I said was what I saw. And anyway, I’d imagine your mama’s lived long enough to have more to be sad about than you have. My mama sure has.” At this Maze finally caught a reaction, a fleeting glance, from the other girl. Was she curious? Angry?
“I mean, she’s got a good bit more to be sad about than I do,” Maze went on. She thought Mary Elizabeth might ask “Like what?” But she only looked at her for a moment longer, then went back to unpacking her boxes and suitcases.
The next day was hot by seven in the morning, as they walked to the dining hall for breakfast. A full day of “get-acquainted activities” with the other new students nearly convinced Maze to call Vista and beg her to come take her home. Not that she would have done it.
Maze stayed close to Mary Elizabeth whenever she could. After lunch she tried to persuade her to duck out of the big assembly on “God’s Will for the Freshman Class” and walk into town, but Mary Elizabeth only stared at her like she’d suggested they go off to commit a murder. So she closed her eyes through the long, boring speeches by the college president, then a mess of deans, and took herself someplace else in her mind—first to Berea the way it must have been seventy years before, when Georgia had first arrived; then to the edge of Shawnee Run Creek, at the end of the trail behind the Sisters’ Shop, on a first warm day of spring. Three different people, Mary Elizabeth among them, nudged her to try to make her open her eyes. But she ignored them all.
After dinner that night, Maze dragged Mary Elizabeth away from the social with the faculty to a grand piano she’d seen in another room, a kind of formal lounge, down the hall. “Play for me again,” she begged.
Mary Elizabeth pulled her arm free and stared hard at Maze. “You are one strange girl,” she said.
That stung a bit, and Maze thought, I thought she was different, but she might be like the others. “You aren’t the first person to tell me that,” she answered, thinking only, Please. Please don’t be like them. It was clear to Maze by the second day of freshman orientation that Berea College was as full of people who would find her peculiar as her high school in Harrodsburg had been. “I reckon that’s why you’re stuck with me,” she added.
Mary Elizabeth stared at her for a while, then opened her mouth as if she were about to say something but abruptly closed it. She turned to the piano, closed her eyes, then lifted her hands to the keys. She paused for a moment, just long enough to tell Maze that this time she’d play something by Debussy, one of the Images, and Maze, who’d learned a little French in high school, recognized the accuracy of her accent. Then her fingers came down so lightly, like two feathers floating free from a featherbed, that Maze was surprised by the rich, echoing tones that came from within the piano’s depths.
When she finished playing, her eyes were closed, her face softer than Maze had yet seen it; there were tears in her eyes when she opened them and looked over at Maze. She smiled shyly and looked down.
“Debussy’s French,” she said, then shrugged. “It’s different when I play the French composers for some reason. I mean, I’m different.…” She shrugged again. “It’s hard to explain.”
“I’ve never heard anything like that,” Maze said, surprised by how quiet her voice was. She truly never had. She shook her head and looked down. “I guess that was silly, me askin’ for church music last night,” she said, then looked up to meet Mary Elizabeth’s eyes. “I don’t know what to say when I hear something like that.”
Mary Elizabeth smiled at her. “Well, that’s a first,” she said, and they both laughed. “And it’s okay; I do play a lot of church music, too,” and before Maze could answer she started in on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” At the last “by and by” Maze interrupted her to say, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear you play some more Debussy.” She wondered, when she said it, if she’d pronounced it right.
If she was wrong, Mary Elizabeth didn’t correct her. “All right,” she said, lifting her fingers from the keys and stretching them out in all directions a few times. “I’ll play some pieces from The Children’s Corner,” she said. “I worked and worked on these when I was younger, with my aunt. She loved Debussy. He wrote these for his daughter. This one’s called ‘Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum.’”
While Mary Elizabeth played, Maze closed her eyes and leaned back into her chair and tried to imagine the life of a child in Paris, France. But the more she listened, the more she found herself dreaming of her own childhood, of happy summer days along the creek, of the rhythm of the loom as Georgia held her on her lap, her feet pumping the pedals and her big, gnarled hands guiding Maze’s own small ones.
When, after the slow, fading notes at the end of “The Snow Is Dancing,” a security guard came to lock up the building and shooed them out of the lounge, Maze opened her eyes and looked at the clock, shocked to realize it was eleven o’clock. Their classes would begin the next day. This time she was the one with tears in her eyes.
If she’d just looked more closely, she might not have misjudged Maze so, Mary Elizabeth often thought later when she relived that first day. She also might not have wasted time trying to play the Brahms Intermezzo—a piece she hadn’t yet mastered and in truth didn’t much like—and instead gotten right to the works she loved. When she finished playing that first night and looked over at Maze, she watched as the girl breathed in and then out, deep and slow. She noticed her freckles then; before that she’d been too distracted by the uncontrollable waves of Maze’s reddish-blond hair, kinkier even than her own since she’d begun to straighten it years before.
And of course then Maze had done what Mary Elizabeth expected her to do; she’d asked for hymns, or for some country tune. But there was the other thing she’d said then, too: “You don’t have to try to impress me.” She’d known what Mary Elizabeth was up to. But then she tried to take it back. She nearly tripped over herself trying to undo what she’d done. She could not close her mouth. But somehow, strangely, only with her, only with Mary Elizabeth. Why was that?
“Why do you do that to your hair?” Maze asked the first time she walked into the room to find Mary Elizabeth holding a scorching hot comb to a hank of it.
“Well, why don’t you do it to yours?” she might have snapped in reply, but didn’t. Other girls had already tried with Maze. Dare Mills and Ferne Denney (who would be crowned May Queen at the end of that first year), blond, blue-eyed roommates two doors down from Maze and Mary Elizabeth, had cooed at her like she was a baby the first time they’d laid eyes on her.
“Oooh! Would you look at those freckles? And I wish you’d let me get my hands on those curls, Maze,” Ferne squealed. “You’d have a nice head of hair if you just got them under control.”
Dare looked Maze over from head to toe in a way only Dare Mills, who was from Ohio, could do, letting her gaze come to rest on Maze’s faded, old-fashioned cotton blouse. “Grace,” she said (she refused to call Maze by a nickname that, she said, she found peculiar), “you could be downright pretty if you tried.”
Maze’s answer? A toss of her curls, a quiet, breathy little laugh, and then, yes, silence. Simply staring back at Dare—a gleam in her eye, more than a hint of a challenge in that unblinking gaze. One night during their first week in Ladies Hall, Mary Elizabeth stepped out of the bathroom down the hall from their room, and there in the hallway she found Maze, cornered again by Ferne and Dare. At first she assumed they were after her again about her hair, which she’d taken to pulling back in a big, unwieldy braid so the girls on the hall would stop grabbing at her curls. But then Mary Elizabeth heard what Ferne was saying, with Dare standing next to her and nodding her agreement.
“My daddy made sure before I came that I wouldn’t have to share a room with one of them. If you just asked, I know they’d have to let you change.”
Ferne’s back was to Mary Elizabeth, and Maze, who stood leaning dreamily against the wall, saw her approaching well before Ferne finished and turned to see what Maze was looking at. She kept quiet, watching her roommate’s slow approach. As Mary Elizabeth passed the three of them, Maze simply looked over at her and said, “Hard to sleep with all the racket some folks make, ain’t it, Mary Elizabeth?” Then she shook her head, laughed a hollow little laugh, and followed her roommate into their room while Ferne and Dare stared at the floor and slunk back into theirs.