LILY WAS GOING OFF with Nathan to get together with some of his friends, so I went into the house alone. I could take Oscar out and walk by Anthony Cruz’s house. I could see what Jennifer was up to. I could memorize lines. I could read.
But nothing was of the slightest interest to me. At this hour, only the news would be on television. Still, that’s what I opted for. I dragged myself into the den, still in my new dress, turned on Channel Seven, and flopped down in front of the TV. I could hear Mrs. Baylor in the kitchen. I thought I smelled meatloaf baking in the oven. I wasn’t hungry. Too many doughnuts at the recital. As soon as I had finished “Für Elise” and sat down, my appetite had returned.
I got up at some point, walked to my room, changed into pedal pushers and a T-shirt, and sat on my bed. I had twenty-three more pages of Footlights for Jean to read and it was the good part, but I knew the book was going to remain closed on my nightstand. I pulled out the script from under the bed and placed it on my lap. I felt not a bit of inspiration. I thumbed through it, checking for Jennifer’s parts. She had lots of lines.
If I was going to be Olivia, I needed to memorize her lines before tryouts in two weeks. Tomorrow, I vowed.
I returned to the den and the Nightly News. Boring stuff about troop increases in Vietnam. I watched a grainy report and wished I’d gotten home early enough for General Hospital. Even though I couldn’t understand the appeal of Nurse Jessie Brewer when she always acted so unhappy, talked in a deep monotone, and hardly ever smiled. She was super-serious about everything.
Yet men were always falling in love with her. I didn’t get it, but still, I liked to watch—every day in the summer and whenever I could get home from school early enough the rest of the year.
I heard Mrs. Baylor moving around in the kitchen, preparing my dinner. I got off the sofa, crept into my daddy’s home office, and eased the door closed behind me. I stood there a moment, looking around. I wanted to see if the letter I’d discovered under the desk organizer from that Paula person had been opened. If it had, I could read it.
I sat down in his chair and resisted the urge to spin around. I couldn’t get caught up in silly things. I had to hurry before Mrs. Baylor called me to dinner. I looked at the desk organizer for a moment, then lifted it. Nothing. Nothing. The letter was gone—it was probably in my dad’s pocket. I was disappointed.
I twirled in his chair just once, then stopped. Maybe he’d put it in one of the drawers. I opened the file drawer and went through the folders. No luck. Then I tried to open the drawer just above. It was stuck. Something was catching. Something was in the way. I hadn’t looked in this drawer during my last visit to my father’s office.
Now I sighed, tugged on it, and managed to get it open. I reached into the back of the drawer and pulled out an old, bent Jet magazine. It was from September 22, 1955. Ten years ago. I could easily imagine my father being annoyed by the drawer but just letting it go. It was probably a drawer he didn’t use much, anyway.
I loved Jet magazine. It reported all the colored celebrity news and gossip and it was full of interesting pictures. The cover showed a light-skinned girl in a bathing suit. “A pretty Los Angeles City College student,” the caption stated. I checked her closely to see if she was all that good-looking. She had a nice smile and a nice figure. I guessed most would think she was pretty.
I turned a page to see a picture of Nat King Cole and “the tall, beautiful Maria Ellington”—whom he was going to marry and make Maria Cole. I stared at her. She was fair skinned, too, with straight hair and light eyes. “Tall and beautiful,” the magazine said.
I turned a few more pages, looking for more old celebrity news, and stopped at a small headline: NATION HORRIFIED BY MURDER. I stared. There was a picture of a young boy standing next to his mother. Colored. He was the one who was murdered, I guessed, and it was odd to think of a young boy murdered. He looked so alive and happy in the picture, but since his photo was right under the headline, he must have been the murdered one.
The boy and his mother were both dressed up. As if it was Easter or something. And they were smiling. She had her hand on his shoulder and a proud look on her face. The caption said the boy’s name was Emmett Till.
I turned the page and let out a cry. I slapped my hand over my mouth. I saw something so horrible, it didn’t seem it was meant to be seen. That same boy was in his casket. His face was smashed. His head looked like a pumpkin that had been dropped from a second story. He looked like a monster. I couldn’t tell where his eyes were.
I quickly turned to the closed office door. I could still hear Mrs. Baylor in the kitchen, cooking my dinner. She’d be calling me soon.
I found myself shaking my head slowly and whispering, “No, no, no.”
What had happened to that boy, Emmett Till? “What happened to you?” I said under my breath as my eyes filled with tears. “Who did that to you?”
I tucked the magazine under the elastic waist of my pedal pushers and pulled my shirt over it. I slipped out of my daddy’s office and into my room just as Mrs. Baylor was calling me to dinner. I stashed the magazine under my pillow and went to the kitchen.
She’d set one place at the table and dished up the green beans, mashed potatoes, and meatloaf. I stared at the plate of food. She stood there looking at me with a strange expression on her face.
“Help yourself to more if you want,” she said as she took off her apron and headed to her room. She glanced back at me over her shoulder as I pulled out the chair and sat down, and a strange look passed over her face. Her lips parted as if she was about to say something but then thought better of it. It wasn’t anything mean or curt or critical. Maybe she wanted to ask me how my recital went. Or maybe she wanted to ask me about Nathan and Lily—find out what I knew, what I thought. I would tell her that I thought they loved each other and no one could stop true love. But she turned and went up to her room with slow, heavy steps.
I wasn’t hungry. I stared at my plate of food. I felt so tired. And sad, about everything, everywhere. I ate all of my dinner anyway. So Mrs. Baylor would be pleased.
Then I watched all the Friday night TV I wanted, but by the time Peyton Place came on, I was too sleepy to continue. I went to my room, got into my pajamas, and walked to the bathroom to brush my teeth (I was trying to be better about that). All that time, I was listening for Nathan’s car or my daddy’s or my mother’s—someone’s!—to turn the corner and pull up in the driveway or in front of the house. The street was quiet.
I pulled the Jet magazine out from under my pillow and read the article and stared at the happy, smiling face of Emmett Till—when he was just being a person, just being fourteen with Bobo for a nickname. There were also pictures of his two cousins. He’d had a last happy day before they did that to him. The report said he’d whistled at a white woman. And that two white men had come for him in the night. Dragged him away from his family. And threatened to pistol-whip his grandmother. His grandmother. Two big white men. What was in their hearts? What was in their souls, that they would pistol-whip an old woman if she tried to stop them from taking her grandson?
Tears streamed down my cheeks. I put my face in my hands and knew exactly why people put their face in their hands. It’s because there’s nothing else you can do. We didn’t live in Mississippi, but hate was under the surface everywhere. Wasn’t it? Even if it was a sneaky kind of hate. It made people look at me and automatically think they were superior. It made them think I was a thief or maybe I’d do something to their swimming pool . . . and that white was better.
I lowered my hands and stared at the smiling picture of Emmett Till and thought, He didn’t even know what was coming. I heard a car and caught my breath. But it went by.
With a fresh and minty mouth, I got on my knees and began my prayers. First the Lord’s Prayer, which was more serious than “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray to God my soul to keep.” It was the prayer I said when I needed hope and wasn’t in a hurry.
Then I prayed the extra part, that my mother would come home and Lily wouldn’t leave me in a few weeks to go off to Georgia (though I wasn’t very hopeful about that) and that my father would be true to my mother and that Lily and Nathan would get married and that starving children would get food and that all the soldiers would come home from Vietnam. (While I was on my knees in my clean pajamas and my freshly brushed teeth, I thought I might as well pray for everything I could think of. I did not want God to find me selfish.) And I added Mrs. Baylor. I prayed that one day she would like me because I never ever, ever, ever thought that my color was better than anyone else’s. Ever. I prayed for Emmett Till—and his mother. And his father. And that he was in heaven. (Although there was no picture of his father, he must have had a father.) I prayed for his cousins, too, and his grandparents, whether alive or not.
I heard the floor creak in the hall just as I stood up. I looked around to see Mrs. Baylor standing there with her arms full of folded sheets. I felt my face grow warm. She left the door and went to put the sheets away in the linen closet next to the bathroom. Then she came back.
She stood there in the doorway and looked at me with her head cocked to the side and her eyes squinting.
“Let me tell you something, child,” she began.
I braced myself.
“You are a good girl.”
I looked at her and began to cry.
She came and sat next to me on the bed. She took my hand. “I should have never said to you that thing I said.”
“About the Africans?”
She snorted. “Can I tell you a story?”
She didn’t wait for my answer. She just took a deep breath and began.
“This ol’ lady here,” she said, bringing her finger up to touch her chest, “was once a little girl—just like you.” She sighed. “And before that, a baby.”
Mrs. Baylor paused, thinking back, I supposed.
I dared to look at her then to find out if I could see the little girl in her. Or the baby. I couldn’t quite, but I knew she had to have been one once. She stared down at her hands. “I’ma tell you why I said something so hateful. Though there is no excuse.”
More tears welled in my eyes. I think it was all the emotions of the day: getting ready for the recital, feeling nervous, having stage fright, seeing my mother, and discovering what had happened to Emmett Till.
“I know you feel alone,” she started.
The tears came. I quickly wiped them away.
“Listen to me. I was born in Jamaica. My mother did not want me because she did not like my father, her husband. She married him because he could give her things. He had a good government job, but she never wanted to have a baby by him. He was a very black man. He looked like an African. But here I came anyway. It was God’s will. And a girl. Who took after her father. I looked just like my daddy shrunk down.”
I laughed.
“Really,” she said. “My mother, on the other hand, was small and delicate, with soft brown skin and with what we call nice features: small nose, lips not too full, thick wavy hair that hung down her back. She was quite proud of that hair. Sometimes she’d let my father brush it. She was a beautiful woman, something like your mother.” She looked at me sideways.
I thought of my own hair. “I once heard my mother and father blaming each other for my hair,” I said.
“You have a good healthy head of hair. Grows long,” Mrs. Baylor said. “Takes a press real good.”
“My mother calls it rhiny. She says rhiny hair is usually kinky.”
Mrs. Baylor laughed. “I’ll braid it up for you sometime.”
She was quiet for a moment, so I waited to hear more about this little black baby whose mother didn’t want her.
“My mother hired a wet nurse for me. She would not nurse me herself. The wet nurse was Nancy. We did not have her long. My father died and we were soon destitute because there was no will and he had left a lot of debt.
“My mother went to work in a hotel, cleaning rooms. She shipped me off to my father’s mother, and that’s where I spent the first twelve years of my life. I was happy. My grandmother loved me so. I was the daughter of her most successful child.”
I shifted uneasily. What must it have felt like to be shipped off? I wondered.
“When I was twelve—just your age—my mother sent for me. I was so happy, thinking she finally wanted me. My grandmother made me a new dress, fixed my hair, and bought me little gold hoops for my ears. These very ones,” Mrs. Baylor said, pulling at an ear lobe. “I still wear them after all of these years, for my grandmother.”
I imagined Mrs. Baylor all dressed up. I stared at the earrings. It was the first time I’d really noticed them. They’d always just gone with her look. “What happened when you went to live with your mother?” I asked.
A shadow fell over Mrs. Baylor’s face then. She gazed out my window at the black night. “My mother didn’t want me for me. She wanted me so I could take care of her baby.”
My eyes widened.
“She’d gotten pregnant by one of the white hotel guests—a married man who’d flattered her, made her think on his short visit to Kingston that he would be her ticket to the States. I think she got pregnant on purpose, not knowing that the white man already had a wife.”
“A girl baby or a boy baby?”
“Girl,” Mrs. Baylor said simply. “I was pulled out of school—the wonderful school that I adored. Snatched from the love of my grandmother and my teacher, who always praised me as the smartest girl in her class.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“My mother lied to my grandmother. Told her she was ready to be a mother to me now, so my grandmother was happy to reunite us. But my mother turned me into a nursemaid. She did not send me to school. She kept me home to care for my sister while she continued to work in that hotel.
“She was a tiny little thing, my sister, Kate—I think because my mother had had to hide her pregnancy. She would have gotten fired if anyone found out she was getting with the guests. I don’t know how she managed to hide it, but she did. Then she told the hotel people that Kate was the child of a sister who couldn’t care for her.”
I pictured a baby the size of a small doll.
“She was tiny and so pale, you could see the blue veins in her temples. A frail little baby. But I took excellent care of her. I was hoping to earn my mother’s favor. As Kate grew, certain features showed up: blue eyes, dark-blond straight hair; my mother was so proud of those blue eyes and straight hair. Soon Kate went from being a sweet baby to a spoiled little girl who thought she was better because she looked mostly white. She began to mimic our mother by treating me like a servant put on earth just to care for her. I lost years of schooling and fell so far behind, I was never to catch up. Never to return to school.”
I felt my throat tighten at the injustice of it. Tears welled in my eyes again. I wiped them away with the back of my hand.
“When I was seventeen my father’s sister, my aunt Blanche, who lived in New York, sent for me to go live with her. In secret. I think she guessed what was going on. I sneaked away. I won’t say how, but I was able to leave and then live with my lovely Aunt Blanche.”
There was a moment of quiet. “Mrs. Baylor?” I said.
“Yes, girl.”
“I never think of my color being better than anyone else’s. Never.” And I was telling the truth.