WHEN GLORIA GOT HOME, SHE WENT TO THE KITCHEN SINK and scrubbed her cheek with dish detergent, then with raspy baking soda. She hated that man! Hated him! Her skin was getting irritated. And his ridiculous wife! Greasy blond hair. Her brown eyes—wide and pathetic. The way she had held the Loveman’s hosiery bag in front of her chest. When Gloria glanced back, she had noticed how the woman held the slender paper bag with both hands, delicate fingers, from its top, like a shield or breastplate.
Gloria hurried to the bathroom and washed with Cashmere Bouquet. She wouldn’t tell her mother. It would break her mother’s heart.
Then she went to the family treasure chest. It was a sea chest, painted a worn green. Nobody had any idea where it had come from, but it was large enough to hold a small person. The women in the family had passed it down and down to the oldest daughter.
Gloria knelt before the chest and opened it. She found the photo she wanted. There she was, faint with age, but the cheek of Susan, her ancestor, branded forever. Somehow Susan had learned to write and to read, though before the Civil War the law had prohibited her learning. On the back of a daguerreotype, her great-great-grandmother had written her name in her own beautiful hand: Susan Spenser Oaks. She was an old woman in the picture, the imprint of a wrinkled oak leaf on her wrinkled cheek.
The only other artifact they had of Susan was a book, but there were many other treasures in the chest. Each mother had added one or two items, specified before her death, to the heritage. Gloria wondered what her own mother would leave; what she herself would leave. Perhaps a worn cake of rosin.
To keep the binding together, an old navy blue strip of cloth and a faded green ribbon had been bound around the middle of Susan’s book:Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe the piece of cloth had belonged to Susan, too. The navy color had held in the cloth, but the grosgrain ribbon had faded to the color of sick grass. Gloria untied the cloth and the ribbon, like a double belly-band, and opened the cover. Inside the book, in a different hand than her ancestor’s, Gloria read:To my friend Susan, with love and joy on the occasion of our reunion, from Una, September 15, 1867, Nantucket.
Her great-great-grandmother had had a loving, literate friend. With the book in her hand, Gloria sat down on the floor. How far back could she remember? How far back in her own life?
She remembered shopping when she was a little girl, with her mother, and streetcars still ran in Birmingham. They’d only been in the city a month or two, and lived in a little house, not this big one on Dynamite Hill. From the beginning, her mother had insisted on shopping at the best stores. At Loveman’s and Pizitz, at Blach’s and Burger-Phillips, with its electric eyes mounted on brass posts to open the door for you, regardless of color.
Back then, when Gloria was four or five, even little girls wore hats, secured with a cord, and white cloth gloves to town. Back in the streetcar days, when Gloria and Mama were shopping inside Loveman’s, Gloria had taken the black elastic cord from under her chin. Her hat was a yellow straw, with a narrow brim; half a wreath of blue, red, and white cloth flowers decorated the front seam between the brim and crown of the hat. The hat’s elastic always pinched the skin under Gloria’s soft little chin. She forgot to put it back on when they walked outside, and a gust of wind blew the straw hat off her head and tumbled it into the street between the streetcar tracks.
“Stay here,” her mother had ordered, and she ran on her high heels after the hat.
Down the street between the shining tracks she ran, glancing this way and that for safety. Then she bent from the waist and pounced on the crown. Gloria could see her fingertips dimpling the straw. And Gloria had obeyed perfectly—still and good on the sidewalk. Triumphantly her mother came back to her, fitted the hat onto Gloria’s head, securing the elastic under her chin, where it promptly pinched. “Just like a cat,” her mother said, “I pounced on it just like Purrfect catching a mouse.” And she had. Never had Gloria been so proud of her sedate mother. Her short and buxom mother so quick and brave, saving her hat from the steel wheels of the streetcar. Her brave mother making a streetcar full of white people wait while she saved her daughter’s hat.
HER MOTHER WOULD NEVER know a white man had spat in her daughter’s face.
But then Gloria thought, I’m going to have to do this again. Christine and I.