IN APRIL, WHEN the dogwoods bloomed, Miss Spivey abandoned reading, writing, and arithmetic as we had previously known them, and threw the whole school into full-time preparations for the Baghdad Bazaar. When we weren’t painting gold stars and moons on miles of blue and red and purple cloth, or mixing up enough white dirt, corn oil, kerosene, and butterbeans to paint the whole county white twice over, we were coming up with harem-girl dance routines and doing something Miss Spivey called blocking scenes for Alaeddin. Full-fledged rehearsals took place on Sunday afternoons, when the various college girls and other out-of-towners, including my sister May, could be present. Both Reverends turned a blind eye.
It had come to light toward the end of March that May was expecting again. (Momma pressed her lips together when she heard, and then she sighed, but when she saw May, she hugged and kissed her and said, “Maybe it’ll be a brother for little Ed.”) By April, May was more than five months along and showing already, skinny as she was. Miss Spivey declared that May being in a family way (Miss Spivey said “with child”) didn’t matter one bit. Shahrazad was a storyteller and could spend the whole time sitting in a balcony at the Sultan’s feet, all covered up in fancy robes that would hide her condition anyway, no matter how much she was showing by showtime.
That really got Mavis’s goat. She went around trying to drum up some righteous indignation on the part of folks like Florence’s mother and the Reverend wives, by asking: Who ever heard of a pregnant lady in a play on a stage anyway? Miss Spivey knew exactly what Mavis was up to, so she asked us in school one day if we happened to be aware that Shahrazad gave birth to not one but three babies in the course of The Thousand Nights and a Night.
This piece of news shut everybody up, except for Ralphord, who said, “I thought she was tellin’ stories every night of the week.”
Miss Spivey took the last green volume—number IX—from the shelf behind her desk. (She never brought in Volume X, which was mostly notes by Sir Richard Burton about his sources of information and things he left out for reasons of decency.) Miss Spivey paged through the book until she found the place, almost at the end, where Shahrazad has the nurses and eunuchs bring in her three sons—“one walking, one crawling, and one suckling,” the last two being twins—to show them to their father the Sultan. For the sake of their sons, Shahrazad asks the Sultan to spare her life, whereupon he announces that he had already made up his mind not to cut off her head anyway, because she was “chaste, pure, and pious,” to use his exact words, which were not words I would have used to describe her, given the stories she liked to tell. Then everybody puts on robes of honor and gets ready to abide in all pleasure and solace until, of course, as usual, “there took them the Destroyer of delights and the Severer of societies, the Desolator of dwelling-places,” and so forth.
Miss Spivey closed the book on her desk and folded her hands on top of it. By now I realized that if Shahrazad had three babies in the space of 1,001 days, or nights, she must have been expecting most of the time she was telling those stories. No wonder Miss Spivey didn’t think my sister May’s condition was a problem, dramatically speaking.
I thought my sister would be as surprised as I was—and maybe a little disappointed—when she heard about Shahrazad having three sons. When I first told May, months ago now, how Shahrazad’s stories held off the will of the Sultan for 1,001 nights, May said, and I remember it shocked me considerably, “I wonder if that would work on Ed.”
I said, “May! Ed don’t want to cut your head off, does he?”
She said, “No, Gladys, honey, he sure don’t.”
But May already knew about the babies. Miss Spivey had shown her those pages a while ago to convince her that she could still try out for the role of the storyteller, even if she was in a family way herself. May said she did wonder how Shahrazad managed it, though. “What d’you think, Gladys? Did the Sultan give her nights off? Or did she just keep on talkin’ straight through?”
She did take some time off for the twins. It says so right in the book.
May was having a lot of trouble with her condition this time around, more than she’d had before. Sometimes she’d get a pain in her lower back so fierce it like to crippled her. The truth was, even Momma didn’t know how much trouble May was having, although she worried about her being miles away from us in McIntyre as her time got closer. Ed stayed home more than usual that spring, and when he did go out with Ebenezer on short trips, Momma had Force carry me and Ralphord to May’s to help her out. One time, I went in and found May curled up on the floor in the bedroom, sound asleep, with the door shut and her two youngest sleeping on the floor up against her like puppies or kittens or something. Not till they all woke up did I see that she had little Ed and little May each tied around the waist with a rope that was tied at the other end to May’s arm, just in case they woke up and she couldn’t go after them. May didn’t want Momma to know about the rope, and she sure didn’t want Miss Spivey to think that Shahrazad was incapacitated, so she made me swear not to tell how I found her on the floor.
It was, without a doubt, the dumbest promise I ever kept.
Something went seriously wrong with Mavis Davis, too, about this time. From a naturally bossy and perhaps understandably mistrustful person, she’d turned into a pillar of hatred. I thought it was on account of what Miss Spivey whispered to her, but Momma said that what happened to Mavis was what happens to a potentially good person when they are behaving in a way they know is wrong. They have to harden themselves. There was only one way for Mavis to keep on doing like she was—and we didn’t even know the half of what she was doing at the time—and that was to hate Miss Spivey more than she hated herself.
We Cailiffs came in for a share of it, too. Although Mavis herself would not have a thing to do with the Baghdad Bazaar, she started asking everybody if they had noticed that all the best parts in the Arabian Nights entertainment had gone to the Cailiffs. When Harriet Eskew said wistfully, “But the Princess is Louise Blount,” Mavis told her to shut up.
I didn’t know what to make of the charge of favoritism, which was not exactly without due cause. I should have known it wouldn’t do any good to point out that some of us Cailiffs had small parts in the play—like me and Ildred, we were anonymous harem girls—and that there was nobody in town who would have picked anybody but my brother Force to be Alaeddin. (It would have been like telling Tyrone Power or Clark Gable, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”) As for Ralphord and May, they had their voices going for them. Sometimes that kind of thing runs in a family. When Ralphord and I tried to make our case to the O’Quinn girls after school one day, Mavis shouldered her way into the group. Arnie Lumpkin was right behind her. I think he was beginning to fancy Mavis Davis, which was just too bad for him.
“It’s because y’all’re Cailiffs,” she accused.
“It is not.”
“And nigger lovers,” Arnie added.
“We are not,” Ralphord said. I poked him. Sometimes I probably expected too much of Ralphord. He was still only nine years old.
Mavis got a smug look on her face. “I bet they don’t even know why their momma and daddy love Negroes so much.” The O’Quinns turned to Mavis, their faces full of expectation. Mavis sneered at Ralphord first, then she told the O’Quinns, “It’s all on account of Ralph Ford.”
“I didn’t do nothing!” Ralphord said. Between me poking him and Mavis’s meanness, he looked about to cry.
“No, stupid, not you. Ralph.” She paused. “Ford. That soldier saved your daddy’s life, which story, I might add, we are mighty sick and tired of hearing about.”
I’d told Mavis about Ralph Ford once or twice at the most. (That was before my mother reminded me that once might be too many times to tell that story to someone whose own daddy was dead and gone.) I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mavis Davis.”
“I am talking about Ralph”—she paused longer, for emphasis, this time—“Ford.”
“What about him?”
“He was a colored man.”
“I still don’t know what you are talking about.”
“I’m talkin’ about Ralph Ford was colored,” she said.
All I could think of was how would she know. I said, “How would you know?”
She didn’t answer that. She spun around to Ralphord instead. “You’re named for a colored man!”
Everybody looked at my little brother with interest now. I expected him to say, Am not, but to his credit, he recovered quickly. He said, “Ralph Ford saved my daddy’s life. He won him a medal for bravery.”
“He was a nigger!” Arnie Lumpkin said.
“You’re a jackass!” said Ralphord.
Arnie Lumpkin stuck his face in Ralphord’s face. He had to bend down to do it. Ralphord drew back, which was wise, I thought, until I saw that my little brother was making a fist. Arnie saw it, too. He laughed and straightened up again.
Then Ralphord said, “I don’t care!” and he turned and ran down the dusty slope of the schoolyard to the red curve of the road, and I think he would have kept on running all the way to Bibbens’ store if he hadn’t collided with Force, who was coming the opposite way to pick us up at school. Mavis and the rest of them scattered. They left me standing alone in the schoolyard while my brothers came slowly up the road, Force with his hand on Ralphord’s shoulder. When they got closer, Force said to me and Ralphord, “Y’all know better than to believe them two.”
Still, Force had no facts to offer us about Ralph Ford one way or the other. About halfway home, we came around the bend and there was Theo Boykin up ahead, walking the same way we were, toward home, and moving slow, which meant that he was dead tired or thinking hard or, most likely, some of both. When he saw us, he stopped and we caught up, except for Ralphord, who’d fallen behind us to watch his own feet shuffling through the dust. We walked in silence for a while. Then Ralphord scooted up closer and said, “Theo? I got a funny question to ask you.” He paused, then continued in a rush, “How would you feel if you found out that you were named after a white person?”
It was a funny question—one that I was surprised Ralphord would even think to ask—but Theo didn’t laugh. He said, “I’ll tell you what’s funny, Ralphord. Practically every Negro in Georgia is named for one white person or another. Didn’t you know that?”
Ralphord shook his head.
“Boykin was the name of the man who owned my great-granddaddy,” Theo said. “On my daddy’s side.”
Ralphord shuffled along. “And that don’t bother you none?”
Theo did laugh then. There was something so sharp in his laughter that for a moment he didn’t sound like Theo. “Hell, no, Ralphord,” he said. “Black folks just love being named for old white massas. How come you’re asking?”
Ralphord told him.
Theo shook his head. “Two of my daddy’s brothers were in that war. They had a separate regiment for Negro soldiers. There is no chance your daddy would’ve been fighting alongside a Negro. Mavis Davis was lying to you, that’s all.”
We were already well into rehearsals—far enough that I knew Louise Blount’s Princess part by heart from feeding her lines every evening—when Mrs. Lulu Blount confessed to Miss Spivey that she had been unable to talk her husband, as Piedmont County Superintendent of Schools, into allowing a colored boy to play a part in our Arabian Nights entertainment. “I thought that was settled a long time ago!” Miss Spivey cried, while Lulu wrung her hands.
Eugene Boykin was even more disappointed than Miss Spivey. “I lost my big debut,” he said, debut being a word Miss Spivey applied to everyone’s performance except for the dramatically experienced Louise. Eugene pronounced the word day-bue, like Miss Spivey did. Arnie Lumpkin said that was just because Eugene didn’t know how to read.
“He sure as hell does,” I said, taking a quick glance around to see if anybody else heard me cussing. “He’s been to school more than you have.”
“Well, he ain’t never seen Miss Spivey write it on the blackboard,” Arnie said. Not that Arnie could read it one way or the other, but on the board it did look like dee-butt, which was how most of the boys at Threestep School said it every chance they got, usually with a little snicker.
Unlike the rest of us, Theo was not particularly disappointed on his brother’s behalf. Theo said maybe it was for the best if someone else played the part. “Like Arnie Lumpkin or that Wallace Turnipseed.” Wallace was another boy very large in girth, if not height. “I’d like to hear one of them say ‘Your wish is my command!’”
But Miss Spivey said, “Don’t give up just yet, Eugene.”
And then, as if we didn’t have enough to set us back on our heels, we lost Miss Templeton. If you wanted to know why she up and left town in the dead of night during that last week of April, all you had to do was ask the CME minister and his wife, who provided room and board for her over in Brennan, or Mrs. Faith Boykin, who was her friend. Any one of them could have told you that Miss Templeton received a telegram from Chicago, which came to Bibbens’ store and had to be delivered to her miles away at the minister’s house in the country, so there’s another person, Mr. Bibben, who could have told you the truth about Miss Templeton’s sudden “disappearance.” After reading in the telegram that her mother had taken sick up in Chicago and wasn’t expected to last the week, Miss Templeton had tearfully accepted Mr. Bibben’s offer of a ride to Macon right then and there to catch the next train.
One person it wouldn’t do you any good to ask what happened was Etta George, even though she had been staying with the minister’s family, too, and had, in fact, picked up the telegram when Miss Templeton’s trembling fingers let it fall to the floor. Trouble was, ever since Miss Templeton boarded the one-thirty a.m. Central of Georgia for Atlanta and points north, Etta George couldn’t finish a sentence without starting to cry.
Given all that, it’s hard to imagine how some folks came up with the story that Miss Templeton left town because she was suddenly with child. By noontime the day after she left, it was just as if the telegram, which Mr. Bibben actually had a copy of for his Western Union records, never existed. It didn’t help that Miss Templeton was good-looking and soft-spoken and so graceful in her ways that the Superintendent himself was heard (by Mavis Davis’s mother) to say that Miss Spivey could have learned a thing or two from the teacher at the colored school—a remark that made even his name come up when people took to whispering. It was enough to make a person’s skin crawl, once you understood what they were talking about. Theo got whispered about, too, in that regard, which made him blush so hard you could see his very dark skin go pinkish, and of course my own brother’s name was mentioned by some. You couldn’t look like my brother Force without people suspecting you of all possible crimes of the heart.
My momma blamed all such talk on meanness and jealousy in the heart of the talker. “There’s some people can’t stand to see a person as sweet and smart as Miss Templeton, without they have to bring that person down by talking ugly about her.”
Theo Boykin did not have much to say about Miss Templeton’s departure. “She left me a pile of books,” he was willing to admit out at May’s the next Saturday morning. He’d brought three of them along and started passing them around to show us: two small cloth-bound books—one by Frederick Douglass and the other by W. E. B. Du Bois—and a new-looking one with a title that made you want to pick it up and start reading without delay. It was called Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Theo dug his thumbnail into a groove in the pine tabletop. “Miss Templeton was saving these books to give me when I went to college. She said she wanted me to know what kind of company I was in.” He looked up at us. “She said someday everybody would be reading them—in high school and college and all.”
“Instead of Shakespeare?” Force said.
“I think in addition to,” said Theo.
Etta George came to live at the Boykins’ after Miss Templeton left town. This was Miss Templeton’s idea, Etta told me later. She was worried that Etta might end up just cleaning house and taking care of the children if she stayed on with the minister and his wife in Brennan. At the Boykins’ she would be closer to those up-to-date schoolbooks.
Moving in with the Boykins was a great trial to Etta George—not because she had anything against them, but because there were only two ways to get to the Boykins’ house from anyplace else: you could cut through the woods or go down the lane past our house. Either route required Etta to face one or the other of her two greatest fears.
The woods were full of snakes. Our house was full of white people.
I once heard Mrs. Boykin tell my momma that, prior to the lessons with Miss Spivey, Etta’s only experiences with white people had been something to do with a landlord in Brennan to whom Etta’s mother owed considerable amounts of back rent. By mutual agreement, Momma and Mrs. Boykin set about trying to help that girl get over her extreme fear. Mrs. Boykin would send Etta George to borrow something from Momma every chance she got, or else to deliver a pie or a bag of pecans, and Momma would ask Etta to come on in and wait just a minute, set herself down, help herself to a biscuit. I didn’t see that their efforts had much effect on Etta. If she came on over to our house with Theo or Eugene, everything was fine, but if she was alone, well, you could look out the kitchen window and watch her trying to bring her fist up to knock on our back door, taking deep breaths and closing her eyes, for a full minute, or two, or three, until her face was glistening and you wanted to open the door but you were afraid she’d faint dead away if you did.
It was equally hard to watch her come down the lane past our house from the road. Sometimes she’d go along on the far side of the pine trees, worrying the grass ahead of her with a long stick. Other times she’d stay on the lane but stick to the shadows, gliding from tree to tree like a ghost. Or she might just pick up and run past our house to the Boykins’ as fast as she could. One time, she was halfway there when an automobile turned off the road behind her. I figured she’d bolt straight ahead for safety, but instead she froze in the middle of the lane right next to a big old pine tree, my favorite one to climb. I believe that Mr. Gordon, who was busy looking for white dirt in the ditch instead of watching where he was driving, might have knocked her over if I hadn’t been halfway up in my tree. I called down, “Up here! Etta, up here!” just in time for her to spring out of Mr. Gordon’s way and into the green cave of branches below me. She started climbing as fast as she could, and to get out of her way, so did I. Pretty soon, we were as high as you could get in that tree, with a view of the Boykins’ place laid out in front of us, Mr. Gordon’s car pulling up to a stop a few yards away from the house.
We watched Mr. Gordon get out of his car, a sheet of paper in his hand. He wore a white shirt and a tie and shiny black shoes and the kind of hat most men only wore on Sundays. A fedora, I believe it is called. He didn’t go up to the house. Instead, he stood in the yard under a pecan tree and waited until Eugene stepped out on the porch. Mr. Gordon sent him back inside to get his mother. When Mrs. Faith Boykin came out, Mr. Gordon might have lifted his hat or he might have just pushed it down farther, you couldn’t quite tell.
“You cain’t lose!” was the first thing we heard him say. He had a way of making his speech thicker when he was talking to country people. When Theo came outside with his notebook under his arm, Mr. Gordon ignored him completely and spoke straight on to Mrs. Boykin, raising his voice a little in case she couldn’t hear every word. “You get one dollar per acre every year, before they even start mining. How many acres y’all got? Ninety-four? All right, that’s ninety-four dollars a year just for settin’ on y’all’s porch, doin’ nothin’.”
I had never seen Mrs. Faith Boykin doing nothing ever in my life. Her hands were always busy, pulling cotton bolls off the stems, or sewing patches on pants or buttons on cuffs, or slicing up tomatoes, or shelling pecans, or rolling out crust for a pie.
“And when they do start mining,” Mr. Gordon said, “they’ll pay y’all even more for what they take out the ground.” He said all this as if it might be news to her, as if he hadn’t come by and said it a dozen times before.
“And my pecan trees?” Mrs. Boykin said. Theo was right alongside her now.
“What about ’em?” said Mr. Gordon. I noticed that he had himself situated at the edge of a piece of shade in such a way as to leave Theo and Mrs. Boykin squinting in the sun.
“Kin they dig out that white dirt without messin’ up my trees?”
The Boykins had the most beautiful pecan grove you could possibly imagine: nineteen acres of mature trees planted in rows that ran as straight in both directions as a checkered tablecloth. In the 1870s, Mr. Boykin’s grandfather bought twenty acres of fallow fields and four bushels of pecans from the man whose property he used to be. The Boykins had pecans falling like rain every October.
“I’m sure y’all could tell ’em to leave them trees standing,” Mr. Gordon said.
“No, sir, you can’t.”
That was Theo. As he spoke, he sidestepped into the shade and took his mother by the arm with him. It was a sweet little move he made. Up in the pine tree, I whispered to Etta George, “Mr. Gordon will be sweatin’ soon—you just watch.” She stared up at me in surprise for so long, instead of looking back down at the yard, that I had to point and say again, “Watch!”
Theo kept talking. “Sir, I read one of them leases.” In fact, Mr. Veal down at the pottery had helped him with it—and so had Miss Templeton—but Theo knew better than to mention either of those persons to Mr. Gordon. “It says the company can dig up whatever part of the leased land they want. And it doesn’t even have to be for digging out the clay, either. If we sign that paper, they could come and cut them a road right through our grove, just like that.”
“Now, why would they do that?” Mr. Gordon took a step toward Theo and sure enough, the sun hit him full in the face. Mr. Gordon squinted but he didn’t back off. “Why would they cut a road through your grove when they got a road right out front to drive their trucks on?”
“I don’t know why, Mr. Gordon, but they could do it if they cared to. It says so right on that paper you’ve got there, sir.”
Mr. Gordon turned to Theo’s mother. He pushed his hat back from his forehead and gave the paper a little shake and said, “What I have here is the opportunity of a lifetime. The good Lord gave you that white dirt as a gift, and I’m askin’ you to put that gift to good use. It’s the chance of a lifetime. It’s something for nothing.”
Mrs. Faith Boykin stood her ground. “I reckon the Lord give me them pecans for a gift, just as much as any white dirt underneath,” she said, “and the peach trees, too, what’s left of ’em. My children have never gone hungry.”
Mr. Gordon was sweating something fierce now. We could tell by the action of his handkerchief.
“Miz Boykin,” he said then, and that was a little shock to our ears. It was rare to hear a person like Mr. Gordon call a colored person Mrs. or Mr. or Miss, for that matter. Mr. Gordon was going a very long way in his mind, I am sure. He was bending over backwards. “Miz Boykin, I’m not talkin’ about not going hungry. I am talkin’ about y’all gettin’ rich. You got a fortune wasting under them trees. Don’t y’all want to be rich?”
Theo made a move as if to say something, but his mother put a hand on his arm and said, “I reckon I’m rich as I care to be for right now, Mr. Gordon.”
“Well, then, good for you!” Mr. Gordon said, and when he turned on his heel to go back to his automobile, we could see that his shirt was stuck to his back with sweat.
After he was gone, Mrs. Boykin sagged a little. “Oh, baby,” she said to Theo. “Do you reckon we should sign that paper? Ninety-four dollars!”
“No, Momma,” Theo said, flipping his notebook shut in a decisive manner. “I don’t think we should.”
In case she still had doubts, Etta George and I both stuck our heads out of the upper branches of that tree, like a couple of giant pine cones, and said, “Don’t sign nothing, Miz Boykin!” which made her laugh. It was hard climbing down from as high as we were, enough so Etta grabbed my ankle once to keep from falling. We were all of us too busy to notice what Momma saw from our house and remembered later: Mr. Gordon up on the road at the end of the lane, watching us from his car.