Eudora means happiness. But it was sorrow that clung to her heart. As Dora examined her new home, she felt it, the sorrow—an extra pump, a shade, a haint of longing. Smatterings of dialogue crowded out her thoughts. Waxpaper. Grease stains. Why we come here? Snatches of phrases melded with fragmented images of her new lodgings. Daughter of Mah Bette’s black chil’. Dust. Duster. Mustee. Runaway. Her head bowed, she examined the room’s loose uneven floorboards. A soot-drenched mouse ran along the corners of the tight close room. Things had not gone as planned. Dora stomped her foot. The startled intruder shot straight in the air and flew through the crack from which it came. “What done you expect? A reception?” Her face flushed, tinting its copper hue a rich red sienna. Instantly aware of her own deepened color, she bristled at the pervasiveness of the Codes—the legacy of slavery that judged her by the proximity to whiteness in fractions of sixty-fourths, the habitual practice, designed to increase the bounty of human livestock, now the source of standards to rank respectability. “Associate goodness wid good hair, proper wid property. Just cus I don’t own nothin’ don’t mean I don’t have nothin’. Or won’t still!”
Blanche was her mother Juliet’s sister, nearest in birth. Eudora had hoped, thought, she might find something of Juliet in her aunt’s face, a smile, a smell. Instead, the porcelain mask was beautiful, smiling, and cold. “Your uncle I’m sure has found you a nice place in town. Roswell Jr. will show you.”
Blanche’s saccharine words now slashed across her cheek like a spring willow switch shorn of leaves. Nice? Fuh who? Gray dust coated the pine wood slats posing as walls; a few mismatched dishes sat atop a single crooked shelf. Beneath the propped-up boards posing for a table—a warped wooden bucket for slop and a rusty tin tub not big enough for a squat. Dora’s full broad lips compressed into a thin straight line of rage. “Treatin’ me like a common lowland lowlife. Seen bettuh in a sharecrop tabby shack. How could I be so stupid as tuh ’spect a welcome from my so-called fam’ly?” Words from her aunt and uncle’s overheard chatter ricocheted in her brain. “Showed up in a basket. Mayn’t even be a Mayfield. You wouldn’t take her for one, ’cept for those eyes. True beauties, true Mayfields they are, for sure.”
“True Mayfields. As if it t’were sumpin to be proud of. If that be true, I glad I not one!” The broken Gullah patois Dora had tried so hard to dispel rattled in her brain. Mah Bette . . . tink cus she dark-eyed and tawny, she warn’t his chile. She wanna believe that he love her, that him kindly, good and noble Massah Mayfield. That him only sell off she mama cuz she wild and not cuz he—“Him husbin to me eben when I slave,” she say. When he try to mess wid she own daughters, you tink she’d see den? Twice-over shamed, she no want to. That why Juliet—that why they all gone from her. Then here I come, the shame lookin’ em right in the eyes. Eyes dey call beauties. Got dey nerve. Call em true. Those eyes, equally a source of wonder and derision, glowered at their current circumstance. Two half-moons of tears collected but refused to fall. “Place lookin’ like this?” The cramped two-room flat closed in about her. Memory burned through her back, a taut steel strap of muscles. Mah Bette’s oft-whispered stories, curling through the spires of smoke from a cob pipe, crackled in her ears, but Dora refused to hear them. “No! We make a new life. These eyes, they doan look back.”
Each of Bette’s daughters—Elma and Blanche, then Juliet—had left Sweet Tamarind, never to return. Mah Bette, whose silken strands circled her face like sea waves at dawn, kept a lock from each of the children born to her, stiff ash blond, auburn, and black-purple curls kept in a sack between her breasts. The old woman had made it all sound like music, a romance, made it seem that each daughter had been running toward something and not away from it. She painted Dora the prodigal grandchild, drawn back with a past scrawled on a scrap of paper. Swaddled in a bundle of rags, she had been carried back in an old fruit basket. A small yellowed picture of a mother and child was pinned to the corner of a tiny quilt wrap, dirty and singed at the corner. A note was attached to the basket handle in an uneven but bold script, Eudora means happiness.
“Sent back wid a huckster peddlin’ pans,” Mah Bette would tell her. “A white man walked up the way wid a carpetbag in one hand and a peach basket in th’other. Lijah-Lah brung him up from the way. I didn’t believe you was no gran’baby of mine, till you opened them eyes. Like two pieces of sky, two little bits of heaven, changin’ color with the wind,” Bette mused. “My girl was lost, but you come back to me.” Dora could almost hear the clanking of miscellaneous pots as her bearer ambled up the stone-strewn path to Mah Bette’s tabby shack. Dora swayed, still hearing the syncopated stroke of pirogue oars against the low white-capped top currents of tidewater, where Lijah-Lah kept his small craft idling. The remembered sound calmed her. She missed the island already. How stupid!
“How stupid! Dora May!” The refrain danced in her head as she winced at the streak of pain across her palm. At the Normal School, the sisters had often slapped her. “How stupid! You can do better,” one would say, while the other wagged her head in agreement. The sisters, missionary teachers, had come to the parish after the soldiers and stayed. Miss Highgate was a colored lady from Niagara Falls, “A slight admixture of negro blood in my veins.” The other, Miss Stubbins, had been an abolitionist, her zeal now transformed into a passion to uplift, to make righteous citizens of the slave population in one generation, “Bring them from the edges of savagery to the threshold of civilization in one mighty stroke, just as we have toppled the Confederacy!”
Shakers, they called themselves. Dora thought this was because of the way they shook the children who did not behave or perform to their standards. Or for the way they smacked their hands with the flat of the ruler. Or used the pointer as a whipping stick. Or the way the children would shake when the two women walked down the aisles of wood-crate desks each Friday, with fists balled up, ready to pound an unsuspecting youth in the soft part of the spine between the shoulders. Each Friday, Eudora would huddle in her seat, her back hunched, trying desperately not to tremble. They took special interest in her.
“Child of sin threefold, they say.”
“Odd colors to mark her.”
“But clever. Bright.”
“Maybe she’s a Shaker, too.”
Eudora Mayfield, or Dora May as she was known then, had been one of fifty parish children who had crowded into the barren main room of what had been the overseer’s cottage. O’Brien had been killed on the stoop where he had attempted to hold his ground, defending his right to possibility as a white man. It was the children’s habit to spit on the stain of blood where he had fallen. Barefoot and already wearing hardship on their faces, the children and grandchildren of Sweet Tamarind slaves had come in all ages. On that first day when the sisters opened the newly hewn door of the shack and stood, their two hands clasped, the setting orange of the afternoon sun aglow behind them, seven hundred and two prospective pupils gathered, their silence heavy with expectation. By the time Dora May strode in, book learning had lost to the fields and the necessity of extra hands to meet the growing crop liens that bound most families as tightly as a trader’s knot. That or the wanderin’, the lure of freedom’s illusive call, drawing folks away from the island toward destinies unknown.
Dora had the same wild, nappy head tamed into plaits as the other Geechee children on the island, but she was distinguished by her unusual colors, the surprise encounter of genes that made her eyes the shifting hues of sky in a face the ruddy color of Sea Island topsoil.
They called her a Mustee and, in the hierarchy of colors from when the chain of Low Country manor houses had required a maintenance corps of servants, she would have been assigned the task of duster. The system had long broken down, had not recovered from the war, but the terms remained. Duster, meaning second-tier house slave, too dark to be a lady’s maid, but bright enough to clean the banister. She resented the word, but not the placement. “Anything but field hand.” She loathed putting her hands in the dirt, even, to Mah Bette’s dismay, tending the old woman’s small garden. Still, the girl was industrious and clever. She could make things and sell them at a fine price. When Lijah-Lah loaded up his catch of fish for the mainland market, Dora could be counted on to add some new bit of ambition. SWEET TAMARIND WILD HONEY, JARRED AND LABELED, TEN CENTS. STRAW MATS WITH PICNIC BASKET, BEST OFFER.
She preferred the potential peril of bees or the eyestrain from the intricate weaving of palm baskets and mats to laboring on the land, but neither enterprise held her attention like needlework. What began as small mending jobs and neighborly favors—a rag-doll, a hem, an alteration—soon became her primary industry. After she mended the itinerant preacher’s frock so the stitches couldn’t be seen and fashioned Miss Emma’s daughter a true wedding dress, with a delicate eyelet making the calico look like lace, word spread. Taking note of her creativity and industry, the sisters taught her to use their Eldridge B sewing machine. It was a petite model, barely six inches across, and it was already twenty years old, but with its spidery filigree legs and floral decorations, it was a wonder to Dora every time she used it, the hand crank and feed occupying every muscle and all of her concentration. She would often work until the light failed. The sisters would find her hunched over, squinting, racing with the setting sun.
Her ambition followed the path of her shoes. She had a bold, sure walk. Whether on the island’s brambled forest paths or the wet sand at low tide, she always wore shoes. She wandered the island, bartering her skill. Along with jars of honey she soon didn’t have to gather herself, baskets, jams, clay pipes, tortoiseshell combs and buttons—all made their way across the stretch of sea to the city and returned as coins that she secreted away. The heavy imprint of her gait belied her size but befitted her purpose.
She and O’Brien’s half-caste boy were the only children on Sweet Tamarind with shoes. Oversized and old, scuffed and run-down in the heels, hers had “belonged to one of the little misses.” Mah Bette had given them to her, bestowed them upon her as if part of some pirate’s trove. “Weren’t hardly worn.” Though the pointed toe squeezed her foot, which always slid down to the front, Dora wore them with a confused pride of inheritance. She had grown into the shoes, had mended them many times. Sealing the soles with tree sap and stitching the instep with heavy thread, she replaced the tie-string with twine coated in wax, a small cowrie on the ends.
Soon she wore them only on Sundays. Now she had even put them behind her. With her sewing handiwork Dora had earned enough to buy her own. “A decent pair of work shoes.” Ordered from the Sears Roebuck catalogue, they arrived in a box wrapped and addressed. “To: Miss Dora May. To The Care Of: St. Simon’s Island. Parish Normal School. Sweet Tamarind, S. C.”
She had hesitated when placing the order. What name to use? Mayfield? Certainly not Field. Chisholm, maybe, for that after-the-war wanderer, the fiddler who swept my mama up in a dance? What name? When the package arrived she stared at the label. “May. Hope that don’t sound too familiar.” May, the month my mama run away, May, the first month after the fall, the first month after the war, the first month of freedom. New life. I think it’ll do juss fine. When I get me a huzbin, I’ll make it the middle, she thought to herself as she sniffed her new shoes and folded back the stiff, new tongues to try them on. They were brown and solid shoes with real laces and the smell of new leather and glue and they bore no history except the one that she would make. “Yes, May. Dora May.”
“Real freedom must be earned,” the sisters said. “Must be deserved.”
“The way to freedom is to uplift!” Alas, these shoes also pinched her toes. Still, they pointed her in new directions.
“Mind, gal! Cain’t sweep under ma feet. Gimme chance to move. Might take that broom and beat you wid it. I said, move way from hyeah!” Dora moved about the cabin in a frenzy of sweeping motions. Dirt specks danced in the air around them. Reading Dora’s humiliation in her doggedness, Bette sucked her teeth. “My daughter Blanche think mighty much of herself. I ’member when I walked away from better than that!”
“Oh, please don’t start! I doan wanna hear nun uh yuh stories!”
“You bettuh look see who you think you talkin’ at, gal. I put my fist down your troat, I will, you gib me mo uh dat soss.”
Dora never liked to display anger. She feared that if she let loose of it, the feeling would consume her, that fire would fly from her mouth if she spoke. How could she be mad at the woman who had cared for her and raised her, taken her in? She watched Mah Bette from the corners of her eyes. Alternately gloating or moping, the old woman mechanically fluffed the bed tick made of straw and settled in. To Dora, more like “settled fuh.” Mah Bette sat heavily on the cot’s edge and primed her pipe. Dora could see that her grandmother was winded. Mo from sweepin fuh haints n fuh dust.
Through the narrow curls of tobacco smoke, Mah Bette watched her granddaughter with bemused eyes. Dora wilted under the elder’s silent, cryptic assessment. She pulled off her headrag to wipe her face and snatched up her bonnet. “I goin’ for a walk.”
“Suit yourself, city gal. Bring back some saltfish and a sense of humor while you at it.”
Life is in front of me, not behind. A good walk always helped Dora to think. She emerged from the small flat into the warm salt air of Charleston. As she followed the trail of day workers, noise assaulted her from every direction.
“Seconds!”
“Got brooms!”
“Pee-eEECHezEHsuh!”
“Porgy walk. Porgy talk. Porgy go wid uh knife an fork.”
The crowd’s movement gave her direction. The narrow, short, dusty streets of Charleston Neck gave way to the busy thoroughfare of King Street and Market, two blocks from the harbor. On the island, she could walk for hours with only bullfrogs and rice birds for company. Here in Charleston, the mixing of whites and colored on the street startled her. Eudora was used to seeing one or two people at a time, and—except for Miss Stubbins, the storekeeper, and the yearly census taker—all of them colored. In Charleston, the races mingled in swarms and waves. Careful never to touch, coloreds stepped off the sidewalk without losing stride. Watching the delicate reel, Dora felt clumsy and unsure, her head light from hunger and agitation.
A cacophony of market smells—saltfish and earthen yams, fresh berries and woodsy cane strips, encircling currents of musk, talc, and plump tobacco leaves—mingled with wafts of dank harbor water. A quartet of turkey buzzards, hovering over a feast of cast-off produce and horse dung, flung their gullets and rattled their wings at her. As she backed away, a centaur on a broomstick with goggles on his eyes, white silk scarf flapping round his neck, careened toward her. The young man blew furiously into the high-pitched whistle clamped between his teeth and honked the shiny goose horn on the handles. Dora froze. The bicycle zigzagged around her, throwing the rider into the squawking crew of scavenging birds. “Dumb country bitch! I oughta smack you upside yo haid!” Dora hesitated, not knowing whether to assist the young white man or run. She backed away and rounded the corner onto an even wider boulevard, where, clanging its bell, bellowing smoke, and spitting sparks from the rails, the King Street trolley screeched to a halt right at the tip of her newly bought shoes.
Her wobbly knees stepped to the side of the tracks, her shaking hand holding her country hat. A tiny bootblack, made to shine from tallow and sweat, dancing for pennies from passersby, set his workbox down and began to circle her, the metal bottle caps in his shoes in heated conversation with the wooden planks of the sidewalk. He mirrored her consternation with trembling hands and eyes popped wide, then turned in a pirouette and doffed his hat in flirtation, his sparkling eyes two black marbles of delight and mischief. The ebony cupid courting the pretty bronze lady in a swoon—a circle of pink speckled faces formed and bombarded them with laughter. As magically as he had appeared, the boy spun away from her and tapped his way around the perimeter of their audience, who tossed bright coins into his cap. He turned to her, preparing to go another round. A serious furrow formed across Dora’s brow, a low-hanging cloud above her eyes. She hurried away as fast as she could. He followed her in pantomime, flexing the muscles in his buttocks to mimic the flapping bustle of her skirt, the crowd’s laughter trailing.
No, things had not gone as planned. Rays of heat rose up from the cobblestones, and the white sky seared her eyes. The tall brick buildings loomed like tombstones, but Dora May refused defeat. “This is Charleston,” she told herself. “Act as if ye have faith! Bound to be a few things of surprise. Take it in stride is all. If you never go back, you can only go forward.” In honor of Miss Highgate’s geography lesson, she bought a peach and placed it in her purse for later, repeating to herself, “The world is in reach of my fingertips.” Her confidence restored by the memory of her teacher, she lifted her chin and continued her walk, now a journey of discovery.
She turned onto King Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, and its row upon row of stores, each with unique signs, names, and merchandise—M. Lazarus Furnishings, Kerrison’s Haberdashery, Land’s Fine Linens—strings of kerosene lamps, suspended on invisible wire, arched across the boulevard, fine white ladies all equipped with parasols to shield their faces from the sun. At the corner of Ashmead, she stopped under the awning and attempted to adjust the brim of her bonnet to shield more of her face. Glancing to the side, she was startled, then fascinated by her own reflection in the display window. She had never seen herself, her full self. She had always felt herself to be large. Her shoulders were too broad for Miss Highgate’s old Butterick patterns. She routinely had to widen the neckline, lengthen the sleeves, and trim the waist. Bloomers, too, were too short in the seam. Even her hat never fit, but sat atop her abundant hair like a teacup on a saucer. She was shocked to discover that she was not as large as she thought, not large at all nor as tall. Only then did she notice the golden letters of invitation painted on the glass across the street. FALK AND BENTSCHNER, HOUSE OF FABRICS. SILKS. WOOLENS. LINENS. COTTONS. VELVETS. MEN’S SUITING. BEADED LACES. EVERY IMAGINABLE FABRIC LACE AND TRIMMING FOR THE ENTIRE BRIDAL PARTY. SHOP AT HOME SERVICE, INCLUDING CUSTOM LABOR.
Dora had bought shoes from Sears and Roebuck, and so she felt that she knew about such things. But here was cloth come already on the bolt, towers of it, and thread already on the spindle. Colors, textures, and patterns she had never imagined. “I will inquire on employment,” she said to herself with the stiff language of someone trying to be proper.
This time adjusting for the trolleys, wagons, pushcarts, and people, she strode boldly toward the entrance, only to be assaulted once again. Inside, a young white woman dressed in fine afternoon clothes was sitting in front of a delicate wasp-shaped machine mounted on a rosewood table fine enough to serve tea. The woman gently tapped her foot on an iron floor pedal between the curved cherrywood legs as if she were listening to music. Only the sound wasn’t music, but the whir of a sewing machine powered by a small cylindrical electric motor attached to the side. Dora watched in disbelief and amazement as the woman stitched the seam of two pieces of thick brocade together in seconds, then held the fabric up to the window. The simple running stitch was straight and firm and fast. Then the woman held up two yard-length squares of heavy brocade and, after adjusting the knobs on the machine, aligned the fabric swatches beneath the machine’s feeder pedal. To Dora’s amazement the material seemed to move itself, needing only gentle guidance from the model’s hand. Again, the task was done in a flash and the stitch, a different stitch this time, was clean and solid. Such tasks with Miss Stubbins’s hand-me-down, hand-crank Eldridge B would have taken Dora a quarter of an hour. She had seen pictures of electric sewing machines, but until that moment she had no idea of their speed. Her mind a whirl of new possibilities, Dora floated through the brass-framed doors and reached over the tabletop to touch the instrument’s gold embossed letters. Singer. Ah, I could sing with this. I could make me a fortune!
“Git yo hanz offuh dat.” The store clerk had a tight nose and thin, withered lips that bespoke a natural parsimony.
“It says here, ‘Purchase Plans Available.’ What do that mean?”
“Nothin’ for the likes of you. That’s for white ladies. Where is yo’ Miss?!”
“I have no Miss. I am a dressmaker.”
“Not in here you ain’t. Git yo uppity ass outta here fo I call somebody. And leave out the back!”
Enraged, humiliated, and dejected, Dora flew toward what she presumed was the back of the store. Not knowing which way to go or whom she now dared to ask, she spun in a slow circle of bewilderment, fighting with her tears, holding on to her hat. The screech of a chicken hawk, its talons bared to attack, dropped her to her knees. Still shielding her face and hair with her palms, she realized she was not in the woods or gathering eggs in the henhouse. The sound was not a hawk, but the grate of metal curtain rings. Dora had stumbled into the women’s changing rooms. “You, gal, is you the fittuh?”
Not good for a young colored gal to be goin’ about by herself in the city. Some of dese young’uns could be my son, waggin’ they tongues out the sides of they mouths at me. Those would not do. Out among the peddlers and street singers, Mah Bette had been sizing up young men she considered appropriate matches for her Dora. Bette thought her granddaughter not bad to look at, but shy of knowin’ it or showin’ it. Not good for a young woman to stay single too long, be too ambitious. My grandgal need a protector. Bette quickly dismissed the smart-lipped, arrogant ones, yellow or brown made no mind to her. Then as she was making her way down the avenue, she saw uh upright, Dogon-Guine man for sho. Got a buckboard, no ring on he finger, and respectable from the way folks call out. That was the one. Fuh now.
Betty waved her hand ever so feebly in the air toward him and smiled meekly. She still had Oshun’s power to draw the light of a man’s eye with her own. “Good mornin’, Mauma, surely there’s somethin’ I can do fuh you this beautiful, blessed day to match the sunshine of your smile.” His dark chocolate skin flushed maroon when he smiled, revealing a perfect set of evenly spaced, strong white teeth.
Healthy, good bones, strong blood, ambitious. Eyelashes so thick a gal could sit on em. Betty could think of a few things he could do, but she voiced only one. “My granddaughter done slipped out of my sight. Went fuh a walk she say, got no idea where. Surely you musta seen her. No young man in his right mind coulda missed her. She a restless sort. We just got ch’here and now she done run off. I seen her goin’ thataway.”
“Toward the harbor most likely. S’where I’m headed. You wanna ride alongside, we’ll find her.” He jumped down and, extending his hand, helped her climb aboard the seat behind his. She liked him even more. “Right this way, Miz . . .”
“Mayfield,” Mah Bette answered proudly.
“Look out now, I got royalty in my carriage! Make way, I got a Mayfield ridin’! There be a statue, a park, even a street named Mayfield, but this the first time I met a person by that name.” Everyone in the Carolinas knew the name Mayfield, one of the oldest planter families in the state, but if this young man had a mind to treat her like royalty, she had no intention of dispelling the notion. She had been as much a wife as a wife could be to Julius Mayfield. That is how she understood herself. Mistress of the house, more than the white woman who called herself such. Julius Mayfield had chosen her, loved her, taken her and taken her back again. Wasn’t cuz of no land or property—was a man made her his own.
“You so gracious, Mr. Winrow.”
“How you know my name?”
“This old lady know a few things. I been watchin’ you ’fore I spoke. I like how you do. It’s hard these days to come across a nice gentleman of color like yourself, Mr. Winrow.”
“Mister, I like the way that sound, but please call me Win, Mauma. Everyone do.” Mah Bette became excited for Dora. She was anxious that her young charge show some interest in cohabiting. Not dry up like those old Sesesh biddies, or choose wrongly like my girls. This one got some prospects. Strong bloodline, his. Oh yes, but humble. Still, wish he had a horse ’stead of a mule.
When the buckboard turned onto Calhoun Street, Bette leaned over Win’s shoulder and pointed to her granddaughter. When the wagon pulled up alongside her, Dora couldn’t even see it. “Oh, chile, you sho nuf got too much on your hands this day. What is all this? Did you steal somethin’?”
Her arms ladened with uneven bolts of material, hat skewed to one side, one lock of hair sticking out like a spear, sweat streaming down the sides of her face, Dora had a mind to spit out something she would regret, so she held her tongue along with her parcels and temper. In reality, she was grateful to see her grandmother appear with a rescuer in tow. She could never figure how Bette always knew, how she would just mysteriously show up when she was needed. At that moment, Dora didn’t much care. She was relieved to unburden herself and to reclaim her wardrobe and hair from disorder. What she did not like was the liveryman her grandmother had so obviously procured for her review. “No, no, gal. Sit up front wid me. Let yo Nana hab room to rest huh legs.” Callin’ me a gal, axin’ me to sit up front like I’m ’posed to be wid he. She ain’t my Nana, she Mah Bette. Miss Bette to you!
Dora soon realized that the driver had asked her to sit up front not to be forward but so he could collect other passengers along the route. Laundresses, day maids, doormen, and waiters on their way back to the Neckbone piled into the back of the buckboard. The pain in her head listed from side to side each time the wagon halted. The bootblack who had accosted her ran beside the wagon in his bare feet, his hardscrabble shoes flying by their laces over his shoulder. The fruit-monger who had sold her a peach hopped aboard. The world at your fingertips. First month of freedom. She pulled the peach from her purse. It had browned and bruised from her travails. She pulled back the skin and listlessly sucked on the warm sweet pulp.
An ancient indigo woman hailed the driver, her hand outstretched in supplication. Dora watched her approach the wagon with an off-balanced gait, syncopated stress on the right foot, the other one dragging beside, short quick glances over her shoulder, a tick of the jaw. “Whoa! Aunt Sibby! How you doin’ tuhday, Aunt Sibby?” He jumped from the carriage and turned to Dora in one move. “Scuse me, m’am, but you got to ride to the back now. Aunt Sibby always git up front when she be ridin’, much obliged.”
The old woman smiled without parting her lips. Her wide, wizened eyes meeting Dora’s gaze. Water-filled eyes, yellowed from too much memory. Where you been, what you leff, Aunt Sibby? Bent bowed legs and shoulders hunched over. Jubilee come too late. Not goin’ to be like that. I’m tryin’ to move forward. Life is in front of me, not behind. Dora slid to the driver’s side and stepped down as the man steadied the old woman, whose high youthful voice surprised her, “Ebenin, Win, how’s my luck today?”
“It’s always good, Aunt Sibby, when you wid me. Got to be.” With firm forearms, Win lifted up the petite woman and gingerly placed her on the seat. Before Win could assist her, Dora squeezed a spot in the back of the wagon next to the bootblack, who was swinging his dusty feet over the sideboard. The boy doffed his bowler hat. Holding tightly to her purse, Dora rode primly alongside, her feet involuntarily dangling next to his. He looked hungrily at her half-eaten peach. She gave it to him. He devoured it in one mouthful, his cheek bulging, then smiled at her with the pit between his teeth. Aunt Sibby. Sabina . . .
Sabina called her an old soul, “Kin see it in she eyes. Done set she mine fo she got dere. Doan lea’ much room fo change it.” And Pretty, smiling through her purple gums in a speech impossible for all but the intimate to understand, “Cose, dat may mean she mayin git whenrother ony dream.”
Almost every day coming to or from the Normal School, Dora circumnavigated the graying columns of wisteria to stop by the Weavers. Aunt Sabina and her daughter Pretty, the oldest family at Tamarind, had been given the name Weaver by the Union census takers. “I’m a weaver,” Aunt Sabina had said, and what she did became who she was. In the hierarchy of Tamarind artisans, their weatherworn shack, the weaving house, was the middle ground between manor and field. It became a favorite place for Dora. She felt safe and welcome in the weaving house. The posts missing from the banister, leaning against the side of the house, clapboard shutters askew, the crooked chimney, all felt familiar.
The old women took more kindly to Dora than other former captives of Tamarind. ’Most everyone had a grudging respect for her grandmother, for Mah Bette’s ability to read dreams and, on occasion, fix one’s future. “She have a gift,” they would say. “Only God choose upon whom it be bestowed.” They didn’t care much for the grandchild, though. “Left behind colored offspring.” When Dora passed through what was still the quarters she sensed, in unspoken glances and stares, the curious knowledge of her family’s past. Reminder of times ebbody sooner forget. Sometimes, though, Sabina’s recollections as a young girl told her things.
Sabina had been a girl when the gin came to the islands. “That djinn, it the Devil. It come out the groun’, spittin fire, make men crazy. Wid power. An yoah Great Gran’mama, that ol silly gal Monday, say, Maas say this here thin’ gonna change the world. Maas say this here maa-chine gonna do alla work of a hunnerd slave. Maas say dis and Maas say dat. Maas say dis here thin’ make my job easy as pie although I spec it ain’t no pie Maas hisself be eatin. Maas say this here djinn gonna let him plow out de norf pasture and do the souf pasture and eben buy up dat swamp lan’. He eben sent dat ol lazy no-count brothuh uh his to Miss’sippi see bout mo lan’. Maas say, No mo rice! No mo indigo! No mo stompin’ in dat swamp neck deep or stirrin’ dem pots till yo han turn blue. From now on, eb’ting gon be diff’ent.”
Overnight, it seemed, the arcane Sea Island culture, the grand barons of the South with their archipelago of great estates that unfurled along the ocean’s edge, had been overthrown. Julius Mayfield, who through the partial humanity of his slaves constitutionally had the voting power of seven hundred men, now found he had to share that power with backwoods up-country hooligans, second sons, indentured servants, trappers and rogues, who ventured west by the throngs, seeking and making their fortunes in the formerly Choctaw-Creek territories of Mississippi and Alabama. The small cadre of men who had for years controlled the destiny of their state and most of the nation found themselves outdone by an invention, drummed up by a Yankee, no less! Some say stolen from a slave. Within ten years, the undulating, fulvous fields of rice and the steaming kettles of indigo, the scarlet blossoms of long-haired cotton, so bright as to seem silver, all gave way to acre after acre of the tight, speckled, scruffy breed, shorthair. The cotton that would be the new king was the scrappy kind. Wild like a weed, the new upland cotton could be culled in sand or delta or dirt. Prematurely sensing the approaching death of a ruling class, speculators appeared like buzzards. What was one to do with an overabundance of labor and a shrinking market demand for one’s product? What was one to do when there was simultaneously a demand for slave labor in the territories, a demand which could not be met, because the international trade had been outlawed?
To supplement his cash crop losses, Julius Mayfield, master of Sweet Tamarind, looked to his livestock to restore his profit and began experimenting with breeding. “Massa come roun’ us up, made us strip all our clothes off, eben our head tie. An then thew us inna barn an lock the doah. Next spring, hyeah come sixty baby. Pretty made that way. Yuh granmama, Mah Bette, too. He do dat ebry harvest or so till he die inna war. Sometime he and he gentlemen frins git up on innere, galavantin’, the bunch of em.”
Though Sabina did not know her own age, she knew her daughter to be seventy-two because it had been written in the manor book, along with the birth of those sixty babies, and the sale of twenty of them. Pretty, it was noted, was Sabina’s youngest, her twenty-second, twelfth born live. At the war’s end, while others left, Sabina had stayed waiting for the return of her children, the sight of them, any of them. Pretty tended her.
Dora envied the life that mother and daughter shared—the warm sounds and scents of the two-storied, leaning shack, lifetimes humming in the spinning wheels, the steamy mixture of salt air and vinegar in the dyeing room. On occasion they allowed her to hold the paddle-stick and stir the simmering cast-iron pots, then hang the heavy hanks of thread on the thick ropes stretched between the house and neighboring trees. Drying in the sun, the tangled coils of yarn formed a muted rainbow of henna, purple, indigo, and evergreen.
The women took turns wrapping Dora’s hair, twining each tuft to make it grow. While Bette fought to comb Dora’s head by pulling and yanking, twisting and cussing, Sabina and Pretty carded it gently with tortoiseshell combs and arranged it in intricate patterned plaits, the light and dark interplay between scalp and hair part of its charm. Folks said they had the growin’ hands. By the time Dora came of age, they had coaxed some length from her hair to match its thickness. Washing day she pranced around, the lioness!
This would not do for the parish school. The sisters insisted that her hair be pulled, slicked, and pressed down tight. “Anything but those pickaninny tie-strings!” they told her. There were new things to be learned. There were all kinds of new mechanisms to tame that wooly mess atop her head. “Magazines. Catalogues. Fine grooming,” Miss Highgate would rail as her fingers flit through the years-old Harper’s Bazaars, whose pages she had taped so assiduously at the binding to keep them from flying about the room. “Good manners are the tools that we need. We are not mere brutes to pick, hoe, scrub, and clean! We must free our people from the burden and expectation put upon them by slavery! And it starts with those tie-strings!”
Mah Bette hadn’t fancied Dora going by the Weavers’ any more than she had approved her attending the parish school. “All them coals and fire. One misstep, pot turn ovuh an you ruin all you got. Don’t nobody want no scarred-up heiffuh.” All three Sweet Tamarind women bore the signs. Bette, who had done her time over steaming vats of lye soap, had keloid welts on her arms and neck from where the scalding water had splashed her. Sabina’s hands were gnarled and twisted like the dry husk of a cotton boll. Miss Pretty was missing three fingers. Dora thought this was also from a weaving mishap. The women did not say, but Sabina herself had maimed her daughter to keep her near. An infant with a mangled hand would not sell.
They passed within days of each other, mother and daughter. One had prepared the body of the other, dressed in simple homespun with rosewater and a garland, a bright copper penny on her tongue. The other lay on a floor pallet of straw, curled upon herself as if sleeping. Dora arrived at the tin-roofed porch to find the wailing women who always appeared when someone died. She flew up the steps, but Bette caught her at the door. “Mother outlib even her baby chile. Gwon to find her again, Ah speck.”
Dora made matching coverlets of damask, double woven and ornamented with intertwining hearts. She placed the quilted squares over their frail birdlike forms and silently watched as they were sealed in separate pine coffins. She took some hanks of their colorful thread, a few calabash buttons, and placed them in her Sears Roebuck shoebox next to the photograph of her mother, Juliet.
The sisters, too, had moved away. The school, which was never well off, got worse as the few Northern dollars upon which the teachers depended shifted to the cause of suffrage. The children did their addition and subtraction lessons in boxes of pressed dirt and strained ink from pokeberry juice and blanched sheets of newsprint for papers. Bible pages frayed, as did tempers.
Dora had thought to become a missionary teacher herself, and she looked to the sisters for encouragement, but Miss Stubbins, packing the books of Botany and Greek which she had never used, retreated into tight-lipped obstinacy, while Miss Highgate had responded to an advertisement. “Bride? What a waste of time,” Miss Stubbins fumed. “While you were writing some lovestruck cowpoke, I have knit five pair of stockings. What age did you tell him you were? Thank God, we’ve given you the means to an honest living, Dora. Marry late, or better, not at all. Never depend upon anyone.”
Such declarations would send Miss Highgate into a frenzy of tears. “Oh, you are heartless.”
“And you are deranged. What do they call it? Brain fever? Illiterate sod-farmer. Does he know you’re a colored woman? ‘A slight admixture in my blood,’ indeed.” Miss Stubbins said she would return. “When I have found a more suitable and dependable companion and when we have achieved our needs as women, as equals.”
Mah Bette simply folded her arms and watched from the comfortable distance of plantation talk. “Both of um need a good poke. Got neither chick nor child. Ain’t natural.”
“They work hard in devotion to our people, Mah Bette.”
“What yuh say? I sittin’ round inna rockin’ chair? What they teach yuh, eh? Sewing with that Yankee cloth, cookin’ with that store-bought flour? That old long-toof white one, try she carry fitty pound rice on she head stead of some book, she fold up into dust on duh ground. And dat colored gal, think she so somebody, somebody pozed to wait on huh. What she know?”
“Writing and arithmetic, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, to start.”
“Uh-hum. Don’t you start wid me.”
Dora ignored her grandmother’s ill-temper and made parting gifts for her teachers. Miss Stubbins was easy—a traveling bag of brocade. For Miss Highgate Eudora could not think of an appropriate offering. Miss Highgate had taught her the first letters of the alphabet, the rotation of the earth on its axis with a peach perched on the tips of her fingers. “Think of it, Dora May. Columbus discovering a world and never to realize what world it was! Our fate is in the hands of the Almighty. But He has given us free will to shape it in accordance with His law. We must be forever fearless to discover what wonders He has in store. There is a world beyond this island and it is glorious. Emerald fields even for an autumn bride.” The Weavers had taught her trust. Miss Highgate had taught her manners and poise and possibility. For her, Dora forswore the ancient paper patterns and created a design of her own invention. While Mah Bette gathered herbs and gossip in the woods and fields nearby, Dora scavenged patches of lace and silken threads and wallpaper scraps. pieces of doilies, table napkin trim, and the torn interior curtain that still blew in the breeze at the manor house—Tamarind, a moldering maze of scorched cathedral walls surrounding the last twist of a spiral stair. In one magical sitting, three days that seemed to pass as one, she fashioned an ivory gown, a patchwork scalloped sheath, gossamer in spots, laced with gold threads that glistened in the sunlight, and presented it to the sister soon to be married, who seemed now only capable of crying. “Why, Dora May! A frock to rival Titania. My mantua! It’s perfect for my wedding night! You could open up a store!”
“I took the liberty, m’am.”
The words had surprised her. Changed her. The dress—the act of making it had changed her. Out of pieces that were bits of nothing she had made something beautiful, designed from her own mind a garment like no other.
Bit by bit they be leavin’, like sand eaten way from a tabby shack . . . She would not be sucked down. Taking liberty, she would seize it. Dressmaker! MISS DORA MAY’S FINE DRESSES AND MANTUAS, she envisioned the sign of her establishment. She went to check her spelling in the sisters’ thick, six-inch dictionary, the last of the books to be packed away. “Mantua: A loose-fitting gown or robe, open to show the petticoat.” She blushed. A fine seamstress, she knew nothing about womanhood.
Dora waited impatiently for the buckboard driver, Tom Winrow, to unload her purchases. Rose Tree Lane was the last of his livery stops he said, or made it so. He smelled of musk and sweat as he chatted. Clearly taking his time so that he could talk to her, he lingered still. He hulked in the doorway, then finally stepped back. Dora thanked him brusquely and shut the door. She had things to do and dawdling was not one of them.
All evening, Dora busied herself cleaning the small rented rooms. She swept the ceiling of spiderwebs, banished the motes of dust, then scrubbed the walls, mopped, scraped, and burnished. Bette followed her around, sprinkling salt in the corners. “Sure you don’t want me to do sumpin? You’ll tire yourself out. Save some for tomorrow. You coulda had that nice young man do some of dis.” Dora would have none of it. “I ain’t thinking bout no man, Mah Bette. I’m thinking bout that thing I seen this morning. That thing sews faster than I kin think. Cost more money than we ever seen. Cost more than a hunnerd dollah, I bet. And they won’t let no colored get it on the pay plan. I got to hab all the money up front.”
“Don’t worry bout dat. Money don’t mean much uh nothin’. I seen a hunnerd dollah, missy. Seen me a whole mess of money a whole bunch of time. One of Maas Julius’s frins try buy me fuh turty-tree hunnud dallah, but he say no mount worth what I give. I seent me a whole bunch of money a bunch of times. He come an hid all his loot when the Sesesh come. Pile upon pile of it. Not worth nuthin cuz it federate scrip. Dug it up and used it fuh kindlin, I did.”
Dora’s eyes rolled but she stayed silent. As much as Mah Bette talked of resistance, she had not left that time either. Dora was determined to get away, to get beyond that, to leave behind all that was painful, sordid, and ugly. Her mind awash with new thoughts, she intended to make her surroundings befit her ambition for herself. She assured Mah Bette she would rest, then waited for the old woman to drift off to begin the quiet tasks. Hit that woodwork again, sew some curtains, then start on these orders. Look at this place. What you gon do with uh ’lectric Singer, don’t even have ’lectricity? Dora glowered at the slop pot. Remembering Blanche’s indoor water closet with pearl tiles, she went looking for the outhouse.
Her skirts hiked over her narrow hips, Dora squatted in the dark and held her breath against the hot, fetid air. She didn’t inhale again until she got back to the second-story landing. Leaning over the banister, she drew in a gust of cool night air. “I will own me a house with a privy and a front door that goes to the street, I will run a respectable business with my name on it,” she declared to the one visible star, “and people will call me Miss.”
Only then did Dora become aware of the music. This was the first night in her life that she could not hear the water, the soft gentle rhythm of ocean waves. Instead she heard music drifting on the soft late summer winds, tingling her face like the sea mist rolling off the bay. Drawn toward the sound, she descended the stairs and entered a narrow arched alleyway. A lone singer perched in a low porch window crooned while indifferently caning a chair. His voice trailed from words to a holler to a wail, the song, an invisible reel cast on the breeze, the music’s changing arcs and pitch drawing her further down the darkened corridor.
The shadows gave way to a broad courtyard. The delicate pianissimo harmonies Dora had heard from a distance now pulsed with a ragged, raunchy rhythm. In the wee hours of the morning, the scene was loud as day. A motley pipe and drum team of children drilled in the dusty square, their bare feet marching in high, uneven steps. Quill and voice made two instruments—reed and horn—drums and feet, the rhythm. The young bootblack who had accosted her that afternoon was leading them. His taut black calves powdered with red dust, his face serious with pride, he pranced about with a piece of driftwood as his baton. Not wanting to repeat their encounters, Dora hurried in the direction of a tall shuttered building that sat across the courtyard, where the warm glow of lanterns beckoned from the windows.
One shutter on the third story hung on one hinge, others missing lattices. A piece of wrought-iron fencing, a section of the second-story balcony, leaned against the wall, chipped, rusting, and stained with lime. Suddenly, a quartet of dock workers burst out the door. Fresh from loading a harvest of timber logs, they celebrated with stevedore gusto, the gravel call of the lead man, three harmonies alone. “All Righty! Join the band! Huhn! All Righty! Join the band! Huhn! Come round and join the band! Huhn! Bo Bo-Boah, Bo Bo Bobo! BAM! Huhn! Bo Bo-Boah Bobo, Bo Bo Bobo! BAM! Join the band! HUHN!” The crew, their interlinked arms propping each other up, marched right toward her. The one on the end had gone to relax, win some money, and have him a woman. He had a little whiskey in him now and crashed into the wall. Before Dora could move, he spun out from the group and grabbed her. That “legomania” got him, the hip action. He was getting that Ashanti quickstep that would one day take on the city’s name, Charleston. Needing a girl’s hot waist in the cup of his hand, he danced a fast, furious scissors move around Dora’s knees, bringing her dangerously close. The music, spilling out of the salon doors, rose into an up-tempo genuine grind, a percussive, poppin’ brass horn drivin’ the song to a frenzy. Her self-appointed partner’s hard-soled boots shook the planks of the sidewalk and rattled the few panes of glass in the window, just when somebody’s fist went through one. Dora pushed herself away. He lunged for her but fell into somebody else. The whole line of burly men went crashing to the ground. “Fight!” the bootblack yelled. Dora May flew back to her rooms.
She sat down on her sewing trunk, her hands between her knees and her feet turned on their ankles. Ringlets of sweat cascaded down her face, drenching her stiff round collar. She watched Mah Bette asleep on the single pallet. Her grandmother’s breathing was heavy and deep, the mouth partly opened, gasping for the night air. Dora buried her face in her hands, then swept off her scarf of muslin and wiped her brow. Some of everybody’s colored folk, and some of everbody else livin’ next doah. “Stomp down, baby!” No, this was not the beginning Dora had imagined.
Opening her sewing trunk, Dora pulled out two of her patchwork quilts. She placed one over her grandmother, then folded the other into a cushion. She knelt wearily and began to pull Lijah-Lah’s hand-carved tortoiseshell pins from her hair. Defying gravity, it spiraled out of its own accord into a crown of abstract auburn peaks, her mind still astir. In instruction and construction is God’s grace, spider-fingers. Dora could lose herself in the movement of her hands, whirling together something whole out of random threads. A pattern, order, design. Her hands were strong, solid, and muscular, with no daintiness or fat. They were smooth and tough like the bark of a young elm. She grabbed random locks to make her plaits for the night and considered her plans for the future.
A gash of light from the hot orange sun pressed against her eyelids. A sliver of light was shooting through an opening in the curtains she had just made, the hem of one panel a full half-inch shorter than the other. Dora did not realize she had fallen asleep, and she could not remember when she had so miscalculated a measurement. Mah Bette had risen at dawn as usual, banjo and herb basket in tow. Somehow the old woman had not let this strange new life alter her rhythm or her own way of doing things. Marching to the window, Dora snatched the fabric down, nails, dowel, and all.
Even through the bustling sounds of the Charleston weekday morning, music still wafted from the alleyway. “Dog-bite-it, they still at it!” The music was not stomping anymore, but a slight, low honky-tonk pick guitar. This was the last indignity. Roswell Diggs Jr. had told her, “Charleston’s not like other places. White and colored always lived intermingled. Papa got this block for a steal after the earthquake in ’86. That’s when it turned colored, when they thought the ground was going to give out underneath it. The place has a lot of history. That’s the Heyward-Washington house across the street, one of the oldest in the city, from before the War of Independence. Aaron Burr’s daughter lived over there.”
And round the corner is a bawdy house, don’t you know? She understood now why Roswell had called the area Little Mexico. Just down the alley and through a trellised gate was a world outside the bounds and rules of the nation. Black men could be kings at music or cards or raising proud killing birds, and white men could excuse themselves from dinner and step out with the boys, south of the border without even leaving the city.
She would have to move, of course, find respectable lodgings on her own, but then how would she purchase the sewing machine? She had not the money to do anything but go back, and she would never do that. Never go backward. Always be movin’, movin’ forward. Life is in front of me, not behind.