High Cotton: A Novel Read online

  Aunt Clara’s activities, dictated by the privacy of her setting, were unchangeable, a routine that absorbed everyone into the perpetual shade of the house. She seemed to know by magic where a light had been left on, as far as the bathroom on the third floor. The telephone never rang, but it was a feminine way of life, one designed for waiting—waiting for the mail, for the uncomfortable man from the Farmers’ National Bank, for the husband to come in from house calls, the father to return from travels around the state, shaking the outside world from his coat.

  There was a limit to my enthusiasm for exploration among crocheted covers and bizarre vesper chairs, though Aunt Clara’s things became interesting as they moved up from the first floor. They evolved to higher levels in forgotten rooms until they attained pack-rat nirvana in the attic. Tinted pictures of bayou picnics, of bearded faces that looked past me; men’s hats; thick phonograph records, radios, phonographs; chests I could not unlock; microscopes from Uncle Eugene’s studies at Meharry; camphor ice, oxide of zinc ointment, and quinine pomade for the relief of gathered breasts, nasal catarrh, and pleurisy, medicines that dated back to the scandal of Theodore Roosevelt breaking bread with Booker T. Washington. I couldn’t trace the scents of fir and formaldehyde to their sources.

  Aunt Clara preferred that I not ransack the memories of her mother and Uncle Eugene. I was welcome to sit with the grownups, to help her wrap dust jackets that she decorated herself around His Eye Is on the Sparrow by Ethel Waters, The Makers of Venice and The Makers of Florence by Mrs. Oliphant. She read for the same reason that she tolerated Nida Lee’s prayers: both induced sleep.

  Aunt Clara’s favorite book for the last eight years had been the autobiography of Marian Anderson. It was a great inspiration to her because it read like one long thank-you note to the churches of Philadelphia, as if her career had been the desk tidy she’d always wanted. The great singer traveled with an iron to press her own dresses. Aunt Clara did not, however, approve of Miss Anderson revealing how much she paid for her gowns.

  Like the swan that strove only to keep its feathers brilliant, Aunt Clara enjoyed the company of family when she knew in advance what the talk was going to be about and to make certain that she didn’t miss anything she did the talking. Aunt Clara remembered the 1939 World’s Fair in New York; the exact time of night a cousin died of gangrene up in Chicago; the name of the German professor the FBI arrested after it was discovered that he was transmitting right from the Spelman campus; the Northern Lights pattern of her sister’s silver at meetings of their club, the What Good Are We; the sheriff who received a Ford Foundation grant because he hadn’t killed anyone.

  Details reassured her, like an oil and tire check. She could remember the number of beaux she had before she met Uncle Eugene. The most impressive was a boy haunted by the memory of his grandmother throwing him from a second-story window when she thought whites were breaking down the door during the Atlanta riot of 1906. She wondered what had become of him. Most likely he had gone North. He’d often said that if he’d stayed in Georgia he’d have been lynched. She was in favor of hotheads: it was a masculine prerogative. She liked my father ever since he overcame “Fear Thought” in school and joined the rallies in support of Henry Wallace’s right of free speech.

  Aunt Clara talked like someone who had made up her mind not to leave any footprints. The lotus hum of her intermittent conversation, like the current from the electric fans in opposite corners of the sun porch, subdued hours. Her odd singsong pursued the smell of butane from my mother’s lighter. “Gene never could make up his mind, don’t you know. Picayunes. Wings. Hit Parade in the can. Dominoes. Lucky Strike in the green package. Philip Morris. Cavalier. Coffee Time. That was the war.”

  She remembered very well how upset a cousin was when E. E. Just punched him at Howard University. I thought she meant the famous Negro biologist had knocked her cousin down. But no, Dr. Just never spoke above a whisper. To get punched, back then, meant to receive a failing grade. Aunt Clara’s cousin had worked too hard on his laboratory manual, copying bacteria from books when he wasn’t sure what he saw under the microscope. Dr. Just had included blank slides, in order to teach his students not to draw anything if they didn’t see anything.

  Some women were house-proud, some were husband-proud, and still others were pleased with their connections. Aunt Clara was all three. She was proud that Mattiwilda Dobbs had sung at my mother’s wedding, that a Washington cousin’s collection of poems had been reviewed in the New York Evening Post before the Depression silenced him, proud even of his parting remark that Jefferson must have had her in mind when he said he had yet to find a black who uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.

  Aunt Clara liked to “go places,” but she hadn’t been anywhere in years and evidently her opinion of wherever she had been had solidified around the issue of service. Holidays at Dobbs Ferry began promisingly enough, but things went quickly downhill to the poor Melba sauce in yet another lackluster Rhode Island Plaza restaurant in Washington, D.C., before “they” finally let “us” in elsewhere. Aunt Clara had probably never had the chance to grade hotels. Her traveling had been done in the days when you depended on “kissing cousins” for a bed.

  It was an indoors life, even a long ride in the powder-blue Cadillac was an indoor event. The trouble was that we all wanted to ride in the back seat. The automatic windows were more rewarding to me than the remnants of cotton fields or the dignified remains of Tuskegee Institute. Aunt Clara looked disturbed when someone wanted to stop. She was hardly aware of what the car passed. If we were heading toward Goat Rock Lake, she was twenty years behind, back with my mother on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, going into Yates’s Drugstore for Dr. Palmer’s Lotion.

  Uncle Eugene’s early death had intensified some of her human instincts. Ebony cabinets bore a clutter of condolence letters, birthday cards, photograph albums. She collected funeral programs like signed menus, though she no longer attended funerals.

  She liked to plan her funeral, what music she would have and which preacher she would not. Her dilemma was that she couldn’t bear the thought of worms and bacteria eating away at her, of taking up room. She wanted to be compact, but cremation was, if not illegal in Alabama, not done. Aunt Clara was pleased with the idea; with another something that no one else had. It was newfangled, like an item in a catalogue she was the first in town to receive. She said my mother could put her ashes in one of Nida Lee’s hollowed-out flamingos or discreetly scatter them in the aisles at Rich’s Department Store. What she wasn’t sure about was what Uncle Eugene would think. She wanted to be with him, but he was buried on the wrong side of town.

  G.C. rolled us in the direction of the segregated cemetery. My mother and sisters got out to go to Uncle Eugene through the brambles. Aunt Clara and I were to have a friendly talk about the unmanliness of being afraid of graves. Her tears were so refined they were abstract. She wished I had known Uncle Eugene. “He was sharp.”

  G.C., facing the wheel, said that what he was was the sun that shone in many a back door. “Turned them every which way but loose.”

  Aunt Clara couldn’t hear him. Nobody here but us coloreds in a Biedermeier mood, her smile said.

  The hours were as confining as chapel must have been in Aunt Clara’s schooldays, beginning with breakfast, which owed something to the threat of roll call. The legendary lazy South, if it had ever existed, was gone, preserved in the movies Aunt Clara claimed never to have heard of. We knew nothing about the failed march in Albany, Georgia, that summer and the celebrations on the other side of town of what they were calling Martin Luther King’s Waterloo. The NAACP was an underground organization in Alabama, but we didn’t know that. All we knew was that we were stuck. My sisters referred to Opelika as Alcatraz.

  My sisters could stand it. They read. They tried on clothes, raided trunks of brittle silk, damaged satin, inspected the paper dolls from my mother’s girlhood, poured their afternoons into past and future recital pieces. I had
not yet recovered from the shame of having failed to perform “Turkey in the Straw” in public after thirteen attempts and hated the sight of Aunt Clara’s sheet music strewn across loo tables and ottomans. Carrie Jacobs Bond, Japanese Love Songs by Clayton Thomas, At Dawning by Charles Wakefield Cadman, Kate Smith’s Folio of Heart Songs. My mother said the organ was not a toy.

  Music helped to seal up Aunt Clara’s house. For some reason, she wouldn’t play the love songs she really liked. In front of company, even family, she limited herself to halting performances of classical music. With her rheumatic complaints, she pedaled away the days—“ … qua … re … sur … get … ex … fa … vil … la.” Her chin went rigid and her amused eyes crossed behind misty glasses as she faced down the truculent notes. My grandmother used to say her sister sounded like a dying cat in a thunderstorm.

  From a back room came the rhythmic chorus of answering motors: the Wilcox & Gibbs for chain stitching, one machine for straight, slant, and swing-needle, another for quilting. The room smelled of cloves and mint, old-fashioned weapons against moths. Muriel traced and stitched her way through continents of velvet, flowered orlon, checkered nylon, lowly cotton, and raised to a high level the iron she used to spare herself the trouble of basting.

  She thought of herself as saved, tucked away in the same room as Aunt Clara’s garage of sewing-machine classics, among them a Pfaff and Necchi no longer in working order. Muriel kept it by the window and stroked the machine’s intricate parts with a rag from time to time. It was a shrine in the middle of door pouches of thread, bolts of rayon, broadcloth, linen faded in spots from having been left so long on a window seat, and a dressing dummy I was not sure Muriel didn’t talk to.

  I was forbidden to play king-emperor on the balcony. My mother did not trust my balance. Not only would Aunt Clara not allow ball playing on the closed-in sun porch, she appealed to my mother to enforce her ban on having balls themselves in the house, as if toys were as dirty as pets.

  Killjoy Nida Lee wondered how one child could make so much noise in a driveway. When Nida Lee brought a message from “Miss Clara,” she smirked as though she had once again one-upped Arnez by leaving her to bring the platters. My sisters retaliated by shrinking ever so slightly from her pinches and pats. We were supposed to feel sorry for her because she was once on a regimen of cortisone injections and had never been able to lose the weight. I was warned not to ask Nida Lee to play the second piano in the back room.

  “Touch me, Lord.” Her inner spark had been ignited again.

  “What is it, Nida Lee?”

  “No harm in praise.”

  “I don’t want that foolishness today,” Aunt Clara said.

  Nida Lee was driven to the piano in the back room whenever Aunt Clara seemed in the mood to pass remarks about ugly black women with pierced ears, or when she couldn’t participate in Aunt Clara’s grilling of my mother for news about nice Negro women’s clubs, those groups that met and raised scholarship money between discussions about how the salad spinners that had just come on the market could be used to dry stockings when the machine was broken.

  “How is the Links Club?”

  “It’s getting browner.”

  When Nida Lee let herself expand at the upright, she tried to coax me into prayer. “Until my hands are new, aw, I’ll be clean when You get through.” Religious emotion was funny to me. Added to the way Southern blacks talked, it was difficult for me to control myself.

  I looked down the road into the Bottom. Flat trucks raised a sultry dust in the mornings. Women went by with baskets of laundry for white people on their heads. Two women, their faces protected from the sun by black rain umbrellas, with big pocket books crooked in their arms, feet spread out in shoes that slapped against their heels, nodded my way as they ambled by.

  “Where are you going?”

  “A good piece up the road.”

  I was about to double up for a good laugh. “Better not,” Arnez said. “Better not.”

  Nida Lee enjoyed the highest opinion of herself as Aunt Clara’s eyes and ears around town, down in the Bottom. She was often on the lookout to see who was coming ‘from down under the hill.’ If Aunt Clara needed anything, Nida Lee would hurry to volunteer. “Now, you know how you get from exposure.”

  “You are a saint.”

  “Go on, Miss Clara.”

  She enjoyed getting out of the house, especially when it meant that she could wake G.C. and make him back out the Cadillac. Nida Lee returned with tea, tumid pound cakes—Arnez’s baking was not what it used to be, she said confidentially—and a whole lot extra.

  “Now tell me,” Aunt Clara said, “what has that woman done now?”

  I got the impression from the names of the miscreants who featured in Nida Lee’s daily reports that the black South was filled with “bigs” and “littles”—Big Johnny, Little Johnny. “Big Mary said to this white lawyer when he called that Mrs. Harris was having her teeth made and after this week she will talk to her and see what she can get her to do. Big Mary is like they say. Underworld people play a profit game. That woman is doing this on Mrs. Harris. It hurts me to see people deceive an aged person for their own profit.” She practically screamed her report, not caring that little pitchers were present, because she wanted to get it out before she forgot something, like model students who deliberately left their notecards behind when they recited Mother’s Day speeches.

  “Mrs. Harris is failing fast and Big Mary is with her night and day.” Nida Lee put on her solemnly satisfied expression, that of the cat with the dead mouse, when she insinuated herself onto the sofa near Aunt Clara’s ear.

  “It is very hard for Mrs. Harris to get up out of the large chair in the dining room and when she does she’s out of breath and some days she does not feel like getting up at all. Big Mary was told that for Mrs. Harris to gain weight will cause her death. The doctor said this, but that woman is still serving the same fat food.”

  “Isn’t that pitiful.” Aunt Clara liked to keep up, but without the muss of too much contact. Anyone Arnez defended as just being friendly, Aunt Clara condemned for taking liberties, showing bad manners. Familiarity, on her part, was also Pandora’s Box. If Nida Lee reported that a reverend’s wife had asked after Aunt Clara and thought she might pay a call one of these old days, Aunt Clara looked ready to bar the doors. I pictured Aunt Clara fleeing acquaintances, in case they approached with ticking packages.

  “I told her you were feeling poorly.”

  “I can’t have that woman in my house. Not until I can get Arnez to get a honey dripper to do something about those drainpipes.” Aunt Clara called any man who did yard work a “honey dripper,” though the term hadn’t been current since World War II, and referred specifically to army privates on latrine duty.

  “She’s not coming.”

  “Say what? That woman is a horror story. I don’t know how some people can live so long and not know you’re not supposed to wear hats at night.”

  “She’s not coming. She fell down last week.”

  “She did what?”

  “She hurt herself. She fell down.”

  “She fell. You know I don’t like it when you talk like a linthead.”

  Aunt Clara also liked to hear Arnez’s news: who had been taken away to the nursing home in Columbus, Georgia; whose husband had gone to the store for cigarettes and not been seen for three days; which family had been left property by a branch that passed for white but was too dark to try to claim it; whose daughter had ended up in jail out in Texas.

  “Isn’t that pitiful?”

  “That’s pitiful.”

  “I seen little Johnny and don’t you know his wife is going to lose that kidney.”

  “Say what?”

  Nida Lee didn’t like it when Arnez had some news that particularly interested Aunt Clara. Not to be undone, she pulled terrifically huge rabbits out of her hat. My sisters called them Pitiful Contests. Nida Lee reminded Aunt Clara that it was almost four years to the d
ay that some poor widow’s three grandsons were killed on the same day, two in Tulsa, one on the highway. “Now that was pitiful.”

  By the end of the first week my stomach was a muddle of cream, lime sherbert, butternut squash, and grits. “Child, you don’t know what’s good,” Arnez said. My palms began to stink of violets, furniture polish, ammonia, and a varnish that seemed to coat Aunt Clara’s whole life and protect her from the effects of time.

  I heard, at night, the windows fall on their rope pulleys; someone on the catwalk; my sisters’ accounts of haints in the woods, of Nida Lee’s voodoo potions, her nine lumps of starch moistened with Jockey cologne; and Aunt Clara playing scratched Angel recordings alone in her room, tallying up the pieces of a Scrabble game to determine which letters she should order.

  “Why you want to go and tell a lie on my sister.” I heard Arnez with Nida Lee in the kitchen. Muriel was in disgrace. Nida Lee had told Aunt Clara that Muriel was stealing. Muriel admitted with copious tears that she took things, food mostly, down to the men working on the other side of the creek. Otherwise, she just wanted to show them things. She always brought them back.

  I’d followed her and her covered dishes by the shotgun cabins with TV antennas. Her courage expressed itself in her not hiding her head under a hat or a scarf. She sewed extra ribbons on her dress when she went “out to the road” or “down under the hill” and picked at the thread until they dropped off one by one.

  The men hadn’t seemed very interested in Muriel’s show-and-tell. They politely took the food and went back to joking among themselves. She waited around, her face taut, looking for a way into their afternoon break.