A Matter of Souls Read online

  Text copyright © 2014 by Denise Lewis Patrick.

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  Cover and interior photographs © Tsuneaki Hiramatsu (fireflies); © Elliot Elliot/Getty

  Images (wood texture).

  Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std 10/14.

  Typeface provided by Linotype AG.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Patrick, Denise Lewis.

  A matter of souls / Denise Lewis Patrick.

  pages cm

  Summary: A series of vignettes reveal life in the Deep South for African

  Americans as they experience discrimination in a doctor’s office, lynching, and other forms of oppression, especially during the 1960s.

  ISBN 978–0–7613–9280–4 (trade hard cover : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978–1–4677–2402–9 (eBook)

  [1. Race relations—Fiction. 2. African Americans—Southern States—Fiction.

  3. Southern States—History—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P2747Mat 2014

  [Fic]—dc23

  2013017597

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 – BP – 12/31/13

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-2402-9 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-3985-6 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-3986-3 (mobi)

  For My Father

  Contents

  The Colored Waiting Room

  Night Searching

  Colorstruck

  Hanging Out His Shingle

  The Season To Be Jolly

  Son’s Story

  The Time Pamela Ann Got Kicked Out of Catholic School

  A Matter of Souls

  Acknowledgments

  Elsie Timmons had gone through the wrong door. Maybe it was a mistake. All she knew was that her mama, Luther Mae, was hollering at the top of her lungs for her to “Bring her womanish behind back, right now!”

  In fact, there didn’t seem to be any other sounds at all on that late summer day in front of Dr. Baker’s neat brick office building. Just the strange, trumpeting tone of Luther Mae Timmons’s words.

  “Girl, I said come back here!” Elsie had to turn around. Her mama’s voice sounded shaky, that way it always did when Papa brought her a tiny sack of peppermints along with his paycheck, or when that big black phone would ring and she’d sit down hard, because somebody—some cousin or aunt, or uncle’s first wife—had died.

  Elsie had to shade her eyes; fall hadn’t set in deep enough yet to dull the brightness of the Southern sun. As the automatic glass door began to shut, Elsie could see her mother out there, slapping her thigh in frustration … no, it was fear! The navy pleats fanned in and out at each strike, and Elsie imagined the nasty red welts that must be rising on her mother’s Carnation-milk skin. Elsie put her brown hand on the door handle. She was torn, and just a little bit worried.

  But before she eased her mother’s mind, before she let herself go back to being the “sweet, levelheaded child” that everybody at Galilee Baptist said she was, she had to see.

  Her heart fell, and her face must have fallen a little, too. The White waiting room was near about empty, with only a very skinny man in a corner chair. He was staring at a piece of paper that he held in his hands. Elsie guessed that he must be hard of hearing, or shortsighted, or both—because he didn’t even flinch when she stepped in. She glanced around, looking for something—she didn’t know what. There were rows of armchairs; there was a potted plant; and a low coffee table held an arrangement of magazines. The sliding, frosted glass office window was closed.

  Elsie’s civil rights experiment had failed. Her mother was the only one worked up sufficiently—and Elsie felt sorry for that.

  She banged the door open and stepped back out into the heat.

  “Oh Lord, girl! What’d they say? You gonna give me a heart attack one day. You all right? ’Cause—”

  “Mama.” Elsie allowed herself to be womanhandled, every bone and joint checked, as if she’d just come back from the war. Her brother was there, there in Vietnam, and he would get the same when he came back, didn’t matter that he was twenty-two. If he came back.

  “Mama, there wasn’t nobody in there. I’m fine.”

  Luther Mae sighed and straightened herself. Suddenly her backbone was like a board, and the way she held her head, the flush on her cheeks looked exactly like a hint of red rouge. The oil on her chocolate-brown waves glistened, and Elsie was reminded of a movie star in one of the double features at the matinee.

  Her mama was that beautiful. Elsie felt double bad for what she had done.

  “Now come on around to the Colored waiting room and stop all this crazy business,” Luther Mae huffed. She had regained her proper church-lady self. Shifting her worn old pocketbook on her arm, she grabbed Elsie’s hand and marched up to the weather-beaten wood door.

  Elsie couldn’t help rolling her eyes up to the black letters standing out on the white metal sign nailed over the door. COLORED ONLY, it shouted without making any noise at all. It couldn’t fade, it couldn’t fall—couldn’t be worn away by wind or rain. That sign would last until hell froze over, Elsie thought.

  “How y’all do?” Luther Mae greeted everybody, but nobody in particular, as they walked inside.

  The Colored waiting room was thick with bodies and voices and heat so heavy that the air felt damp. A beat-up old fan chugged around and around, using its last gasps to try to make a difference. Elsie was almost hypnotized by its uselessness, staring with her mouth open as Luther Mae kept her march up to the frosted glass window.

  She rapped on it sharply. Nobody came. Nobody called out “Just a minute, please” or even “Hold on, I’m coming!”

  Luther Mae full-out knocked the second time. Her knuckles were hard; they were loud. The frosted glass shook, but nobody came.

  Elsie looked upside her mother’s head and saw the sweat in little tiny beads around her hairline; she had gotten a press and curl only yesterday. The back of Luther Mae’s neck was creeping up red, and Elsie was suddenly mortified at holding up everything so that she could try her little game at the front door.

  This wasn’t even her own doctor’s appointment. It was Luther Mae who’d been having “spells,” fainting over her sewing machine at the tailor’s shop where she worked. And once at the Piggly Wiggly when Elsie was pushing the cart on another aisle. Papa had tried to say she might be expecting another baby, but even Elsie knew that her Mama was not hoping for that.

  “Well, where are they at?” Luther Mae rested her pocketbook on the window ledge, briefly touching her forehead on the glass. It seemed like she was peering in, but Elsie knew better.

  “Mama, come on and sit down. I’ll stand at the window for you.” Elsie took her mother’s elbow and looked around for a seat. The six or seven rickety folding chairs were all taken. A teenaged boy slouched against one drab wall with his arm twisted crookedly in a makeshift sling torn from a bedsheet. The woman pacing back and forth past him was rocking a baby who wheezed and coughed
a deep cough. Elsie felt her mother drooping.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay!” she whispered harshly.

  “Here, baby. Is that Luther Mae?” Elsie looked in the direction of the whiny old voice. It was one of the deaconesses from church, one so old and wizened that she had outlived four husbands. People said the walking stick that she held against her knees had been carved by her African grandfather back in slavery time. Elsie was always kind of scared to get too close to Miz Butler, because she suspected that those milky gray eyes could look down into her soul.

  Then she would know that Elsie was itching to shake things up, to do something …

  “Sister Butler—” Elsie’s mother tried, but couldn’t quite finish her weak protest.

  Miz Butler flipped up the end of her cane and nudged a man in rough work clothes who was sitting beside her. He jumped and cut his eyes at her, but she smiled and said, “Thank you, son. We all in here tryin’ to get help, ain’t that right?”

  Elsie suppressed a giggle as the man eased up from his seat, grumbling. Her mother sat down, and Elsie looked around for a magazine or something to fan her with. There was no coffee table here, no brightly colored rectangles stacked in neat rows.

  “Here, child.” A woman about the same age as Luther Mae, but big with child, leaned from behind Miz Butler to give Elsie a copy of Jet magazine.

  “I read it from cover to cover. Cool your mama off with it.”

  “Thank the lady, Elsie,” Luther Mae murmured, holding her head with one hand.

  “Mama …” Elsie hissed in embarrassment. She was old enough to know how to behave without being told!

  “Thank you, ma’am,” she said. But Miz Butler snatched the magazine, her wrinkly hand brushing against Elsie’s baby-smooth one. Elsie took a step back.

  “We been waitin’ a long time,” Miz Butler said quietly. “That baby with the croup had an appointment for two o’clock, and it’s long past three …”

  “I don’t never get seen on time here. I usually drive on over to the clinic in Shreveport,” somebody said.

  “They in there,” the boy muttered. “I seen the nurse comin’ in with a sack from the Dairy Queen when my daddy dropped me off. I bet they eatin’ lunch!”

  Just then, Luther Mae moaned and slid out of her chair onto the pink-speckled linoleum floor.

  “Mama!” Elsie dropped to her knees, patting her mother’s cheek. “Mama!”

  “Elsie Mary, give her some air,” Miz Butler commanded. Elsie looked up, and Miz Butler fixed those eyes on her.

  Elsie knew what she had to do. She stood up and walked across the Colored waiting room. She reached out and pushed the frosted window to one side.

  Before she blinked, she saw them all, frozen, like actors in a scene at the movies: The freckled, red-haired nurse, with her bloodred lips in a surprised O, holding her hamburger in midair with her perfect manicure; ketchup dripped down on her starched white uniform. The gray-haired, portly nurse who still wore the old-fashioned pointy cap on the back of her head, standing at a file cabinet with a sheaf of records in one hand. The doctor, with a laugh stuck in his throat, his stethoscope shining like the Brylcreem in his carefully combed hair. Both his hands were shoved into the pockets of his bright white coat. Elsie could clearly read the words Dr. F. Baker embroidered in royal blue script over his breast pocket. Immediately, she recognized it as her mother’s work. Then she heard the clock ticking before she heard herself clearing her throat.

  “Excuse me.” Elsie remembered lots of things right at that moment; mostly she remembered reciting poems for Miss Caroline Washington, her third-grade teacher, the one who wore Peter Pan collars and tight straight skirts and who had studied at Spellman College out in Atlanta.

  “Excuse me!” Elsie repeated in perfect e–lo–cu–tion, and the movie scene snapped back into action. The file drawer slammed, the hamburger’s waxed paper rustled, and the doctor’s shoes tapped across the floor.

  “My mama has just fainted in the Colored waiting room, and could you please give her some h—er, assistance? Right now, please?”

  The redheaded nurse, not taking her eyes off Elsie as she spread the smudge of ketchup on herself, drawled, “Well, I never!”

  The gray-haired nurse moved with surprising quickness to push the younger one away and look out of the frosted glass window.

  The doctor ignored both of them and ran out of sight. Elsie could hear him in the hall, right before he flung open the inner office door. He paused, his eyes wide, and stared at the brown crowd as if he had no idea they’d been there the whole time. As if their movie had been running on another screen all along—not a double feature, but two separate movies. This movie thing was so strong in Elsie’s head that she blurted out, “The Colored waiting room is just like the balcony! You can’t see us, but we can see you.”

  The doctor turned to look at Elsie in puzzlement, as if he had, in fact, just been able to see her. Then he dropped down and touched her mother’s wrists, swung his stethoscope into place, and called to the nurses.

  “Evelyn! It’s her heart! Get me digitalis! Phoebe, call for an ambulance!”

  Elsie leaned in close, hearing the word heart. Her mother was pale, as pale as the redheaded nurse. Elsie smoothed back her mother’s waves from her head.

  “I’ll never forgive myself,” she heard the doctor whisper under his breath. He glanced up at Elsie just as both nurses came out, just as the Jet magazine lady pulled her out of the way.

  Elsie looked back steadily at him, knowing that her “sweet, levelheaded” demeanor (as Miss Washington would have called it) did not match the blazing defiance in her eyes. But that doctor saw. And so did somebody else, Elsie realized, as something poked her shin.

  “She’s gone be all right, Elsie Mary. Everything gone be all right.” Miz Butler croaked.

  “I know,” Elsie said. Her mother’s eyes fluttered open as they put her on the stretcher. Elsie, full of newfound power, smiled.

  Mamie took a deep breath and dropped her eyes from the window to the face of Alfred’s old watch. Past midnight. As she shoved her wrist back into the pocket of her apron, her arm tingled, like she had slept on it wrong. But she had not slept at all tonight. Standing in her front room in the dark, Mamie knew something had happened to her child. She wasn’t a conjure woman, hadn’t been born with any double veil. Yet she knew certain that somewhere in that chilly darkness, the South had tried to take him.

  Knowing it made her move. She crossed over to the door and slipped into her work shoes. Opening it with the softest click, she hopped right off the edge of the porch. Steps were no use, no convenience to her. She opened the gate and took to the dirt road with her eyes wide open to the familiar shapes of the mimosa trees they had planted long ago.

  At Reverend Bell’s house, she looked for any signs of light or life, but they had probably gone to sleep hours ago. She was walking fast toward the street, a wide blacktopped ribbon Claiborne Tucker had sweet-talked the state into putting down for free. Tucker Lane was a winding strip between orchards of pecan trees. Behind Mamie it dead-ended smack in front of the old Tucker place. In front of her it curved for two or three miles before it met the highway leading to town.

  Mamie hugged herself, hunching her muscular shoulders against the October air. She listened for the hum of the truck. It was only an old piece of truck that Alfred had gotten from some ancient White man after it quit running in a field. Alfred took it and then let it sit up on bricks in the backyard for two years. Freddie Boy had played with the thing off and on till he got it going again.

  Freddie Boy could do almost anything with his hands. How often had she chastised him for messing around with scraps of wood or old machine parts? He never paid her any mind when she did. As he got older, he had figured out how to squeeze his chores in between his book learning and tinkering time.

  Mamie listened hard for the sound of that smooth, rebuilt engine. The engine Freddie Boy had fixed. The truck Freddie Boy had left home driving th
is morning. She heard nothing.

  A whisper of wind through the dry trees told her to step off the blacktop. She looked across the dry ditch to her right, squinting. If only it had been a full moon, she might be able to just see something. As it was, she had to keep blinking to make out the difference between the bushes at the bases of the trees and the nothing surrounding the bushes. She would have to go into that, and it was no longer easy or familiar.

  Mamie’s pecan-picking days had ended. Something like rheumatism had set in her left shoulder and dogged her so bad that Alfred had put his foot down about it, told her to turn in her sack. It was then Alfred got the electric run out to the house, and she started taking in pressing. She was good, too. Thanks to Alfred and that ironing, she had not set foot in these fields for a while, quite a while.

  Even when she was a wisp of a girl, Mamie had found no beauty in greenness. She smelled no sweetness in spring grass or wide-blooming roses. It all meant work to her. Somebody, some Black body’s backbreaking work spread the manure and walked the miles behind the mower and suffered the thorns.

  Nature was not her friend, but she had a gut closeness to it tonight. It would have been more of a comfort to have Alfred beside her; she had to admit it at least to herself. Alfred would have placed his big hand just at her waist and held it lightly there. Just enough touch for her to feel him and all that he was without her ever being held back, or held on to.

  Mamie sucked in a breath so deep that it turned into a sob.

  Lord have mercy, she missed Alfred.

  They had argued about Freddie Boy having the truck in the first place. Alfred ranted over how their son was too young to understand the responsibility, that he would sure enough somehow lose that truck before he got a hundred miles on it. Mamie patiently stated the facts that her husband believed but could not say. That a Colored boy like Frederick, too smart and too aware of what he didn’t have and couldn’t get, was not safe in the world of White men. The truck would carry him straight into such a world. Mamie knew this, and she hated it all the same.