A Matter of Souls Read online

  The buddy who’d laughed at Bernadette’s crayon drawing, Joe Timmons, had actually been a cool kind of cat, from some little Louisiana town that sounded like a sneeze—Chabot. And he was going on about the Negro college his father had attended, some place called Gram-bling. “Coach Rob would lose his mind to get a bear like you on defense, man!” he’d said.

  There was a bus to Shreveport. From there he had to transfer: Grambling was a town all by itself. Imagine that, he thought. A college town made up of Black folk!

  He looked at his wristwatch. He had bided his time.

  With his head held high, he got up to take a walk. Beyond the four main blocks the road forked. He didn’t know where the right ribbon of dark asphalt led—but he knew the hill to his left. He strode over it, passing the ghostly lumber mill. The faded black and white sign hung crookedly on the padlocked gate. He wondered briefly if the politicians had succeeded in moving it, or if it had simply failed.

  He continued slowly downhill. The remains of this deserted community were vaguely familiar. To one side was a weedy lot. The house where he’d been raised had once stood there. Nearby had been Willa and Jimmy Lee’s place. It seemed there had been a fire, and only the ruins of the crumbling brick chimney crouched in the undergrowth, Jimmy Lee’s shed having long ago tumbled down. The other shotgun houses on the row were only skeletons of their former selves, abandoned by the other broken people who must have left after Willa did. There was nothing here. Even the houses were dead.

  He walked briskly back through his past, marking nothing to memory. His starched uniform and medals allowed him to step into the tiny store attached to the gas station to buy a sandwich and soft drink without incident.

  He stood alone in the sun as the dusty bus screeched to a stop. The driver nodded at his uniform, then at him.

  “Welcome back, son.”

  Immediately, the young man reminded himself that he had chosen to step into a new world. He had chosen to begin.

  “The name’s Absalom,” he said smoothly, glancing down at the black block letters on his nametag. “Absalom Collins.”

  He would keep the fathers—the one he’d never known, and the one he hadn’t known long enough. They were a truth he could never deny.

  The driver smiled and accepted his ticket. Absalom Collins shook the clay dust from his boots before he dropped his duffel in the front seat facing the windshield and sat down, his eyes wide open for his new self.

  The brown child squirmed in the hard wooden chair, trying not to look into the nun’s disapproving face. She tried staring at her own black and white oxford shoes, with their double-tied laces that she had done herself. She tried a darting glance out of the big open window, but there wasn’t even a cawing blue jay in the trees to hold her attention. Somehow, Pamela Ann couldn’t help it. Her eyes were drawn back to Sister Formidable’s eyes; they were angry dark beads.

  “Sit up straight!” Sister Formidable barked in strangely accented English as she scowled over her eyeglasses. She rifled through the papers on her desk. The sound of the rustling pages swelled to fill the empty air, then stopped. For five long minutes, she pretended to read.

  Across the desk, Pamela Ann became still. Calm. Sister Formidable wanted her to be afraid, but without the nun’s words squeezing her heart, the child relaxed. She breathed slowly and easily along with her own thump, thump, thumpety thump. She wanted to smile, but didn’t dare. Noise was the enemy, but silence? Silence was her best friend. That was why she liked to pray inside her head, Blessed Mother, watch over me.

  Pamela Ann thought about Sister Formidable and her sister sisters. They didn’t appreciate any honor to God that could not be heard echoing off the vaulted ceiling of the chapel or seen in the bent and scraped knees peeking out from the hems of navy pleated skirts—and if knees could be seen, that was another problem altogether.

  Clearing her throat, Sister Formidable signaled that this particular period of punishment was over.

  Pamela Ann allowed herself to sigh, acknowledging that her precious little spell of peace had ended. She waited.

  “If the pagans were not in your home, you would behave like a good girl,” the nun said carefully. Still, to Pamela’s ten-year-old ears, she sounded as if she’d pronounced g–i–r–l as “gehl.” And the pagans … Well. The pagans were Pamela Ann’s grandparents and her father, who were Baptist. They were the ones who owned the business that paid the tuition for her to attend St. Benedict the Moor School, because her frail, “not quite right” mother had been a devout Roman Catholic before she got sent to the asylum in Pineville.

  “I do not see,” Sister Formidable continued, “why you felt you had any right to interrupt Sister Contumelia during a lesson.”

  “She said the ‘niggras’ in this country should stop causing trouble.” Pamela Ann repeated the pronunciation she’d heard as accurately as she could.

  Sister Formidable picked up a ruler and rapped it on her desk impatiently. “What nonsense are you speaking?”

  “Well, my mama says every one of us should protest for equality. And I told Sister Contumelia she said it wrong. It’s pronounced Nee-gro. I know, because my mama taught me that, too.” One of the things Pamela Ann had inherited from her mother was speaking things plain.

  “Your mother, who is in the insane asylum! How dare you take this attitude! You are arrogant and disrespectful!” Sister Formidable spoke harshly but was apparently a bit flustered.

  Pamela Ann had a delayed reaction to Sister’s threatening tone. On any other day, that red-faced frown would have her squirming as she anticipated a fiery lecture accompanied by the burning blows of the paddle on her behind. But unfortunately for Sister Formidable, she had started Pamela to thinking about her mother.

  There had been good times, fun times, before her mother went away. Everybody in Lowtown, where Pamela had lived all her life, said that Joyce Farmer was brilliant. There was nothing she couldn’t do. She had learned to read when she was three and taken to the piano, playing by ear, shortly after that. They said seven-year-old Joyce quizzed the preacher about why God had put Jonah in that whale, and whether God had trapped Colored people on Earth for the same reason. She started following the Catholics after that. She was pretty, too—brown and slim, with flashing dark eyes and a heart-shaped smile. She fell hard in love with Beamon Toussaint, and he followed her off north to the university.

  Something happened to her there.

  The way Pamela Ann always heard her grandmother Ma T tell it, something happened, and when they came back south a couple of years later, Joyce wasn’t the same. So she had borne Pamela Ann and lavished all her attention on her “little brown baby with sparklin’ eyes,” reading her Paul Laurence Dunbar and Dorothy West, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. She was thrilled by Pamela Ann’s perfect pitch and sat the baby on her lap to reach the piano keys. In her mind, Pamela Ann could summon her mother’s throaty voice any time of day.

  Joyce went to Mass every Sunday and fell to her knees on Saturday afternoons in the confessional, staying for what seemed like hours as Pamela Ann sat waiting in the drafty, dim church, inhaling the sweet incense. What, the little girl had wondered, could her mother have done that much sinning about?

  When Pamela was eight, she got tired of listening to the old ladies whisper with Ma T every time Joyce quoted Shakespeare or broke into a made-up opera about Negro rights. She got tired of watching her father’s shoulders beat down during family dinners about “all his promise gone.” He would only look at Joyce while she cocked her head back at him, smiling sweetly.

  “Well, what happened up there?” Pamela had mustered up the courage to ask between bites of smothered pork chop one Sunday afternoon.

  With a cool voice, Joyce had answered, “the white people killed your mother.”

  Ma T dropped the gravy boat. Grandpapa and all the aunts and the preacher fell silent as Beamon reached out and took Joyce’s hand.

  “She doesn’t mean it, Pam,” he said. But Joy
ce batted her eyes and nodded her head.

  “Oh, yes. Yes I do. Pamela Ann, the White folks killed Joyce Toussaint. Your mama is not the woman she once was.” She slipped her hand away from Beamon’s. “Isn’t that right, honey?” she asked softly.

  Pamela Ann’s father looked into his wife’s eyes, then into his daughter’s.

  “You always was too smart for your own good,” Ma T muttered, mopping gravy off her lace tablecloth. “Went up there and them White folks drove you crazy. She don’t need to be left with Pamela, Beamon!”

  Pamela’s mouth had dropped open, her father abruptly stood up, and her mother screamed.

  “You can’t separate me from my child! She’s the only way I’m alive! Beamon, tell her!” Joyce’s voice rose hysterically, and she turned to Pamela. “Every time I look at you, Baby, I see who I used to be. Don’t let them kill you too!”

  “That’s enough,” Beamon said gently. But Joyce was shaking as she looked around the table for some agreement, some support. Pamela could see that it was only her father and herself who backed her mother up. She stood up and took her mother’s hand.

  Pamela remembered her insides quaking and barely holding the strong urge to let all her water out.

  Suddenly, Joyce’s knees bent, and as she sank to the floor, her face was wet with tears.

  “Oh, I forgot,” she whispered, almost to herself. “I’m dead.”

  Pamela had let her eyes gaze down at the shiny wood floor as she recalled these things, but now she slowly raised her head. She looked under her eyelids at Sister Formidable, and instead of a smoking behind, she felt hot anger inside.

  Arrogant and disrespectful. She knew what arrogant meant—how dare this person talk about her mother as if she was crazy? Wasn’t that disrespectful? And what did she know about real life anyway? That’s what Ma T always mumbled about the nuns.

  In first grade, Pamela Ann had thought they were holy women, the real wives of God. They were smart, they prayed, they spoke Latin and sang—almost like her own mother. But as she got older, she listened and she watched and she thought.

  They were not always kind. They were not always generous. And sometimes—sometimes, they treated their little Negro students with the same roughness that they did the secondhand textbooks that St. Benedict inherited from the White Catholic school across town. They often treated their Negro students not with joy, but as if they were a penance.

  Penance was what Joyce was always seeking in that confessional; penance was what the priest always gave Pamela Ann on Fridays when he chanted behind the red velvet curtain: Five Our Fathers. Five Hail Mary’s. Pamela Ann’s sin was always the same: she was mad at Ma T for sending her mother Joyce away.

  Pamela Ann narrowed her eyes as she tried to look deep into Sister Formidable’s mind. Past her horn-rimmed glasses, underneath the white wimple and black veil. She leaned to the edge of her chair, craning her neck.

  Sister Formidable dropped the ruler and arched back, as if she thought Pamela might fly at her. Her blue eyes widened, and she went very pale.

  Pamela Ann could hear her mother’s voice inside her head. She smiled.

  “I think—I think you owe my mother an apology … Sister.” She slid back.

  Sister Formidable’s fingers crept to the black telephone at the corner of her desk. She attempted, but found that she was not able to dial a number while keeping her eyes on Pamela Ann.

  A funny thought crossed Pamela Ann’s mind. Maybe she’s afraid that I’m crazy! The girl giggled. Sister Formidable fumbled through a small file of cards near the phone and then dialed with trembling fingers.

  “I need Beamon Toussaint,” she almost whispered. But she seemed to be recovering herself. “Yes, I mean Mr. Toussaint!” she barked, and waited—not looking across at Pamela Ann. “Beamon, you must come and get this girl. No, I cannot explain. She must go.”

  Pamela couldn’t make out her father’s muffled words, but the nun’s fingers tightened on the receiver.

  “I … I don’t know about that. Yes. I see, but you’ll have to take that up with Father—Oh. Yes, I understand—good-bye.” She hung up in a rush.

  “Should I go get my things?” Pamela Ann asked, swinging her legs under the chair. But Sister Formidable shook her veil vigorously and stood up.

  “You will not return to Sister Contumelia’s classroom; it would be too disruptive. I will gather your belongings and speak to your father. You will meet him outside …” She walked briskly toward the door, then paused with her hand on the knob.

  “Pamela?” Sister Formidable looked over her shoulder. Pamela had never before seen such a curious expression on any nun’s face. Was it wonder? Astonishment? A puzzlement that prayer might not work out?

  “Yes, Sister?” Pamela Ann answered sweetly. Her mother was inside her, for sure.

  The nun shook herself and blinked, as if she expected to see something or someone different when she opened her eyes again.

  “Nothing.” She clicked the door shut between them.

  Pamela Ann smoothed the pleats on her skirt and wondered what her father had made the nun understand on the telephone.

  “What possessed you, Daughter?” Beamon was leaning against the passenger-side door of his shiny gray Buick with his arms folded.

  He didn’t seem, to Pamela Ann, to be particularly angry or surprised. In fact, she thought as she slowly walked down the wide brick steps of St. Benedict the Moor School, he looked like he was proud.

  Pamela shaded her eyes from the noonday sun and peered at him to make sure.

  She had never lied to her father.

  “Mama did,” she said, stopping just a few steps away.

  “I see.” Beamon glanced away from her for a minute, then paid close attention to the filtered cigarette that he pulled out and lit.

  “You know,” he said, tossing down the burnt match, “your grandmother is worried about you.”

  “Because I got sent away from school?” Pamela Ann asked.

  “Because you seem more and more like your mama every day,” he answered, blowing off a series of round puffs of smoke. Each one was smaller than the one before it. Pamela Ann lifted her head to watch them float up into the sky together, joining the clouds.

  “You’re a lot like Joyce,” Pamela Ann’s father said in a funny voice, almost like he was talking to himself.

  She looked in his direction, but he had turned to open the door for her.

  “All that promise gone,” he muttered, closing Pamela Ann’s door with a soft click. She stretched up to see him through the rearview mirror as he came around the car. When he got in, he paused before he put his key in the ignition.

  “What is it, Daddy?” Pamela asked. Her heart started beating fast, faster than fast, the way it did on the big Ferris wheel at the state fair. The way it had when she watched her Daddy drive off in this same Buick with her mama in this seat.

  “Y’all both deserve better,” he said firmly. He turned the key and shifted gears. And then he smiled at his daughter. “This place can’t hold you, Pamela Ann.”

  Pamela sucked in her breath, not knowing exactly what was coming. She gripped the soft leather seat and stared over the dashboard. Her father didn’t turn at the corner, heading toward the white-columned funeral home where Ma T and Grandpapa ruled the same way Sister Formidable did at St. Benedict the Moor School.

  No, Beamon cruised through the town, going somewhere else. He left the city limits, sailing on the blacktop toward the highway turnoff. At the flashing red traffic signal he slowed to a stop. Pamela Ann’s heart was in her throat.

  “Daughter,” he said, taking a deep breath, “we are breaking out.”

  He revved the motor and put the car into drive, screeching left past the sign that read Pineville, 49 miles.

  With her heart thumpety-thumping again, Pamela Ann sat back to enjoy the ride.

  Our Father, who art in heaven …” Don Joachim Rodrigo was a very pious man. His nervous fingers rolled against the worn w
ooden rosary that he used for everyday prayer. He was a spiritual man. He attended Mass at the old church every morning in order to start his day in the proper frame of mind. He ran his household with fatherly compassion and was known as a most scrupulous businessman. That is why, finding himself aboard a sea vessel weighted down with humanity, Don Joachim Rodrigo found himself terribly ill at ease.

  He shuddered at the possibility of his beloved wife discovering his true whereabouts, for she, beyond any doubt, was a good and just woman.

  “Hallowed be Thy name … I am lower than the serpent!” His lips twisted the words of the familiar adoration. He tightened his grip on the bead and stared out across the white foam whipping up pointy tips on the rolling green ocean. His stomach began to churn along with the waters. But Don Joachim knew that his misery was superficial. Even as he felt his muscles tighten in sudden spasm, he knew that below him—only a few feet beneath his calfskin boots—were creatures in deep and true pain.

  “Thy will be done …” Don Joachim tried to shut his ears against the low moans issuing up from the hold. “Forgive us our debts …” He could not go on. His hands shook so that the rosary clattered to the deck. He stooped to recover them, and a sturdy wind lifted the putrid smell up through the wooden planks. Don Joachim’s fifty-five-year-old knees buckled. He smelled sweat and tears, and waste and fear.

  “Christ, mate! Hold it together, then!” A rough hand jerked Don Joachim up and shoved him inside his cabin. The tight, airless space served only to trap the odors surging through his nostrils and into his brain. The sailor slammed the door, leaving Don Joachim slumped against the swaying wall.

  Everything had begun, truly innocently, one month ago. It had only been a matter of business! At that time, Don Joachim was satisfied in his prosperity. He found joy in his only daughter, Rosalinda. And he took pleasure in the promise of his sons, Claudio, Benito, and Manolo. Indeed, his greatest pleasure was in his eldest, Manolo. The one who counted before he could walk. The one who had learned to bargain with his brothers for their sweets. The one who slept all night in the warehouse on one occasion simply because he liked the stacks of cargo.