A Matter of Souls Read online

  It was Alfred who was not ready for what his son would find there. He was not ready for his boy to be challenged on his right to own anything worth something. And what if it was found out that Freddie Boy had practically made the truck himself, that he had skills and a brain to go with them? Alfred jumped angry. He’d put his fist down on the table so hard the cat leaped onto the stove, and then he roared about that.

  “What is it all for, then?” Mamie raised her voice, and Freddie Boy slammed out the front door to get away from them. His part in this argument was through. “You tell me what the doggone point is for us to be sendin’ him to school; us scrapin’ cents together to send him down to that college, if you too scared to let him live?”

  “Colored folk don’t live, Mamie Lee!” Alfred spun around to face her, and Mamie saw defeat plain in his face. This was no argument, really. They didn’t disagree on the main things. His eyes were wide and bright, his long cheeks flushed. His chin trembled beneath his rough, brown beard.

  Mamie had never seen him so; she knew at that moment that in twenty years she had never really seen him.

  “Alfred?” She called his name quietly, wondering if the man she loved was still inside him. She had grabbed the back of a chair and held it so tight her knuckles began to ache.

  “No bank’s gonna give us a loan.” Alfred’s words dropped like rocks. Mamie felt her shoulders sag, but she jerked them up.

  “Maybe—”

  “Been to Baton Rouge, Lafayette, far as New Orleans, Mamie. Ain’t no bank willing,” he said without looking at her. “Paid our every bill on time. Got nearly a thousand dollars saved. Even the house wasn’t enough, and it’s paid for!”

  Alfred would not look at her.

  “They’ll give a Colored man money to buy a new car, long as it’s a Ford and last year’s model. But to start a business? Damn ’em! Damn ’em to hell!” He leaned against the wall.

  They had talked about starting a clothes-cleaning business ever since Freddie Boy was a baby. Mamie had built a clientele. Alfred had worked his way up from shoeshine kid to chief steward at the Tucker Hotel in his thirty years of perfect service.

  It was a dream they’d had together.

  “I can’t give you what you want, Mamie.”

  “Alfred, I don’t need nothin’ else,” she’d said.

  But that blow from the banks had hurt him bad. Mamie watched him retreat deeper and deeper into himself. One gray morning a year ago, he went silently to work, and he never came home. He had left his leather-banded watch on the table beside the bed, as if time no longer meant anything to him.

  Mamie had never blamed him. How could she? He had it in his head and his heart that he had failed her, and that he had raised his son to believe in a future that was a lie. And she had never realized how the weight had worn him down year after year, disappointment after disappointment, until it was too late.

  Mamie breathed deep and caught the last smoky scents of fall leaves somebody had burned somewhere. She hunched her shoulders, not wanting to think about fire; not wanting to give in to the shivers running up and down her spine.

  There was a rustling on the ground a few yards away, which startled her. She stopped, slowly rolling her head in the direction of the sound. Two glossy yellow eyes looked back at her. Possum. Mamie stomped her foot and watched it run. She hated those creatures. Always night searching. Always pale and bony-faced, like death.

  “Frederick!” she cried out. The possum had scuttled off to the right, and so she eased the opposite way. She felt her son, her baby, so close and at the same time farther away from her than he had ever been.

  She walked. For every inch her body went forward, her thoughts crept backward.

  She had listened to the radio earlier in the day as she vigorously scrubbed Miss Virginia Walburton’s cotton percale drawers on the small washboard. Miss Virginia had always been a sweet potato pie or two on the heavy side, and since she was elderly now she liked only light starch and no creases in her “intimate garments.” The only hands she had ever allowed to touch her fifty pairs of lace-trimmed underwear were her own and Mamie’s.

  (Mamie was quite happy that Miss Virginia was so peculiar and particular. Miss Virginia had promised, if Mamie and Alfred ever opened up their own full-service place, to entrust the remainder of her extensive wardrobe to their care and attention. What did banks know about trust?)

  On the radio, the man talked about dogs being set on five Colored boys who had lingered too long after their high school football game. They had run, and some of them interrupted two White waitresses walking home from work.

  Mamie reached so abruptly to shut off the rest of the story that she dropped a wad of pale blue onto the floor. She’d picked it up and set it aside without rinsing it again.

  She didn’t need to listen to find out what happened to those boys. She knew.

  Now she called out to her own. “Freddie Boy!” Her voice was hoarse, and only crickets answered. Her heart started beating fast. Thumping faster.

  A short distance away, she thought she saw lightning bugs flash their behinds on and off. But it was way too late at night for them, wasn’t it?

  Mamie took off running toward the impossible glowing. She tripped over roots. The light grew fainter and vanished.

  She stumbled and fell, hearing glass crunch under her knee just before she felt the sting of the cuts as the glass shards pushed into her skin. She glanced down as she put her hands out to steady herself.

  Beer bottles. The stale stench floated up. There seemed to be a flat trail in the grass—a tire track. She located the other one by narrowing her eyes. There were bourbon jugs and more beer bottles.

  Mamie fought the panic rushing between her ears. Slowly, she raised her head.

  A tree stood where the swarm of lightning bugs had appeared. She was right upon it.

  It was old and broad and gnarled and knotty. Mamie followed the wide trunk up to heavy branches hanging low and laden with dark ovals, nuts overlooked or never picked. The branches were surely sturdy enough for the clothesline Mamie allowed herself to view with dry eyes.

  She took a step forward, and then her limbs refused to obey.

  The world stopped around her.

  “Freddie Boy?”

  Her stomach shook, but she tried to gulp back everything. Everything.

  It had taken them seven years to have Freddie Boy. Alfred’s mother claimed she had prayed on it and accepted the fact that the Lord had been testing her by giving her son a barren woman. Mamie’s own mother had brought by every herb in her experience, moved their bed around the entire house, chanted, and even studied Alfred’s dreams.

  Alfred never gave up. And when she was finally with child, as soon as she was sure, she told Alfred. She met him at the front door with her hair done up and wearing her best Sunday dress.

  “Afternoon, Daddy,” she said. He knew the happy news instantly because Mamie never referred to him by hussyfied juke-joint nicknames or in any vulgar way.

  Alfred dropped to his knees and cried when Mamie told him. He wrapped his arms around her waist and laid his head where her baby was.

  “Frederick Douglass Holmes, are you in there?”

  Those were Alfred’s first words to his son.

  That clothesline could never hold a man. Mamie pressed her hands against her stomach as if Freddie Boy was still safe inside.

  The night and Mamie’s despair swallowed up the color of her son’s hair and windbreaker and pants. He was a crumpled heap an arm’s length away. Mamie imagined there must be blood soaking the ground. There would certainly be blood.

  The line could not hold him, she told herself again.

  “Frederick. Oh, my Frederick.” Mamie bent over with no expectation. He was turned away from her. She hitched up her skirt and carefully stepped over him, squatting on his other side.

  With a calm bordering on madness, she looked at his face.

  He was seventeen. He was a beautiful seventeen-year-old
boy.

  His laughing chocolate eyes were swollen into two purple lumps the size of those golf balls Alfred used to bring home from his weekend job as a caddy. The flesh underneath both was even darker, and on one side seemed black with bruising. On the other his whole face jutted out horribly around his jawbone.

  His face looked too big for his slender neck. Mamie thought it might wobble like the snapped neck of a turkey not-quite-killed for the Thanksgiving table. She shook her head, aware of the crazy comparison. Not quite dead.

  Blood trickled from the corner of Freddie Boy’s mouth. His mouth looked normal, with his wide lips parted only slightly. She could not see any of his teeth.

  Freddie Boy’s left sleeve was ripped away from the jacket; his hard, muscular arm was twisted back underneath his body. The angle was unnatural. His right hand was draped across his body, bloody and raked with oozing cuts. He clutched it in a fist at his groin.

  Mamie sucked in a breath, but the air had gone. Her lungs burned.

  He had fought. Tried to protect himself.

  Both legs were bent where there were no joints. His right foot seemed to turn up, pointing to his face. What else was shattered inside him, along with his spirit?

  She could not see his chest move. She could not see past the matted hair if his temples still pulsed. He did not move. She did not touch him.

  It was no use wondering who had done this to him or why. She knew the beginning of Freddie Boy’s story as clear as she’d known the end of the story on the radio.

  Mamie held her muscles taut, and she swayed. Her eyes ached. Her womb ached. She pressed her eyes shut and recalled her baby boy’s tiny new body placed warm upon hers; he had been bloody then, too. But he had screamed, and she thanked God that he was alive. Now he wasn’t making a sound.

  Mamie wondered if it was better that he be dead than broken up like this.

  She tilted her head, and the tears streamed steady over her face like rain. All of a sudden her sorrow was so strong she could not hold herself upright against it. She slowly laid her body out on the cold, damp ground beside her son.

  “Mamie Lee! I been at the house for you!”

  Sounded like Alfred. Mamie raised her chin just to see across her son’s still chest.

  It was Alfred’s lankly self, loping though the grass. There was a fire in his step, and a fire in his eyes that lit up Mamie’s night.

  Alfred was standing over them.

  “We ain’t givin’ them our boy, Mamie,” he said, lifting her up to rest beside him. She inhaled his man-ness.

  “We ain’t lettin’ them take our son.”

  “Alfred!” Mamie touched him with her palm and looked back at Freddie.

  She was his mother! It was a sin before God that she could think her son better off dead! A great pain seized her heart, and she regretted her awful notion. She pulled away from Alfred, feeling him move behind her, and gently touched her fingertips to their son’s mouth.

  “He’s warm!”

  “You stay with him. I’m gonna get help. You don’t leave him, Mamie.”

  She slipped her arm under Freddie Boy’s neck and gingerly raised his head as she lowered hers. She kissed the temples. She recalled his smiling little-boy face, the screeching voice begging her to “touch Eskimo noses” with him.

  More tenderly than she ever had, Mamie rubbed her nose against her son’s.

  “Remember that song you used to sing?” Alfred was hovering over her, urging her.

  “I don’t remember no song, Alfred!” She wondered anxiously why he didn’t go on, like he said he would.

  “Yeah, you do now. Sing to him, Mamie. He’ll hear you. You got a sweet, sweet voice. Remember that song? Sing it to your baby boy nice like you can.”

  That was Alfred to a T. Plying her with compliments to distract her mind. But he must be right. Alfred was right about the truck, wasn’t he?

  She ever so lightly placed a hand on Freddie’s forehead. Yes, warm.

  And then Alfred reached over her shoulder, putting his calloused hand on top of hers.

  “You sing to him, Mamie,” Alfred whispered.

  Mamie licked her lips and found them dry; she forced spit back down her throat to ease its tightness. Whatever song did Alfred mean? No lullaby came to her, so she opened her mouth, ready to go on whatever came out.

  “Earth has no sor-row… that heaven can … not… cure …” The old hymn rolled out. But that was the ending, not the beginning. Mamie sniffed. She had to sing a beginning!

  “Come …ye… disconsolate…”

  “Mmm…”

  “Where-er …you … lan-guish …”

  The sound Freddie made was so faint that she was not sure she’d heard anything at all. Mamie choked in her singing, yet managed to keep humming. She strained to pick up more, wishing she could see the air going in and out of his lungs to be sure.

  “Breathe, baby. Breathe for Mama. It’s gonna be all right.” Mamie looked off into the night, loving the breath back into her son.

  Giant round yellow eyes were coming toward them. Flashing eyes, signaling to her. Maybe the White boys had come back and she would die together with her son. Mamie was not afraid.

  The lights stopped. She heard voices calling out to her.

  “Mamie! Mamie Lee Holmes!”

  Bodies, people were walking out of the light.

  “We come for you, Mamie!” She saw the grizzled white top of Reverend Bell’s head. He loomed out of the light. She blinked, seeing his sons and the shimmering pink face of Doctor Waskom behind him. Mamie threw her head back and gasped for breath.

  This was the doctor who’d set Freddie’s broken arm when he was ten, who had handled him like he was any hurting child. The tears blinded her to the flurry of what went on around her next; she only was sure that she did not let them take Freddie away from her arms.

  “W-Where’s Alfred?” she hiccupped, finally allowing the doctor to put himself between her and her baby. Reverend Bell took off his coat and threw it over her hunched shoulders.

  “Mamie, honey, Alfred ain’t here.”

  Mamie looked at him for a minute, then turned back to the doctor.

  “He’ll live? Our boy will make it?” she asked. The doctor was grim-faced as he met her eyes.

  “Can’t promise, Mamie,” he answered. “If he does, he won’t ever be the same.”

  Mamie believed him. She believed that if Freddie survived, he would live hard, and hurt, never use that mind or those gifted hands the same way again.

  Maybe his life wouldn’t be much different from what it would have been if none of this had ever happened, she thought. His life would have been hard, and hurtful, and hardly ever right, even if this night had never happened.

  “You hear me, Mamie? Child, Alfred ain’t here. My wife saw you wandering in the middle of the night and sent us after you. Mamie?”

  Mamie jerked away from him, quivering. Alfred had been with her. She didn’t care what anybody said. How? Somehow.

  Awe shook her till Reverend Bell’s coat fell away, till she could hear nothing but Alfred calling to her from far off.

  “Come and get him, Alfred!” she murmured, so nobody else could hear. “Come on and take Freddie with you. Come on, come on.”

  Mamie arched her head over her shoulder, listening for Alfred to answer.

  “Give me that syringe! Hurry!” She heard the doctor instead. The doctor was frantic. She heard him pumping Freddie’s chest, and she heard the pumping stop.

  Reverend Bell wailed, “Oh, Lord have mercy on his soul!”

  Mamie bowed her head.

  She looked up at the sky and saw no stars. No moon.

  She is black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem!” Hazel dropped the stack of envelopes she’d just pulled from the mailbox. She clucked at her own clumsiness and bent to pick them up, rising just in time to spy the source of that rich baritone voice. Next door, over the honeysuckle-draped wire fence, an intense pair of dark eyes was fixed on
her.

  “If Reverend Clark catches you flirting with scripture, JC—” She couldn’t decide how to finish the reprimand, partially because it wasn’t all that genuine. She resented his comment about being black, despite the fact that out of all six Reed sisters, she was sure enough the darkest in the bunch. But then, she took great satisfaction in his noticing her… comeliness.

  “Girl, Reverend Clark got hot blood runnin’ through his veins too. How come you think he can burn up the pulpit like he does every Sunday? And speaking of Sunday, what you doin’ next Saturday night?”

  Hazel burst into tinkling laughter and slapped the mail against her thigh as she strode back up the sloping yard to Miss Clotille’s porch. She never answered him. One thing she had learned well from Miss Clotille, her employer since she’d turned thirteen six years ago, was how to be coy. At the steps, she flung a broad smile over her shoulder.

  JC continued to eyeball the scenery, propping his elbow up on the handle of the lawnmower he’d pushed from Miss Clotille’s over to his next job.

  “You as fine as plum wine, Hazel Mozella Reed! You hear me?” he shouted at the slamming screen door.

  Hazel stopped at the mirror hanging over the marble hall table and took a long drink of herself. She prayed thanks every night for the natural waves—Indian hair, her grandmother Mama Vee called it—that fell back from her temples, even when she sweated her head. She had long ago learned to painstakingly arch her heavy eyebrows and believed they were now a “perfect accent to her high cheekbones and full, yet never broad lips.”

  Hazel couldn’t help but think of the words Madame Florence Ethel Ameal-Jones had used to describe the “Ideal Colored Woman” in the last issue of Miss Clotille’s Half–Century Magazine. Yes, Hazel thought, I have all of those attributes except one, and I’m working on that! She leaned in closer to her reflection and tilted her head to look.

  There was a difference! Clear as day, she could see that there was. She raised trembling fingers to touch her cheek.