Broken Ground Read online

  Could it be that one of our three visitors selected The Souls of Black Folk from the limited offerings of the traveling library? I wonder about this as Miss Berger hustles them into her small, windowless office and then beckons for me to follow. I have to edge my way into the room, which holds a cabinet of library supplies, the two-burner unit, the often contrary loose-leaf copy machine (manufactured in 1902), rolls of dated maps, three towers of moldering books in need of repair, and a crate that serves as both umbrella stand and Lost and Found. The room barely contains Miss Berger and the two other women, who are nearly as tall as she and big-boned to boot. In comparison to them, the elderly man seems a bird, perched on the edge of the table that holds the copy machine. When I tuck myself in beside him, he leans away from me. He’s uncomfortable standing shoulder to shoulder with a white woman. He grips the rim of his hat so tightly that his fingernails pale. I wish I could reassure him, but I don’t know where to begin. His female friends regard me, their expressions flat and unrevealing, as Miss Berger closes the door, and the small space becomes still more claustrophobic.

  “Well.” Miss Berger expels a long, shaky breath. “Here we are. But what happened to ten o’clock tomorrow night, as we’d planned?”

  “This couldn’t wait.” The taller woman’s voice is grim. She shoots a smoldering glare down her long, hawkish nose—a glare which rakes over me, then Miss Berger, then fixes on me again.

  “Now, Minah.” Miss Berger’s voice is firm and calm. “This is Ruth, my reliable colleague. You can say what you need to say in her presence. No need to beat around the bush.”

  “There’s real trouble this time. Can’t afford any unnecessary risks.” The woman—Minah—doesn’t take her gaze from me.

  Miss Berger says, “Ruth’s not a risk, and, Minah, you know there’s always trouble.”

  “This is different.” Minah sucks in a breath. “Wolf’s at the door.”

  For one long moment Miss Berger holds perfectly still, and I swear I can hear the beating of hearts other than my own. Then, “Say it,” Miss Berger says.

  Minah turns to her friend. “It’s yours to tell, Susan.”

  “No, it’s Papa’s.” Susan, round as a barrel, has a lushly plump face that shines with perspiration. She reaches across our tight circle to touch the elderly man’s sleeve, and he gives a nod of permission. “But since he can’t . . .” Susan clears her throat. “Papa was walking home from the Thorne place last night around about eleven. They kept him late, chopping wood and such.”

  The man’s scarred, arthritic hands don’t look like they could wield an ax. But I must underestimate his strength. You don’t get calluses like he has from doing nothing.

  “The Thorne place is way out, west on Central, where it’s just dirt road. You probably know that.” Susan’s hands are the opposite of her father’s, fleshy and dexterous, working the air. “So Papa has some miles to walk at the end of each day. He passes the Homestead.” Susan hesitates, and her hands go still. “Well, you do know about the Homestead.”

  “Indeed,” Miss Berger says.

  Everyone knows about the Homestead—the first claim staked in this area during the Land Run. Rumor has it that Timothy Bradford, the man who took possession of the place, was actually a Sooner; he jumped the gun and snatched up prime property before others had crossed Territory lines. Timothy Bradford’s descendants still live on the Homestead, though they’ve long since leased portions of their fields to tenant farmers. After three generations of wealth, they’re as strapped as any other local landowners, I’ve heard, with harvests being what they’ve been in these last years.

  “Papa smelled the smoke.” Susan’s hands, working again. “Then he saw it rising above that windbreak of cottonwoods off the side of the house.” She lowers her voice. “Papa’s no fool. He didn’t go close. But he heard them singing. He heard their horses neigh and stomp the ground.”

  Miss Berger looks at me. “Do you understand, Ruth?”

  Minah interrupts the answer I do not have. “No time for explanations, Sarah. Not now. White people get hungry enough, desperate enough, they get blameful. Next thing we know, it’ll be Tulsa 1921 all over again.”

  “Papa and me, we did our time in Tulsa,” Susan blurts. “We came here because of it. We don’t want another Tulsa.”

  Thanks to Miss Berger, I know about Tulsa 1921, too. But before Miss Berger informed me, I’d heard nothing about the race riot that occurred over the last day of May and the first day of June that year. That’s when a mob of white people attacked the Greenwood District, the wealthiest Negro community at that time in the United States—“it was also known as ‘the Black Wall Street,’ ” Miss Berger said—and burned it to the ground. “The violence went on for sixteen hours,” she continued, her eyes glittering with some emotion I didn’t fully understand. “In the end, eight hundred Negros were admitted to white hospitals, because their own hospitals were in ashes. No one ever figured out how many people died—somewhere between fifty-five and three hundred. That’s what I’ve heard, though the authorities put it at thirty-nine. Ten thousand folks lost their homes. Thirty-five city blocks were destroyed. All because Dick Rowland, a nineteen-year-old Negro shoe-shiner, startled Sarah Page, a seventeen-year-old white elevator operator, in the elevator of Tulsa’s Drexel Building. That’s the so-called justification for the riot. That and the history of these United States.”

  I was eight years old in 1921. It seems like a long time ago to me, and the Tulsa of that time like a backward place indeed. A race riot like that wouldn’t happen now—not one that big, for the world to see. At least, that’s what I’ve thought until today, until right this moment, when tension such as I’ve never known charges this cramped, airless room. All I want to do is get out of here, run far. But there’s no way out. Not without pushing and shoving, making a general fool of myself and disappointing Miss Berger. Not without ignoring Susan’s papa, who has balanced his gray fedora atop the loose-leaf copy machine and, like his daughter, now shapes the air with his hands. As he gestures, he opens and closes his mouth, trying to speak, emitting grunts instead. I catch a glimpse of where his tongue should be, but isn’t; it’s a pink nub of muscle instead. And now Susan responds to her father with similar gestures—sign language, I realize. They’re talking to each other.

  “’Case you were wondering,” Minah says to me, biting out the words, “that man could talk good as you before the riot. But during it, he said something someone with a knife thought he shouldn’t have, and that was the end of that.”

  Nausea rolls through my gut.

  “Papa wonders about this new mayor.” Susan is focused intently on her father, ignoring Minah and me both. “He’s heard some good words.”

  Miss Berger nods. “Your daddy’s heard right. He’s a decent man, Mayor Botts. Or he wants to be. That’s my perception. We’ll talk to him.” Susan and Minah cut eyes at each other, and Miss Berger corrects herself. “Sorry. I’ll talk to him. Botts seems to be more . . . well, as mayor, he has to keep up certain appearances, but he’s got enough Choctaw running through his blood to understand situations like this better than any city official before him. And he’s thick as thieves with the new sheriff, who swears up and down he’s not like the old one.” Miss Berger turns to Susan’s father. “Any other suggestions or questions, Jubilant? Please share them if you have them.”

  Jubilant flashes his hands. “Don’t wait,” Susan translates. “Talk to Botts soon as possible.”

  Jubilant picks up his hat, then runs a brittle finger along the bottom of the rim, wiping away the red dust that must have settled on the copy machine without either Miss Berger or me noticing. The fedora has left an imprint on the machine, as perfect a circle as any crown.

  “I’ll go straight to the mayor’s house.” Finally, Miss Berger opens the door and, as air drifts in, gestures broadly, ushering us from the office. “I promise I’ll talk to him tonight.”

  Minah, Susan, and Jubilant leave the way they came, out
the side door. Miss Berger doesn’t waste a moment after their departure. She snatches her pocketbook from beneath her desk. She’s nearly to the front door when I manage to catch up to her. “Wait! What was happening at the Homestead? Who—”

  “KKK.” Next moment, Miss Berger is out the door.

  I stay nearly two more hours at the library, searching out and reading everything I can find about the Ku Klux Klan and the Tulsa race riot. Turns out, even Miss Berger hasn’t been able to acquire much on these topics.

  THE LITTLE TIME left passes, leaving only a handful of hours before I board the train for California—the hours of tonight, tomorrow, and tomorrow night, to be exact. The day after tomorrow, soon after dawn, Miss Berger will drive me to the station. Perhaps then we’ll have a chance to talk more about her visit to Mayor Botts. So far: “He listened.” That’s all she’s said. I try to bear in mind that we haven’t had time for conversation, with so much for me to finish up at the library before I go. Not that Miss Berger is demanding extra work from me, but as a thank you to her, I want to do it. I want to give the place one last, thorough cleaning and spruce up the grounds. I want to set every shelf in order, type up the story-time schedule for the fall, make necessary adjustments to the card catalog. I do these things. And I catch and release two last mice.

  Now it’s the end of today, closing time, the last time for me. I flip over the sign. My fingers are stained with ink from all the typing. My cuticles are torn from the scrubbing, dusting, weeding, and pruning. My hands are shaking. Closed has never felt more Open, on the precipice of a great unknown.

  I turn, startled to find Miss Berger not at her desk but standing right before me, as she did on the dust-ridden, windy morning of my return last spring. She takes my hands in her own, contains their shaking. “You’ll tell them tonight?”

  It takes me a moment, but then I nod. I’d prefer to relay the news of my departure only after I’m entirely packed. But I know I shouldn’t. In fact, I can’t. It’s not only that it wouldn’t be fair to Mother and Daddy. There’s a practical component: I’ve tried packing in the dark dead of night. Mother or Daddy always awake at the sound of me stumbling over or bumping into or dropping something. Bleary-eyed, they’ll charge to my room (Daddy) or waver in the doorway (Mother) and ask what’s what and why. I always make up some sorry excuse about end-of-season cleaning, to which the reply is always Do it in the light of day, why don’t you? Tomorrow I will pack in the light of day. Tonight I’ll tell them what’s what and why.

  Miss Berger catches her breath at some shift in my expression. “Oh, Ruth. Don’t worry so. It will be all right. If they don’t want this for you, know that I want it for you enough for both of them.”

  Throat tight, I manage another nod. Satisfied that my hands are steady again, Miss Berger releases them.

  I FIND MOTHER and Daddy at their typical posts in the front room after dinner—Mother in her rocking chair, thumbing through her dilapidated book of handwritten recipes; Daddy in his easy chair, working on the Sunday crossword puzzle. They are listening to Gene Autry and Smiley Burnette, singing on the National Barn Dance show out of Chicago. Chicago sounds a stone’s throw away; the radio signal always comes in loud and clear on nights like tonight, when, perfectly centered and framed by the open window, the bright moon hangs in the star-studded sky. A clean-cut hangnail moon tonight, and Chicago just down the road. But California—I don’t believe we’ve heard a peep or a rasp of static from California. It might as well be on the other side of that moon.

  I sit down on the overstuffed sofa—the fabric coarse and stiff, nothing like the lesser island of Charlie’s and my once-upon-a-time life. I take a deep breath. “I’m going to college.” There. I’ve said it.

  A june bug drones against the window screen, trying to get outside where it belongs. Daddy pencils another word into little squares. He doesn’t look up, nor does Mother. Smiley Burnette’s accordion swells, so I raise my voice a bit. “I’m leaving in two days. For college.”

  Now Mother looks up, her finger set on a recipe to mark her spot, her expression muddled. She blinks in my direction. Daddy checks the worn-down nub of his pencil’s lead. “Come again?” he says.

  “ ‘Whoopi-ty-aye-yay,’ ” Autry yodels. “ ‘I go my way . . . ’ ”

  I leap from the sofa, turn off the radio, face them again. “I received a full scholarship to attend a four-year college, Union University in Pasadena, California. I accepted the scholarship. I leave for California day after tomorrow.”

  The recipe book slips from Mother’s lap to the floor; stained, wrinkled index cards unglue themselves and scatter. Daddy is on his feet, towering over me, newspaper rattling in his hands. “You’ll do no such thing.”

  I lift my chin to meet his eyes, just the shade of mine. “Try to stop me.” I want to shout, but this squeaks its way out.

  For a long moment, I think Daddy might do just that—try to stop me. He casts the newspaper to the floor and lifts a hand, stiff and flat, to slap.

  “It’ll kill me staying here.” I manage to say what I’ve practiced these last weeks. “If I stay, I may still be breathing, but I’ll be dead inside. I have to go.”

  He lifts his hand higher, level with my cheek.

  Mother steps between us. She thrusts me back, away from him. When he dodges to the right, she shadows him. To the left, she does the same. Mother has never been more agile than at this moment, keeping her husband and her daughter apart. In the face of her resistance, Daddy seems to deflate. His expression shifts from enraged to incredulous to disoriented. His hand lowers to hover awkwardly at his hip. He resorts to words. “Rebellious,” I hear him say. “Ungrateful.” And something about the Fifth Commandment. Something more about sin.

  Still, Mother will not step aside. “Go to your room, Ruth.” She’s the one who shouts this, in a tone that seems to reflect Daddy’s summation of me: Bad girl. But I know differently. Mother is trying to protect me, not shame me. I tell myself this as I go to my room, as I lock myself inside.

  I SPEND WHAT’S left of daylight packing and, after a restless night in bed, I’m up with Captain the next morning. Accompanied by his crowing, I start to pack. It doesn’t take long. By the time his relentless revelry has dwindled to the occasional boastful squawk, my big, old suitcase is full. It holds everything I now call my own. My few clothes and toiletries. My Bible and my Brothers Grimm. The three photographs of Charlie and me: seven and six years old, dragging a wagon; just graduated from high school, brandishing diplomas; on our wedding day, clasping hands. And our wedding gift from Miss Berger—the quilt with its bright rings of fabric. Breathing a prayer—an unformed sentiment somewhere between thank you and help—I close the suitcase and lock it with a key. I tuck the key into my pocketbook, hide my pocketbook under the bed. Only then do I unlock my door and open it a crack. I hover there, listening, until the sounds of the house establish themselves. Daddy’s not here or I’d have heard something from him—brusque word, rough movement, heavy footfall. Mustering courage, I slip down the hallway to the kitchen.

  Mother sits at the table, weeping into her hands.

  “Please.” I sit beside her. “Forgive me.”

  “Why?” Why should I? I think that’s the implication, but then Mother adds, “For what?”

  “For leaving you.”

  Mother lowers her hands, revealing her ravaged expression. When she is upset, she tugs at her thinning hair; her interlaced fingers are tangled with dull strands of gray and red, a scant cat’s cradle.

  “You’re not ever coming back, not really.” She plucks at the strands, trying to free her hands of them. “With Charlie, I always thought you might. When your babies came, I let myself think, you’d need my help. Finally, I would be a real help to you. And maybe those babies would see me as something other than who I’ve let myself become. Maybe they would see me as brave and strong, the grandma who never scolds, who only does right by them. Maybe I would have been a good grandma to your babies, Ruth
, as I’ve never managed to be a good mother to you.”

  “You are a good mother.” I long to weep with her, but as ever, my eyes are dry. “You were so very good yesterday with Daddy—brave and strong.”

  “Once maybe. Once maybe I was.”

  “No! Not just once. More times than I can count.”

  She ignores this. “Mine has been half a whole lifetime of weakness. But for your babies, the other half, maybe I would have been different.”

  I close my eyes, but still I see them, the babies, tottering—first steps!—through the bellflowers with Charlie and me close behind and Mother watching from the back door, a radiant smile on her face. She looks younger than I’ve ever seen her, and Charlie and I are as we were before the blowout, almost kids ourselves, and our children, a boy and a girl and, yes, a baby in my arms, are the perfect combination of us two. They have Charlie’s blue eyes, and my hair when it turns honey-colored in the summer sun, and his long limbs, and my smooth, clear skin. Maybe the little boy has freckles, because I love Charlie’s freckles, tracing them with a fingertip until there’s the reward of a smile. Little feet pound unsteadily against the earth; the flower stalks stir; the baby is a solid weight in my arms; the baby smells of milk and Ivory soap; the baby looks up at me with blue eyes so big I could fall right down into them. I could drown in those eyes.

  I gasp like I’m coming up for air, and Mother’s face swims before me. Abruptly, she stands and goes to the kitchen clock that long ago stopped keeping time. She takes the clock from the wall and fiddles with it until off pops the back. From the belly of the clock, she removes a slip of paper. She sets the slip of paper down on the table before me.