Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (11 page)

The child at the back of the room, whose duty it was to open the door when anyone knocked, rose and answered the summons; all the children turned around and stared at the black girl in the doorway. No one had ever seen a colored child in the white school. Trembling, Zaddie went forward with Miss Elinor’s lunch. The teacher thanked her, then introduced her to the class. “Boys and girls,” said Miss Elinor, “this is Zaddie Sapp, who is exactly your age. If she went to school she’d be in the fourth grade too, and she’d be as smart as the smartest one of you sitting here. She is saving up her money to pay the tuition at the Colored Arts and Mechanics College up in Brewton, and I will give her a quarter this very minute to put in her bank.”

Zaddie took the quarter and rushed headlong from the room. From that moment—if, indeed, she had not already signed herself over—she was Elinor Dammert’s creature for life.

. . .

One day in October, home from the mill for lunch, Oscar learned quite accidentally from Ivey Sapp that his mother and his sister would be going to Pensacola on an overnight visit in order to get to a particular dressmaker early in the morning. Oscar quickly figured out that Mary-Love hadn’t mentioned her upcoming absence to him because she hadn’t wanted him to take advantage of it by spending the time in the company of Elinor Dammert. Oscar stepped out on the back porch and called Zaddie over to him. The girl, who was sitting under one of the water oaks that had kept on growing even though it was fall, came directly over.

“Zaddie, you know where Miss Elinor teaches, don’t you?”

“I been there,” said Zaddie.

“Will you take her a note for me? I’ll give you a quarter to do it, Zaddie.”

“I’ll take it, Mr. Oscar,” said the black girl eagerly. She would gladly have done it only for the chance to see the classroomful of white children again. Zaddie knew secretly that she could read better than half of them.

Oscar went back inside and wrote out a note at the kitchen table. He folded the note, took it out to Zaddie, and then after saying goodbye to his mother and sister he returned to the mill.

Late that afternoon, Mary-Love and Sister took off for Pensacola in the Torpedo roadster driven by Bray. Bray had been taught to drive the family’s two automobiles, and more and more his position in the Caskey household was that of chauffeur. Mary-Love left her son a note suggesting that the trip had been made on the spur of the moment and telling him that supper had been left covered up for him on the kitchen table. Oscar ignored the note and the supper. He ate next door, and then took Miss Elinor and Grace to see
The Ghost of Rosie Taylor
at the Ritz Theater. After the flood the Ritz had reopened with scarlet upholstery and a new rosewood piano.

Later, when Grace had been put to bed, Miss Elinor and Oscar took a little walk down to the river. They sat on the mooring dock looking at the moon and stayed there until the town hall clock tolled midnight. Oscar declared that he hadn’t been up that late since he tried to save the Caskey houses from the rising floodwater.

After that, Zaddie had a new job—she was a messenger. Every day she delivered to Miss Elinor the note that Mr. Oscar had written on the kitchen table directly after his noontime meal. Miss Elinor would read the note and write another in reply. Zaddie would take this note to the mill and walk straight into Mr. Oscar’s office. Everybody in the school and everybody in the mill knew what Zaddie was doing, who had written the notes, and to whom they were directed.

Zaddie began to get to know Miss Elinor’s students by name, and once, when she got there just at recess, she had even jumped rope and was able to teach the little white girls a rhyme they had never heard before.

Elinor Trimble Toe, she’s a good fisherman
She catches fish and puts them in a pan
Some fry up and some fry down
Wire and bar and limber lock
Clock fell down and mouse ran round
To my dying grandma’s house
With the old dirty dishrag in her mouth

Zaddie was proud of her daily errands, and didn’t care a bit if Miss Mary-Love wouldn’t speak to her anymore because of her services in the courtship of Miss Elinor and Mr. Oscar.

Because their big meal of the day was at noon and supper consisted of leftovers, Mary-Love found it difficult to complain when Oscar said he was going over to eat at James’s where the food was hot. “You are bothering James,” Mary-Love ventured to object, when she could refrain from objection no longer. “You are running up his food bill.”

Oscar shrugged and replied only, “Mama, James eats dinner with us over here every day and you don’t charge him a penny. He can afford to have me for supper once in a while.”

“Every night!”

“He asks you and Sister to come too.”

“It would drive poor Roxie into the ground if all of us went over there all the time.”

“No, it wouldn’t. Roxie doesn’t have to cook during the day. And she told me she didn’t see why you and Sister ate cold food when you could have hot.”

Mary-Love wouldn’t reply, for she wouldn’t bring herself to admit that she refused to sit at the same table with Elinor Dammert. War, it should be understood, remained officially undeclared. Sister wasn’t allowed to go next door either, and at home she just picked at her cold plate and wished she knew what they were talking about over at James’s.

No mother and daughter in Perdido were closer than Mary-Love Caskey and Sister, but it was not to be supposed that either told the other everything she thought or knew. In fact, each of them liked to keep little secrets from the other, secrets which could be sprung at some opportune moment to produce a grand effect—rather in the manner of a little boy tossing lighted firecrackers beneath his sister’s bed while she napped on a hot summer afternoon.

What Sister was holding back just now was not exactly a secret so much as it was an opinion, and that opinion had to do with Elinor Dammert. It was Sister’s belief that Elinor was a powerful young woman, and that the power she wielded was exactly the sort to which Mary-Love herself had become accustomed. Elinor Dammert put things in place. She set things up. She set things right. She picked up people and she put them down again where she wanted them as a child might arrange the figures in a wooden Noah’s ark. Sister even had a mental image of James Caskey as a wooden figure. In her mind he was on a round base and a single stem represented his legs. Grace was a much smaller such figure. Zaddie was painted black and Oscar had the biggest smile. And Elinor Dammert, in Sister’s imaginings, threw her arms about the waists of those figures and lifted them up and carried them where she wanted them to be and put them down again. The figures wobbled a little, but they stayed in place.

Mary-Love, by contrast, wheedled. She set up psychological stratagems by which her will was accomplished. Elinor was more powerful of the two, Sister suspected. Mary-Love only sometimes seemed so, because Elinor was holding back. While it was perfectly within Elinor’s power to pick Oscar up and put him where she wanted him, she wanted Oscar to come to her of his own accord. But it was well within Elinor’s capacity to knock over the wooden figure that was Mary-Love Caskey and roll her in tight circles until Mary-Love grew nauseated. Elinor was toying with Mary-Love, perpetuating Mary-Love’s blindness to her own inferiority, perhaps wishing to test whether Oscar were capable of overcoming his mother without assistance. This opinion is what Sister was keeping from her mother, only waiting for the right moment to spring it.

. . .

One evening, a few days before Thanksgiving, Sister had a headache. Mary-Love had been carrying on about Miss Elinor all afternoon long, and that was a subject Sister thought she had heard enough of, especially as she considered that her mother’s every pronouncement on that subject was jaundiced and inaccurate. As they sat together at the kitchen table eating leftover pork chops and corn, Mary-Love picked up where she had left off.

“I don’t know what we are gone do about Thanksgiving.”

“What do you mean, Mama?” said Sister wearily, slicing some fat off the chop.

“Well, we’ll have it here, of course, and James and Grace are gone come, but what, I want to know, is James gone do about that woman?” Mary-Love Caskey couldn’t be brought to say “Miss Elinor” aloud, but always called her “that woman”; this was sometimes confusing since she had always used that epithet for Genevieve Caskey as well.

Sister didn’t answer, but she was so in the habit of responding to every remark her mother made that her very silence said something.

“Well, Sister?”

“Have you talked to James?” asked Sister. “Have you invited him directly?”

“Of course not! Why should I? Where else would they go for Thanksgiving?”

“James expects for you to invite Miss Elinor.”

“I won’t do it! Did he tell you that?”

“Yes,” replied Sister. “He said he expects you to walk across the yard and extend a personal invitation to Miss Elinor to have Thanksgiving dinner over here.”

“I won’t do it! That woman has not stepped foot one in this house, and I don’t intend to open the door for her now!”

“Then James says that he and Grace and Miss Elinor will have Thanksgiving dinner over there, and they’ll invite you and if you don’t want to come that’s your business.”

“Sister, why are
you
delivering this ultimatum? Is there another word for it?” she demanded rhetorically. Then, as if perhaps Sister had not taken the question as it was meant, Mary-Love answered it herself. “No,” she said firmly, “there is not. It
is
an ultimatum.”

“James told me to say that. He told me this afternoon.”

“Sister,” cried Mary-Love in an extremity of annoyance, “do you believe this?” She ran to the kitchen window and looked out. The dining room of James’s house was lighted and she could see Miss Elinor through the window serving something onto Grace’s plate.

“Mama,” said Sister, whose headache was worse, “everybody in town thinks you are crazy out of your mind for not taking Miss Elinor to your heart. Everybody in town thinks the world of her.”

“I don’t!”

“Everybody
but
you, Mama.”

“Bray doesn’t!”

“Mama, I’m gone tell you something—”

“What?”

“Mama, I think you better start liking Miss Elinor.”

“Why is that, Sister?”

“Because Oscar is gone end up married to her.”

Mary-Love drew back from the window with a deep breath.

“I would be surprised,” continued Sister unmercifully, “if he has not already asked her.”

. . .

In fact, Oscar was circuitously asking that question at the very moment that Miss Elinor was spooning out English peas onto Grace’s plate. He said, “Miss Elinor, you know what?”

“What?” said Miss Elinor.

“I’ve been thinking about Zaddie.”

“You are running that girl to death!” said James at the head of the table, laughing. With Elinor there every night, and Oscar there most, James felt a little of what he imagined it might feel like to have a real family.

“That’s what I was thinking,” said Oscar.

“Zaddie has got more money than any other little girl in Perdido, white or colored.” Miss Elinor sat up straight, and cut into her ham. “Every time you see her coming, Oscar, you give her a quarter. And I do, too.”

“But her legs are tired,” said Oscar.

“What do you expect Elinor to do about Zaddie’s poor old legs?” asked James.

Zaddie, who had been listening to this conversation from the kitchen, appeared in the doorway and lifted her skirt to show that her legs were not worn down at all.

“Miz Digman will not let me put a telephone in my classroom, Oscar. If you continue to send me notes, then you have to have someone to deliver them.”

“My legs are fine,” began Zaddie, but Roxie grabbed her by the skirt and dragged her back into the kitchen.

“White folks don’t like to look at a little colored girl when they are eating,” said Roxie sententiously, “unless she is bringing in a plate of something hot.” The door of the kitchen was pushed shut and Zaddie, for a time, heard no more.

“But what if we were married?” said Oscar. “Then I wouldn’t have to send you notes.”

Elinor looked up. Then she looked at James Caskey. “Mr. James,” said Elinor, “I think Oscar is making a proposal of marriage.”

“Are you gone accept him?” said James, with every indication of pleasure in his face.

“What do you think, Grace? Should I get married to your cousin Oscar?”

“No!” cried Grace, with distress written all over her countenance.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want you to leave!”

“Well, where would I go?” She looked up at Oscar. “Oscar, if I married you, would you take me away?”

“I’m not ever gone leave Perdido, Miss Elinor!”

“I mean out of this house, Oscar. Where do you propose that we would live?”

“I don’t know,” said Oscar after a moment. “It only just occurred to me this minute—while James was talking about not getting a letter from Genevieve—that I ought to be married myself. And I looked up and there you were, just sitting there not married. I really haven’t had time to consider everything. I have not yet bought a ring, Miss Elinor, so you needn’t ask me to produce one. I couldn’t do it even if you held a knife to my throat and demanded it.”

Grace picked up her knife and waved it in the air as if to tempt Elinor to put it to just such a use. Her father spoke Grace’s thoughts.

“Oscar,” said his uncle, “I don’t hardly think it would be right for you to take Miss Elinor away from Grace and me.”

Oscar turned in his chair and peered out across the yard at the lighted kitchen of his own home. He could see his mother standing in the window, looking out at them.

“I don’t think Mama’s gone be any too pleased either, when it comes down to it.”

“Oscar,” said Elinor, “Miss Mary-Love is not pleased when you have
anything
to do with me. She will certainly not be looking forward to your walking me up a church aisle.”

“Elinor,” cried James Caskey, “haven’t you ever been to a wedding? In a wedding, the groom is standing at the front, and the bride and her father come down the aisle. You say your daddy is dead, I guess I’ll have to take his place.”