Echoes of a Distant Summer (43 page)

In truth, Serena’s problems had not begun with Sister Bornais, but six years earlier, in 1921, in a black township called Bodie Wells in southeastern Oklahoma. She and King had left Louisiana to escape the relentless sheriff of New Orleans, and they bought a general store in a black-run township at the feet of the Ouachita Mountains. It was one of the few black towns that King could find in the nearby states that had electricity. He did not want to give up the comforts that came with electricity.

In 1921 Bodie Wells was a town of six hundred souls, not even a
postage stamp on the vast, flat envelope of Oklahoma. It was a town in which the citizens daily girded themselves for battles against forces over which they had no control, yet its people felt a certain pride. Although many worked in the city of Clairborne, where they were brought face-to-face with their second-class citizenship, each day they returned home, they returned like victors, for they lived in a town where their voice and their vote mattered. The town’s existence itself was a victory. In those days victories were judged against the worst that could happen rather than the best. There was no pretense in 1921 that the “Land of the Free” was meant to include black people. Racism and gravity were two certainties. The people of Bodie Wells were tough and hard. They struggled through twelve-hour days to wrest a crop from the temperamental earth and then went home to drink or gamble until they passed out. If they were temperance people, after they worked their twelve hours they went to one of the churches and spent hours on their knees praying. Subtlety and moderation had as little to do with their lives as justice and fairness. It was a town struggling to hold on to land that had been hard won with sweat and tears. At night shotguns were loaded and leaned against front doors, in case the Klan should come calling. The people had dug in to fight. There was no place to run; the windswept plains lay to the west, and to the east lay the cold, inhospitable ridges and crests of the Ouachitas.

Serena knew well hard work. She had been raised on a sharecropping farm where there was never enough money to lift the family out of the muck and mire. She had seen her mother work herself to death just to keep the family clothed and fed. Serena knew the torpor, the stupor, the exhaustion that came from day after day of long hours of muscle-tearing, back-wrenching work. There was a tyranny in that life which pressed the joy out of living, a tyranny so complete that most never escaped its oppressive clutches. She had seen them on Sunday at the clapboard church, people so tired and beaten that their bodies could not hold a laugh and their faces could not frame a smile. They were shackled by hopeless exhaustion. They were inhabitants of a world where there was no beauty. Sunrises, sunsets, full moons were merely nature’s alarm clock signaling the passage of time. Beauty was an abstraction having nothing to do with their lives—lives in which days turned into centuries, and finally the meaningless death following the meaningless life, with never once any true hope of escape.

She wanted to escape that world. She wanted to leave it entirely behind. She wanted to live in a real city, someplace that had an indoor toilet and electricity. King had been her ticket out. He had given her a chance to dream, to hope, to see what was possible. With him she had intended to craft a new and different life. She saw herself becoming a grand lady presiding over a dynasty of her own children, children who would succeed in the world because prejudice was not heavy enough to keep them down or stop them from dreaming and becoming. It was true that it was King’s money, money derived from his gambling and bootlegging businesses, that bought her the standard of living the likes of which she had only fantasized. And his willingness to use violence ensured that they would keep what they possessed and would always have money. In the back of her mind, she had thought that she would eventually wean him away from his guns and in time they would lead the lives of honest, breadwinning people. She had begun working on her dream within a month of arriving in Bodie Wells, when she persuaded King to buy one of the two general stores in town. She planned to craft a life that had none of the meanness and sordidness of poverty in it. Her family would be joyful. There would be laughter around her hearth.

Bodie Wells allowed her to shape her dream in the relative safety of a small pond. Running the general store gave her a position of respect and also an opportunity to establish herself as one of the town’s important women. Buying merchandise, doing the inventory and the accounting, and keeping the store books all helped give her a real understanding of operating a business. She worked on her manners and her diction. She read books on etiquette. She was prepared to work to improve herself. It was a small pond, but during her six-year stay she became one of its big frogs.

The letter had come a week after Thanksgiving in 1921. King was away in Mexico at the time. The snow had been falling steadily for several days in thick, powdery flakes that covered everything, including Main Street, which was the only paved street in town. King had been away nearly a month dealing with his bootleg business. Their marriage was still new, only a few months old. It was her first time being alone. She had never, ever spent a holiday by herself, but both Thanksgiving and Christmas passed and there was no word from King. It was hard to remember what she hated more, the wind or the silence. The wind populated
the passing hours with haunting voices borne of desolate plains, while the silence confirmed in its own empty way that she was alone. Some nights before she went to sleep she wondered whether King ever planned to return to her.

When Christmas passed, Serena could no longer wait. She opened the letter. There were actually two letters in the envelope. The first one was from Captain Mack, a white man who was like an uncle to King. It read:

For Serena the next letter had been even more difficult to read, but she could not put it down. Her hands and eyes would not obey her. In her mind she was screaming, shouting at herself,
Drop the letter! Don’t read it!
Yet her eyes followed each line of the letter to its horrible conclusion. It read:

Serena didn’t remember what had happened after she finished reading the second letter. All she knew then was that her world had come crashing down around her ears. All because of some floozie who couldn’t keep her pants on. She didn’t know this woman, but she knew her. The woman was coming to contaminate the world that Serena was creating, bringing the sordidness of unmarried sex and children out of wedlock. Mamie was a woman of easy laughter and easy liaisons. She wasn’t planning ahead, trying to build a future like Serena. What right had this woman to come looking for King? He had left her once. Wasn’t that enough? But underneath Serena’s indignation was fear, fear that she couldn’t escape the life that she had lived on the farm, fear that she wasn’t entitled to success and happiness.

She did not know what to do, but of one thing she was certain: Her
concept of dynasty did not include having another woman’s whelp preside over her children. She would fight that all the way. She did not stop and think for a minute that King should have a choice in the matter. It was her dream. It was her decision. When King arrived the day before New Year’s, Serena told him nothing of the letter. After all, if that woman was going to visit the DuMonts, perhaps the problem would take care of itself.

Things were wonderful between King and Serena for a month, then the second letter had arrived. It was delivered to King directly. Serena only got to read it after King had left to return to Louisiana. With no response to the first letter, Serena had sincerely hoped that there would be no more news of the woman and her child, that they would sink back into whatever swamp they had crawled out of. The look on King’s face after he read the letter revealed to Serena that she had driven a wedge between them by her silence. This was the point at which Serena first noticed that her life was divided. She could see herself from a distance, as if she were walking parallel on the opposite side of a small creek. This wasn’t a problem initially; but over time the creek grew to a stream, and the stream to a river, and the river to a sea, and the sea became the wide, vast ocean. It took years, but eventually she lost sight of herself. The second letter had effectively driven the nails into the coffin of her dreams.

King had left Bodie Wells directly after reading the letter. He was gone within two hours of opening it. Serena was left surrounded by the silent distance of hired help. Six weeks passed and no word from King. She had no idea what had happened to him, nor what to think. Doubt gnawed at her like a rat nibbling cheese, and the passage of each day left another tooth mark on her heart. Within two weeks of his departure she realized that she could not keep the general store without King’s money and support. The store was earning money, but not enough to maintain their standard of living. If there was just one bad harvest and a stretch of bad times fell upon the citizens of Bodie Wells, the store would be out of business. Another problem was that men were not used to dealing with a woman. They tried all sorts of tricks to cheat her. The traveling hawkers and salesmen did not accord her the same deference and respect as when King stood behind her. People were even beginning to shoplift merchandise. Her success was tied to King’s presence. Without him the pursuit of her dream would fail, and the prospect of failure frightened Serena: It meant returning to the farm in Louisiana. She could clearly hear that world calling her, welcoming her back to the morning sadness and the evening fatigue. She wanted desperately for King to return. She was prepared to do anything to keep him. Anything. In the second month she received a letter from New Orleans. It was about King. He and another man had been arrested by Sheriff Corlis Mack’s deputies. Serena was almost happy to find out that King had been caught by the sheriff of New Orleans: At least he hadn’t left her to live with that other woman. There was a reason he had not returned. It gave her the chance to prove herself to him, show him that she was sorry for her mistake. Serena resolved that she would help him escape no matter the cost.