Folly (9 page)

“Maybe . . .” Folly said.

“I just got a feeling . . . .”

“You can go ahead and talk to her all day far as I'm concerned.”

“Making a fool of myself,” Mary Lou added.

“What's it matter,” Folly said. “Look girl, don't let no worry about being a fool get in your way. You feel you should talk, talk. No sense holding your tongue when it's got an urge to move.”

“I got a feeling Daisy hears us talking, sometimes.”

“I think she's pretty far gone, but I sure hope she'll give Martha a word.”

“Martha's pretty upset, isn't she?”

“I reckon she is,” Folly said. “It's been hard on her, being out on the strike and then having Daisy in the hospital the way she is. Not that one thing has anything to do with the other. But it does tend to work on you that way. Here we are speaking out against the bosses and the way they run the show down there, and the same time, here's Daisy, laid low and silenced. It works on you to feel like she's taking our punishment. Martha ain't a fearful woman, but I reckon she's scared that Daisy's going to die; like as not she's scared, too, we're not getting anywhere with this strike and it's all gonna come to naught.”

“You scared, Ma?”

“Here and there, I am, but I ain't gonna let fear rule me. When you do that is when you gotta wonder if your life's worth living. You ought to see some of them girls over to the mill . . . show them a union card and their teeth start to chatter . . . it's a wonder they don't fall out.” Folly wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. “They don't speak their fears, they chatter them. All that does is spread 'em around, far as I can see. They're the ones who'll be first in line behind someone who's going to stick out her neck to get them something, but if the one with her neck stuck out moves aside, you watch out. They won't step forward unless it's time to cash in.

“You go right on talking to Daisy. You speak up whenever you think it's right to. There's plenty out there waiting for someone else to speak up for them . . . you don't need to be one of 'em.”

Mary Lou took in her mother's words while inside her head she talked to Daisy.
Daisy don't die. Daisy, can't you hear. I know you can hear. They need you for the strike. You're a strong woman, Daisy. You always come back. We'll have a picnic out in the yard. I'll stop by your trailer every afternoon, except the days I work. I have to go straight from school to work some days. We love you, Daisy.

Mary Lou, tears in her eyes, kept her head turned as if she were looking out the window as they drove the rest of the way home.

11.

Mabel stirred the beans with a wooden spoon, lifted a spoonful up to taste. Her boy came over and stared into the pot, his ears sprouting plugs that led to the portable radio on his belt, his head dipping with the music. With a thoughtful look on her face, she tasted, then offered the spoon to Dean, who tasted, too, then pantomimed: so, so. She held the chili powder over the pot, pantomimed: more of this? He frowned, noncommittal. They were six weeks into the strike and Mabel was hot and tired and losing patience. She went through the salt, the pepper, the cayenne, Dean no help at all. With her thumb she ordered out, out of my kitchen, leave me alone. He went, stooping his head at the doorway. The week before he had informed her that not only had he surpassed her in height, but also his feet had grown to such a size that she would no longer be able to borrow his sneakers. She stirred the beans again, tasted, then covered them.

She still had to go to meet with the other organizers, though she had knocked off early from the rounds of people she was supposed to visit to get more union cards signed up. The thought had jumped into her in the middle of the day while she was visiting Miz Lucille Bailey that it wouldn't do for the Black women joining the union to get too far ahead of the white women, and she hadn't been able to put it down since. Now she realized it wasn't her idea at all, it was Miz Lucille Bailey's. An old woman, wise and worn, she walked with two wooden canes, swaying side to side. She looked weak to Mabel when she lurched out over, strong when she came back to her center. She'd said, “I be there when you ready, but I ain't too crazy about signin' up them cards. We gotta look out that the Black women don't get stuck out there riskin' our jobs, the white women deciding to pull out. You know what I
mean? I got me only a few good working years left, but you watch out for your own self, Mabel, you hear?”

Yeah, Mabel thought, washing up the last of the dishes in the sink, always got to be watching out. Sometimes this seemed an enormous drain, sometimes just the way life was cut out for her—though not by her choice. She realized she'd been carrying this idea that Miz Lucille Bailey'd raised in her all along, but hadn't turned it over. It was like moss on the back side of a stone. Once you'd disturbed it, you couldn't put it back to rest in the same place. Neither did she feel firm about where to go with her feelings. She wanted the Black women to be able to be out in front, and to be proud of it, to fight with their own best strength and to feel the power of that, as she had these last few weeks, but they had to know their vulnerability, too. And they had to know that their fight wasn't just simply with the man. She felt her own mind sway the way Miz Lucille Bailey walked.

Before she left the house, she went in and pushed the OFF button on Dean's radio. He gasped as if she'd cut his lifeline, put a finger over a tracheostomy tube or pulled the plug on a respirator. Deliberately, while she had his full attention, she instructed him to mind Liza, Scott—the younger kids—because she had to go down to the meeting.

For a union headquarters Jesse had rented Bea Jones' beauty parlor over on Back Street, which Bea couldn't keep up working in because she had a slow growing brain tumor that made her hands shake. It still had mirrors the length of one whole wall and pink sinks every six feet and smelled faintly of permanent lotion. Tuesdays and Fridays those women who had been on the line that day and those who were going house to house, talking to the women who had not yet signed cards, checked in here at 4:30.

They sat in a circle, Emily and Mabel and Freena in a cluster opposite the mirror, which was partially covered with taped up flyers and announcements, but not so much that Mabel couldn't see herself and the other two Black women reflected in it.

“Where's Jesse?” Emily asked.

“I don't know but I think we ought to get started,” Folly said, her voice weary.

“What's got you?” Gilda asked, chewing her gum vigorously.

“Ain't my day,” Folly answered. “I struck out.”

“How so?” Mabel asked.

“Got nothing but a headache going around today. No signers.”

“I only got one,” Gilda said.

“What's the story they're giving you?” Martha asked them.

Gilda put on an extra sweet voice: “I don't want to get involved. I'm just not the type to think about politics or anything like that . . . union. I never have understood them kind of things. I just try to go along and live my life without hurtin' no one else. I figure as long as my way don't hurt no one, I can follow it along.”

Sure, Mabel thought, feeling closed in and hot in this place—don't notice who you hurtin' as you lay back.

“I've heard that one,” Folly said, “but the one that really gets me is: ‘I believe that the owners
do
have the right to decide how we should work—how much they want to pay us, when they give us time off.' I got that today, more than once.” She perched her hands on her hips, imitating a woman she had visited. “‘This here house you're sitting in. It's mine. It ain't no big deal, but I own it, and that gives me the rights to decide what all I want to do with it, if I want to plant flowers out front, if I want to tear the back shed down, just what. So if I got that right, then those guys who owns the mill, they got their rights, too. I can't have mine if I won't give them theirs.'”

“What'd you say?” Martha asked.

“I told her we weren't talking about planting no flowers down at the mill, we're talking about sick time and how production goals get set and stuff like that. She said, ‘All the same we're living in a free country, and I'm glad of it.'” Folly turned up her hands, helpless against this logic, and leaned back in her chair.

Free country, huh? That was something Mabel could hook onto from a whole other point of view.

“I hate that,” Shirley said, “when they try to make you out to be against your whole country just because you're speaking up for your own rights.”

“You shoulda asked her does she think we deserve less just because we own less?” Martha suggested.

“She woulda said yes,” Gilda speculated.

They sat chewing on this a minute until Martha broke the silence. “Okay, if this is what we know we gotta fight, then how're we gonna change their minds?”

Mabel looked up and saw herself in the mirror. This helped to confirm her presence. She had round cheeks, which gave her face the appearance of softness, but she could see as well as feel how beneath the surface the muscles of her cheeks were drawn up tight, firm against her teeth. She wished this meeting was a resting place for her, as it seemed to be for the white women, but she could see in her face that it was not.
Black folks were still getting shot at for being Black. The KKK was riding around day and night. Maybe she was crazy to take up with these women here, but she felt she had to. Her fight was here as well as out there at the mill.

She cleared her throat and spoke, the strength building quickly in her voice. “You ain't heard from one Black woman yet. Now I know you ain't asked to, but you about to hear from this one anyway. You sittin' here talkin' like what those womens says in them houses you visitin' is the final word on why anyone and everyone don't want to join up . . . and that just ain't so. I been goin' round, too, and so has Emily and Freena and some other Black women, and we ain't about to set here and pretend we not here, even though that's what you seem to be doing.” Mabel saw them flinch at her anger and added, “Whether you mean to or not. And this ain't the first time you've done it, either, but I wouldn't mind if it could be the last.”

Mabel felt agreement coming from Freena and Emily beside her even though she didn't take her eyes from the white women to look at them. She didn't plan to go on until someone took up with her. She had plenty of time. In the silence, the smell of the permanent lotion seemed to grow stronger and stronger, a white woman's smell. She remembered the first day they'd set up in here, some of them talking about how that smell reminded them of home, of their mothers doing up each other's hair in their kitchens, making curls. Not her. It most certainly had not reminded her of home, of Black women doing their hair, which had a whole other smell, not to be confused with this one, and a whole other way as well.

Folly's take on what Mabel said was instant guilt and regret. She knew it was true—no argument. Not that the white women, at least herself, she should only say this for herself, had meant to do it, but the fact was, they
had.
She felt as if she'd fallen into a trap, too busy, too single-minded, had stepped right in. Now she was embarrassed to be found there, at the same time she was glad to know, she was relieved by Mabel's putting it in words. She felt as if this at least gave them the chance of springing the trap. She looked at Mabel, at the face that could break out into such lively laughter, now still and hard as a mountain. It was hard to imagine how her presence could ever have been ignored, and not just hers—Mabel and Emily and Freena made up nearly half the circle. How deep the blur this meant in her seeing, how deep the wound it must leave. She felt urgent in her need to be part of a repair, yet it was hard to step forward. She felt unsteady, weak in the
legs, but she knew she could not have the familiarity of her old ground if that meant recognizing only half the circle, over half the women at the mill, nearly half the people who lived in Victory. She had a passing wish for Jesse's presence, for someone outside this circle to open up the contact. She didn't know where Martha and Gilda and Shirley were at all. In her mind they were flying all over the room, their mutual gripe session scattered.

Gilda spoke first, winding a strand of her blond hair behind her ear, “I don't see why y'all didn't just speak up when we was griping about those women who don't want to sign.”

“I do,” Folly said. “We got carried away thinking that the excuses we were getting were the same ones everyone was getting.”

“Yeah,” Gilda said, “because they didn't say nothin.'”

“We didn't ask. We were goin' on our own ideas . . . . White ideas,” Folly added.

The tension in the room was alive and nearly palpable. That's right, Mabel thought. Tell each other. Do. She wasn't sorry she'd exploded this, though she wasn't yet sure where it would go. She tried to rest her mind on Miz Lucille Bailey saying so simply, “Watch out for your own self, Mabel.” Nodded at herself doing just that.

Martha broke in with the impulse to move on, asking Mabel, “What kind of reasons are you getting?”

Mabel turned first to Freena, then to Emily as if to offer them the floor, but they gestured silently for her to continue. “I haven't had no chance to talk about this with my sisters, so I don't know if they're gettin' the same thing. What I'm gettin' is a lot of caution about how we could be used.” She saw the eyes of the white women widen. “Now don't y'all look at me like you never heard the first thing about the white person exploiting the Negro before, and us living in this here same town.”

“How could you be used?” Gilda asked slowly, as if she were unable to understand Mabel's point.

Mabel wasn't surprised. She had encountered this attitude before—whites, who were perfectly smart, sharp even, suddenly seeming to be dumb when asked to comprehend the point of view of Black people. “It ain't too difficult to figure out,” she answered. “If the Black women turn out to be the majority supporting the union, putting their names down on them cards, you watch how fast them white boys pull something to put us out on our asses. Set us all up against each other . . . .” Mabel hesitated but kept her will trained on Gilda, whose eyes
were silent, not going to give away a thing. But Mabel could bet they were hiding her illusion of superiority. “And if you think this is my problem, honey, then you ain't gettin' it.”

“Amen,” Freena said quietly.

“I get it,” Gilda said, not without an edge of insolence.

“What you think?” Mabel asked Emily.

“I'm glad you brought it up. I think it's real important we understand each other on this, and I've heard this same concern expressed by some of the women I've visited. Another thing I was thinking when Folly was talking about these women who don't want to sign . . . I don't think most of us in the Black community has many whatever you want to call them—illusions or delusions—about this being a free country.”

“What about you, Freena?”

“I been mostly out on the picket line, not visiting with folks the way y'all been, but I see it, I don't have no illusions, or no trouble picturing the scenario. For every Black girl we get behind this, we gotta know you've got a white girl willing to stand behind her name on one of them cards, otherwise something bad gonna come down, that something bad bein' to hand over to Big Sam a way to get hisself back a lily-white mill and standing on a bunch of Black girls' bodies to make his ownself look tall.”

Freena, so young, maybe twenty—Mabel was heartened by her quickness to comprehend the depth of the problem. She was not surprised that Gilda, the same age as Freena, had visibly pulled in her limbs, pursed her lips, and was translating the Black women's concerns into a discounting of her own hard work. “You can see we're behind you,” she said, the chewing gum tucked behind her teeth now. “We're out there every day.”

Folly put her hand on Gilda's arm, spoke directly to her: “They're not saying we—you and me—are gonna turn tail and run out on them, but we gotta know how easy it would be for the mill to set us up, white against Black, if we don't look out.” Then she looked up at the Black women. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry we've been so dense on this. I guess this is a time when we can start changing that.” As she spoke these words to the Black women, she realized she'd spoken first to Gilda, who meant little to her compared to Mabel, the way the fullness of Mabel's strength had served the strike, had served against Folly's own fears when they rose. So why had she spoken first to Gilda? Because of their common whiteness. Because the pain of Gilda's defensiveness, her need to stay blameless, was familiar, recognizable to Folly, and she wanted to touch it, to tamp it down with her whenever it rose in either
of them. She knew that there were white women at the mill who'd be all for having a lily-white mill again, as Freena said, probably even some of those who were fighting with them for the union. They'd best get on with looking at this, both inside and outside themselves. She needed to know a lot more about what it meant to be Mabel and Emily, Freena and the others, to be Black women. She needed to know herself as a white woman who didn't just take it for granted that since she was white, she needn't bother with anyone who wasn't.