“What they call you again?”
“Corinthians, ma’am.”
Suce eyed him closely and rubbed one bare foot over the other.
“Where your people hail from?” she asked, and reached over and touched the bare wood of a small table that sat beside her rocker.
“Oklahoma,” he said as he watched her fingers stroke the wood.
“How you all end up here?”
“White folks run us out, burn down the town, kill off good right many Negroes too.”
“Sad.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Most men comes and asks the family for the woman’s hand in marriage,” Suce said, and folded her arms across her chest. “They don’t just show up and proclaim it’s done already.”
“Yessum, I was—” Corinthians started.
“I told him all that wasn’t necessary. I told him I was grown and didn’t need nobody’s permission for nothing.”
Suce looked at Lillie, a little bitty thing with too much mouth.
“Still,” Suce continued, “t’aint right.”
Silence.
“So where y’all been?”
Corinthian’s mouth opened, but Lillie’s words flew past him: “We been on our honeymoon.”
Suce smirked. “Honeymoon?”
Vonnie grunted from the kitchen, the girls pulled at the hems of their skirts.
“That’s right.”
“You ain’t got no job no more, you know that?”
“Don’t care, moving anyway.”
“What?”
“Where?” Vonnie said from the kitchen, a glass of ice water clutched in his hand.
“Phila-del-phia,” Lillie sang.
Suce looked confused.
“That’s in Pennsylvania, ma’am.” Corinthians spoke slow and loud.
“I know where it’s at.” And then, “My daughter tell you I was stupid and deaf?”
Eyes blinked and his skin turned scarlet. “N-no ma’am.”
“Why Phila-del-phia?”
“Got a house there.”
“Really?”
“And a congregation.”
“You don’t say? You a minister?”
“Yessum.”
“Hmmmm, and didn’t have the good sense to ask for her hand proper?”
Corinthians dropped his eyes in shame. “It all happened so quick,” he mumbled.
“Uh-huh, things always go quick with Lillie.” Suce snuffed.
Vonnie spat up his drink of water, caught most of it in the palm of his hand. The girls hid their smiles.
“Fool,” Lillie muttered at Vonnie, and then threw a sharp look at her sisters.
“Y’all going to Phila-del-phia by train?” Suce asked.
“No ma’am. By car.”
“You all got an auto-mo-bile?”
“Brand new.”
“Is that right?” Suce breathed and looked down at her hands. She was lost for a moment, trapped in an earlier time when her eldest son, Moss, came back from town in a coughing, hacking piece of junk on four wheels. It’d taken him a good two hours to get it home, him not knowing how to drive an automobile, and the road not willing to have it on its back driven by someone with no experience.
Suce laughed at the memory.
“Ma’am?” Corinthians said, leaning in.
“It’s nothing,” Suce replied, and dabbed at the corners of her eyes.
Lillie searched her mother’s face for some glimmer that would tell her that Suce was impressed, but Suce’s expression remained bland.
“How long you know’d our Lillie?”
“He know me long enough to know that he love me and want to take me the hell away from here!” Lillie screeched.
Suce’s cheek twitched, and she threw a look at Corinthians’s strange shoe again.
“You know what you doing?”
The question was so heavy that Corinthians pulled at the collar of his shirt and looked toward the open window and wondered where the air went off to.
“Yes ma’am,” he said with as much force as his unsure voice would allow.
“Uh-huh.” Suce moaned and then turned her attention to Lillie. “Y’all gonna come back and visit?”
Lillie, as if she had been waiting for that very question, flicked her waterfall hair over her shoulders, threw her head back, and laughed. “The only way I’ll ever come back here will be in a pine box!”
The girls held their breath and reached for each other’s hands.
“What so bad ’bout here?”
“Ask them,” Lillie flung at her sisters, and then turned on Vonnie. “Ask
him
. He know.”
Suce turned an inquisitive eye on Vonnie, but her mouth didn’t utter a word.
___________________
In Philadelphia the neighbors welcomed Lillie with open arms.
They pretended to mind their own business even though they eavesdropped from behind lace curtains, watched out in the open, right on the porch while seated in wooden rockers and pretending to read the paper or enjoy the day.
By the time Corinthians was dead, they
tsk-tsk
ed loud enough for Lillie to hear and made sure she saw the arch in their backs and the upward tilt of their noses whenever she was near.
Back then, Germantown, Philadelphia, was divided into pockets of Southerners. Alabamians to the west; South Carolinians to the south; North Carolinians with a sprinkle of Virginia people to the east; Georgians, Floridians, and Kentuckians on the north side, the rest settling in the middle. So there were some who knew the Sandersville Lessings personally, and the first words that got back to Suce said:
Lillie come to Phila-del-phia, to Germantown. Married woman. Minister husband. She sitting up in the front pew of the Church of the Black Virgin, white gloved, proper dress, singing the Lord’s prayers, smiling at her minister husband, bringing cookies to bake sales, buying furniture on credit, belly swelling, first baby come, a girl, she the sweetest thing you ever did want to see. Light skin-ded, head full of black hair, pretty l’il thing—they name her Love.
Second set of words say:
She bought two life insurance policies, a new car, more kids come, a boy named Bernard Moses and a girl named Clementine Marie.
Her hands full, one walking, one teething, one crawling. House nice, new porch, hanging flower baskets. They doing all right for themselves.
A credit to the community. A credit to her race.
Third set of words come:
She a good wife. Visiting her husband in the hospital twice a day, finding another minister to stand in for him at the church. The children clean, look sad for their ailing papa, though.
Fourth set say:
He went hard. Lillie bawl like thunder, fell out at the coffin. Cash in the policies, sold off the church and the building beside it. Men coming and going, she wearing red gloves, red lipstick, red beads around her neck, drinking, the devil’s music playing in the parlor, another baby come (even though her husband dead), a girl, Lillie name her Wella. What foolish kind of name is that?
Fifth set say:
Well, any one of us could have told Corinthians as soon as we laid eyes on Lillie Lessing that she would be the spade to dig his grave. But he couldn’t see it. Blinded by her fair skin and long hair and whatever it was she did to him in bed at night that kept him grinning like a idiot.
She was too young for him anyway and not even a virgin!
Now Lillie barely minding her own children, leaving them for days at a time while she whore around Phila-del-phia, around Germantown, like she done lost her goddamn mind!
The eldest girl too grown for her own good. Grown and passionate about red. Red scarf tied around her neck and we’ve even seen her clomping up and down the streets in her mama’s red high-heel shoes, sitting on the porch, legs crossed like a harlot, face painted up to match.
Now is that any way for an eleven-year-old girl to act?
Somebody better get up here and see about these chirren!
___________________
Suce had never been on a train in her life and wasn’t about to get on one now, but Vonnie had to tend the land and the others were off making a way in Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City. Raising families, crammed into two-by-four places called tenements. Working hard at putting some distance between slave and sir, mammy and miss.
So Beka and Helen would have to go.
Sunday dresses, money pinned to the inside of their brassieres, polished shoes, purses dangling from wrists, hands clutching brown paper bags with shiny, greasy bottoms.
Trees streak by outside of their window, army men laughing loud around them. Women clutching babies, old people nodding off before the first whistle blows.
Helen and Beka try to hide their excitement, try to look like this is just one of many train rides, but they give themselves away when they point and giggle like schoolgirls at everything and anything.
They don’t have money for a compartment with beds, and even if they did, colored folk aren’t allowed that luxury, so when their eyes begin to burn from staring too long, they finally sleep; Beka’s head resting on the glass window and Helen’s on Beka’s soft shoulder.
They arrive in Philadelphia in the middle of a rainstorm, their dresses soaked through, water running down the vinyl seats of the taxi. Wrong way, right street. “What’s the house number again?”
Beka and Helen standing on the porch, sure every eye that peeks out from behind eyelet drapes knows Beka has a rip in her hand-me-down slip.
Press and curl done for and grease dripping in globs from their ruined hair, Beka bangs on the white front door while Helen presses her face against the window, trying to spot some movement in the lamplit parlor.
“You sure this the right house?” Beka screams over the thunder.
Helen digs down into the front of her dress and pulls out a slip of paper. She eyes it for a while and then says, “Yeah, this it.”
“Let’s try ’round the back!” Helen yells over the downpour, and they take off down the stairs and round the house toward the rear.
Helen sees them first, and stops dead in her tracks. Beka, blinded by the torrential rain, runs smack into Helen’s back. “Oh, shoot I’m—” Beka starts, but then sees too and gasps.
Half-naked children, wallowing in the mud like pigs.
They stand in amazement and then a slither of amusement snakes through them and Helen yells out, “What y’all think you’re doing?” Her voice is light and laughter pushes out her words.
Three of them stop. The smallest one keeps wallowing.
“Who you?” Beanie Moe asks, and takes a step toward them.
Baby Wella finally stops rolling, and her small hands smack at the mud that’s clinging to her face. She looks at him and then follows his eyes to the women before popping her fat thumb in her mouth.
“Oh, baby, don’t!” Beka shrieks, and moves past Helen, scooping up Wella and starting up the back porch stairs.
Helen wipes at the rain on her face and leans in to one leg. He has a right to ask, she thinks as she rests her hands on her hips. They are family, even though she has never laid eyes on him, or any of the others.
“Get offa my sista!” Beanie Moe screams at Beka, and the skin covering his scrawny build tightens and Helen can see every bone in his body.
“We your aunties,” Helen barks. And then, “Ya’ll get on in the house.” A wave of her hand toward the back door and serious eyes follow.
Beanie Moe watches her, chest rising and falling, but no feet start walking. Clementine, who they call Dumpling, throws a cautious look, takes a step, and then stalls. Another look, a blast of thunder, and her feet start up again and she scurries past her siblings, up the stairs, into the house, and waits, dripping and watching from the doorway.
“C’mon, now,” Helen urges.
Beanie Moe is still blowing air like a bull and his hands are balled into the most pitiful fists Helen has ever seen.
She raises her hand quickly to her mouth to hide the smile with a cough. “We all gonna get pneumonia out here. Now, get on in the house.”
“C’mon, now,” Beka pleads weakly from the doorway.
Thunder rolls across the sky and a jagged fork of lightning cuts through the darkness.
Beanie Moe looks up at the sky and then back at Helen.
“Beanie Moe, now, I ain’t playing with you!” Helen yells. “Don’t make me come over there and drag you into that house!”
Another shuddering boom of thunder and then the sound of a heavy limb breaking away from an elm across the street.
It’s the sound of his name and not the thunder or lightning that rattles him.
Beanie Moe
, the letters rolled and came together on that stranger’s tongue, spinning out and sounding as sweet as it did when his mother called it.
He squints at her. There is a resemblance, but she is taller, darker.
The standoff lasts a few more seconds, and just as Helen makes her mind up to tackle Beanie Moe, he suddenly turns and calmly climbs the stairs and walks into the house.
* * *
Now standing there, all of them shivering and soaking wet. Helen eyed the children, while it was all Beka could do to keep her mouth shut.
The house was a mansion compared to their Georgia saltbox. Fine parquet floors twinkled beneath the gaslights. Rose-colored carpet climbed the staircase. A large, oval, mahogany table graced the spacious dining room, and the parlor held, from what Beka could see, two sofas and at least three sitting chairs.
“Ain’t there four of y’all?” Helen asked the crowd of young faces that looked back at her.
The children said nothing.
Helen sighed. “Where’s your mama at?” She threw the question out into the air and waited. Still no one offered a breath or a word. “Y’all don’t speak?” Helen asked, her hands gripping her hips.
“Sure they do.” The words floated to them from the top of the staircase. Beka’s and Helen’s heads snapped toward the sound and they found themselves blinking wildly and then thought to laugh, but just smirked.
“Oh my,” Beka started. “If you don’t look just like your mama.”