LOWER MANHATTAN, NEW YORK
JUNE 1903
Hiram Stokes was not a man carried away by his emotions. He had never loved a woman, other than his mother, and had certainly never been in love. But Vyda Rose Alston had found a crevice in his heart that he had not known was there, and had crawled right in and filled it. She evoked in him a tenderness that surprised and troubled him, and he had always known that if the time ever came and the need arose, he would be there for her, asking nothing but that she trust him. And need him.
It was dark and the buggy was a block away from his stoop on South Street; but he could see that she was disheveled in appearance, an unusual condition for Vyda Rose, and clutching her baby stiffly. The driver of the buggy, a woman called Carrie, was visibly upset, her lined face conveying the urgency of their visit. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly 3 A.M.
He noted with alarm the deep red stains on Vyda Rose’s dress, and her bleeding hands, as the buggy stopped in front of his stoop and Carrie alighted. She was a sensible woman, Hiram had always thought, and demonstrated more levelheadedness than most prostitutes were willing to make apparent. Her tone was almost businesslike as she related the facts as she had been able to ascertain them: The building supervisor had attacked Vyda Rose in her room; she had fought back, finally stabbing him with a piece of glass. There had been quite a ruckus, and at least one eyewitness. The police were surely involved by now.
Hiram received this news with dread and a deepening sensation of nausea. He recalled the super’s glaring resentment on those occasions when he and Vyda Rose had passed his room, his hostility unclear in its direction—toward Vyda Rose? Perhaps she had rebuffed his advances. Or toward Hiram, for being with her in the super’s stead? He had never been sure until now. He desperately regretted having not cared.
Hiram rushed to Vyda Rose’s side and took one of her hands, looking into her face. She did not appear particularly upset now, but her face was swollen and streaked with dried blood. He noticed that her hands trembled. Hiram looked at them, those hands that had traversed his body on those rare and cherished occasions when she had allowed him to make love to her, then returned to him the favor, matching his skill as well as his ardor—each time resurrecting in Hiram the hope that she felt what he felt when her long, dexterous fingers kneaded his flesh in long, languorous strokes that made promises Vyda Rose never seemed to recall thereafter. But he would relive for weeks the gentle, healing impact of her touch, the taste and texture, sweet and smooth, of her skin, the warmth and liquidity of her center. He would experience again her stirring scent, and the soft bushiness of her hair. And a void would replace the space in his heart that Vyda Rose had inhabited—not merely an absence of flesh and voracity, but of kindness and caring; generosity and warmth; determined strength and courage that were Vyda Rose.
Even now, an ironic dignity surrounded her, as she reached around her child to clasp their joined hands at her baby’s back.
He knew that she must go, and this filled him with sorrow. He began to miss her, then hung his head ashamed of his own selfishness. This was her moment—she needed him, and he would come through for her. He must get her to some place safe. But where was safety for a colored girl who had killed a white man, of humble circumstances, but a white man nonetheless? Vyda Rose’s hands trembled more violently, and she began to sob. Carrie took the baby from her arms, and Hiram helped her out of the buggy and into his home.
It was small, only one room, and bare, its only comfort the sleigh bed that he had occasionally shared with Vyda Rose. Carrie sat beside her on it now, holding her tightly and speaking to her in a comforting tone. Hiram glanced at them as he moved about the apartment, searching through boxes and drawers. He was surprised by their intimacy. He had not known that they were close.
The baby slept soundly in the center of the bed. Piece by piece, Hiram assembled an outfit—brown trousers hemmed too short for him by an inept tailor; a shirt and tie; an inconspicuous tan jacket that would be too large for Vyda Rose but would have to do; and shoes that might nearly fit—thanks to her large feet. As he searched for a hat to cover Vyda Rose’s long, unruly hair, Carrie glanced at him, then abandoned her embrace of Vyda Rose to turn fully toward him.
“Watchoo doin’?” she inquired.
“I’m gettin’ her things to wear. She gotta get out the city, and she can’t do it like that,” he gestured toward the two women with his hand. “I’ll take her to New Jersey in the morning, and from there we’ll get a train and go.”
“Go where?” Carrie demanded, her eyes narrowed.
“Wherever we can get to,” Hiram replied. “First train leavin’, we on it.” He extracted a wad of bills from a shoe on the floor of a closet and stuffed it into his pocket. Vyda Rose and Carrie glanced at each other, Carrie’s expression doubtful, Vyda Rose’s eyes immense with fear.
But she recalled the train ride from North Carolina to Staten Island, and the ferry from there to Brooklyn. Her shoulders straightened. She could do this, especially in disguise.
“But what about my baby?”—her baby just six months old, her new life’s purpose. She could not escape with Jewell. She could not leave her behind.
Hiram thought for a moment. The look of panic on Vyda Rose’s face was not lost on him, the only child of a mother who had lived only for him. “Carrie will take her to Mama’s. Won’t you, Carrie?”
Carrie looked from Hiram to Vyda Rose. Her expression softened. Resignedly, she let out a sigh and nodded. Hiram gathered the clothing in his arms and held it out to Vyda Rose, who took it gratefully, her face wet with tears.
HUDSON RIVER
JUNE, 1903
Watching her had been agony. Standing on the stoop as they left Hiram’s building, she had held the infant tightly to her breast, tears streaming down her face, her eyes closed meditatively; and Jewell had giggled naïvely, her fingers laced in her mother’s hair. Time was escaping, but neither Hiram nor Carrie had had the heart to tear mother from child. Finally:
“Vyda Rose,” Hiram had nudged. Vyda Rose had not seemed to hear.
“Vyda Rose,” Carrie had offered gently. She and Hiram had looked at each other helplessly. “Honey, we got to go. You’ll see her when this is over.” But Vyda Rose had kissed the child and tickled her ribs, eliciting more giggles. “See?” Carrie had pointed out. “
She
knows that.”
Vyda Rose had smiled sadly. “She don’t know nothin’,” she had said, drawing Jewell close and planting several kisses on her small face. Finally, Vyda Rose had allowed Carrie to lift the child gently from her arms.
A fitful night’s sleep and an early morning subway ride later, Hiram and Vyda Rose had boarded a ferry for New Jersey. She stood near the railing now, her thin shoulders and slim hips drowning in the oversized men’s clothing, something fragile and unmanly in her stance. Hiram wondered if it had been wise to try to disguise her. She might have attracted less attention in a plain dress. He could have asked Carrie to provide this. But in the panic and despair of last night’s events, he had been unable to think clearly. Now, there was nothing they could do but hope that the authorities would be uninterested, or at least less than diligent, in searching for the super’s killer.
He stood beside her, resisting the urge to hold her tightly, and remembered fallen women who had graced his mother’s home with their presence during his childhood; beautiful women, wearing more makeup and less clothing than the church ladies with whom his mother also prayed in her home, less passionately, on other nights. These women—the fallen women—wore bright colors and voluptuous perfume, their arms bare and their breasts spilling from the tops of their dresses. They cried prettily sometimes as they prayed, and smiled at him, embarrassed, as he stole glimpses of them from the doorway to his room. These were women “with concerns,” his mother had said. The church ladies had called them sinful, fallen, shameful. But Hiram had thought them beautiful; their sadness, which no one had explained to Hiram but which he felt he understood, mysterious and passionate and beautiful. These were women who needed something, and their need was beautiful, beckoning. It beckoned as he grew to maturity. It beckoned still.
One of these needy women would unearth in him the ghost of passion resurrected in boys becoming men, the ghost that lay dead in his own flesh, waiting for the kiss of enlightenment, awakened to a self-defeating quest for yet more and different and greater indulgence, and in the groggy confusion and excitement of awakening, Hiram would learn to crave this need in women with a bloodthirst that rode him, forever enslaving him to his own need. And he would hate the source of that need, and the source at which it was satisfied; the various sources to whom he believed he made love, but with a gentle horror; apologizing as he extracted himself, delicately, from the webs of disillusionment and disappointment he had not intended to create. His own need gratified for the moment, he lacked the wherewithal to meet theirs; and it was their need that hurt them, and hurt him as well.
Later, he was to learn that those fallen women knew what others needed, and knew how to provide it, a knowledge that grew out of their understanding of themselves.
Vyda Rose, too, knew what others needed, but she did not understand, Hiram felt, the source of this knowledge: her own need, the gasping collective need of women given the illusion of love, only to have even that snatched away; women trained in soliciting the love of others, but never learning to adore themselves.
But Hiram understood. The passion of these women for their paramours, and of his mother toward her God, were one and the same; and what the church ladies resented in those women was the love greed that they recognized as their own; and Vyda Rose, heiress to this estate, differed only in her comfort with her own passions.
A breeze caught a tendril of Vyda Rose’s hair. Hiram moved to hide it beneath her hat, but stopped himself. “Tuck your hair.” He motioned toward the straying strands. She stuffed them hastily beneath her hat, and peered up at him sadly, breaking something within Hiram. He wanted badly to touch her, reassuringly, as Carrie had touched her, as his mother and the fallen women had touched one another, and tell her that he understood and needed her.
But he could not. Not until they were safely ashore; perhaps not until the train had taken them to some faraway place where he could rescue her from what he only presumed, with passion and conviction, was her need.
People ambled past them—colored people nearby, and whites at a comfortable distance—stopping to look over the railing at the waves as they crashed against the ferry; nodding at one another, and at Hiram. Vyda Rose kept her head bowed, watching the waves and the New Jersey shore that loomed ahead, willing the ferry to make haste in getting there. She tried in vain to keep her mind still and silent, to keep her hands steady. At times, her entire body trembled and she could hardly stand. She ached for her daughter, her mother, and her grandmother; for Lilly, and others she might never see again. She had fought back tears all morning. The effort was exhausting her. Were it not for Hiram’s comforting presence, she knew that she would have crumbled.
She feared that she did not make a convincing man. Men stared at her, inclining their heads to look at her face beneath the brim of her hat. She tried to appear nonchalant, but she knew that they knew. Men could detect pussy through some sixth sense intrinsic to them and passed to their sons through their genes, Vyda Rose thought. Hiram had assured her that it did not matter—another dead immigrant would hardly merit a police report, much less a dragnet. But then, Vyda Rose thought, they were running, were they not? Only for the sake of caution, he had reasoned aloud, discerning her thoughts.
A white man approached her, breaching the boundary between white and colored, staring, openly curious, at her face. She tried to meet his stare, then looked at Hiram, her eyes wild. Hiram did not look at her, but rocked on his heels, whistling as he had all morning. The man passed on. Vyda Rose grabbed Hiram’s arm.
“You think he was the po-lice? Oh, God. Help me—”
“Vyda Rose,” Hiram said coolly. “He ain’t no police just happen to be on this ferry.”
“But if they lookin’ for me—”
“Vyda Rose,” he said again, evenly, the effort to sound rational in spite of his fear making him seem annoyed. “You killed a low-down white man who was nothing but trash. Police ain’t goin’ out of their way, unless you get in theirs. Okay?”
But Vyda Rose ducked around a corner where no one was standing, fighting to control her tears. Hiram followed her.
“Okay?” he demanded. But Vyda Rose was irreparably shaken. He held her in the shadow created by the ferry’s great awning, and she cried profusely and as silently as she could. Several passersby stared at the unusual pair—colored passersby. They would not tell even if they suspected Vyda Rose’s crime.
The white man had disappeared.
Hiram thought, again, that he should tell her. Her shoulders shook pitifully, and she took in great gasps of air between sobs. He felt that he should tell her that he cared for her, and would always be there for her. But she knew this, he rationalized. Wasn’t he here for her now?
By the time they emerged from the shadow, the ferry was approaching the shore, perhaps two hundred feet away. Vyda Rose’s face lit up with relief and anticipation as she stared across the bay; but she glanced behind herself nervously. “Let’s go, Hiram,” she begged. “Let’s be the first ones off.” And she turned toward the gang plank.
The white man stood a short distance away, this time with two others. They were staring at the colored woman dressed like a man. Their expressions might have conveyed curiosity, humor, or triumph, and Vyda Rose would not have known the difference. A look of horror replaced the excitement on her face. Reaching to steady her, Hiram opened his mouth to say, “Calm down. Just don’t panic.”
But Vyda Rose had turned to run, pushing past the astonished crowd. Too stunned at first to react, Hiram gathered himself and ran after her, reaching the front end of the ferry just in time to hear her splash into the bay. Without hesitating, Hiram leapt after her, trying to recall if Vyda Rose had ever mentioned that she could swim. He tried to see and to think as he adjusted to the initial shock of the cold, deep water. He wondered if the white men had been cops or merely fascinated passengers. He thought he saw her, far, far away, the legs of his too-short pants flapping in the blue-green water, moving away from the shore. He was confused. He began to tread water, his head jerking in one direction and then another, frantic and unable to see or breathe. And then an overwhelming sense of failure and despair began to engulf him as he felt himself being dragged heavily down, down, into the murky waters of the bay, recalling all the things his pride had not allowed him to show her, the things that he had nearly said.
He imagined, as he often had, the girl he thought she must have been: pigtailed, stubborn, and proud; perhaps flamboyant, with dreams of glamour and distinction, but a nature lover at heart; that girl, enjoying the sensation of the water as it pressed itself against her belly and back, squeezed between her toes, forced itself behind the lids of her tightly closed eyes. He imagined an expression of surrender and of rapture on her face, and the beauty of this struck him as boundless and enchanting. He imagined that she did not fight the undertow, no flailing arms losing a hopeless battle with nature’s inevitable will. She moved instead in concert with it, her legs flagellar, fluid, moving
with
the water as it eddied around them, propelling her upward, her body straight and rigid; an arrow piercing the water, clearing a path through its depths; a rocket soaring through the hydrosphere, bursting through its surface. He wondered that she did not proceed, in projectile manner, to penetrate the canopy of the sky. And as sunlight, harsh bright sunlight, struck his own shuttered eyes, shocking them open wide, and air filled his lungs, he thought he saw that girl, her hair a hennaed halo around her head, as she emerged naked from the rocks around the pier, not looking back, but moving with the grace and desperation of a gazelle chosen through some mischance for prey, moving with fear and an instinct for survival across terrain unfamiliar and hostile; moving as across a native plain, in a native country across the sea, the winds of a God and an ocean at her back.