River, cross my heart Read online

  Johnnie Mae fought to keep her face respectfully immobile. It took effort not to indicate how tired she was of hearing the same instructions each morning as her mother got ready to leave for work. She knew full well all the watching out for heatstroke was her responsibility. In wintertime it was watching out for chills and uncovered ears, feet, and head. In Mama's lexicon, every season had its dangers, and Johnnie Mae was her mother's lieutenant in charge of "watching out." At the door Mama turned, as usual, to issue a final directive. "Clean up the kitchen before you leave this house, hear me?"

  Papa added nothing to Mama's list of orders. He put bacon inside the last two biscuits and stuffed them in his pocket for later. He followed her out the front door.

  Clara sat at the kitchen table, twirling a slice of bacon. With both parents out of earshot, Johnnie Mae turned her displeasure toward her "obligation." "Finish up that milk and help me wipe this place up!"

  Ann-Martha Pendel was the freckled, laughing, meriny woman who did washing for white people. In summer, her laundry room was the overgrown, weed-choked yard behind her house at 32nd and P streets. Drying sheets hung on rope lines that extended from the porch roof to several tall but measly trees at the rear boundary of the yard. As they fanned out over the yard, the sheets created a labyrinth. Ann-Martha was to be found somewhere in their midst, arms pumping up and down on a wooden scrub board.

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  Miss Ann-Martha, with no husband or children, was considered a colored woman of independent means and uncertain morals. Alice Bynum, resigned to the expediency of her daughters' work as Ann-Martha's runners, had warned them— especially the maturing Johnnie Mae — against engaging in idle talk with the woman. "No need to sit about jawin' with Ann-Martha Pendel. Just make the runs and collect the money, hear me?" Of course, Johnnie Mae knew you didn't have to sit around jawing to catch the tenor of Miss Ann-Martha's moral behavior. The careless way her breasts flopped underneath her shift and the slackness of her lips when she spoke out of the side of her mouth were unmistakably the signs of low moral character. Even a child could see that.

  Johnnie Mae didn't particularly like the musky smell of the woman and usually tried to stand as far from her as was practical. Yet Ann-Martha managed to whisper conspiratorially, out of Clara's earshot. "A yella gal can rule the mens if she's smart, especially colored mens. A brown gal got to work a bit harder. A blue-black gal is got no chance. You remember that!"

  The full import of this foolishness would be lost on Johnnie Mae even if she could understand all the broken-up shards of words Ann-Martha used in her chuckling conversation. What'd she mean by that? Best to ignore her talk and tend to the laundry only.

  Johnnie Mae and Clara loaded the clean bundles for delivery to Miss Ann-Martha's customers and pulled the wagon back through the maze of hanging clothes. As usual, Clara couldn't resist hurling herself face first and giggling into the ballooning sheets at the back of the yard, beyond Miss Ann-Martha's line of vision. Johnnie Mae fussed at Clara. "Come on, girl, we got no time for foolishness!"

  Grown folks often noticed Johnnie Mae Bynum's indus-triousness and commented on it. "That girl is just like her mama—always busy," they said. White folks, too, took note of the brusquely respectful little colored girl who collected and delivered laundry. Her back was always arrow straight as she approached the back doors o( Miss Ann-Martha's customers. Mama's advice rang in her ears. "Don't have too much to say to them. Just yes-ma'am 'em and no-ma'am 'em and go about your business. And don't be grinning like a Cheshire cat if they offer you a cookie." Waiting solemnly while they inspected the clean clothes and handed over the dirty bundles, Johnnie Mae gravely counted the nickels and accepted a cookie or a bun with glancing but polite acknowledgment and a slip of a smile.

  A scowling, down-on-her-luck white woman on Dumbarton Avenue was the first customer on the route. She resented a proud demeanor in a nigger. It just didn't suit her to see a colored child presenting herself so uppity, so businesslike.

  "They say a Chinaman's opened up a laundry shop down on Water Street." Her nasal twang was razorlike. "He'll run Ann-Martha out of business for sure."

  Standing straight, Johnnie Mae made no reply. Mama's words reverberated in her head: "Keep your mind on what you want, not on what they say." Clara, beside the wagon at the bottom o{ the steps, shifted from one foot to the other. Her bottom lip quivered. She was ready to run.

  The woman went back into the house for the fifteen cents due, placed the coins on the porch rail, and held open the screen door for Johnnie Mae to carry in the three clean bundles and put them on the kitchen table. The woman bent down,

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  whisked up the dirty bundle, and pushed it into Johnnie-Mae's arms.

  At the porch rail, Johnnie Mae heaved the bundle down the stairs into the wagon. Snatching up the money, she took the steps two and three at a time as she descended. At the bottom, grateful for a signal to move, Clara punched the laundry down into the wagon.

  "You be careful ot my laundry. Tell Ann-Martha I don't want no cat's paws on those shirts. If I see any, I'll take my business to the Chinaman," the small, raw woman hollered after Johnnie Mae, who jumped oit the last step, picked up the wagon handle, and left the woman's yard as quickly as the rickety conveyance could be pulled over uneven ground.

  Hanging on to the tail of the wagon and breathing out of her mouth as she struggled to keep up with her sister, Clara asked, "What's a Chinaman, Johnnie'"

  Without turning around, Johnnie Mae answered in a flat, authoritative voice, "A yellow man with a pigtail."

  "Oh. Yellow like Miss Ann-Martha?"

  "No. Yellow with a long pigtail and funny eyes."

  It was noon when Johnnie Mae and Clara turned down 30th Street toward Miss Ann-Martha's to drop off the dirty loads and collect their twenty cents. Mr. Pud Allen's street-cleaning wagon, drawn by a swaybacked horse, moseyed along ahead of them. When the horse deposited a stinking pile at the corner of 30th and N streets, Clara giggled and pinched her nose. Johnnie Mae laughed too and wondered what was the use of Mr. Pud Allen washing the street if his old nasty horse was letting loose every other block. At this rate, Mr. Pud Allen and his horse would always have a job of work.

  Johnnie Mae handed Clara three pennies and pocketed seven cents. The rest, one dime, was for Mama's housekeeping. Alice Bynum allowed her girls to keep some of the money they earned hauling clothes for Miss Ann-Martha. In this, the Bynums were different from many of the other colored families in Georgetown. Most of the recent southern migrants kept all the money earned by their sons and daughters and pooled it with the rest of the household's earnings. There were no idle children among the colored families of Georgetown, except those too feeble or too young. And every child old enough to stand was old enough to work. If they worked for pay, they turned it over to their folks. The bigger girls had younger siblings to tend while their mamas cleaned, cooked, did laundry, or took care of the white people's children. Many of these girls also cooked and kept the house if their mama "lived in" and came home only one day of the week.

  The clay brick sidewalk was as hot as a griddle when Johnnie Mae and Clara returned home to put away the wagon and then head up to Aunt Ina's. On the morning laundry rounds, Johnnie Mae had been thinking about the fragrant coolness of Volta Place and the quiet dark of Aunt Ina's parlor. The spreading, rounded crowns of ailanthus, white mulberry, eastern cottonwood, and red oak canopied Volta Place as it wandered west from the Wisconsin Avenue thoroughfare. The trees blocked sunlight and protected the large, rich folks' houses, the narrow carriage houses, and the alley dwellings of poor folks. Rosebushes — every variety — stood beside doorways and trailed along trellises. The smell o( Volta Place was sweet—rose, lavender, lilac, sweet grass, and onion grass.

  The smells wafting out of 3304 Volta Place were of chicken and cornbread fried in the early morning. Johnnie

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  Mae and Clara were expe
cted to eat at Aunt Ina's on summer afternoons. Clara especially was supposed to eat and "set awhile" out of the heat of high noon. Aunt Ina, once she had finished her early morning cooking, would position herself at the small window in her parlor. From there she would peep through the branches of the box elder as she sewed collars, buttonholes, buttons, and socks, looking to catch sight of Johnnie Mae and Clara rounding the corner from the avenue. Ina Carson was one of the few colored women in Georgetown with a sit-down job.

  Aunt Ina's sewing was so neat, her stitches so small and even, that the seams of her garments seemed to be joined by a wish. Her filet crochet adorned the bosoms of some of the wealthiest ladies in Georgetown. Ina's own arms, bosom, and bottom were fleshy and soft, yet her fingers were lean and muscular. Her face, too, was round and soft, and the total effect reminded Johnnie Mae of one of the red tomato pincush-ions in Aunt Ina's sewing basket. Completing the picture were the neat rows of threaded needles stuck in the bodice of Aunt Ina's housedress, which made it prudent not to hug her but in-stead to peck her cheeks at arm's length.

  After eating, Johnnie Mae and Clara sat on the cloth-covered hassocks at Aunt Ina's feet and practiced sewing tiny skirts and blouses for the dolls they'd made out of Aunt Ina's empty spools. The girls threaded needles, sorted buttons, and peeped out the window at folks meandering down Volta Place. Occasionally they ran out to the curb to fetch something for Aunt Ina from a passing huckster wagon.

  Some afternoons Johnnie Mae and Clara ran errands for Aunt Ina over to Kate Murray's, a store for notions and fabrics on Wisconsin Avenue. The girls would buy buttons, elastic, or

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  ribbon for Aunt Ina's special customers. The young women clerks at Kate Murray's, a haughty bunch not much older than Johnnie Mae, were dressed up to look matronly in high starched collars and long, black serge skirts. Though Johnnie Mae and Clara enjoyed staring down into the store's glass cases at spools of thread and knitting wool, Johnnie Mae knew the snippy clerks in Kate Murray's liked nothing better than to speak sharply to colored children and shoo them out of the store for breathing on the glass countertops. She sometimes scolded Clara before one of the clerks could fix her mouth to. "Don't lean on the glass, Clara, stand up!" But Johnnie Mae was secretly happy that Clara's breath created a circular cloud of condensation on the glass above the spools of red and orange thread.

  The police precinct was located on Volta Place, too, and proximity to it gave Ina Carson unquestioned authority on the moral turpitude of most of black Georgetown. On Saturdays, foot traffic on Volta Place usually included bowlegged, listing, colored drunks prodded by nightsticks up toward the Number 7 precinct. And the late night quiet was often punctuated by the thumping and thwacking of billies upside colored heads, male and female.

  The goings-on in Bell's Court, an alley settlement of "dirt-poor Negroes" situated in the middle of that block of Volta Place and extending back to P Street, frequently gave Ina reason to shake her head and purse her lips and were often the subject of conversation with her cousin Alice. Aunt Ina strictly forbade Johnnie Mae and Clara to venture down the alleyway that intersected Volta Place in the middle of the block. The noisy, card-playing folks packed in practically on top of each other in wooden shacks in Bell's Court were, in

  Ina's opinion, an embarrassment to the colored race. Most were "just this minute" up from the Deep South and hadn't had schooling and didn't know the first thing about city living. You could hear them hoo-rawing after their half-naked children and cursing each other any time of the day.

  Across from Bell's Court, on the north side of the street, stretching northward a full block, was a playground surrounded by a vine-covered metal fence. Nestled within the fence, guarded by ailanthus, were swings, a sliding board, a sandpile, and a swimming pool. The pool's shimmering aqua water promised cool-as-a-cucumber refreshment to anyone who was allowed in. Colored children were not allowed in. Johnnie Mae, Clara, and their edible playmates—gingerbread Mabel, caramel Lula, black-coffee Hannah, Sarey the banana, and Tiny, the tall, slim girl colored the same as the skin ot an eggplant—were kept to the periphery of this paradise.

  Johnnie Mae overheard Aunt Ina tell her mama that some of the children of Miss Helen Pear had gone in there. The Pears were colored, but had been allowed in the pool because the white people hadn't known they were colored. Aunt Ina had witnessed the folderol when the truth became known and the Pears were marched off the premises in their swimming suits and taken into Number 7 for a strong reprimand. Aunt Ina said that Mr. William Pear had been made to pay a big fine.

  With no errand to run that afternoon and lulled by food and quiet talk, Clara fell asleep. Her head rested on the wm-dowsill and a string ot saliva slid onto the hand propping her cheek. Aunt Ina's chin fell to her bosom and her hands were still except when a fly alighted on her face. Swatting and snoring lightly, the two rested in the husky late afternoon air.

  Johnnie Mae slipped out of the house and left Aunt Ina and Clara dozing in the front window. She crossed the street and stood at the fence outside the whites-only playground. Honeysuckle blossoms twined in and out oi the crisscrossed rods of the fence that ran the length of the playground. The vine's blossoms hosted hundreds of yellow jackets that might easily be mistaken for buds. Johnnie Mae brooded that the honeysuckle had surely been trained to the fence to draw the yellow jackets so they would sting colored children and discourage them from peeping through the fence.

  Johnnie Mae found a spot under a large tree where she was concealed from the view of those in the pool but could still see inside. She lay with the tree's roots running under her stomach, her hands linked behind her head. Johnnie Mae stared at the swimmers. Some floated, some dove from the board and swam the pool's length, and some stood around giggling and showing off. A redheaded boy pounded his chest, strutted along the edge o{ the pool, and teased a group of girls nearby. Johnnie Mae seethed at the profligacy of the pale girls who lined the edges of the pool bobbing only their feet in the water. They wasted the pool's exquisite coolness on giggling and wiggling. Why didn't those girls cut through the water and let it rinse all the sticky sweat off them? Why didn't they want to show up that redheaded boy?

  "I'd show that redheaded boy some stuff," Johnnie Mae muttered to the girl in her soul who bristled with angry pride and only grudgingly accepted the injustices that grown folks wouldn't talk about. "I can swim better than any of 'em! If they let me in there, I wouldn't just sit on the side!"

  "How come we can't go in that pool and swim?" Johnnie Mae had repeatedly asked Aunt Ina since the beginning of

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  summer. The girl's moaning and moping about swimming in the "white people's" pool had begun to test Ina's patience. Johnnie Mae was Ina's heart and she'd always been able to see straight down to the nut of the girl. She knew that Johnnie Mae understood full well how things were for colored folks— even here in Georgetown, where things were a bit better.

  "You don't need to be over there anyway," Aunt Ina had answered time and again. "Those people ought to know bet-ter. They built that children's playground on top of an old graveyard. That's hallowed ground. They had no business disturbing the dead by building a children's playground over their heads. Be glad you're not in there. I recall they found many a false tooth and finger ring in there when they turned over the ground. That's no place for children to be playing. The dead want to rest." All Aunt Ina was doing was trying to thwart the child's questioning. She knew well enough that this reasoning didn't cut any mustard with Johnnie Mae.

  And exactly who, Johnnie Mae wondered, were "they," anyway? Was President Coolidge the one? Was he the head white person who said colored couldn't swim in the pool? Did the white people get together in secret meetings and decide that colored people ought to step to the back door and couldn't go into the restaurants and sit down to eat? Were all the white people in on the plot?

  Last night, stretched out for sleep on pallets on the second-floor porch, hoping to
catch what cool breezes might come along, Johnnie Mae and Clara had listened as the voices of their parents wafted up from the kitchen. Willie and Alice turned over the question that Johnnie Mae had been peppering them with as well: "How come they won't let colored children swim in the pool on Volta Place?"

  Willie shook his head downward toward his shoes. "That girl's got a worry, Alice. She don't understand this thing, and she's not gonna let go of it easy."

  Alice flared to her daughter's defense. "Nor should she! What reason they got to keep them out of that playground, or the school, for that matter? We pay our rent money the same as these others around here. Some of the colored own their own homes here. Still they say our children can't play in the playground."

  Willie was afraid of his wife's passion. He was a man who plowed under any strong emotion. Coming up on a tenant farm, Willie had been raised by people who reached the end of the day too tired to talk about their tiredness. Bereft of parents, then grandmother, then sister, Willie had grown up taciturn, though easygoing. But his Alice was a geyser — a hot spring—boiling up with the sense of injustice. And she knew full well the price colored folks paid for such anger.

  "We've not been here long enough to spout off about what is and isn't right," Willie said.

  "What you talking about, man? How long've we got to be in a place before we spout off? You saying this place is no better than Carolina? What we leave Carolina for?"

  Not wanting to hear the answer to her own question, Alice rose quickly to scoop their two coffee cups from the table. She extinguished the coal oil lamp that stood on the table between them. She didn't want to see Willie's face now. She didn't want to see his face and recall how frightened he'd looked when she had first started talking about leaving Mara-bel and coming to Georgetown. Sometimes that look still flitted across his face. Alice knew that sometimes he was still frightened that they'd come so far from their home.