By: Jennifer Diamond
RATIONALE
Sula text: p-23-29.
At Meridian the women got out with their
children. While Helene looked about the tiny stationhouse for a door
that said COLORED WOMEN, the other woman stalked off to a field of high
grass on the far side of the track. Some white men were leaning on
the railing in front of the stationhouse. It was not only their tongues
curling around toothpicks that kept Helene from asking information of them.
She looked around for the other woman and, seeing just the top of her head
rag in the grass, slowly realized where “yonder” was. All of them,
the fat woman and her four children, three boys and a girl, Helene and
her daughter, squatted there in the four o’clock Meridian sun. They
did it again in Ellisville, again in Hattiesburg, and by the time they
reached Slidell, not too far from Lake Pontchartrain, Helene could not
only fold leaves as well as the fat woman, she never
felt a stir as she passed the muddy eyes of the men who stood like wrecked
Dorics under the station roofs of those towns.
The lift in spirit that such an accomplishment
produced in her quickly disappeared when the train finally pulled into
New Orleans.
Cecile Sabat’s house leaned between two others just like it on Elysian Fields. A Frenchified shotgun house, it sported a magnificent garden in the back and a tiny wrought-iron fence in the front. On the door hung a black crepe wreath with purple ribbon. They were too late. Helene reached up to touch the ribbon, hesitated, and knocked. A man in a collarless shirt opened the door. Helene identified herself and he said he was Henri Martin and that he was there for the settin’-up. They stepped into the house. The Virgin Mary clasped her hands in front of her neck three times in the front room and once in the bedroom where Cecile’s body lay. The old woman had died without seeing or blessing her granddaughter.
No one other than Mr. Martin seemed to be in
the house, bit a sweet odor as of gardenias told them that someone else
had been. Blotting her lashes with a white handkerchief, Helene walked
through the kitchen to the back bedroom where she had slept for sixteen
years. Nel trotted along behind, enchanted with the smell, the candles
and the strangeness. When Helene bent to loosen the ribbons of Nel’s
hat, a woman in a yellow dress came out of the garden and onto the back
porch that opened into the bedroom. The two women looked at each
other. There was no recognition in the eyes of either. Then Helene
said, “This is your … grandmother, Nel.”
Nel looked at her mother and then quickly back at the door they had just
come out of. “No. That was your great-grandmother. This is
your grandmother. My … mother.”
Before the child could think, her words were
hanging in the gardenia air. “But she looks so young.”
The woman in the canary-yellow dress laughed
and said she was forty-eight, “an old forty-eight.”
Then it was she who carried the gardenia smell.
This tiny woman with the softness and glare of a canary. In that
somber house that held four Virgin Marys, where death sighed in every corner
and candles sputtered, the gardenia smell and canary-yellow dress emphasized
the funeral atmosphere surrounding them. The woman smiled, glanced in the
mirror and said, throwing her voice toward Helene, “That your only one?”
“Yes,” said Helene.
“Pretty. A lot like you.”
“Yes. Well. She’s ten now.”
“Ten? Vrai? Small for her age, no?”
Helene shrugged and looked at her daughter’s
questioning eyes. The woman in the yellow dress leaned forward.
“Come. Come, chere.”
Helene interrupted. “We have to get
cleaned up. We been three days on the train with no chance to wash
or…”
“Comment t’appelle?”
“She doesn’t talk Creole.”
“Then you ask her.”
“She wants to know your name, honey.”
With her head pressed into her mother’s heavy
brown dress, Nel told her and then asked, “What’s yours?”
“Mine’s Rochelle. Well. I must
be going on.” She moved closer to the mirror and stood there sweeping
hair up from her neck back into its halo-like roll, and wetting with spit
the ringlets that fell over her ears. “I been here, you know, most
of the day. She pass on yesterday. The funeral tomorrow.
Henri takin’ care.” She struck a match, blew
it out and darkened her eyebrows with the burnt head. All
the while Helene and Nel watched her. The
one in a rage at the folded leaves she had endured, the wooden benches
she had slept on, all to miss seeing her grandmother and seeing instead
that painted canary who never said a word of greeting or affection or…
Rochelle continued. “I don’t know what
happen to de house. Long time paid for. You be thinkin’ on
it? Oui?” Her newly darkened eyebrows queried Helene.
“Oui.” Helene’s voice was chilly.
“I be thinkin’ on it.”
“Oh, well. Not for me to say…”
Suddenly she swept around and hugged Nel –
quick embrace tighter and harder than one would have imagined her thin
soft arms capable of.
“Voir! ‘Voir!” and she was gone.
In the kitchen, being soaped head to toe by
her mother, Nel ventured an observation. “She
smelled so nice. And her skin was so soft.”
Helene rinsed the
cloth. “Much handled things are always soft.”
“What does ‘vwah’ mean?”
“I don’t know,” her mother
said. “I don’t talk Creole.” She gazed at her daughter’s wet
buttocks. “And neither do you.”
When they got back to Medallion and into the
quiet house they saw the note exactly where they had left it and the ham
dried out in the icebox.
---------------------break in text p.27-28---------------------
Nel sat on the red-velvet sofa listening to
her mother but remembering the smell and the tight, tight hug of the woman
in yellow who rubbed burned matches over her eyes.
Late that night after the fire was made, the cold supper eaten, the surface dust removed, Nel lay in bed thinking of her trip. She remembered clearly the urine running down and into her stockings until she learned how to squat properly; the disgust on the face of the dead woman and the sound of the funeral drums. It had been an exhilarating trip but a fearful one. She had been frightened of the soldiers’ eyes on the train, the black wreath on the door, the custard pudding she believed lurked under her mother’s heavy dress, the feel of unknown streets and unknown people. But she had gone on a real trip, and now she was different. She got out of bed and lit the lamp to look in the mirror. There was her face, plain brown eyes, three braids and the nose her mother hated. She looked for a long time and suddenly a shiver ran through her.
“I’m me,” she whispered. “Me.”
Nel didn’t know quite what she meant,
but on the other hand she knew exactly what she meant.
“I’m me. I’m
not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me. Me.”
Each time she
said the word me there was a gathering in her like power, like joy, like
fear. Back in bed with her discovery, she stared out the window at
the dark leaves of the horse chestnut.
“Me,” she murmured. And then, sinking
deeper into the quilts, “I want…I want to be… wonderful. Oh, Jesus,
make me wonderful.”
The many experiences of her trip crowded in
on her. She slept. It was the last as well as the first time
she was ever to leave Medallion.
For days afterward she imagined other trips
she would take, alone though, to faraway places. Contemplating them
was delicious. Leaving Medallion would be her goal. But that was
before she met Sula, the girl she had seen for five years at Garfield Primary
but never played with, never knew, because her mother
said that Sula’s mother was sooty. The
trip, perhaps, or her new found me-ness, gave her the strength to cultivate
a friend in spite of her mother.