Chapter 8

'Here?' Alice asked, pointing at the sign nailed to the fluted wooden pillars of the porch, and, just perceptibly, cringing. 'Oh, surely not here!'

'You ain't going to make a scene now, are you, child?' Bessy tightened her grip on the girl's hand and began dragging her towards the swaybacked steps. It was five o'clock of a misty Sunday morning on North Tidewater Road, so that no matter what kind of fuss Alice put up at this point, it would make no difference.

'But the sign! Why do you want to come here? What are you going to do?'

'Oh—the sign!' Bessy had gone in and out the front door so many times that she wasn't even aware now of the weathered, but still distinct legend: Green Pastures Funeral Home—then, beneath, in larger, gilt letters UNDERTAKING. When she'd bought the place at auction, Bessy had decided to leave the sign up as a joke, and from a sense, besides, of the traditional; now the joke was grown so stale as to be, in Bessy's eyes, invisible. 'Don't take no account of that sign, honey. This here ain't no funeral home no more.' Then, though this joke too had lost most of its punch: 'Now it's a fun house, and we got different undertakings going on.'

Reassured but still dragging her feet, Alice let herself be led up the steps. Despite all the sleep she had had on the bus out of Baltimore, and then in the bus station in Richmond, and in the second bus, she was still groggy. Her back ached from having had to sit up all night, and her feet were raw from the long walk in shoes but no stockings. Worst of all, she was starving; since yesterday's breakfast she hadn't had anything but one ham-and-cheese sandwich on the bus. In a sense, she had been just as glad as Bessy to be here, to be anywhere so long as it marked an end, so long as she could take off these shoes and eat and take a shower to wash off all this brown ook

Bessy rummaged through her carryall for her house-key, then, growing impatient, began pounding on the door. Within, Alice could hear running footsteps and a little girl's giggle (had someone else been kidnapped too?), and more footsteps ...

'Christ Almighty, Clara,' Bessy called out, 'stop playing footsy, and open this damn door.'

The lock rattled, and the door swung open, creakingly, upon a darkened foyer. There were more footsteps and whispers, but it was too dim to see anything but the indefinite, hulking silhouettes of furniture. Alice tiptoed through the foyer, straining to see and holding her breath. This was more like it! This was what kidnapping should be like—a strange, dark house, whispers, mysterious footsteps!

Behind her, Bessy closed and locked the door, then demolished the splendid suspense by throwing on the light switch and discovering, perched at opposite ends of a tawdry leatherette couch, in the centre of the most ordinary living-room, two grown-ups, a man and a woman. The man was black, the woman white.

'Clara, Fay, say Hello to Dinah.'

The white woman said, 'Hello, Dinah,' and broke into giggles. Alice realised with a pang of disappointment that it was her laughter that she had mistaken for another child's.

'What the hell!' said the black man, who was ugly and buck-toothed and not, after all, a man.

'You watch your language around Dinah, you hear, Clara?'

'My name isn't Dinah!' Alice said with exasperation. 'I tried to explain to you yesterday, but you wouldn't listen. My name is...'

'It's Dinah now, honey.' Bessy sighed gratefully as she began to ease off her shoes. 'Babydoll, why don't you go out in the kitchen and make us up some nice stiff drinks?'

'Okay!' said Fay brightly. 'With ice cubes!' Fay was, despite that she wore only a ratty seersucker bathrobe, as pretty as a movie star, and when she jumped up from the couch it was with a bouncy, lithe grace astonishing in a woman of mature years. Her hair was the same whitish blonde that Alice's had been only hours before.

'She gonna turn tricks?' Clara asked Bessy.

'Now what do you think? Good Lord, Clara, she ain't no more than ten years old, and she's littler than a cheese mite!'

'I'm eleven, going on twelve!' Alice protested. 'And my name is Alice !'

But Bessy and Clara continued their enigmatic conversation quite oblivious to what Alice had to say.

'So if she ain't here to work, what's she doing here? You sure as hell ain't gone and adopted her, for the love of sweet charity!'

Bessy's sigh expressed both resignation and pleasure—resignation at Clara's obstinacy and pleasure at being altogether out of her shoes. 'Since when does anyone work around here?' she inquired of her shoe. 'Ain't no one been working so's I'd notice it these last ten years.'

'Like hell!' said Clara. For a moment Alice wondered if maybe she wasn't a man. She was dressed like a man, in levis and a denim jacket. She had, as nearly as Alice could tell, a man's figure, albeit she was scrawny. She moved like a man. Her hair was cut short and shaped, with the aid of a pound or two of grease, into a spiky ducktail. Lastly, she had, if not a man's voice, a man's way of speaking.

'Clara honey, you are in pain, a real pain,' Bessy said good-humouredly.

'Shove it!' said Clara fiercely.

From the next room came a tinkling sound, like Japanese wind-chimes. Fay entered the living-room backwards through a swinging door, carrying a tray upon which four glasses of what Alice hoped without much conviction, might be cream soda were arrayed in a neat square. She served Bessy first.

Bessy sipped her drink. 'Why, that tastes very good, Fay. Thank you.'

Fay beamed. 'I made it myself.'

'It's real good—but why did you make four?'

Fay's blue eyes opened very wide. 'Because I counted! I didn't forget Fay this time. I counted one, two, three, four!'

'Crap!' said Clara. 'Don't you know nuthin? Dinah here can't drink this stuff. Fay. She's only ten years old.'

'Eleven,' Alice whispered to herself dismally. But no one was interested in the truth.

A puzzled finger strayed up to Fay's pouting lips, allowing the tray, upon which the glasses were no longer symmetrically disposed, to teeter portentously. Clara quickly took her own glass off the tray, and the tray righted itself.

Fay's smile, when it came, was dazzling. 'Why, then I get both of these! And...' (glancing mischievously at Alice) '... you don't get none!'

'I don't get any,' Alice corrected her. She knew it wasn't good manners, but then Fay herself was hardly a model of deportment.

With a little squeal of pleasure Fay plumped down on the couch, one glass in each hand. Seeing that abundance of rosy pink flesh before her, Alice felt more poignantly than ever how dirty and black she was. Fay looked as fresh as a baby, despite the cosmetic excesses spread over her pretty face. Her lips were so thickly frosted with lipstick that they looked like two pieces of pink fudge, and her eyes were like the glass eyes of a very expensive doll, the clearest sky-blue. They regarded the great world round about with a wide-open look of perpetual astonishment—an effect much heightened by the thin mascara arches that were inscribed upon her forehead fully half an inch above the probable line of her eyebrows. Her short, turned-up nose was very pink about the nostrils, as though she cried a lot, or had a cold, or was a bunny rabbit. She was, in short, very pretty, though it was not the sort of prettiness Alice would have wished for herself—under any other circumstances than the present.

Clara, by contrast, seemed to have set out to make herself ugly with the same deliberation with which Fay tried to look nice. Admittedly both of them had considerably native endowments. Clara's eyes protruded from a long, wedge-shaped face that was the hue of a charred pine log; beneath wide cheekbones her face tapered to a point at, unfortunately, her mouth, where one large white tooth overlapped a second, which in turn stood forth in proud independence from the lower lip. It was a weaselish face across which flitted a weaselish range of expressions: suspicion, calculation, a readiness either to pounce or to retreat, in equal measure, and when she glanced sideways at Fay, which she did not a little, something like hunger.

'Here comes Donald Duck,' Fay announced, raising one glass to her pink-frosting lips. 'Donald Duck wants to come in the door. Open the door for Donald Duck!' The door opened for Donald Duck and Fay took a delicate sip of her drink.

'Now here comes Micky Mouse. He wants to come in the door too.' She raised the second glass to her lips, and the door opened for Mickey Mouse.

Alice looked questioningly at Bessy, who stirred uneasily in her chair. You see, honey,' she explained, 'by the looks of her, Fay seems to be a grown-up woman, but inside she's just a little girl. Inside she ain't even as old as you are.'

'But I'm not a baby!' Fay announced in a concerned tone.

'No, you're not a baby,' Bessy agreed.

Clara pointed a warning finger at Alice. 'You keep outa my way, understand! Just keep outa my way, and I'll keep outa yours.'

'But I'm not in your way,' Alice protested. 'You're sitting down, for heaven's sake!'

'Just keep out of it, that's all I'll say. Kids don't have any business in a place like this. Christ, how I hate kids!'

'I love kids,' Fay said solemnly. I'm a mother, and I just adore babies. Would you like to see my baby?'

'Not if she's sleeping,' Alice replied.

'Oh, I can wake her.' Fay set her two glasses down on a three-legged end-table that was jammed into a corner of the room for support, then she got down on her hands and knees and felt beneath the sofa. 'Here she is,' she exclaimed at last. She held up a cheap, naked plastic doll by one leg. 'Isn't she just the sweetest?'

Fay sat back and began crooning over her baby and letting it drink from her glass of whiskey. 'I used to have a name for her, but I forget now what it was. Shall I call her Dinah now— for you?'

'My name isn't Dinah. If you want to name your baby after me, you should call her Alice.'

'Alice, my sweet little baby Alice,''Fay purred

'Your name is Dinah now, young lady, and you remember that. You say your name is Alice one more time, and I'm gonna let Clara give you a whipping with her strap. And believe you me, that won't be no fun.' Clara smiled weaselishly, in agreement. 'Now if someone asks you what your name is, what you going to tell them?' ' ;

'Dinah,' Alice answered sulkily.

'That's right. Because you is Dinah now, honey.'

'Can I take a shower?'

'Ain't no shower,' Clara declared flatly.

'A bath, then? I want to wash this ook off of me.'

Clara regarded Alice with curiosity, while Bessy laughed softly into her depleted whiskey glass. 'You go take a bath, Dinah honey, if that's what you want, but ain't nothing going to wash off you but a little dust from our bus ride. On account of you're coloured folks now, the same as Clara and me.'

'A Negro?'

'If that's what you want to call it, honey.'

Alice ran down the long hallway, opening doors to the bedrooms until she found the bath. It was a very queer bath indeed, with a tub fully eight feet long, but Alice could not spare a second thought for even the most anamalous tub now She scrubbed her face and hands with soap and hot water, but the

only result seemed to be that her face became darker,

A Negro! She thought of all the times this summer she had wished for a nice tan, of the times she had wanted to be like Miss Godwin. And now she was, if anything, darker than her governess—and it was awful, awful! She wanted desperately to be herself again. Instead, she was ... Dinah. Dinah had been a Negro, but on the other hand, Dinah had not been real. She'd been a fantasy—part of Alice's sickness. But she was over her sickness now, and she knew that Dinah had never been anything more than pretending. Pretending—and then, believing in it. Dinah didn't exist.

But as she stared into the mirror of the medicine cabinet, she seemed to hear a teeny-tiny voice in her head, and it said: 'Oh yes I do!'

Bessy could hear Alice sobbing in the bathroom, but there wasn't very much she could do to comfort her. Besides, she thought, there were plenty enough little girls in this world crying their eyes out about the colour of their skin, and they was always going to be just one colour, black. Whereas Alice would start turning pale again in a week if she didn't take another pill. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea if all white folks took one of those every so often, just so they'd see what it was like to be coloured folk.

'Oh my dear little baby Alice' crooned Fay over her doll. Clara gave her the raspberry and tramped upstairs to her bedroom.

Alice: Bessy had to stop thinking of her as Alice, or she'd let her tongue slip one of these days. She was Dinah now. Strange, that it had to be just that name, and not Georgia, for instance, or Mae Pearl. That would have been a better name for her: you don't hear of any white girls by the name of Mae Pearl. But Dinah was all right too. Bessy wasn't going to change the plans she'd been told, not a jot nor a tittle.

Not that she had any urge to. The more she thought the whole things over, the better she liked it. The idea of feeding them pills to the kid was a stroke of genius. Bessy hadn't even known there was such pills, but it turned out they was made of the same stuff that went into those special suntan lotions that people used in the winter instead of going to Florida—only about fifty times stronger. The beauty of it was that Bessy could take Alice anywhere, and she wouldn't be noticed. Because she wasn't Alice any more—she wasn't the little white girl who'd have her pictures in the newspapers—she was Dinah, a black little pickaninny, and the next best thing to invisible, as far as white folks was concerned.

Black or white, she was a nice little girl, Dinah was, polite and sharp as a tack. Also, Bessy thought guiltily, she was probably a very hungry little girl by now. She would have got up out of her chair and fixed her something to eat, except that her feet, her poor, aching feet, just wouldn't take her into that kitchen.

'Fay, honey?'

Fay's eyebrows lifted to their utmost extent, questioningly.

'Would you fix up Dinah a bite to eat and pour her a glass of milk, if there is some?'

'All by myself? What should I make?'

'Just a couple of sandwiches—and some potato chips, if you and Clara have left any.'

'I know how to make peanut butter sandwiches, or jelly sandwiches, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or cheese sandwiches, or cheese and jelly sandwiches, or ...'

'That'll do just fine, honey. You just go and fix them up and tell Dinah when they're ready.'

Bessy shook her head, as she watched Fay prance into the kitchen. If she weren't so damned soft-hearted she'd have thrown out the both of them years ago. They sure as hell didn't pay their way. That Clara was as ugly as sin, and as if that weren't enough, she hated men and always found a way to let them know it. Which didn't bring in many repeating customers to Green Pastures Funeral Home—except for the few men who wanted to be hated.

Fay didn't have many steady customers either, despite that she was the prettiest piece that Bessy had ever had working for her. The trouble with Fay was that after doing her business, she'd ask for a piece of bubble gum or do some fool thing that would let her John know he'd been making it with a five-year-old. Which most Johns don't really like.

Two dead cats—that's what Bessy had on her hands. She would never have kept Green Pastures going if it hadn't been for the mortgages and an occasional windful from someone who needed a quiet rooming house till he could find a boat to go away on. This business with Alice ...

Damn it, she had to remember to think of her as Dinah! This business with Dinah was the first piece of really big luck that had come Bessy's way since World War II, when she'd made her pile. Now, if only her luck stayed good. Three days —that's all she asked. Three days, and then the kid would be back in Baltimore and Bessy could move off to parts unknown, taking her bundle with her. She didn't expect to see Norfolk again till she was ready to be buried in Nansemond County.

Three days. Nothing could happen in three days. But, sweet Jesus, wouldn't there be the devil to pay if they caught her on this? A white kid kept prisoner in a coloured cathouse. There'd be a lynch party quicker than you could say Jackie Robinson. She chuckled, picturing old Farron Stroud, looking mean and trying to figure out some way to string her up. There wasn't a tree in Virginia big enough to string Elizabeth McKay up from.

But it wasn't really so funny when you stop to think. Because they would do for her, and for Fay and Clara too, and probably burn Green Pastures down afterwards, the sons of bitches. And then, even if there was a body left over to be buried, there'd be no money for a funeral, or for that pink marble stone, or for the plot. If she had the money, it would be different. Then she could go thumb her nose at the likes of Farron Stroud. Hell, she could even go around in one of those Civil Rights protests and sing about Freedom!

'Fay!' she called out.

'What is it! I'm terribly busy making these sandwiches.'

'Oh, it ain't nothing.' She wanted to ask for another glass, but she had to remember to cut down for these next three days. She'd promised, and in any case it was a good idea to go easy. She upended the glass and sucked at an ice cube to punish her tongue for still insisting on wanting another after she'd told it no.

Alice came in, wrapped in a towel, her black curls dripping water. 'Could I have some pyjamas, please?' she asked.

'Honey, ain't nothing here would fit you. You'll just have to sleep raw, or get along with that towel. Here, let me pin it up over your shoulder.'

Fay came out of the kitchen with a tray of sandwiches.

'Lord, Fay, what kind of stomach you think this child has got! How many sandwiches did you fix?'

Fay's eyes clouded from the effort of explaining: 'But I asked you what to make, peanut butter or jelly or peanut butter and jelly or...'

'All right, all right. You and Dinah go into the kitchen then and have your supper...'

'Breakfast,' Alice corrected, for it was quite six o'clock now, and the sun was creeping into the living-room through every crevice of the closed blinds.

'Your breakfast then, and wash the dishes when you're done.'

'I get first choice,' Fay insisted as she took Alice into the kitchen. 'I get the peanut butter sandwich. You can have the peanut butter and cheese, if you like.'

'No thank you,' said Alice politely.

It was a song in a foreign language, and the plaintive little voice would crack every time it tried to squeeze extra grace notes into the refrain. French?

Yes, French.

Bessy remembered—though she would have liked better to forget—the Creole girl. A pretty little piece, and always singing too. What had her name been? Something out of the way. She wondered what ever had become of her after that night back in '50. Some girls kept in touch, but not what's-her-name. Couldn't much blame her for that. She had a better reason than Bessy to want not to remember. A hell of a thing to happen, and her only having come to Green Pastures a month before or so.

Bessy let her eyes close almost shut so that she could see the room not as it was now but as it had been then, in its moment of glory. Modern? Bessy had felt like a real pioneer when she'd fixed the place up like that. No velvet drapes and coloured glass for her. Those orange lamps she'd had on the end tables—what had ever become of them? Were they up in the attic? Or had they been busted in some sailors' brawl? And now just one poor end table left—and it was missing one wrought-iron leg And the rug: when she'd bought that the salesman had said it wasn't no trouble at all to keep a one hundred per cent nylon rug snowy white. Well, she'd have liked to have shown it to him now! It was so dark that you almost couldn't tell the stains apart from the rest of it.

Modern? Oh, it had been very modern—fifteen years ago. But the one piece of furniture in this room she could trust to last the week out was the rocker she was sitting in—and she'd taken that out of her mother's house, the time her mother had died. There was no telling how old it was. It seemed to Bessy she'd seen it around since she was a little girl no older than ...

Dinah. The smooth gold oak showed through in patches where the varnish had rubbed off, but it looked none the worse for that. She wished she could have said as much for herself.

On the other hand, you take the very newest thing in the room—take that phonograph sitting on the three-legged end-table. The Creole girl had bought that the first week she'd worked at Bessy's, a tiny 45 record player with a thick red spindle and a stubby little arm that clicked and moved for all the world like a kitten's paw digging its claws into the records. All the records there used to be around the house—Blue Moon, Tenderly, Garden in the Rain, Tell Me Why, The Little White Cloud That Cried—all lost, all gone, all scattered to the winds or broken, and the phonograph broken too. Yes, you could take it—and throw it in the garbage!

Time, time, time! How it came sneaking up on a person! How it would trick a person into believing nothing would ever change, that life would always go on the same ... until there you were standing at the very edge of the grave and looking down into it and trying to pretend it wasn't yours but somebody else's...

'Where do I sleep?' asked Alice, who had finished wiping the dishes.

'Can she sleep with me, Bessy, please?'

'No, babydoll—you know Clara wouldn't like that one little bit. Dinah here is going to sleep in Bessy's room.' Bessy heaved herself to her feet—and realised for the first time that she hadn't taken off her hat yet. She was tired.

Herding her little prisoner before her, she climbed the stairs with a sigh for each arduous step. Though it was quite bright outside now, Bessy's room was in semi-darkness. From under her own ruptured double bed she pulled out a trundle bed on squealing casters. She debated changing the sheets—they were anything but fresh—but Alice settled the matter by tumbling into it like she'd been chopped off at her ankles and pushed over. Those pills were still on the job.

Bessy undressed self-consciously, not quite sure that the child wasn't just playing possum, and got into a comfy nightgown—such a relief!—locked the door, pinned the key beneath her arm, and switched off the overhead light. She made absolutely sure that the girl was sound asleep (tickling the soles of her brown little feet), and then she knelt beside her bed and folded her hands.

'Lord?'