Chapter 9

Surely there is nothing more dreadful than the darkness of a strange house—or, more dreadful yet, a funeral parlour; surely there is nothing more dangerous than to tiptoe right beneath the nose of the snoring giant; surely there is nothing quite so adventurous, once one is a little over the shock, as being kidnapped. Of course, in the strict sense Bessy's bedroom might not have qualified as dark, despite all that the curtains and the blinds could do; nor was it, as much as Alice might have liked, strange (imagine, though, if the walls had been stone! Imagine portraits of the ancestors; imagine a curse; imagine bloodstains on the tapestry, or, for that matter, imagine the tapestry!), nor yet a funeral parlour—any more. Bessy, however, came as close as one could fairly ask of a person to being a giant, and Alice was tiptoeing almost beneath her nose, and she was, beyond a quibble, kidnapped, which was, after all, the essential thing.

She raised a slat of the blind and peeked out...

... and there was nothing to see! Water—muddy brown water, much more than Alice could have swum across. Pressing herself against the window pane and looking straight down she could see tufts of marshy-looking grass. There must, she decided, be a better way to escape than climbing down from this window.

The door to the hall was locked, she had heard Bessy lock it, but there were two other doors that she hadn't locked. The first proved to be a closet, smelling of lilies-of-the-valley and mouldy shoes. The second opened on to a dreadfully messy bathroom—on the other side of which there was another door. Alice closed the door to Bessy's room behind her, and now the darkness was dark, since the bathroom was windowless and the transoms above the doors were shut tight. She moved barefoot across the chilly tiles with delicious stealth and felt for the knob of the other door. It opened ... and there, near enough to reach out and touch, was Fay, asleep! What a strange house it was where everyone went to bed in the morning!

Sleeping in a twin bed across the room was Clara, also (and very audibly) asleep. And the door from their bedroom to the hall was ajar. She would escape!

Down the hall, down the stairs, then quickly across the living-room to the front door: ah, but of course that was locked. It should be a simple matter, then, to climb out of a window— but there was no way to open the living-room's big picture window, and the smaller window on the farther wall proved just as intractable, for the latch was sealed tight with layers and layers, years and years, of white enamel. The kitchen window was small and too high for Alice to reach without the help of a stepladder. But there were still all those other rooms along the hallway; one of them, surely ...

But better than that there was another doorway at the end of the downstairs hallway, a back door, and Bessy hadn't thought to lock it.

From the ledge of the door to the ground was a sheer drop of three or four feet into marsh grass and mud of an uncertain consistency. Alice hated to get dirty, but people had dared worse fates: Jean Valjean, for instance, had escaped from that terrible police inspector by wading through the Paris sewers, compared to which a little mud...

That's quicksand, you know,' came a voice from behind her. It was Clara, wearing a filmy nightgown and smiling in an ugly way—though perhaps that was the only way she knew to smile. 'You jump down into that crap, and it'll be the last we'll see of you. You'll just be swallowed up, gobbled.' She made a sound indicative of this process.

'But if it were quicksand, the whole house would sink!' Alice protested.

'Well, you just go ahead and jump into it, if you don't believe me. Why do you think nobody bothers to lock that door? 'Cause no burglar's going to come in that way.'

'Then it's a dumb place to build a house.'

'The house was here before the quicksand. The quicksand came when the tidewater started backing up, and the tidewater started backing up when they built that big tunnel under the bay. And as a matter of fact, the house is sinking, but it just takes longer for a house to go down than for a person. You're a pretty little girl, did you know that? What'd you say your name was?'

'Oh no, I'm ugly,' Alice said with conviction. She wanted to add: 'And I'm not really black at all,' but she was afraid that would seem unkind, or even prejudiced, to Clara, who was so very black.

'Well, that makes two of us,' Clara said agreeably. 'But cheer up, kid—looks ain't everything.' She seemed in a much better temper now than she had only minutes before. 'How you come to be staying here?' she asked. 'Are you some relation of Bessy's?'

Alice lowered her eyes. Maybe Clara didn't know ... Was it possible that she would be willing, then, to help her escape?

'How old did you say you was? Twelve? You look older'n that to me.' Clara rumped Alice's black curls in an almost affectionate way.

'Did Bessy tell you that I'm...'

'Mm-hmm? What's that, gingerbread?'

'... kidnapped? '

Obviously, Bessy had not told her, for her eyes became just that degree more protuberant than they had been.

'Yes, I'm kidnapped. Bessy and two other men kidnapped me, and I'm being held for ransom. I live in Baltimore, and my real name is Alice Raleigh. Dinah was my name when I was sick.'

'Sounds like you ain't got over it.'

'Oh, I'm quite well now, thanks to...' Alice's eyes clouded over, but only for a moment. 'But that's all over now, and in any case it's of no interest to you. You will help me to escape, won't you? You can boost me up to the kitchen window, I can't reach it myself, and Bessy need never know ... need she?'

'How much ransom?' 

'I don't know about that part. A lot, I suppose. I'm rather rich, you see, and I'm not ... a Negro. Though of course there's nothing to be ashamed of. Being one, I mean.'

'You sure look black, honey,' Clara commented sceptically.

'It's because she made me take pills. I hope she has pills that will turn me white again.'

'I've been hoping that all my life, kid.'

'It's true. Look at my eyes, my eyes are blue.'

Clara looked into Alice's eyes, smiling that mean smile of hers. Alice felt herself blushing and wondered if it were noticeable. Did coloured people blush?

'Will you help me, Clara? If you do help me, I'm sure my uncle will give you a reward.'

Clara's eyelids tightened about her large eyes. 'You're sure of that, huh?'

'Oh, positive. After all, it will save him paying the ransom.' 'Well, I ain't so sure. I'm a lot surer of getting some of that ransom, now that I know what's going on. How much do you think it'll be? How much has your uncle got?' 

'Then you won't help me?'

'I'll help you upstairs. That's where I'll help you. You must git yourself some sleep on that bed Bessy made up for you. And be quiet, understand. I don't want you waking her up.'

Clara locked the door between Bessy's bedroom and the bathroom. There was no escaping now, so Alice went quietly and quickly to sleep. She dreamt of a great snowball fight on a vast field of ice between the polar bears and the penguins. Every time that Dinah (for that is who she was in her dream) threw a snowball, big fat white hairy Mrs. Buckler would catch it and fry it and eat it, which became very frustrating in time, though it was not, exactly a nightmare.

The hardest part of being kidnapped, for a person of any intelligence, is the boredom, for kidnappers, however thorough their preparations may be in other areas, do not as a rule make provision for the entertainment of the kidnapee. There was nothing for Alice to do; there was nothing for Alice to read; there was nothing for Alice to think. Bessy had allowed her the run of the house, after securing her promise that she wouldn't try to get away (and warning her, once more, of the quicksand below the back door) or talk to anybody else that came in the house. She had to promise to go in to the bathroom or the kitchen, whichever was nearest, whenever the doorbell rang, and to stay there until the visitor had either gone away or up the stairs. It wasn't much of a bargain, since aside from the giant bathtub there were few interesting features to the house, one bedroom being very much like another, but at least it was better than being confined in Bessy's hot bedroom day and night, drenched in the cloying odour of her cologne.

She read through Just-So Stories once more, but she was a fast reader and finished it in under two hours. Bessy had tried to find her something about the house to read, but there wasn't anything, not a thing.

Clara, late in the afternoon, offered to play checkers with her. Alice asked if she wouldn't really rather play chess, and Clara used some of her filthiest language.

Bessy said, 'You watch that, Clara, or I'm going to have to wash your mouth out with soap.'

Clara said, 'Up yours!' Bessy just chuckled.

Clara proved to be a very poor checkers player. She never planned her moves ahead, and Alice trounced her three times running. They never did find all the checkers, after that.

There was no television set, but there was a staticky old radio. From nine till eleven on Sunday night, Alice sat with Bessy in the kitchen listening to the Top Forty and memorising the words of the songs. Or she would draw pictures with a ballpoint pen on Bessy's stationery (which smelled, like almost everything that belonged to Bessy, of lilies-of-the-valley), but she never had learned how to do good likenesses, and a ballpoint wasn't much good for anything else. For self-expression in the manner of Miss Braggs, she needed crayons or finger paints.

'I'm very bored,' Alice said. It was no longer a fresh observation, but it was more than ever true.

Tell you what, Dinah,' said Bessy, 'why don't you and me make some rice pudding? You know how to do that?'

'My mother doesn't let me cook. She says it's beneath my station.'

'Lord! Eleven years old and can't cook.' Bessy shook her head.

'I'd love to learn,' Alice insisted, 'if you'll teach me.'

By two o'clock that night all the visitor's had gone away, and while Bessy and Clara 'killed a pint', Fay and Alice ate the whole pot of rice pudding. Fay kept complaining that Alice had taken all the raisins for herself.

'I have not. I've had fewer raisins than you.'

'You have,' Fay insisted, on the verge of tears.

'Oh, for heaven's sake!' said Alice.

'You're a greedy old pig!'

'No I ain't! You're...' Alice caught her breath. She had said ain't, a word that she had never used in her life. But no one seemed to have noticed. Bessy was glassy-eyed from the liquor, and Clara had learned not to listen when Fay started to whine, as, after a night's work, she usually did.

'Yes you are,' Fay whined now. 'You're a pig, pig, pig!'

'No I ain't,' said the little black girl. 'I ain't a pig.'

'Come on, Dinah,' Bessy said. 'It's your bedtime.'

Bessy rocked back and forth in her rocker, humming a hymn. It was early—eleven o'clock on Monday morning, and things seemed to have settled into a comfortable routine. Little Dinah, now that she was over the shock of being turned black, had straightened herself out, and the only fuss she made now was the one fuss kids will make anywhere, any time—she fussed that she was bored. You'd think just being kidnapped would be enough for a child, but no, she had to do something.

Bessy did what she could. Yesterday she'd dug up a stack of Clara's old movie magazines that she'd tied up and stored in a spare bedroom to keep till the Boy Scouts came around on one of their paper drives. Wasn't a girl in the world that didn't like to read movie magazines. Not Dinah though. And Fay's comics, the same way—just turned up her nose at them. And then she'd holler because she didn't have anything to read! Well, try and reason with a child!

'There must be something,' Alice said. 'Don't you have any books?'

'Read that book you brought here.' 'I've read it. Twice.'

'I don't think all that reading's healthy for you. You'll ruin your eyes.'

'All right—then let me listen to the radio.'

'I told you—you can't turn the radio on when Clara's asleep. She don't sleep so good, and when she gets waked by noise she can make a real scene. Why don't you draw some pictures, like you did last night?' Bessy had been no little bit disturbed by Alice's scribbly, slashy drawings the evening before. She wondered if the girl might not be getting mentally. People that think and read too much, she was convinced, were in danger of getting mentally.

'Oh, I know I'm not any good at drawing. Don't you have any books?'

'You go look in my bedroom closet. There may be some books there that I never found to give to the Boy Scouts. But be quiet on those stairs!'

An hour later Bessy began to wonder what was keeping the girl so quiet, quietness being unnatural in a child, and went up to investigate. Even before she was in the room she could hear Alice giggling to herself. Trust a child to find mischief.

But when she opened the door, she was just sitting on the bed reading a big thick red book, which Bessy didn't remember having around the house.

'What you reading that's so amusing, child?'

Giggling, Alice lifted the book up so that Bessy could read the faded gilt letters on the cover: Feminine Hygiene, by L. T. Woodward, M.D.

'Lord, that ain't no fit book for young girls.' Bessy grabbed it and carried it downstairs to the kitchen, where she placed it on the top shelf of the cupboard, well out of Alice's reach. 'Books

like that are for when you get my age,' she admonished. 'You mean I can't read anything I want to?' At home I can.'

'This ain't your home, and I don't want to send you back to Baltimore with no funny ideas. So while I'm at it I'd better check what other trash I got in that closet up there.' Bessy laboured back up the stairs, fumbling for the gold-rimmed glasses she kept in her purse. It mattered little that she couldn't find them, for their chief purpose had been ornamental and ritualistic rather than optical. She rummaged in the mouldy carton of books on the floor of her closet. Out came Passion Fruit, Forever Amber, Mimi, Harlot of Babylon, and a dozen other paperback novels, their spines split with many readings, their soiled covers depicting more or less the same full-bosomed redhead or blonde or brunette in a torn blouse with a gun in her hand, or a sword, or a whip. In the end Bessy had to carry the whole carton down to the kitchen, leaving Alice only a Gideon Bible, a copy of The Little Engine That Could (Fay's?), and Prescott's The Conquest of Mexico.  After further deliberation Bessy returned and removed the last-named book as well.

'Well gee, what am I going to read?' Alice demanded.

There's worse reading than the Bible. When I was a little girl, my Daddy read to us children every night from the Bible. Whatever else I may have to regret in my life, I ain't never regretted that.'

'Don't you ever read anything, Bessy? Even my mother read something.'

'No, I've never been much of a reader. 'Bout the only thing I ever look at any more is Sunrise, and a few magazines like that.'

'Could I look at those, then? Before you put them up on that shelf.'

'Oh, you can look at those all right. Ain't nothing in them to harm a young mind.'

'Bessy?' Alice asked a short time later, when they were both sitting in the living-room. 'Why do you read undertaking magazines?'

'Oh, I'm going to have me a nice big funeral one of these days, and I read through those magazines so I'll know what I'm putting my money into. There's more kinds of coffins and fancy trimmings these days than you'd believe possible, and each kind has got different advantages. Some coffins is got silk inside, and others is brocade, and I even read about one of Brussels lace. Wouldn't I like that! Costs a couple of hundred dollars more though. I didn't have any idea how complicated it all was till I moved in to this place. You see, I bought Green Pastures at auction, after the man who owned it, old Mr. Washburn, went and died, and after I moved in these magazines just kept right on coming to the address. I don't suppose they really belong to me, but the post office won't take them back, 'cause they're not first-class mail, so I always had 'em around the house. Then one day I got to looking at one. Well, you know how it says in Scripture—Vanity of vanities, the Preacher says, all is vanity. It's all just vanity and vexation, everything a person tries to do, and the wise man dieth even as the fool. And a bit farther on it says—there's a time to be born and a time to die. Well child, it's clear as day that this ain't my time to be born.' 

It was Monday night, and Alice, sitting atop the kitchen table, was playing a game of chess with Dinah, who was winning. Since the chess pieces were only checkers and bottlecaps and medicine bottles, it sometimes was hard to remember just which pieces were which.  Bessy, Clara, and Fay were sitting out in the living-room, waiting for a friend called John.

She was so tired of them, tired of Green Pastures and the unreasonable hours one had to keep here, tired of the Top Forty songs on the radio, and tired, especially, of her black skin. She vowed to herself, that when she got home, when the medicine wore off, she would never, never again wish for a suntan. Her skin would always be just as white as her mother's —a beautiful translucent sick-bed white.

'You're in check,' Dinah said. 'Why can't you keep your mind on the game?' She adjusted the position of the pink plastic doll (decently clad now in a handkerchief) so that it could concentrate better on the game.

Alice made a move.

'If you move there, I'll take your queen, stupid.' Alice took back the move.

'You should have castled on your last turn. Now it's too late.'

'If you won't be quiet and let me concentrate...'

'Do you know what I think?' Dinah said meditatively—for her mind was not really on the game either. '... then I shall have to concede!' Alice concluded loftily. 'I think they must have had help, that's what I think.' 'Who?'

The kidnappers. Bessy and Harry and the one who said he was the chauffeur. They had help from someone who knew you. How else would they know Miss Godwin's car was broken down? How else would they know about me?'

'You don't exist,' said Alice.

'I could say the same of you if I wanted,' Dinah pointed out to the pink plastic doll. 'I was only trying to help.'

'Who do you think helped them? Uncle Jason? Miss Godwin? Don't be silly!'

'What about... Mrs. Buckler?'

A rather frightened look came into Alice's eyes. 1 told you never to mention Mrs. Buckler! You don't suppose that she... ?'

This conversation was interrupted by the ringing of the front door. Bessy peeked through the blinds in front of the picture window and announced, with some relief, that it was John. Alice pushed open the swinging door between the kitchen and the living-room just a crack to see him. He was a white man, and nearly as skinny as Clara, with a thin beak of a nose and pale, Wary eyes.

'Well, if it ain't Farron Stroud!' said Bessy heavily. 'What a pleasure to see you, Farron, after all this time.'

Farron Stroud moistened his lips and cleared his throat but still found himself without a voice.

'We ain't seen you for so long we thought you must be spending every night making election speeches. Can't read a newspaper these days, without seeing your face in it.'

'Um, as a matter of fact, I was just this evening... Um, where is... Um, I hope she isn't already ...'

'I'm right here, lover,' said Clara. 'If you'd look up from the floor a minute, you'd see me.'

Clara and Farron went upstairs together. Clara, who was wearing her usual levis, had removed the wide leather belt from them, and was thwacking it on her thigh energetically.

Bessy came into the kitchen and found Alice peeking out through the door, but she didn't seem put out by it. She turned on the radio, and for half an hour they listened to the Top Forty with the volume turned all the way up. That was how Alice liked best to listen, but Bessy hadn't allowed it because of the neighbours. The neighbours—and here it was after midnight!

Try and reason with an adult!