Chapter 14

It was as clear as clear could be, it was certain past all doubt, that Green Pastures Funeral Home was nowhere to be but then was her own home on Gwynns River Falls Drive anywhere to go? Besides, there was the matter of her promise to Bessy.

'And what sort of promise is that?' Dinah scoffed. 'A promise made to a desperate criminal!'

'Nevertheless,' Alice returned smugly, 'a promise is a promise.' (It may be that the notion of attempting an escape was also a little scary, but somehow this aspect of the subject was never openly discussed.)

'A prisoner of war is honour-bound to try and escape.'

'Where should I escape to? Answer me that! Home? Maybe Daddy would just bring me right back here. Or to the police? They'll just treat me like those people on the bus treated me, like the man with the beer truck treated me, because they only see my black skin.'

'What about Uncle Jason?' Dinah asked reasonably.

There was no denying that her uncle had always been nice to her, so Alice veered off on a new tangent: It's all very well to say "Go to Uncle Jason"—I suppose it seems a very simple matter for you—but have you thought where Uncle Jason is? He's in Baltimore, and you don't even know where you are.'

'We're in Norfolk,' Dinah said, though not quite confidently, since her source of information had been Fay.

'And how do you intend to get to Baltimore from a city that may or may not be Norfolk? You can't very well ride a bus without money for a ticket.'

'Oh, will you can it!' said Clara, coming into the kitchen, where this dialogue had been going on. 'I may have to be a goddamned baby-sitter, but I sure as hell don't have to put up with your crazy jabber.'

'I'm very sorry, I'm sure,' Alice said with an etiquette as lofty as the ineffable Miss Boyd's. Then, seeing that she'd offended Clara, she quickly went on: 'I can recite Jabberwocky. Would you like to hear it?'

'Yeah,' said Clara, though by the way she said it you would have thought she didn't really mean it. Alice was uncertain therefore whether to recite or not. She began, in a tiny voice:

'Twas brillig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimhle in the wabe: All mimsy .. .'

'I'll mimsy you, Miss Uppity!' Clara growled in her manliest manner. She was wearing her usual off-duty ensemble of denim trousers and jacket, which contrasted strangely with the cloying smell of the spilt cologne. Half an hour's bathing had not been able to efface the smell.

'You wouldn't talk like that if Bessy were here.'

Shortly after the phone call from Roderick, Bessy had had an attack of trembling for which, she claimed, the only cure was a good stiff one and then a bit of a nap. Alice couldn't understand how anyone could go back to bed within three hours of getting up and had protested violently when Bessy had wanted to take her upstairs with her. She'd promised then to be very, very good and mind Clara in every respect.

'I'll Bessy you!' Clara said, not at all reasonably. 'Come here, smarty-pants!' Alice moved towards her reluctantly. 'C'mon, c'mon! Godammit.' A scrawny hand, all bumpy with purple veins, seized the soft flesh of Alice's upper arm.

'Ow! don't do that! Ow!' Then her head jerked back till the bones of her neck grated and she was looking at the cracks in the ceiling. Clara had hit her! Hit her across the face with her other hand. It was so incredible (grown-ups don't hit children, do they?) that Alice didn't make a sound. She was simply thunderstruck.

'You'll learn to put on your uppity manners around me, little black girl! You think just because you're white you gotta be treated like some goddam princess? Well, you ain't going to be, not here. No, you're black as I am now, and you're gonna get treated black.' Clara was pulling her out through the swinging doors into the living-room, where Fay was nursing her 'baby' at her breast. She looked up from this tender task reprovingly.

'Fay, pull down the shades. I'm going to teach this here piccaninny a lesson or two.' Fay's full, pink-swathed figure bounced about the room, and presently they were in semi-darkness. Alice was made to sit on the sofa between the two women. The scent of their cologne was so strong that Alice felt like vomiting.

'Why?' she asked, forcing herself to sound calm, and imitating (though she did not know it) Miss Godwin. 'Why do you want to pick on me? I never did anything to you, did I? Did I?'

Clara laughed roughly. To me? No. No, you never did a thing to me, baby. But let me tell you some facts of life. I been living in this world for more years than I care to remember, and it's a white man's world, and I been living by the white man's rules, and did I ask them why? But now you are in my world, babydoll, and I make the rules here. Fay, take her arms.'

Fay, though in other ways still a child, had a grown-up's strength; it did no good to struggle against her.

'I hate you,' Clara whispered, but though her previous tone had communicated just this sentiment, she pronounced these three words with something like affection. With one hand she began unbuttoning Alice's dress at the back; with the other she held a doubled-up extension cord.

'I've never given you any reason to hate me,' Alice pointed out, still striving after calmness.

'I hate you because you're white. That's reason enough, and more.'

'But she ain't white, Clara,' Fay protested. 'She's almost as black as you.'

'Shut up, stupid. She only looks black. Inside, she's all white.'

Alice had braced herself against the expected blow, but the extension cord came down not on her back but across her bare thighs, left exposed by the too-young dress. She yelped with pain.

'Now, don't you make any noise, or you'll only get it worse.' But of course her only hope lay in waking Bessy, so she screamed again, louder. Clara's thin hand clamped down across Alice's face, not just silencing her but—since it pinched her nostrils shut—smothering her as well. Alice tried to struggle free, but Clara seemed to be on top of her, she couldn't move, she felt herself grow faint... The doorbell rang. 'Damn!' said Clara.

She began buttoning up Alice's dress. 'Fay, you go answer that.'

'I hope it's not a John,' Fay whined. 'Because I haven't finished feeding my little Alice yet.'

It was indeed a John, the same hawk-faced man who had been here just last night.

'Well, hello again,' said Clara. 'We can't hardly keep you away these days, can we?'

'Hello, um, Clara.' Farron was scarcely audible. He lifted his eyes from the floor, before they had lifted quite to Clara's face he eyes encountered Alice. A thin tip of tongue licked across his thin lips. Is, um, is she ...?'

Clara's hand came down to play in Alice's kinky hair. 'You asking after my little cousin Dinah here? Naw, Farron, forget about it. You could never get that much money.'

Farron had come to stand over Clara and Alice. Alice snuggled back into the sofa, obscurely frightened. 'What's that smell ?' Farron asked.

'It's that goddamned Fay,' said Clara. 'She broke my cologne bottle.' They started talking about the cologne bottle and forgot about Alice. They were halfway up the stairs when Clara called back: 'Fay, you look after little Dinah good and proper now, understand? She isn't supposed to go outdoors. Otherwise ...' There was a slap of leather against wood, and Alice saw Farron's legs tremble.

When they were alone, Alice asked, 'Does Clara ever hit you, Fay?'

'Oh, lots of times.'

'Why don't you tell Bessy about it?'

'Can't. If I do that, Clara says she'll kill me dead.' Fay stuck her thumb in her mouth and made a popping sound, either by way of demonstration or simply to punctuate her remark.

'How?'

'With a poison stick. She has a poison stick that she hides in her closet, and if I don't do just what she says she'll touch me with it, and anywhere she touches me, even my littlest toe, then I'll die!'

Fay, Alice decided, was surely the stupidest, most gullible grown-up that Alice had ever met, and she had met some very stupid grown-ups.

'I know a fun game,' said Alice.

Fay began to chew on a strand of loose blonde hair with anticipation. 'What is it? Do I know how to play?'

'Hide-and-go-seek. I hide somewhere, and you have to find me. You want to play that?'

Fay bit into the pink fudge that was her lower lip. 'I'd like to, but I don't think I'd better. Clara wouldn't like it, if you ran away.' There were, it seemed, limits to Fay's credulity.

Then I know another fun game. It's called Don't-Peek. We both close our eyes, and the first person who peeks is the loser.'

After a few games of Don't-Peek, Alice realised that this idea had been no better than the first. By the clock on the wall she measured the time it took Fay to peek, and it was always less than a minute. Not nearly time to do what she had in mind. The episode with Clara had resolved all her hesitancies about escape.

'I know an even better game,' she said determinedly. 'But we'll need some bottles and plates.' She dragged Fay and her baby into the kitchen. There were two cartons of empty Coke bottles under the sink, and Fay took down a stack of saucers from the cupboard. Alice showed her how to stack them: a bottle, a plate, a bottle...

Fay squealed with delighted expectation: 'If you put another one on top of those now, it's going to fall down for sure.'

'Now, this game is called Tower-of-Babel, and here's how we play it. I get the kitchen and you get the living-room. Whoever makes his stack first'—she handed Fay a carton of bottles and six saucers; Fay left her doll lying on the counter—'has to run and catch the other one. For instance, if I get my stack done then I run in and tag you and say, "You're it!" and then I've won. But if you get all your bottles and saucers piled first, then you run and tag me, and then you're the winner.'

'What does the winner get?'

'The winner gets to be Queen of Babylon. Okay?' She led Fay back out into the living-room, to a spot that afforded no view into the kitchen, and started her building her Tower. 'Now, in case any of your saucers should break, here's an extra supply.'

Back in the kitchen, she quietly pulled the linoleum-topped table in place underneath the high half-window. Standing on the table she was tall enough to pry open the window halfways but still too short to climb out through it. From the living-room there was a sound of crashing and shattering, followed by a fit of giggling. Alice pulled out three drawers from the kitchen counter (the first held cooking utensils, the second pot-holders and dish-towels, the third two bottles of Bessy's cheap gin) and stacked them criss-cross on top of the table.

'Are you building your tower?' Fay called into the kitchen.

'Oh yes,' Alice said. 'And I'm almost finished.' In testimony she kicked the carton of coke bottles and threw a saucer on the floor. 'Ohhh, it fell down!'

She took a medium-sized paper bag from the niche beside the icebox and put in a quart carton of milk and a loaf of bread. Unfortunately, there was no lunch meat left. This way she would have something to eat during the day, and it would look, to a casual observer, as though she were just carrying home groceries. She found her copy of Just-So Stories underneath School for Sinners and put that in her grocery bag. Then, just out of mischief, she stuffed in Fay's baby.

She peeked into the living-room where Fay sat discouraged, picking her nose. 'I'm almost done,' she screamed, frightening Fay into a second flurry of building.

Grocery bag in hand, she mounted to the table top, then climbed up the makeshift, unsteady steps. Raised as far as it would go, the window was just wide enough to crawl through. With a prayer that the carton would not split, she threw the bag down into the weeds. She climbed through the window head first, then realised she would have to go back and try it the other way. She didn't fancy dropping six feet—more than six feet—on to her head! There was a crashing sound behind her—Fay's second tower crashing down. Her toe reached back for a foothold on the topmost drawer, she felt the drawer teeter and slip away. Closing her eyes, she pushed herself through the window and off the sill. She landed with a clatter of kitchen utensils. She was free. She picked up the grocery bag and started to run.

The milk was so warm and ooky it was like yogurt, and the spout hadn't opened out the way it should have, so that she'd spilled milk all down the front of her dress. And her feet! Her feet were raw in these wretched, toe-crimping saddle shoes. But she couldn't very well go barefoot over the blistering, July-afternoon pavements. When she'd sat down on the kerbstone to have her lunch, she'd taken off the shoes and put them in the grocery bag, but as soon as she started walking again ...

She was tired, terribly tired, so tired she wouldn't think in a straight line. She'd walked and walked for hours, and she simply couldn't find a way out of the city. Norfolk was a trap for pedestrians: it was bounded on every side by water. The only road going north went through the big bridge-and-tunnel across the Bay, but it was closed to foot traffic. If only she could get a map of the city, but when she'd gone into a filling station to ask for one, the attendant had treated her with unimaginable rudeness. Really, it was most perplexing and impossible.

Discouraging too, perhaps? No, she wouldn't let herself

become discouraged, and this brave resolve she strengthened by reciting to herself a verse from a poem that her father used once to read to her:

In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud: Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody_t but unbowed. But the poem made her think of her father... Her own father... A tear plopped into the warm milk.

Almost a block away, where the other people had been sitting down along the street, a car stopped and four men in red and white silk gowns, like Episcopal choir members at Christmas, got out. Similarly-gowned men were appearing from other directions, and there were policemen, in two different kinds of uniforms. Alice reasoned, from these many evidences, that a parade was about to begin, or perhaps it had just ended. Ordinarily she would have enjoyed seeing a parade.

'And just what do you think you're doing?'

For the first time Alice noticed the boots in front of her. Her gaze travelled up the gabardine-clad legs, past the gunbelt, the khaki shirt (with silver numbers on the collars), to the large, red, and extremely foreshortened face. The face wobbled atop its tower of flesh, as the policeman (whose face it was) rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet.

'I'm having my lunch,' Alice said. 'Sir,' she added, for he looked angry enough to be called 'sir'.

'Come on,' he sighed. 'Move along.'

'Couldn't I finish my lunch first? I'm not in anybody's way here, am I?'

He grabbed her up so suddenly that the bottle of milk was knocked over. 'Oh dear!' The accumulated sorrows of the day seemed to reach the threshold of the intolerable, and Alice would have broken out into a flood of tears if she hadn't reminded herself that she would be crying literally over spilt milk. This was such a droll idea that instead of tears she burst into giggles.

'Where you come from? You don't talk like any piccaninny from around here.'

'Baltimore,' she replied, watching the last of the spilt milk trickling down a gutter grating.

The policeman said, 'Uh-huh.' He took her hand and led her into the crowd of people that had gathered about the other people who had sat down (and who were now singing hymns).

There was evidently not to be a parade, after all; in fact, there was something like a traffic jam going on. Car horns honked festively.

'Now I want you to point out your mammy and pappy to me, hear?'

To please the policeman, she looked over all the hymn singers carefully, though it seemed highly improbable that she would find either of her parents here. There were Negroes of all ages, and a number of white teenagers, and a very old white woman who was the loudest of them all, though she sang off-key. 'I don't see my mother or father anywhere,' she said, truthfully.'

'Uh-huh.' He didn't seem to believe her.

At the periphery of the crowd the general uproar came to a sudden, sharp focus. The people at the edge of the crowd were pushed forward, right into the laps of the people sitting down. In the ensuing melee, one of the gowned men began to kick the old woman who sang off-key. Alice could scarcely believe her eyes. The old woman hadn't done a thing to provoke him; besides, grown-up men just don't kick old ladies, no matter what old ladies may do! Others of the red-robed men cheered him on: 'That's it, Lem!' or 'Kick her goddam ass off!' And that kind of language. Nobody tried to help the poor old woman. Her friends just sat there singing sad hymns. Perhaps the two groups belonged to different religions.

'Uh-huh,' the policeman said again, faintly. He let go of Alice's hand and pushed his way through the crowd to the man in red, who stopped kicking to talk with him. His compatriots made a disappointed noise, but the group sitting down kept on singing so that Alice couldn't hear what the policeman said to him. Even the old woman was singing again, though not so loudly. An approaching police siren or fire klaxon tried to drown out the hymn.

A man in a grey suit, with slicked-back hair that made Alice think of a seal, appeared beside her and thrust a microphone at her. 'I'm Averill Hotchkiss of KHGG-TV's Hotline News. And what's your name, sweety-pie?'

'Alice,' she said after a moment's indecision. 'Alice Raleigh.'

'Look into the camera now.' Talking all the while, he turned her about so that she was staring into what appeared to be the window of a mobile and highly-elaborate automatic washing-machine. 'Now, what's that name again?'

'ALICE!'

'Alice! Well, Alice, what do you think of all this trouble?'

'I don't know what to think. I don't think that man should be kicking the poor old ...'

'A terrible thing, yes. What about school Alice? Do you want to go to the same school as little white girls?'

Alice looked perplexed. Away from a mirror, it was hard for her to bear in mind that she was no longer a little white girl herself. 'I don't see why not. Shouldn't I want to?'

Averill Hotchkiss disappeared into the crowd, trailing behind frail, inaudible burblings and the cord of the microphone. Awkwardly, the mobile washing-machine lumbered after him. It wasn't till that moment that Alice realised she'd just appeared on television.

There was the problem now of food, a problem she had never been confronted with before. Never, at least, with any urgency. It was after six o'clock and she hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast. It was all very well to be free, but did it have to mean starving to death? At least at Bessy's she'd always had enough to eat.

It was a pity about her loaf of bread. She'd taken it out of the grocery bag, and when the policeman had taken her into the crowd, she'd had to leave both behind. When she'd gone back for them, the grocery bag with the book and the doll (and her ragtag shoe) were still there, but not the loaf of bread. She would have traded everything else to get that bread back now. It was ridiculous: here she was, an heiress for pity's sake, and she didn't have the price of a Salted Nut Roll!

It was then she chanced to look up (her eyes seldom left the endless plain of the pavement now; she was numb with weariness) and to see the gilt letters in the dusty window. Because of the narrowness of the storefront the letters were bowed upward in an arch:

STAN'S USED BOOKS AND MAGAZINES

Covers of used magazines were Scotch-taped to the glass: sun-bleached Playboy's, Rogue's and Knight's, their nudes and demi-nudes changed to various sickly shades of blue and yellow. A few dead flies had somehow managed to wedge themselves down between the magazines and the window.

'Why, that's it!' Dinah said aloud. (For Alice had better manners than to talk to herself on the street.) 'You can sell your book!'

'Sell my book?' Alice asked incredulously. 'Sell the book that Uncle Jason gave to me? A first edition of Kipling?'

'All the more reason, my dear. If it sells for a lot of money, you may have enough left over after you eat to buy a bus ticket. At least to the other side of the Bay. In any case, what else can you do?'

Dinah, in her usual utilitarian way, was absolutely right, so she pushed open the heavy door, triggering a bell in the farthest reaches of the shop, dark as another Africa. Alice waited demurely before the main counter of the bookstore and passing the time (as the owner seemed to be in no hurry) by looking over the titles: The Kama Sutra (with an introduction by L. T. Woodward, M.D.), The Perfumed Garden (with an Introduction by L. T. Woodward, M.D.), Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Song of the Whip (no author mentioned on the cover), City of Night, by John Rechy, and Psychopathia Sexualis (with an Introduction by L. T. Woodward, M.D.).

'Hello?' Alice called back into the obscurer depths. 'Is anybody home?'

'Aak? Unx? Mmp!' Then he appeared, a squat balding man with a funny hobbling walk like a chimpanzee's. His dirty white shirt was open to reveal a dirty white tee-shirt, the neck of which had been so badly stretched out of shape that an unseemly amount of his pink, fuzzy chest was exposed to common view. His face was sprinkled with more than one day's growth of salt-and-pepper beard, and his eyes, like the recesses of the shop out of which he had just emerged, were deeply, darkly shadowed.

'I'd like to sell this book to you, sir,' Alice said, taking Just-So Stories out of the grocery bag.

'What? Yaa?' He snatched the book out of her hand. 'Wha! Whaziss?' He looked at Alice intently, then back at the book. He opened it to the title page, snorting still more fiercely.

'Is something the matter?' Alice asked concernedly.

'Where you steal it, kid?'

'It's mine! It's my own book. It was a present to me from my uncle.'

'Ya'spect me to believe a story like that?' He punctuated this question with a very rhinoceros of a snort.

Tears came into her eyes. 'But it is! Really, really, it is!'

'Fifty cents,' he murmured, as though to himself. 'I can give you fifty cents. It's more than you'll get anywhere else in town, but I've got a soft heart.' He touched his soft heart, where his lank tee-shirt hung down to reveal it. 'Look, this is my price sheet. I can't pay any more than what it says here,' He waved a sheaf of typed papers, dirty as his shirt, in her face.

'Are you sure that's all? Because it's a first edition, you know. A first edition of Kipling.'

'So? So, who reads Kipling? This is what people read nowadays ...' He waved a dirty hand at the dirty books spread out on the dirty counter. With his other hand he held out a fifty-cent piece of not more than usual dirtiness. Alice only hesitated a moment before accepting it. Only half a block away, she remembered, there was a restaurant where fifty cents would buy a hamburger and french fries.

When the little nigger girl had left his shop, Stan hobbled back into the darkness, holding the tattered old book with sacramental respect. He looked at the gin bottle, then at the telephone. He decided to make the phone call first.

A different woman answered than the woman who had called him that morning.

'About that book you were asking after?' Stan wheezed. Those Just-So Stories! Well, I got the edition you want. So you can bring your money—I can't take no cheques, sorry—to Stan's Books on 47 Truslove Street. When can you be here by? I'll stay open late if you'll send someone tonight.'

'I'm afraid, sir, that a rather urgent matter has come up that's taken everyone but myself out of the office. I'm just answering the phone here, and I really can't tell you anything about that book. And I can't say for certain when anyone will be coming back. So maybe the best thing would be for you to call back sometime in the morning.'

'In the morning?'

'Yes, in the morning. After nine o'clock. That would be best. Thank you, sir.'

Stan held the receiver to his ear long after she'd hung up. Then he began to swear. Fifty cents! Fifty cents down the drain! He poured himself a glass of gin and stared at the traitorous phone until the half-light of the July afternoon had become a quarter-light and finally none at all. It never rang again that night.