In Love and Trouble (8 page)

This curse-prayer was regularly used and taught by rootworkers, but since I did not know it by heart, as Tante Rosie did, I recited it straight from Zora Neale Hurston’s book,
Mules and Men,
and Mrs. Kemhuff and I learned it on our knees together. We were soon dressing the candles in vinegar, lighting them, kneeling and praying—intoning the words rhythmically—as if we had been doing it this way for years. I was moved by the fervor with which Mrs. Kemhuff prayed. Often she would clench her fists before her closed eyes and bite the insides of her wrists as the women do in Greece.

3

According to courthouse records Sarah Marie Sadler, “the little moppet,” was born in 1910. She was in her early twenties during the Depression. In 1932 she married Ben Jonathan Holley, who later inherited a small chain of grocery stores and owned a plantation and an impressive stand of timber. In the spring of 1963, Mrs. Holley was fifty-three years old. She was the mother of three children, a boy and two girls; the boy a floundering clothes salesman, the girls married and oblivious, mothers themselves.

The elder Holleys lived six miles out in the country, their house was large, and Mrs. Holley’s hobbies were shopping for antiques, gossiping with colored women, discussing her husband’s health and her children’s babies, and making spoon bread. I was able to glean this much from the drunken ramblings of the Holleys’ cook, a malevolent nanny with gout, who had raised, in her prime, at least one tan Holley, a preacher whom the Holleys had sent to Morehouse.

“I bet I could get the nanny to give us all the information and nail parings we could ever use,” I said to Tante Rosie. For the grumpy woman drank muscatel like a sow and clearly hated Mrs. Holley. However, it was hard to get her tipsy enough for truly revealing talk and we were quickly running out of funds.

“That’s not the way,” Tante Rosie said one evening as she sat in her car and watched me lead the nanny out of the dreary but secret-evoking recesses of the Six Forks Bar. We had already spent six dollars on muscatel.

“You can’t trust gossips or drunks,” said Tante Rosie. “You let the woman we are working on give you everything you need, and from her own lips.”

“But that is the craziest thing I have ever heard,” I said. “How can I talk to her about putting a fix on her without making her mad, or maybe even scaring her to death?”

Tante Rosie merely grunted.

“Rule number one.
OBSERVATION OF SUBJECT.
Write that down among your crumpled notes.”

“In other words—?”

“Be direct, but not blunt.”

On my way to the Holley plantation I came up with the idea of pretending to be searching for a fictitious person. Then I had an even better idea. I parked Tante Rosie’s Bonneville at the edge of the spacious yard, which was dotted with mimosas and camellias. Tante Rosie had insisted I wear a brilliant orange robe and as I walked it swished and blew about my legs. Mrs. Holley was on the back patio steps, engaged in conversation with a young and beautiful black girl. They stared in amazement at the length and brilliance of my attire.

“Mrs. Holley, I think it’s time for me to go,” said the girl.

“Don’t be silly,” said the matronly Mrs. Holley. “She is probably just a light-skinned African who is on her way somewhere and got lost.” She nudged the black girl in the ribs and they both broke into giggles.

“How do you do?” I asked.

“Just fine, how you?” said Mrs. Holley, while the black girl looked on askance. They had been talking with their heads close together and stood up together when I spoke.

“I am looking for a Josiah Henson”—a runaway slave and the original Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, I might have added. “Could you tell me if he lives on your place?”

“That name sounds awful familiar,” said the black girl.

“Are you
the
Mrs. Holley?” I asked gratuitously, while Mrs. Holley was distracted. She was sure she had never heard the name.

“Of course,” she said, and smiled, pleating the side of her dress. She was a grayish blonde with an ashen untanned face, and her hands were five blunt and pampered fingers each. “And this is my … ah … my friend, Caroline Williams.”

Caroline nodded curdy.

“Somebody told me ole Josiah might be out this way. …”

“Well, we hadn’t seen him,” said Mrs. Holley. “We were just here shelling some peas, enjoying this nice sunshine.”

“Are you a light African?” asked Caroline.

“No,” I said. “I work with Tante Rosie, the rootworker. I’m learning the profession.”

“Whatever
for
?” asked Mrs. Holley. “I would have thought a nice-looking girl like yourself could find a better way to spend her time. I been hearing about Tante Rosie since I was a little bitty child, but everybody always said that rootworking was just a whole lot of n——, I mean colored foolishness. Of course we don’t believe in that kind of thing, do we, Caroline?”

“Naw.”

The younger woman put a hand on the older woman’s arm, possessively, as if to say “You get away from here, bending my white folks’ ear with your crazy mess!” From the kitchen window a dark remorseful face worked itself into various messages of “Go away!” It was the drunken nanny.

“I wonder if you would care to prove you do not believe in rootworking?”

“Prove?” said the white woman indignantly.

“Prove?” asked the black woman with scorn.

“That is the word,” I said.

“Why, not that I’m afraid of any of this nigger magic!” said Mrs. Holley staunchly, placing a reassuring hand on Caroline’s shoulder.
I
was the nigger, not she.

“In that case won’t you show us how much you don’t have fear of it.” With the word us I placed Caroline in the same nigger category with me. Let her smolder! Now Mrs. Holley stood alone, the great white innovator and scientific scourge, forced to man the Christian fort against heathen nigger paganism.

“Of course, if you like,” she said immediately, drawing herself up in the best English manner. Stiff upper lip, what? and all that. She had been grinning throughout. Now she covered her teeth with her scant two lips and her face became flat and resolute. Like so many white women in sections of the country where the race was still “pure” her mouth could have been formed by the minute slash of a thin sword.

“Do you know a Mrs. Hannah Lou Kemhuff?” I asked.

“No I do not.”

“She is not white, Mrs. Holley, she is black.”

“Hannah Lou, Hannah Lou …do we know a Hannah Lou?” she asked, turning to Caroline.

“No, ma’am, we don’t!” said Caroline.

“Well, she knows you. Says she met you on the bread lines during the Depression and that because she was dressed up you wouldn’t give her any corn meal. Or red beans. Or something like that.”

“Bread lines, Depression, dressed up, corn meal? … I don’t know what you’re talking about!” No shaft of remembrance probed the depths of what she had done to colored people more than twenty years ago.

“It doesn’t really matter, since you don’t believe … but she says you did her wrong, and being a good Christian, she believes all wrongs are eventually righted in the Lord’s good time. She came to us for help only when she began to feel the Lord’s good time might be too far away. Because we do not deal in the work of unmerited destruction, Tante Rosie and I did not see how we could take the case.” I said this humbly, with as much pious intonation as I could muster.

“Well, I’m glad,” said Mrs. Holley, who had been running through the back years on her fingers.

“But,” I said, “we told her what she could do to bring about restitution of peaceful spirit, which she claimed you robbed her of in a moment during which, as is now evident, you were not concerned. You were getting married the following spring.”

“That was ’32,” said Mrs. Holley. “Hannah
Lou
?”

“The same.”

“How black
was
she? Sometimes I can recall colored faces that way.”

“That is not relevant,” I said, “since you do not believe. …”

“Well of
course
I don’t believe!” said Mrs. Holley.

“I am nothing in this feud between you,” I said. “Neither is Tante Rosie. Neither of us had any idea until after Mrs. Kemhuff left that you were the woman she spoke of. We are familiar with the deep and sincere interest you take in the poor colored children at Christmastime each year. We know you have gone out of your way to hire needy people to work on your farm. We know you have been an example of Christian charity and a beacon force of brotherly love. And right before my eyes I can see it is true you have Negro friends.”

“Just what is it you want?” asked Mrs. Holley.

“What
Mrs. Kemhuff
wants are some nail parings, not many, just a few; some hair (that from a comb will do), some water and some feces—and if you don’t feel like doing either number one or number two, I will wait—and a bit of clothing, something that you have worn in the last year. Something with some of your odor on it.”

“What!” Mrs. Holley screeched.

“They say this combination, with the right prayers, can eat away part of a person just like the disease that ruins so much fine antique pewter.”

Mrs. Holley blanched. With a motherly fluttering of hands Caroline helped her into a patio chair.

“Go get my medicine,” said Mrs. Holley, and Caroline started from the spot like a gazelle.

“Git away from here! Git away!”

I spun around just in time to save my head from a whack with a gigantic dust mop. It was the drunken nanny, drunk no more, flying to the defense of her mistress.

“She just a tramp and a phony!” she reassured Mrs. Holley, who was caught up in an authentic faint.

4

Not long after I saw Mrs. Holley, Hannah Kemhuff was buried. Tante Rosie and I followed the casket to the cemetery. Tante Rosie most elegant in black. Then we made our way through briers and grass to the highway. Mrs. Kemhuff rested in a tangly grove, off to herself, though reasonably near her husband and babies. Few people came to the funeral, which made the faces of Mrs. Holley’s nanny and husband stand out all the more plainly. They had come to verify the fact that this dead person was indeed
the
Hannah Lou Kemhuff whom Mr. Holley had initiated a search for, having the entire county militia at his disposal.

Several months later we read in the paper that Sarah Marie Sadler Holley had also passed away. The paper spoke of her former beauty and vivacity, as a young woman, and of her concern for those less fortunate than herself as a married woman and pillar of the community and her church. It spoke briefly of her harsh and lengthy illness. It said all who knew her were sure her soul would find peace in heaven, just as her shrunken body had endured so much pain and heartache here on earth. Caroline had kept us up to date on the decline of Mrs. Holley. After my visit, relations between them became strained and Mrs. Holley eventually became too frightened of Caroline’s darkness to allow her close to her. A week after I’d talked to them Mrs. Holley began having her meals in her bedroom upstairs. Then she started doing everything else there as well. She collected stray hairs from her head and comb with the greatest attention and consistency, not to say desperation. She ate her fingernails. But the most bizarre of all was her response to Mrs. Kemhuff’s petition for a specimen of feces and water. Not trusting any longer the earthen secrecy of the water mains, she no longer flushed. Together with the nanny Mrs. Holley preferred to store those relics of what she ate (which became almost nothing and then nothing, the nanny had told Caroline) and they kept it all in barrels and plastic bags in the upstairs closets. In a few weeks it became impossible for anyone to endure the smell of the house, even Mrs. Holley’s husband, who loved her but during the weeks before her death slept in a spare room of the nanny’s house.

The mouth that had grinned behind the hands grinned no more. The constant anxiety lest a stray strand of hair be lost and the foul odor of the house soon brought to the hands a constant seeking motion, to the eyes a glazed and vacant stare, and to the mouth a tightly puckered frown, one which only death might smooth.

for sister Clara Ward

I’m going to sit at the Welcome table

Shout my troubles over

Walk and talk with Jesus

Tell God how you treat me

One of these days!

—Spiritual

T
HE OLD WOMAN STOOD
with eyes uplifted in her Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes: high shoes polished about the tops and toes, a long rusty dress adorned with an old corsage, long withered, and the remnants of an elegant silk scarf as headrag stained with grease from the many oily pigtails underneath. Perhaps she had known suffering. There was a dazed and sleepy look in her aged blue-brown eyes. But for those who searched hastily for “reasons” in that old tight face, shut now like an ancient door, there was nothing to be read. And so they gazed nakedly upon their own fear transferred; a fear of the black and the old, a terror of the unknown as well as of the deeply known. Some of those who saw her there on the church steps spoke words about her that were hardly fit to be heard, others held their pious peace; and some felt vague stirrings of pity, small and persistent and hazy, as if she were an old collie turned out to die.

She was angular and lean and the color of poor gray Georgia earth, beaten by king cotton and the extreme weather. Her elbows were wrinkled and thick, the skin ashen but durable, like the bark of old pines. On her face centuries were folded into the circles around one eye, while around the other, etched and mapped as if for print, ages more threatened again to live. Some of them there at the church saw the age, the dotage, the missing buttons down the front of her mildewed black dress. Others saw cooks, chauffeurs, maids, mistresses, children denied or smothered in the deferential way she held her cheek to the side, toward the ground. Many of them saw jungle orgies in an evil place, while others were reminded of riotous anarchists looting and raping in the streets. Those who knew the hesitant creeping up on them of the law, saw the beginning of the end of the sanctuary of Christian worship, saw the desecration of Holy Church, and saw an invasion of privacy, which they struggled to believe they still kept.