Solemn (33 page)

“Yeah, Holly. Well, she don't know everybody yet. I'll talk to her myself.”

“I told her I could draw in there and everybody else said that was fine.”

“And you right, Majority. I'm sorry 'bout that. I'll talk to her. I promise.”

The girl had a cuss for every piece of clothing she put on, down to both socks, which did not match. Her feet crunched papers of her drawings and the lead from her pencils added to the stains already worked into the soles of her feet. She stormed out.

*   *   *

A white boy, personally, brought Solemn her meal to her room: baked chicken, mashed potatoes dripped with gravy, green beans. Solemn shook salt and pepper at the plate on the tray, mixed in butter, and devoured the meal as the one familiar thing about where she was. According to the “RULES” and “PROCEDURES,” she could choose to visit the locker room shower stalls either at night or in the day. She decided she would never go in. Would she be doomed to just slipping on the floor, or her head banged into a bathroom mirror, or her face drowned in a toilet? She pretended to sleep after this.

In middle of the low evening, the girl she had to sleep next to now showed back up—huffed, puffed, and hostile even after she closed her eyes. In middle of this first night, Solemn slept not one wink. But she saw Majority looked on her bed like a pile of rags wet with oil or water. White girls weren't something she had experience in. For all she knew, her blue-vein roommate was a real witch if there ever was one.

 

TWENTY-SEVEN

Solemn stepped with bare feet onto the cool floor. The girl in her room had maybe dressed to eat or gone away. Even made her bed, so it looked more like one Solemn had seen during a hospital visit or two: waiting too patiently not to be up to something. There was a shuffling in the hallway, not as boisterous and chaotic as one heard before the bells rang back in school. Still in her nightgown, she met a processional walking down the hall, in a loud manner she knew would have never been tolerated at any of her schools.

“Where's this to?” Solemn asked the line streaming as evenly and silently as a runny nose. The girls—mostly brown and black, just a few thin-skinned and pale whites—appeared to be professionals, worker bees, on their way to something useful.

But they were only on to breakfast or the shower rooms, one of the girls explained. A few grown-ups stood along the wall, expecting charges just to know. None noticed the new face. Solemn got in the breakfast line. She looked for Jane.

Solemn was toughened up, sure. But everything from a clipboard to an open door to a good night's sleep appeared to be like pulling teeth here. She mustered courage to ask a girl, a somewhat friendly face, about Jane, “You know that one?”

The girl hunched her shoulders and muttered; “Uh-inuh.”

Another girl intervened. “Which one that? 'Cause we don't be knowin' they names. Ain't no point for you to know 'em, girl. They all be gone quick. We just call 'em all by a number. You new?”

Solemn nodded. The girl went on to explain …

Tomorrow, Jane could be Worker 1. Holly could be 2. 3 could be Vincent or Tyrone. Depended on who was there. Jane was not in sight, but another one was, to lead Solemn where she belonged amidst the brash, showy, and either too loud or terribly quiet girls she stayed mixed with. After lunch—sandwiches and fruit cocktail with plastic-wrapped utensils, like real school—Solemn learned her job that day would be pulling up weeds, by herself, in the garden decorating the grounds for visitors.

A male staff member hung close and talked on his cell phone. No one asked if she had two whole parents, or kids, or a middle name. Her favorite songs and singers did not matter, she guessed. So, she concentrated on the dirt. She kneeled in the garden with its fuller bloom hibernating for now, as cooler air was coming, and she kneaded the earth round and round in her hands like a stress ball. The earthworms and dottier bugs rolled in and out the ground plus around the leaves. Grass stains covered the caps and scar upon her knees, from so many trips and falls in Bledsoe; harvested daydreams it all was now. Yet she had her peace. For this trip closer to the cities and aboveground of rejections in Bledsoe and an adventure taken much earlier than those who just went off to war or college, Solemn was grateful. Between the stems to sprout petunias and pink ladies and daisies come spring, Solemn inched close to a fat fairy's wand left behind—slim leaf, soft cottony puffs, bent in direction of where the sun most shone upon it. A unicorn's root, Solemn had heard it called. With her back to them all and her behind in the air and her hair let down over her face, she mourned the girl who once stuffed bills and coins in a jewelry box with a unicorn's chipped horn on top.

*   *   *

In getting the hang of it all, Solemn saw the staff's assignments were so relentless she started to mark the weeks on the backside of her introductory manual. Ninety-nine, by her count. It was actually 102. There was always a mess to be mopped, a sill to be dusted, a pest to hunt, a pitcher to set out back in the sun with tea bags and molasses—but the girls could not venture a sip. It was never complete. Classes were nonexistent. She and the others studied from a set curriculum handed down in a copied spiraled notebook, with final tests in back: to cover basic math, reading, grammar, and industry.

Charlotte. Danielle. Kioko. Unity. Jo Anne. Kelly. Juwana.

Solemn melted into what turned out to be another whisk of disappointment carried over from the biggest thing in a trailer home being her imagination: Majority's rugged and gruff ways of being. They included just not speaking to Solemn or sharing with her, or helping her along, or doing any more than waking up with silent treatment to go to sleep with a snore. The only time Solemn had a reason to think she would not have to be focused on something else besides herself was when it was time to eat. The cafeteria was designed like a rich man's dining room, with soft, comfortable cushions in the high-backed chairs but little to no light. The plates were all the same size and carried the same portions. Dietary restrictions weren't kept up with. It wasn't the food. Solemn and her new friends were served quickly and in the same order all day by a Miss Ruth and whoever else on the schedule had decided to join her that day.

Although not as repellant as the average show-off or know-it-all, Majority had to jump up to tell her own audience, “Oprah come from my block y'all!”

One or two girls thought they knew better, but Majority wouldn't concede.

“The studio where that audience at right outside my window in Chi,” she insisted. “What you talkin' about? Oprah from Chicago … mark my word, nigga…”

Solemn could have helped her, let her know she knew the truth. But she figured it would invite more scorn and wrath and contempt than she could handle as it was.

After a spell, Solemn shrank her new mansion down to its more appropriate designation: she was in an orphanage, like Annie or Oliver. The staff used the children to take care of the home, the grounds, the cellar, the attic. Some of the three dozen other girls were branded with coiled skin from atrocious burns they had all but forgotten the moments of, missed teeth from accidents and fights. Over half of them all were illiterate.

Sharika, Liza, Alfina, Merriweather, so on and so forth.

There was one phone in the office every girl had to sign up to use. Solemn had not signed up yet. They had to have so many “points” to get their packages and letters. Solemn was only one of a few who ever received any. She left them unopened in the office, afraid of what Majority might do to the olive branches Bev sent: a Mariah Carey record, Maya Angelou memoirs, a copy of the
Sounder
book with the DVD movie too. Dr. Givens turned a blind eye and strutted through occasionally with inspectors and contracts, clusters of suited whites who stood with hands behind their backs. “The State,” they were. They smiled bizarrely at any who had the nerve to look them straight in the eyes.

The minute Solemn sat down, the secretary or a volunteer or a Day Worker or a Night Worker told her to get up and start to work on something else.

The tops of pill bottles stuck. The cough syrup coagulated. The roaches flew. The mirrors cracked. The second Solemn closed her eyes she thought she heard Day Worker 1, or Day Worker 2, or Day Worker 3, or Miss Bernadine.

Soon, a few girls got in a chokey kinda fight at supper. They knocked Solemn over by accident. A tender circle skidded onto her elbow.

Sooner, man Worker 2 or whatever motioned Solemn to the broom closet.

She went to see what he wanted.

His privates poked out of unzipped pants. She ran.

The workers listed her next tasks from inside her dreams. On the day of her turn, she awoke and saw the day's tub of dishwater prepared in advance. When it was not her turn, the baking soda and steel wool set by the feet of the two bathtubs scared her off from washing nonetheless. A sore throat made no difference. A fever had no point. A tantrum was moot. Cramps were worthless. The only surefire way out of the rotation of labor in the home was to study. All the time, and hard.

Solemn was bossed by voice, gesture, and sign into a far-fetched thirst for Bledsoe.

“On Sunday, if yas want to, sign up for chapel. Make sure you got a clean skirt. Only if you ain't go no points … Quit that running. Where my pen go? Y'all done…”

Chapel was disappointing in what it promised. So, Solemn never signed up again. When the Fanny girls shot out from the van, the free ones moved closer to their parents. But these boys and girls worked, too: they held the door open, passed out programs, swept chapel steps, pushed cars out of potholes, corrected sloppy-hanging choir robes, added tissue to the bathroom. Their heels were not too high. Their hair was just enough. Everything but the music was quiet. And some of them traveled around walking and humming or driving to some more of them later on, with baskets of turkeys and sweet potato pies in backseats. And it actually looked fun now, from where Solemn sat.

Solemn watched them as she rode back to Fanny's in her van with the others, past the used-car lots and cattle farms and roadside junkyards and convicts digging in wild grass. If there was something to watch on TV—a pivotal game, a pertinent news story, the lottery numbers—there was peace back at the home. But, the next morning, they were all once again moving around in the ocean of work whose waters never receded. Solemn relinquished the power dolls, hallucinations, savings, prayer, and comparing to whites once held. She had no corners of her own, no alone place to touch herself thinking about anyone, girl or boy, who excited her. She blocked it out entirely. Her options at Fannys unsupervised visit to the bathroom or early-morning sneak to the garden (where she one time saw soon flowers smashed to death by a pair of thrusting bodies who scooted atop it) touching herself with Majority in the room—were limited.

*   *   *

Majority's sketchings were her lifeline at Fanny's, a running theme. She begged Scotch tape from Miss Bernadine to paper the walls of their room, some consideration to respect the family photos Solemn would not admit turning to. Majority concentrated on the visions she once took for granted from the sixteenth floor of her project building, which bordered Chicago's most essential and lengthy interstate. She included the Ferris wheel of Navy Pier and the impressive domes of the Museum Campus. Within tens of thousands of painstaking pencil points were creations of hundreds of skyscrapers across the downtown addresses Majority herself had rarely traversed, only saw on the news—where people went to real jobs, got to talk to news crews, and shopped off bootleg.

On an unexpected night, prompted by nothing, Majority's invitation to Solemn was an itching and competitive question: “What you do?”

Solemn had pretended to sleep.

“Huh? Oh, you're talking to me now?”

“Hey, I ain't know you. I'm from Chicago. In Chi, you don't talk to strangers.”

Solemn was not ready to open up.

“Where you from?”

“Bledsoe,” Solemn said quietly. She was near sixteen. Three years to go. Or nearly two, now, until she was eighteen.
Three years,
she thought, as she spoke.

“Where's that?”

“It's downstate, past Jackson.”

“Oh, you from here, too.”

Solemn was only going to have a conversation with Majority so she could have some influence over their radio. She knew, from her own intake, it could not have been Majority's alone. She just did not want to risk trouble it seemed Majority was fond of.

“What you do to get sent up here?”

If Solemn remembered nothing from Mrs. Longwood's lectures, not knowing the meaning at the time due to the humor of the delivery, or Pearletta Hassle's vacation from Singer's Trailer Park with the cross of notoriety fixed into her name, or Landon's forever and a day uprising plans, which never came to pass, it was to never tell anybody too much of your future or past. They'd shit on the former and sadden the latter.

“That's my business,” Solemn told her.

“Aw shit … I got you fam. Undercover. I gotta check everybody out.”

“So do I.”

“I mean, we gotta stay in this room with each other. And I ain't gay. So…”

“I'm not gay.”

“Oh snap! I was wondering…'cause, you know, I like a good dick. That's it.”

Solemn fingered the cross around her neck, Bledsoe at her throat and appreciation to it lodged there, though she wasn't gonna speak it.

When it seemed warm and friendly and fun, she was nearly afraid to ask Majority what she had done to get sent all the way from Chicago to here. She asked anyway.

*   *   *

When she was nine, Majority found a full egg in a hen her mother told her to cut up and she wondered. When she was twelve, she found a crisp mouse slipped into the batter of the cornbread her grandmother told her to slice and she knew. She would be the first to admit she wasn't the smartest. But she was smart enough to know she wanted better things to do. Sex was not necessarily on her list of things to do, but it was a thing to do. Majority's aunts and grandmothers grew tired of yanking her back from the Chicago streets outside the Horner Homes where they lived, as white women with relatively less offense or danger so a higher score of peace. They saw her sashay into their cinder-blocked units with fistfuls of money she could produce no check stub for. She was mixed. And that's how she liked it. She made more and got treated better that way.