Solemn (38 page)

 

THIRTY-TWO

FREEDOM

Night Worker 2 be here on Thursdays. She like to smoke. Miss Bernadine complain she smell it in the office in the morning. So Night Worker 2 go outside to smoke now. I seen her from our window. Night Worker 2 tiny. Night Worker 2 scared of us. I seen it in her eyes. She be so nervous one of us get out the bed. Night Worker 2 go out the back kitchen door to take her smoke. Our room face the back. That's how I seen her. That's the only door back there under our window. I seen that, too. Night Worker 2 look out to the road and the garden when she smoke. Night Worker 2 don't look up when she smoke. Nobody look up when they smoke. They look out or down. Night Worker 2 be here Thursday. I seen the schedule in the office when I went to Miss Bernadine to count my damned money. Night Worker 2 gone go out to smoke on Thursday. Night Worker 2 gone have that big nigga working with her too that night. But he be sleep. Thursday night, Night Worker 2 gone get her ass beat when we hide in the freezer till we see her go out. That's freedom.

“Majority, ain't no way I'm gonna turn this mess in. I think Dr. Givens meant something else by freedom. But you can write real good, Majority. Real good.”

Since the mockery incident, Majority had calmed. She would do better, she promised Solemn. And the Staff. She had. She had been especially nice to Solemn.

“You want my cookies, Sol?” “You hot, Sol?” “You cold, Sol?” “You want me to turn the fan off?” “I got the store pads, scented with wings. Take all the ones you need.”

After the “emotional seizure,” as Dr. Givens explained it to her, Solemn could stay in her room and avoid the others. Other than going to the bathroom, Solemn waited on her body to ask her for a bath. This went on for three days the first time and five days the next. This went on with her wearing robes and stumbling, pale as a melon abused to early picking and sale, through the hall until Majority or a Worker led her back.

The twist-off top stems of vine tomatoes slipped out a trash bag with a hole in it. The stems only have five prongs, but Solemn thought she saw a pile of spiders, and the other girls pointed at her, laughing when she cried.

She ran out the shower room with thunder and lightning heard. It was just water.

She looked out the window when she woke from a nap, no appetite but tray set down in a chair seat by her bed anyway, and thought The Man at the Well knocked.

Rather than wonder how she hadn't left this and all of it in Bledsoe, Solemn figured on who might have the real scoop: Miss Bernadine. She knew it all.

“You s'posed to be up here, Miss Redvine?” Miss Bernadine asked Solemn, while she recounted the books and fanned her light-yellow blouse back and forth.

“I'm goin' back,” Solemn said, uninterested in dinner: fried chicken, again.

“I know you is. Shit. And you need to put something on your feet, Solemn. That's why you sick now—”

“I was looking for the paper,” Solemn said. “I wanna see about the woman they found in Ethel.”

“Oh yeah. I heard 'bout that. Lord have mercy … shame.”

“I knew her.”

“Oh, everybody knew that woman. Surprised her mama didn't go beat up on
Oprah
trying to talk about that girl. Got sick of them folks … Said she was on drugs hard.”

“She wasn't on drugs when I knew her,” Solemn said.

The first rule Miss Bernadine told anybody clocking in for the first time was: “If they say number one, know it's number two. If they offer a favor, look for a cross. If they give a compliment, give 'em a write-up.” But she remembered Solemn a little more deeply from her brother and her manner: Bledsoe, in Attala County for sure.

“How you know that woman, Solemn?”

“She used to live where I lived back in Bledsoe,” Solemn said. “In a trailer park.”

Miss Bernadine asked, “Well, good God, girl, was she your neighbor?”

Solemn told it to Miss Bernadine.

“She was my daddy's ho for a minute,” Solemn said. “She had his baby too.”

“You know what, gal,” Miss Bernadine said, jotting the words she would have about it with Dr. Givens around on the back of her mind, “now
that
I can believe.”

*   *   *

When she got home, Miss Bernadine double-backed through the Jackson
Clarion-Ledgers
she had piled up in the doghouse after she read them to find the obituary and the report. It was one of the more interesting stories from her career at Fanny's, unloaded from her mind onto her sympathizers at the card games and bingo get-togethers and “How you doing?” sudden knocks. Wasn't a person in Mississippi, it seemed, who didn't hear Viola Weathers' mouth. Miss Bernadine actually liked them better when she knew the real truths: Every single one, not one of them not, had a story. And that story was almost always somebody else's passed down and unadmitted. She came to the group room the next day to bring Solemn what she could find, not too much about a black druggie whose family had left the Delta: she come from Jackson, was a college student, lost a baby few years back, wasn't too much seen since then, and any information about her or what was done could be directed to the same folks who hadn't cared too much before.

*   *   *

To wait in the freezer room was certainly an option, though it was padlocked from the outside. How to get in and how to get out were the challenges. Majority had her ideas. Solemn did not trust or believe. One mistake and what had been her perfection up until that point would condemn her for more time than she had come in with—and most certainly somewhere much less accommodating. Solemn turned to a clear page of paper to start listing what she remembered of fractions and the electoral college, for her GED.

“First-aid kits upstairs and in the office and in the back of the cafeteria. Keys to the freezer in the kitchen. Cafeteria door lock from the inside and outside. My guess is she gotta leave it open with the door stopper we use at dismissal. Now, if we just have a reason to need that kit, and get carried into the kitchen or something, then me or you could grab the keys to the freezer, let ourselves in there later on and out soon as we can see that bitch go out the back door.”

“What would we have to do to need the kit?”

“I don't know … something. Fall down the steps, knock out a tooth, shit…”

“Then, we have to go to the hospital, with a patrol…”

“Well, shit. I can't think of everything.” Majority scratched her privates under her purple lace panties. She pulled at her wet hair.

“I don't think this worth it. I really don't need no more trouble.”

“I don't, either. But I can't stay here no more. I'm sick of this shit. Cleaning and slaving and getting bossed around and missing out. It's a whole world out there…”

“This ain't so bad.”

“You must not know what good is.”

“I do.”

“It wouldn't be so bad. What you think they gonna do? Call the FBI? We ain't that important, Solemn. We really, really ain't.”

“Where would we go?”

“Chicago … it would be easy. We look young, Solemn. People would help us.”

“I don't know…”

“You know what. Just cut me. Get mad and slash me or something.”

“Then,
I'm
gonna get in trouble.”

“Won't matter. You'll be gone soon after.”

“And what about you, your face?”

“Not my face, bitch. My chest or something I can cover. Well, wait a minute. I don't know. I got some pretty titties. Can't mess them up. Okay, my arm.”

“What I'm gonna cut you with?”

“I don't know. Shit. I'll find something in here. I'll snatch a switch off the trees and sharpen it with a pencil sharpener.”

“We can't sharpen the pencils, Majority. We can't drink from glass bottles. The mirrors sealed off. The scissors blunt. The hangers is plastic.”

“Wait a minute … I know. One of them damn steel wools. I get one of those out the kitchen. My cousin taught me how to unwind it, then wind it back up sharp and tight.”

“You gone get tetanus from that.”

“They gave us them shots. Damn, Solemn! Would you stop worrying? Think positive. Have some heart. Don't you worry about the details. Leave 'em to me. But, when it's time to go, now, you gotta be ready to go. Don't think. Just go.”

*   *   *

The introduction of escape was one of the few things Solemn could think about now that it was all over for her inside, like a better secret now. Thursday came and went, with the matter dropped. And the next Thursday as well. And the Thursday after that. Many many many more Thursdays until it was Christmastime. So many of them never got anything as it was. Solemn, however, was expectant. She had made her requests for cassette tapes and DVDs, from home. They hadn't come yet. Solemn was sure they would. She didn't know the situation. A cheerful season didn't stop the groups from hypnosis by television, causing it to need more guarding from staff than the youth themselves did. Occasionally, there was a consensus dictated by the tomboy or ones who couldn't read too good:
Bounty Hunter,
NASCAR, the NBA, any morsel of a rapper rapping.

The others became amusing, less vicious than Solemn initially perceived. No doubt, many of them remembered the brother and sister-in-law who had brought her in. They drew her up in their minds as haughty, and not worth the effort. Solemn always did what the staff said, as she had always done, down to what had led her to them. But she wasn't much of a writer and failed to deliver the “Freedom” essay on time.

“Well, prolly too much to ask anybody to concentrate in here to write a single word but ‘hell,'” Dr. Givens told Solemn. She had a book holding a brown man's face on the front, black background, ripped cover at a corner, water stained along the edges of the pages. “But here. Man from Natchez wrote this. You might like it, Miss Redvine.”

Solemn opened the book—
Native Son
. And she began to read it, searching for Mississippi within it. But the book and the man it was about were both in Chicago. She planned to take her time with it. Chicago sounded rough but good. Solemn couldn't put it down. Sex in the movie theater, rapes and same thing as Mississippi: white people to work for, to have a good job. With the book, the television appeared a tyrant now, an antiseptic, even when it wasn't switched on to anything good. Other girls sat it out, too, in a safe concavity on couches near the bookshelves, along with her. They smiled and took note of other titles around them, in the power but politeness of all the little words.

Day Worker Jane interrupted Solemn once, at the very end of the so long and shocking book, before the part called “Trial,” after the killer thug Bigger was caught. Solemn was moody at the speeches with no points to her, so she let herself be led to the kitchen. Long before lunch, aromas of cinnamon and vanilla and nutmeg were a decongestant to her predicament, enough to almost send Solemn to tears. It smelled like Christmas. Well, it was.

She helped punch out snowmen and gingerbread men and Christmas trees from stencils in cookie dough. For once, Miss Ruth was smiling and she was not even sweating under a bonnet. She stood in front of the fan with her hands out, feathering her white blouse upon herself and making jokes with the young kids who had shown up that day to work. They were supposed to make many hundreds of cookies, kept in the freezer to use throughout the long season and have something to offer any visitors who made the season a point. And they sweated inside the kitchen, Miss Ruth keeping watch over the children and her utensils and her freezer and her meat and her pots and her warmers and her thermometers and her sheet pans. Hers. She smiled at Solemn, too much. She walked over to the child, one she saw often, who never spoke too much or caused a ruckus or blamed her when and if a few bugs wandered to the food.

“Howdy,” Miss Ruth said to the brown child, punching out the figures quickly.

“Hello, ma'am,” Solemn said to the woman. Unlike the rest of them, who were complicit with hostility, Miss Ruth was a stability there Solemn knew. The stability sat down beside Solemn, to admire about four dozen figures Solemn had prepared for Fanny's girls, set the trays Solemn put them on to the side, and continue on with her together. The stability set down charming tubes of red and green sugar sprinkles to add to the creations. The stability passed them to Solemn, knowing the child would know what to do. Then, the stability guided her on just how to soak the stainless-steel stencils in warm water to keep the remnant dough off the edges, so the characters would come forth when the dough cooked warm, sweet, delightful to them.

“Where you comin' from, darling?” the stability asked Solemn.

“I'm from here,” Solemn told her. “Mississippi.”

“Me too,” the stability said. She grabbed a hunk of the sticky sugar dough and had several figures cut out in a minute or two. Expert and sharp. Just for them.

“Been here all my life,” she told Solemn, as her workers mopped the floor, shined the pots, washed the plates, and scraped away the burnt spills from the burners. “I like it.”

And they worked well that way just so, for an hour or more, with adequate results.

The discrepancy of her background resonated to pity and trust, as Miss Bernadine asked Solemn to come to the front office with her to help sort the mail, since “your hands too damned pretty to get messed up with Comet.” Once Solemn finished stuffing papers inside different slots and slicing open envelopes relatives sent, she saw Akila's name.

Dear Solemn,

I hope you get my letter and the money I sent you too. I know it's not much. But I ain't working. Your brother's back again. Solemn, he done changed. We'll go check on your folks. Junior just turned 3 and he's talking now more than ever. I wish you could see him. Eva is 2. I missed you at her party. Your parents came. Rented a car and everything. I was proud of them for it.