Tina Mcelroy Ansa (31 page)

Lena didn’t think she had ever seen a shooting star before that year, but with Herman, she saw showers of them night after night.

Looking up at the stars, Herman grunted and said, “You know, I never been to the stars.”

Then, he paused and looked over at Lena.

“Wouldn’t want t’ go now, not w’out you.”

Lena reached over and stroked Herman’s temple. Then she recited “The Stars”:

“You believe that, Lena?” Herman asked as the last words of the childhood poem evaporated from the air.

“Believe what?”

“That only God and you shall live and love when the stars have passed away?”

She didn’t know what to say. It was a poem she had learned for a
ladies’ day recitation at some Protestant church when she was no more than five, and she hadn’t given the words a thought.

“You know it’s the truth, don’t ya, Lena, baby?” Herman asked soberly as he reached over and gently stroked her face. “Even when the stars have passed away, Lena. You got everythang. You got the keys to the kingdom, baby.”

E
ven after Lena’s parents were killed instantly in the plane crash. Even after both her brothers died in their thirties. Even after it seemed certain that she would never have a family of her own. Even after losing so much, folks in Mulberry still told each other, assured each other, “Hell, Lena McPherson okay. She
got
everything!”

“They
got
everything already,” she had heard relatives and friends say about her family all her life. The McPherson children received the little presents to mark each occasion in their lives: cute cards with dollar bills tucked in them, animal jigsaw puzzles and games for birthdays, and study lamps and dictionaries for graduations. But each purchase was accompanied with the comment “Shoot, them children
got
everything.” And usually, someone else would add, “And if they ain’t got it, they daddy’ll buy it for them.”

Then, “Well.”

The “Well” said it all: Well, ain’t that the way things are? Well, ain’t that life. Well, them’s that’s got … Well, ain’t life unfair. Well, shit!

And then the little three-dollar gifts—just a “little tokenette of a gift,” as Grandmama called them—would be purchased, wrapped and presented along with everybody else’s as if nothing had ever been said. Sometimes, as a child and even now, Lena could hear what she called echoes of conversations surrounding the gift she was just receiving in her hands. Before Lena could even say “thank you,” she would distinctly hear the gift-giver or the gift-giver’s mother or grandmother or husband distinctly say, “Lord knows she don’t need this little gift. She
got
everything already. She don’t
need
nothing.”

The townspeople didn’t mean it maliciously or even jealously. For them, it was just a statement of fact. “Them McPhersons, they
got everything.”

As far as everybody in town was concerned, Lena was still a lucky little baby girl born with a veil over her face. When she played the lottery, she won. When she’d play an illegal number at The Place sometimes, it was as easy as playing 222 or 555 or some number that showed up on her car clock. And 222 or 555 or whatever would fall the next day.

She had stopped buying local church tickets for picnic baskets or men’s and women’s watches or a new Cadillac or a home-baked cake. She always won. She had made enough enemies among the women’s auxiliaries of enough churches and sororities, schools and Girl Scout troops to know not to push her luck with them.

Sometimes, Lena would buy a raffle ticket for a television or a VCR when she knew one of her customers was in need of that particular item, and fill in the name and address of that person. They always won.

“What you dream last night, Lena?” folks at The Place had asked her for the first twelve years of her life. Finally, her mother had stepped in.

“Leave my child alone!” Nellie had insisted until folks stopped asking.

But Lena still carried the burden of her birth.

People all over Mulberry had told her so many stories and legends
and beliefs about how to protect and aid a child born with a caul over her face that she began to think of herself as an expert apart from her own experiences.

“Now, if the child is born in the spring or summer,” Miss Louise told her down at The Place, “then you go out in your garden and dig a hole and plant a piece of the caul over a kernel of corn. And when the corn grow up through the skin and produce, give a ear of it to the child to gnaw. That’ll protect ’em from evil spirits just like drinking the caul tea.”

“Well, whether it’s winter or summer, you know you got to bury the rest of the caul in a glass jar in the yard,” someone else would put in.

“Or you can just keep that piece of birth skin clean and safe for the child dried and preserved in a white piece of paper,” Miss Emma offered.

Unfortunately for Lena, none of these rituals were performed to protect her. Not all the way through.

But she retained some of her luck. Sister had pointed out, “Good God, Lena, haven’t you ever noticed how you always seem to zip through customs? No one ever questions your identification or your personal checks or your credit card. Your hotel reservations are never misplaced, and your luggage is
never lost!
And you got the nerve to
check
your overnight bag!”

Adults had told her all her life how she was just plain born lucky. “Lena, baby, if I had your hand I’d throw mine in,” customers at The Place who were shooting kind of bad had told her all her life. “Yeah, baby, I’d throw mine in.”

One of the favorite stories told in the McPherson household was of Lena’s birth.

“A lucky little baby girl here,” Dr. Williams had said within moments of her birth. The doctor—for decades the town’s lone black physician who still made house calls well into the 1980s—had a stroke the year before her parents died. And Dr. Williams died the next month.

Mrs. Williams, the doctor’s stunning second wife and the auxiliary heartbeat of the old private hospital, was still elegant and vital. She was one of the townswomen who kept giving Lena their beautiful old heirloom gabardine suits and their gossamer-thin silk blouses with fifty pearl buttons down the back. She would swing by the Williamses’ beautiful old brick house at the top of Pleasant Hill not far from the hospital site every now and again to show Mrs. Williams how stunning she looked in one of the older woman’s elegant hand-me-downs.

“Um, um, um, Lena, you know you can wear a suit.” Mrs. Williams would pause and smile. “That’s the suit I was wearing the morning you were born, Lena.”

Lena heard that all over Mulberry. Sometimes, she told Sister, she felt like the cynosure of a national question like, “Where were you when JFK was shot?” “Where were you when Martin Luther King was slain?”

In Mulberry, it was, “Where were you when Lena McPherson was born?”

It was never asked that way straight out, but it was asked.

Men waiting for their women at the entrance to the Mulberry Mall would watch Lena swing out of her car and stride into the mall with a wave in their direction.

“Hey, Lena, how ya doing? Hey, there, Lena. Morning to you, Little Miss Mac,” they’d yell back.

Then,

“How old you think she is?”

“Lena McPherson? Shoot, let’s see.”

“Lena? She got to be in her forties.”

“Yeah, she ’bout in her forties.”

“ ’Bout? Lena McPherson
well
in her forties. My cousin went to school with one of her older brothers. The first one to pass, I think, Edward. And my cousin two years younger than me. She got to be
well
into her forties.”

“Well, now, ’cuse me, but she can’t be all
that
old! Yo’ name ain’t Ray Charles, Negro, you ain’t blind! Look at her!”

“Oh, I know exactly how old the girl is. I was playing poker with her daddy the night she was born.”

“Aw, man, you didn’t play no poker with Jonah McPherson. You know them games was too rich for your blood. You was probably skinning. Playing a game a’ Georgia skin.”

“Well, I was gambling with Jonah that night. Jackie Robinson had joined the majors a couple a’ years before and had just played in the World Series.”

“Yeah, that was that year ’cause I remember Jonah let my daddy slide on a gambling bet having to do with Jackie Robinson. And Jonah McPherson didn’t never hardly do that.”

“Yeah, I remember folks talking ’bout that.”

“What? Jackie Robinson?”

“Naw, ’bout Jonah McPherson being so happy with his new baby girl, only one he got, he let some money slide.”

“Yeah, like I was saying, that makes Lena forty-four or forty-five, something like that.”

“Well, all I know is she ain’t no Perdue!”

It was the last pronouncement as the gaggle of men fell into silence again to watch Lena exit the mall and go striding back to her car in a short pink suit trimmed in black cord.

But folks talked about her and her family all the time. What the McPhersons got, what the McPhersons own, what the McPhersons eat, what the McPhersons do. How lucky the McPhersons all were.

To the town, the car Lena drove now was just another example of how lucky she was. It was a Mercedes-Benz SLKII, a sweet little job that was not even on the market yet. It was scheduled for release at the end of ’95, but on a business trip to Atlanta, her seat partner on the plane was an Italian man who designed automobiles. “I am Roberto,” he said, slipping into the seat next to her and opening his portable computer. “And you are?”

The SLK was his baby, and he was so charmed by Lena that he offered her a test model.

She ended up not even having to pay anything for the privilege of
sporting around town in the little copper-colored beauty that no one else could acquire for love, money or influence until the end of the year.

Her children downtown tried to get her to buy a Humvee, or at least a Range Rover, too, for those times she wanted to really take on the elements. But she told them her old green Grand Wagoneer sat in the driveway way too much as it was for her to be going out acquiring another underused vehicle.

“Aw, man!” they would say each time they brought it up. “I thought you was down!”

Folks in Mulberry would just watch her whiz by in the solidly compact prototype two-seater and shake their heads at her luck. One or two old folks even hummed, “Them that’s got shall get, them that’s not shall lose …” with a resigned shake of their heads.

On top of that, so many people in Mulberry knew Lena from her work, from her picture in the paper from time to time, from her one-of-a-kind car, that she didn’t even pump her own gas. Some willing man, and once in a while a young woman Lena had seen grow up on the streets of Mulberry, always appeared to pump her gas.

Being lucky or unlucky. It was what everyone she met felt perfectly comfortable proclaiming about Lena.

They continued to proclaim it even after her parents’ funeral, a funeral that rivaled the one in
Imitation of Life
, only without the caskets. Folks still said, “That Lena McPherson, now, that’s a lucky little girl, that’s one lucky woman there.”

The day of her parents’ funeral, one of the county’s black sheriffs, Mr. Longfellow, the man who had made sure Lena passed her first driver’s test without any problems, had to mobilize some of his off-duty officers to control the traffic of mourners and rubberneckers. The town’s lone newspaper, the
Mulberry Times
, sent out a photographer and probably would have run pictures of the service, too, if someone in the composing room who had gotten out of a scrape thanks to Jonah hadn’t destroyed the picture and cutline and substituted an ad.

In the middle of the Catholic Mass for the Dead, someone raised
the old southern hymn “That Old Rugged Cross,” then “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” (Nellie’s favorite), then “Count on Me” and of course, “Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross.” Someone even stood and, sounding like the ghost of Mahalia Jackson, sang, “Soon, we will be done with the troubles of the world, troubles of the world, troubles of the world. Soon we will be done with the troubles of the world. I’m going home to live with God.”

So many people stood and raised a prayer for Jonah and Nellie. Old thin women in wheelchairs strained erect. One cherubic-faced young man who had worked his way off and on through Tift Agricultural College down at The Place testified. An old schoolmate of Jonah’s said, “I told my bossman, ’I known Jonah all my life. Man, I
gotta
take off and go to this funeral.’” A loud woman in back wouldn’t stop screaming every now and then.

One of Jonah’s boyhood classmates, a retired minister, stood among the sea of carnations and roses and lilies and gladioli and baby’s breath, and warned the entire church, “Don’t sit there and weep for Nellie and Jonah like you exempt. Naw, we
all
going home one day! Just like Nellie and Jonah McPherson, we
all
going home one day!”

The little priest was so touched by the Holy Spirit that he stood and testified, too, to the generosity of the deceased toward the school and parish.

There was only one man, an aging local gambler, who took the opportunity of Jonah and Nellie’s final service to even a score or two.

“Oh yeah? Well, let me tell you ’bout Jonah McPherson, the dearly departed. He couldn’a
departed
soon enough for me,” the heavy-set man about Jonah’s age stood up in the middle of the carpeted center aisle of the church and announced. “Everybody in here know what a hard man Jonah McPherson was. Hell, he’d take your last two dollars! He didn’t give a damn! Just ’cause a man like to play a little cards, play a little Skin, ain’t no cause for somebody with a little money to hold it over his head. To take advantage of him and get that man to sign over his house and property and such to him.