No Crystal Stair (7 page)

I don't know if my heart is pure. But I do know I love Rob. Please, dear God, help me. Let me be a good wife. Let me make him happy.

The tones of the organ resounded through the chapel, paused changed tempo and made a solid melodious announcement

“Here comes the bride!”

Ann Elizabeth Carter took her father's arm and walked down the aisle to the man she loved.

 

 

The spacious Carter lawn was ready for the reception. It had needed only a few potted plants from the florist to supplement the natural background of blooming crepe myrtle, roses, honeysuckle and hydrangea. The rented tables, scattered under the towering trees, were draped in white linen and held centerpieces of white gardenias and baby's breath, tied with silver ribbons. Two young students from Morehouse in white waiter's coats poured champagne or ladled punch from the bars set up at either end of the lawn. One large table was laden with dainty sandwiches and hors d'oeuvres. Another table held a five-tier wedding cake surrounded by small serving plates and tiny white paper napkins embossed in silver with “Ann E. and Rob.”

“Well,Julia Belle, you've really outdone yourself this time!”

“Oh, Letty, no. I just wanted it to be special. Something for Ann Elizabeth to remember.”

“Julia Belle, the wedding was beautiful. Never saw Ann Elizabeth look so lovely.”

“Thank you, Dr. Thomas. And Marge. How nice to see you. Have you met Mrs. Metcalf, Rob's mother?” No one could have
known that Julia Belle's heart was breaking. Such high hopes she'd had for Ann Elizabeth, and they'd come so close to being fulfilled. She could have married Dan, taken her place among Atlanta's finest. But instead, she was off to God knows where with a nobody. “Oh, no, they won't have time for a honeymoon. Rob, you know, is an officer in the Army Air Corps. He's needed right back. Oh, how do you do Mrs. Nelson? So glad you could come. Have you met Mrs. Metcalf, Rob's mother?”

She winced as she watched Thelma Metcalf extend a work worn hand. She must remind Ann Elizabeth about rubber gloves.

“No, Mrs. Metcalf is from California... No, they'll be living in Tuskegee.” In one room! And then what? Dan would have built her a beautiful home right here in Atlanta where she belonged. “How do you do? Yes, a lovely couple. Yes. So happy.” Oh, Ann Elizabeth, you do look happy. I want you to stay happy. But why, oh, why... ? Now Julia Belle felt a little bit of what her own mother must have felt when she married Will Carter.
He's so dark. What will your children look like?

But at least Will Carter was a doctor. Robert Metcalf was a uniform with a pair of silver wings that would tarnish after the war. And then what?

“Oh yes, they are a handsome couple. They're happy.” I'm happy for you, Ann Elizabeth. I am, Julia Belle thought but she could not still the cry in her tortured heart. Why, oh, why couldn't it have been Dan?

“Ann Elizabeth, honey come on. You and Rob. Cut the wedding cake so you can change clothes. You need to leave soon. Where is the photographer?” Dear Lord, thank you for the sunshine. Don't know what we would've done if it had rained. “I'm glad we had the reception early so you can get to Tuskegee before dark. Ann Elizabeth, stand right here. Here's the cake knife. Wait, Rob. Now. Look down at Ann Elizabeth. Smile.”

T
hey did not get to Tuskegee before dark. They had started out early enough, the four of them—Randy, Pete, Ann Elizabeth and Rob—in Dr. Carter's big car. They could never have fit in Randy's little roadster, especially with Ann Elizabeth's luggage and the few gifts she'd decided to take, mostly linens and towels. Silver, china and all the rest of the fancier presents would be stored in her parents' attic.

Ann Elizabeth knew she looked attractive in her going-away outfit—pink linen sundress with matching jacket, white gloves and a wide leghorn hat. All for effect—and her mother's photographer. As soon as the car turned the corner, she shed hat, gloves and jacket. The boys also took off their jackets and relaxed for the three-hour drive, laughing and joking about the wedding and the wedding guests.

Randy and Pete, on the front seat, discussed the relative merits of the single girls.

“Couldn't get near most of'em on account of this handsome fellow,” Pete complained.

Ann Elizabeth smiled. Her brother
was
handsome in an odd sort of way with his blue eyes and tan skin.

“What about Helen Rose?” Randy asked. “I thought you liked her.”

“Couldn't get near her on account of her mother.”

Randy laughed. “Aunt Sophie's on the watch. You know how it goes—best man, maid of honor. That combination is known to lead to marriage.”

“Marriage!” Pete shrieked as if frightened by the word. Then he glanced apologetically toward the back seat. “Nothing against the institution, you understand. Just wasn't what I had in mind.”

“Well, it's what Aunt Sophie always has in mind,” Randy said, chuckling. “But not for you, you lowly lieutenant. Her thinking runs more along the lines of doctors and lawyers.”

“Stop it Randy!” Ann Elizabeth laughed. “Don't worry, Pete. Rob and I will have Helen Rose down for a visit and you needn't be afraid to date her. I promise she won't ask you to marry her.” She leaned back against Rob.
Ron and I
. That had a nice sound.

“Comfortable, Mrs. Metcalf?”

“Oh yes.” Mrs. Metcalf. Mrs. Robert Gerald Metcalf! She looked down at the plain gold band on her finger next to her engagement ring with its tiny diamond solitaire.

“All paid for,” Rob had said. “A lucky night at poker!”

“Rob, do you gamble much?”

The two in the front seat whooped and Rob gave her a startled glance. “Whatever made you ask that?”

“I thought... well, I don't know. But... do you?” she persisted a little anxiously.

The creases in his face deepened as he smiled down at her.

“Well, no. Not now that I have something more interesting to do on Saturday nights.”

“Good!” said Randy. “With old lover boy out of the game maybe the rest of us will have a chance.”

Lover boy. Tonight. What would it be like? Tonight, alone with Rob. Her husband... “As natural as breathing,” her father had said. “Making love is part of loving. If you really love Rob...”

She did love him. She truly did. On impulse she reached out to touch his chin. Quickly he dipped his head to kiss her hand, and the look in his eyes, the feel of his lips against her palm, made her blush. But the sense of excitement was tinged with anxiety, and she turned away to stare out the window.

They were past the city streets now and the lush green landscape that was rural Georgia swept by them. Rolling hills, tall pines, fields of corn and cotton. There, set back on a little mound, was a run-down house around which a group of black children played. The sight was familiar to Ann Elizabeth. Often while visiting in the country with her uncle Jimmy's family, she'd sat in his car outside just such a shack while he attended a patient inside.

Nostalgia gripped her as she remembered summer visits with Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Sarah in the small town of Monticello. Long sunny fun-filled days running free as a bird with her cousins. The pungent odor of the cedar tree as she sat high in its branches and watched a far away train race by. The feel of warm earth on bare feet and the color of her bath water from the soil of red clay hills. The taste of fresh juicy peaches, watermelon, sweet corn on the cob, crisp fried chicken and rich warm milk brought straight from the cow and strained by Annie, the girl who came daily to help Aunt Sarah.

Now they were passing a field of cotton. She saw a lone black laborer digging among the plants where small balls of white were beginning to burst through the brownish leaves.

“You don't see many peach trees out this way,” she said almost to herself.

“Uh-huh.” Rob was leaning back against the seat, his eyes closed. Ann Elizabeth nestled close to him, caught up in her own thoughts.

Yes, during those summers in Jasper County she'd seen a few fields of cotton, but mostly she remembered the peach trees. Dwarf peach trees standing in stately rows as far as the eye could travel. But this was the same country atmosphere, she thought as hot humid air drifted through the open car window. The lush odor of fresh-turned earth, meadow grass and cow manure. The scent of open countryside, the countryside that made her feel exposed and vulnerable. She gave a tiny involuntary shudder.

Memories of the past were bittersweet. Something sinister and threatening lurked behind and nibbled at the peace of those carefree summers.

One day a man had been dragged from his shack. He'd been found the next morning hanging from a tree, his body riddled with bullets. Ann Elizabeth never knew what crime he had committed, but she'd heard Annie whisper to Mandy, who came to wash clothes and had the peculiar habit of eating dry starch, that he'd “talked back to Mr. Parsons.” And she'd heard Uncle Jimmy whisper to his wife that he couldn't tell if the man had died from the hanging or the bullet wounds. “Painful either way... pitiful.”Ann Elizabeth had never seen her uncle look so helpless. These kinds of conversations were always conducted in whispers when children were nearby.

One thing they talked about quite openly. Williams Farm. Maybe because it had happened so long ago, before she was born, and carried no threat of present danger.

Williams, a white farmer, would take black prisoners from the courthouse to work out their fines at his farm. But the fines were never worked out. The cruelly treated and forever enslaved prisoners were never released. Those who rebelled were simply killed and tossed into the river. Whispered rumors were ignored because the victims were black and Williams was a powerful man in Jasper County. But when eleven bodies chained together floated beyond the county line, the travesty could no longer be ignored. Only then, in another county, was Williams brought to trial and finally imprisoned. That was in 1924, Mama said, two years after Ann Elizabeth was born. She must have been about five when, with her parents and Uncle Jimmy, she'd viewed the abandoned farm. The sight still burned in her memory. The small broken-down boxlike cells, the remnants of heavy rusty chains, still hanging from the walls... Randy had jumped into one of the cells, draped a chain around himself and grinned at them. Mother had snatched him away, her face pale, and yelled
at Uncle Jimmy, “I told you we should never have brought the children here!”Uncle Jimmy had laughed. “Oh,Julia Belle, don't be so upset. The kids don't even know what it's all about. And this kind of thing is over now—over and done with.”

Over and done with. So why was she thinking about it today? The hanging chains, her mother's pale face and the Yellow River flowing swiftly by.

Ann Elizabeth gave herself a shake. Why was she recalling this now, on her wedding day? Why this sudden feeling of dread? As if she'd stepped from a safe familiar world into—what? The knowledge of what had happened was a specter buried deep inside. But always there. It made a body nervous, edgy, always balancing between the pleasure of the present moment and the fear of what could happen in the next.

It wasn't something a person talked about. But she knew the men felt it, too, the way they grew silent as they drove through the small towns. The way Randy drove slowly, carefully, past the neat houses with white picket fences and the storefronts where people lounged or ambled by.

When Randy stopped at a roadside gas station to fill the tank, Ann Elizabeth gazed longingly at the door marked Ladies. All that punch at the reception. She needed to go. But she knew better than to ask.

Helen Rose had asked last summer when she and Sidney Smith were driving to Uncle Jimmy's. Actually Helen Rose was fair enough to pass and sometimes did so to suit her conveniences. She must have forgotten about Sid, who was indisputably black. Arrogant, too. When her request was rudely refused, Sid ordered the man to shut off the pump. “If we can't use your facilities, we don't need you gas. ”He paid the forty-two cents due and drove off. A hundred yards from the station he was stopped for “speeding” and taken to jail. If it hadn't been for Uncle Jimmy who was well-known as the colored doctor in the
county, there was no telling what could have happened to him. Even so, his fine was three hundred and fifty dollars.

“Stupid boy,” Uncle Jimmy had said. “You have to be careful how you act in this area He ought to know that.”

“Stupid girl,”Julia Belle had said. “Helen Rose knows better. Men!” She had declared, shaking her head. “Sometimes they felt a need to flex their muscles, especially for and in front of their women. It's your duty, Ann Elizabeth, never to force your man into a battle he hasn't the slightest chance of winning!”

“Another thing Helen Rose ought to know,” she continued. “Playing white is a dangerous game. Like that time on Stone Mountain.”

“They thought she was white, Mother,” Ann Elizabeth had said. “She wasn't playing white.”

“She was getting ready to. Like it was some kind of game. Lord! If she was found out, they could all have been lynched!”

Ann Elizabeth shuddered. If she hadn't been sick with a fever she might have been with them that Sunday, and unlike her cousins, she was recognizably colored, as was Sidney Smith, who'd planned to meet them for a picnic. Her cousins—Helen Rose and Uncle Jimmy's kids, George, Ruth Mae, John and Edwina—were on their way. The were all high schoolers except George, who had graduated and was driving the second-hand Dodge, his graduation present from Uncle Jimmy. On the mountain they encountered a mob. The Ku Klux Klan was having a rally.

“When that man stopped us,” Ruth Mae had said later “it scared the bejesus out of me! I tried to be cool when he just looked at us and invited us to join the rally. Then that silly Helen Rose pipes up with ‘We'd love to'and I almost peed in my pants! Thank goodness George was driving! He declined ever so politely and got us off that mountain as quick as he could.”

“Yeah,” Ruth Mae had continued. “We met Sid and the others, turned them back and had the picnic at Washington Park. She'd paused dramatically, ”Just suppose we'd stayed and the Klan had seen us with Sid. You know how dark he is. We could've been in real danger!”

I'm in danger of wetting my pants right now, Ann Elizabeth thought as she watched the door marked Ladies open and an attractive woman in a red checkered dress emerge. She tossed her long blond hair, put a comb in her purse and walked to the car in front of theirs. She smiled at the man who was driving as she slipped into the seat beside him.

Ann Elizabeth felt a wave of pure envy. Such a simple thing. Comb your hair, refresh you lipstick, relieve yourself.

Oh well, she could wait. When they came to a town with a depot... They always had facilities for colored at the railroad station.

As they drove into Alabama, there was a drastic change in the weather. Thunder roared and great bolts of lightning flashed across the sky. The rain came hard and heavy, and the windshield wipers struggled against the torrents. Luckily there were few cars on the road.

“Blessed is the bride the sun shines on,” Pete teased.

“It was shining when I got married! Anyway, I like it.” Somehow she felt safer as the rain pelted the car, closing them inside. “The rain now doesn't count, does it, Rob?”

“No, it doesn't, sweetheart. I promise that your path will be only roses and sunshine.”

She smiled at him, rested her head against his shoulder and was soon fast asleep.

She was jolted awake when the car gave a sudden lurch, skidded and something went bump-bump-bump.

“What the... ?” Randy braked to a stop. “Flat tire.”

“Well, I'll be dammed,” Pete said. “I thought a car like this...”

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” Randy assured him cheerfully. “Must have picked up a nail.”

“That does it,” Rob said. “Next time I get married I'm taking the train.”

“Next time! Robert Metcalf, you... you...” She playfully beat his chest with her fists and laughed and he kissed her.

“Hey, man, you're not going to stay under this tree, are you?” Pete asked. “One rule about lightning is to stay way from trees.”

“I'm not moving until that tire is changed. You want to change it in this storm, be my guest.” Randy leaned back in his seat and prepared to take a nap.

“Honey, go back to sleep,” Rob said. “We've got a long wait.”

By the time the rain had stopped and the men got out to change the tire, Ann Elizabeth felt as if her bladder would burst. She stood on the wet pavement and looked around. It was growing dark now.

“Randy,” She called, glad that Rob and Pete were busy with the jack. “I gotta go,” she whispered.

“Can't you wait?” he asked, glancing doubtfully toward the trees that bounded the road.

“No, I can't!”

“The ground's awfully wet.”

“I know, and I don't plan to ruin my new sandals.” She said as she took them off. “You just check behind that tree. I don't want to step on any snakes in my bare feet.”

A few minutes later as she stood behind the dripping tree she could hear the curses of the men and the clanking of their tools. They were having trouble with the lug nuts or something. But she couldn't care about that or their being only a few feet away. The dazzling bride of a few hours, her bare feet sinking into the mud, gave a great sigh as she pulled up her pink linen dress and squatted.