Inventing Victoria Read online

  “Let it be one you say is called a fairy tale,” Binah often pleaded nights the girls weren’t bone tired. Essie happily picked up the well-worn copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, a book she’d bought at Miss Tansy’s Odds-and-Ends Shop expressly for Binah, who often asked Essie to read the same story three nights in a row.

  Essie always obliged, hoping it would spur Binah to want to learn to read. Within weeks of moving into Miss Abby’s Essie had come to cherish Binah no matter that she was limited in conversation and prone to say strange things, was more like eight than eighteen. At least Essie had a friend. A sense of purpose too. There was so much that she could teach Binah, who had a peace about her Essie wished she had.

  “Was left on Miss Abby’s veranda in a sweetgrass basket, they say,” Binah had casually told Essie. “Spose it was for the best.” Sweet-tea-brown Binah, slack jawed and blind as a bat without her spectacles, had not a whit of curiosity about her ma or her pa. Neither did she mourn being born with a right arm a bit twisted and shorter than the left. “Makes me mighty grateful my each legs the same size,” she said on one of the days the girls were out back with a bucket of steamed crabs. No, nothing much bothered Binah. She took everything in stride. Never took offense or got riled, not even when someone was cruel to her as happened one day when Cook sent them marketing.

  Essie had been at Miss Abby’s for just about a year on that bright May day when the girls walked arm in arm to the Market House. It teemed as ever with fruit peddlers, vegetable peddlers, butchers, fishmongers, women selling candy, selling flowers, vendors of every sort.

  Binah was mesmerized by the great pile of corn in Miss Prichard’s tiny stall, aiming to select ears with the most silk, Essie knew. Binah seemed to have her mind just about made up when a blowsy, snaggletoothed white woman yelled at her.

  “Nigra, you is taking too long!” The woman shoved Binah aside so hard that she tumbled to the ground.

  “I sorry,” Binah responded to the woman, who never even glanced her way, just commenced dropping ear after ear of corn into her basket.

  Just then a gang of white rowdies barreled through the crowd out to steal food and pickpocket like always. In the distance dogs sent up yelps and yaps.

  Blood boiling, Essie helped Binah to her feet. “We can come back for the corn. Let’s go get the squash.”

  The girls hadn’t taken three steps when another commotion kicked up.

  “What I done!? What I done!?” shouted a man, voice full of fear.

  As she and Binah drew near, Essie saw that the frightened man was Primus Grady. Officer Riley McDermott, a churlish ox of a man chewing tobacco, was giving the old man a drubbing about the neck and head. Then he grabbed him by the arm.

  “What I done!?” Primus Grady cried out again.

  “I tole you, nigra, you can’t be peddlin’ chickens here without no license.” The policeman released his grip, picked up the cage of chickens beside the old man’s feet. The three scrawny bantams started squawking and running in circles.

  Poor thing, thought Essie as she looked at the old man, bent and gaunt with a scraggly beard. Dirty homespun shirt kept closed with rusted safety pins. His patched pants, held up with a piece of cord, didn’t even reach to his ankles. His run-down shoes lacked laces.

  Cage in hand, Officer McDermott grabbed the old man’s arm again. “You just earned yourself a twenty-dollar fine!”

  “Sir,” said Essie, pushing through the crowd. “Please, sir, Mister Grady, he’s all he’s got, barely scrapes by. Ain’t no way he can pay a big fine.”

  Officer McDermott was red-faced. “You shut up!”

  “Sir, I’m just—”

  The policeman knocked Essie’s market basket out of her hands, shoved the cage of chickens at her, then snatched her up by the arm.

  “Need help?” It was another policeman, Matthew Buckley, a man Essie used to call Uncle Matt.

  Immediately Essie looked down at the ground.

  “I got things under control,” said the ox chewing tobacco.

  “What’s the charges?”

  “This ole good-for-nothing ain’t got no license. And this nigra wench was mouthin’ off. Gonna charge her with disturbin’ the peace.”

  Officer Buckley treated Essie to a wink and a roguish smile. “Riley, I know this gal. You can let her go.”

  Officer McDermott spat, released his grip on Essie. “If you say so, Matt, but if you ask me she need a good hidin’.”

  Avoiding Buckley’s eyes, Essie grabbed her basket from the ground, hurried through the crowd and back to Binah.

  Nearby stood Sarah Pace’s prim and proper mother, Florence, with her sister, Drusilla. Both women were shaking their heads, looking prideful and disgusted.

  Essie looked away.

  “What a disgrace that Primus Grady is!” one snapped.

  “Trash. Absolute trash!” said the other. And Essie could feel their eyes on her.

  “Over three puny chickens,” Essie muttered as she and Binah walked on. “You know what’ll happen to Mister Grady if he can’t pay that fine?”

  “Policeman keep his chickens?”

  The girls were nearing the Sheftall butcher’s stall.

  “They’ll keep his chickens for sure. Also likely to make him work the fine off … Farm him out to some planter or put him on a chain gang doing road or railroad work.” Essie had read of a colored woman who got ten years in the penitentiary for snatching five dollars from a white child’s hand. “What white child goes about with five dollars?” Essie had scoffed after she read the item.

  The girls were past Sheftall’s stall, past a white graybeard peddling peacocks, past clusters of crates and barrels, when Essie sighed. “Will it ever end?”

  “End? You mean the world?” asked Binah. She lit up. “Midwife Keziah say there be a book in the Bible that say the world will end one day. Yes, it will.” Binah stopped, broke out into a broad smile. “Same book say there will be a new heaven and a new earth.”

  “I meant whitefolks ways, Binah. Like how that woman shoved you. How Officer McDermott troubled Primus Grady. You think he ever ask a white peddler if he has a license?”

  Essie was steaming over other recent outrages. That white boy on Bull Street who shot a black boy in the leg for sassing him. She was also still galled over the Johnson C. Whittaker incident.

  “At six o’clock yesterday,” the Savannah Morning News had reported, “Johnson C. Whittaker, the colored cadet at West Point, was found in his room bound hand and foot, in a half-unconscious condition, and with a piece of one ear cut off.”2 The paper later reported that the authorities believed Whittaker had mutilated himself, then made things look like he had been attacked.

  “Even when we try to serve the nation …,” Essie mumbled. “Things going from bad to worse.”

  For the first time in a long time Essie thought about leaving Forest City. She had read about hundreds, thousands of Southern colored folks pulling up stakes, people called Exodusters, people seeking to get as far away as possible from places where colored were lynched, burned at the stake, beheaded, whipped, where colored women were constantly outraged, where whitefolks strutted around declaring, “This is a white man’s country!”

  “And all these doggone Confederate monuments they’ve been putting up,” Essie muttered. Augusta. Thomasville. Macon. Quitman. Columbus. The Savannah Morning News celebrated the laying of cornerstones and unveilings of monuments outside of Georgia too. Essie had made a point to steer clear of Forsyth Park on the day the city replaced the statues of Justice and Silence atop its Confederate monument with a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier. As then so now Essie wished every one of the monuments struck by lightning as happened to the one in Lynchburg a few years back.

  Essie had read that Kansas was the promised land for loads of Exodusters. Kansas, where land could be had for just a few dollars and where colored were free to build their own towns. Nicodemus was the first such town that came to mind on that bright M
ay day at the Market House. Essie wondered what it would be like to live on the prairie, dwell in a sod house. Come winter could she bear up under the cold?

  “End times!” Binah blurted out just as Essie ceased woolgathering about being an Exoduster. “That’s what Midwife Keziah always say. End times!”

  “Maybe she’s right,” said Essie, mind on how much ground colored had lost. “You know, Binah, there was a time, back after slavery days, we had colored men on the city council, also in the state legislature. Was a time we had about a dozen colored man in the US Congress. One was from Georgia. Jefferson Long … Now I think we don’t have but one, Senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi.”

  “What did those colored men do?”

  “Make laws, run things … You know here in Savannah we had our own colored fire companies, but they broke them up a few years back.”

  Binah frowned. “Where’s the harm in colored men putting out a fire?”

  Essie shook her head. “Whitefolks want all the power.”

  “What make them like that?”

  Essie shrugged.

  “Think when come the new heaven and the new earth whitefolks will learn to share?”

  “I don’t know, Binah,” Essie replied. “I just don’t know. It’s passing strange.”

  FINDINGS

  Only complaint Essie had about Binah was how she junked up the top-floor room they shared, junked it up with stacks of crates containing her “findings.”

  “Could mean somethin’ to somebody,” Binah usually said when Essie asked, “Now, Binah, what in the world are you going to do with that?”

  That might have been an empty blue ink bottle, a tortoiseshell hair comb missing most of its teeth, a couple of wooden alphabet blocks. Thrown-away things. Things Binah found in the street or in boarders’ waste bins.

  When the spirit moved her Binah filled a bushel basket with findings and lugged it over to washerwoman Hetty Denegal’s cottage on Bay Street. Miss Hetty mothered stray children, some true orphans, others half orphans with their one living parent in prison, in the asylum, or just run off.

  A wooden and papier-mâché doll with a missing leg topped the basket Binah toted to Bay Street on the day Miss Abby told them the news: “You two will soon need to ready Room Number Four. She will be here in two weeks.”

  “You know, Binah, I never even asked you her name,” Essie said as they cleaned the kitchen that night.

  “Whose name?”

  “Room Number Four.”

  “Dorcas Vashon.”

  “Dorcas … Vashon,” Essie repeated. “Will we need to do anything out of the ordinary in readying her room?”

  Binah shook her head. “Just make sure we don’t forget to put a mosquito net on her bedposts. One time I forgot and Miss Abby got mighty cross.”

  “What’s she like, Dorcas Vashon?” Essie asked the next day as she and Binah sat at the big wooden worktable in the kitchen. Essie stringing and snapping green beans. Binah shucking corn.

  “Nice. Keep to herself though,” replied Binah.

  Binah being Binah, Essie knew she would batch up the cornsilk for drying, bundle up the husks, and in a few days’ time start making dolls for the Bay Street strays.

  “How often does this Dorcas Vashon come?” asked Essie.

  “One year she came once. Another year twice. I can’t remember all her comings.”

  “For how long does she stay?”

  “Days. Maybe a week or more.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  Binah shrugged, then smiled. “Carolina. Charleston, I believe.”

  “Why Miss Abby don’t rent the room out to other people in Dorcas Vashon’s absence?”

  Binah looked around. There was no one else in the kitchen but them. Still, Binah lowered her voice. “Miss Dorcas don’t want no other spirits in that room. She pay Miss Abby a tidy sum for it to be that way.”

  Essie was convinced that Binah was making that up.

  Then again what else could explain such a waste of money? Unless paying for a room she wasn’t all the time using was just another way of being generous.

  “Must be a very rich woman,” Essie said as she sat there stringing and snapping. Not in the Savannah Morning News, not in the Tribune had Essie ever read of a colored woman like Dorcas Vashon.

  “Rich she is for sure,” said Binah, “but don’t nobody know where the richness come from.” Again Binah looked around the kitchen. “But there is whispers.”

  “Whispers?”

  “One is that she put a hex on a white man to make him leave her his big ole house in New Orleans—or maybe it was in Charleston. I disremember.” Binah paused. “Besides that big house, there was other property. That whisper I heard from Patty.”

  “Patty who was here before me?”

  Binah nodded, pushed her glasses up her nose. “Trunkful of gold, too, if you ask me.”

  “Trunkful of gold?” Essie was confused.

  Binah nodded. “I bet that white man she hexed had a big ole trunk of gold.”

  Essie tried not to laugh.

  Binah leaned in. “I heard Cook say onliest way a colored woman could have so much money was if she ran houses of illput.”

  “Houses of what?”

  “Illput.”

  “You mean ill-repute?”

  Binah nodded. “That sound more like it.” She pushed her spectacles up her nose again. “What kind of place is that, Essie?”

  Essie thought for a bit. “It’s a place—well, like my ma’s place.”

  When the girls were first getting to know each other, Essie had told Binah that she left home because it was rowdy, like a boardinghouse where people could kick up a ruckus all times of day and night.

  Essie had strung and snapped three pounds of beans. One more pound to go.

  And she counted the days before she’d meet the mysterious Dorcas Vashon. She couldn’t wait!

  EYES AFIRE

  Essie was wiping down the rockers on the veranda when a jet-black carriage pulled up. She looked to the street seconds before the driver’s “Whoa.”

  She put down the rag, straightened her dress, smoothed her hair at the sides, then dashed down the walkway. She beat the driver to the carriage door, freeing him up to tend to just the luggage.

  “Miss Dorcas Vashon?” Essie asked as chipper as she could. She opened the carriage door, offered an arm.

  “Yes, my dear, I am.”

  “Name’s Essie, ma’am.” Essie was surprised, disappointed actually, that Dorcas Vashon’s high-neck black dress was so plain. Not a bit of lace or beading on the collar or cuffs. No ribbon work. Essie had envisioned her arriving in something very fancy.

  But the woman was just as Binah had described her. “Short, thin-boned, crinkly hair, a tad darker than you. Always wears black. Likes to take her meals in her room. And she don’t eat meat.” However, Binah had said nothing about the elfin woman’s eyes.

  Eyes afire.

  Could burn a hole through a rock.

  Once Essie settled Dorcas Vashon into Room #4, she fetched her a glass of sweet tea, asked if there was anything else she could do for her. All the while Essie kept her head lowered in fear of those eyes.

  “No, my dear. I will just rest awhile.”

  Essie curtsied, began to back out of the room.

  “My dear, please tell Cook that I will take supper at seven,” said Dorcas Vashon.

  Essie had just reached the doorway.

  “Yessum.” Essie made a mental note. Apparently Dorcas Vashon could take her meals anytime she pleased.

  Earlier in the week Essie had several times practiced carrying a tray laden with food up to Room #4. She practiced again the day Dorcas Vashon arrived. Still, when Cook placed the plate of roasted vegetables, a bowl of lentil soup, and a glass of lemonade on the silver plate tray, Essie was a featherhead.

  She was almost through the kitchen door when she panicked.

  Can’t hold the tray and knock at the same time.
/>   She hadn’t thought to practice that.

  Essie turned around. “Binah, come with me, please.”

  Binah put down the dish she was washing, dried her hands.

  “You walk ahead of me, do the knocking,” said Essie.

  A few days later, when Essie was in Room #4 to take away the supper tray and ask Dorcas Vashon if she needed anything—

  “Sit with me awhile,” the woman replied. “That is if it won’t keep you from your duties.”

  “It won’t, ma’am,” said Essie. Even if it meant that she didn’t get all her chores done until after midnight, Essie was not about to say no to Dorcas Vashon.

  WINDLESS, FIREFLY NIGHT

  Essie took to rising at five o’clock instead of five thirty so that she could get an earlier start on work. For Dorcas Vashon, again and again, bade her to visit with her for a while.

  “How long have you been working here, Essie?” the woman asked on one occasion when Essie was tidying Room #4.

  “Going on two years.”

  “Were you born in Savannah?”

  “Yessum.”

  “Was your family born in Savannah?” That question came on another day.

  Essie bit her lip. “I don’t know anything about my pa, ma’am. My ma, she came here on Sherman’s March.”

  “From where?”

  Essie shrugged. “Never said.”

  “Is your mother still alive?”

  “Yessum.”

  “Do you spend your day off with her?”

  Essie swallowed. “No, ma’am. We had a falling-out.”

  “Over what?”

  Essie squirmed. “If you don’t mind, ma’am, I’d rather not say.”

  “I see.”

  Essie wondered how much the woman saw, really saw.

  “What are your plans?” asked Dorcas Vashon the following day.

  Essie had just brought in a vase of hydrangeas fresh cut from the front yard.

  “Plans?”