Every day for a week, a yellow girl ran up the street towards the Chalfonts. She ran with a paper sack tucked under one arm, her black hair laid flat on the long March wind. It was a fine spring day, on this particular day, not long after Easter. Smells were blowing back up into Chicago from the South. Some good, some bad, all familiar.
The yellow girl lifted one corner of her white dress to run in it. The soles of her feet were as black as burnt pancakes as they slapped the sidewalk, and black boys of the neighborhood, on the street or watching from porches and windows, with no work and nothing better to do, whistled and called out to her as she flew by. What a feather in the cap of a neighborhood boy to be able to say that he’d had a Dixon girl. The best one, Terry, too. They called out to her:
“Slow down, Topsy!”
“Where’s the fire, gal?”
One of them whistled from the branches of an oak tree which dangled a banner that was made out of a bed sheet, crudely painted in red and blue letters reading: I.H.T.J.W. He whistled and Terry looked up and waved but she did not deviate from her course. She ran up the street to the ramshackle house of the Chalfonts.
It was as crowded as a brothel during Lent, the Chalfont house. Crowded with offspring. Fat Ethel Chalfont had been in the hospital, and now she was home again, needing help with her seven children, or so she claimed, the youngest of whom was still awaiting a proper name, or so she claimed, for the Truth was like ice in Fat Ethel’s mouth. She could shape it into a small perfection, and present it like a trinket on her tongue.
A week before Terry started ‘helping’ at the Chalfonts, Fat Ethel had stopped Terry’s mother on the street, both of them enroute to a bake sale. It was on a weekday morning that this happened, Ruth with two cream cakes, and Ethel with her burlap sack of salt biscuits. Fat Ethel, who had once been as thin as anything, imposed on poor Ruth right there on the street, sly in knowing that Ruth would say ‘yes’ if only to get away from her. Ethel strained to speak properly, but still an “ain’t” popped out.
“Ruth, honey, and don’t you hesitate to tell me so if no’s what you’re thinking, but I was wondering if I might perhaps ask me a favor of you…that healthy young daughter of yours…Terry?…my leg is still healing, as you know…and what with my brood to look after…and Buck ain’t being no help…”
“My girl…Terry? You need Terry to…”
“It would only be temporary…”
So Ethel put her case to Ruth, and nodded smugly as Ruth consented, Ethel concluding with a flinched-from hug and “Oh, you’re an Astor, doll,” over Ruth’s elaborate Christian “yes.”
Her common law husband Buck rarely worked, so Ethel brought money into the house by doing what she called “matchmaking”…setting up men who could pay for the service with local teenage girls. Most of the men were ex-lovers of Ethel herself, and reputedly fathers of some of her children, a rumor that Buck had spent years chasing around the neighborhood, until he finally gave up, sitting on the porch instead, with that hang-dog face of his, muttering.
Being a good Christian, and cut off from gossip, Ruth Dixon knew nothing about all of that, and agreed to send Terry over to help with housekeeping, while Ethel Chalfont “recuperated.” Terry hated the idea at first, but changed her opinion of it the first night she tried it. The first night Terry came home from the Chalfonts’ she was smiling, and her mother laughed, holding her nose, singing “My goodness, child, you’re starting to smell like the country, that Chalfont smell has rubbed off on you!” and Terry had blushed and run to the bathroom.
Ruth’s secret strategy was to keep her extremely desirable daughter out of the hands of the local boys. To keep those black hands off the angel-food cake of her daughter. Four hours of Terry cooking and cleaning at the Chalfonts every night was four hours of Terry not meeting black boys, she reasoned. She didn’t want Terry pregnant already at the age of sixteen, and changing diapers on her honeymoon, which is exactly how it had happened for Ruth. And Ruth’s mother. But at least the boys in those cases had been light-skinned.
Terry had started with the Chalfonts on a Sunday. Friday afternoon came, and she couldn’t stop herself from peeking at her new wristwatch, a gift that she’d claimed to have gotten from Ethel Chalfont herself. Terry’s mother had had qualms about letting her keep it. So Terry didn’t even mention the bracelet, the music box, or the five pound sack of Fifth Avenue bars, all of which she hid in her closet, all of which were gifts from a man.
She kept peeking at her new wristwatch and chanting, softly, “I.H.T.J.W.”
She was sitting on her bed, staring at herself in the vanity mirror as the room blushed orange with last-chance sunlight, and she was chewing a Fifth Avenue bar, waiting for Ruth to make dinner. She was memorializing herself in the mirror. A sweet breeze touched her cheek, causing her to look out the window, and she could see the distant figures of children straggling in across the vacant lot on Throop Street, coming in from Ada park, summoned by mothers calling out about suppertime like muezzin bellowing from their towers.
Terry pulled the window shade down. Was tonight really the night? Would she know what to do? Would she know what to say; the proper sounds to make? Would she be better or worse or no different at all than all the others that had ever done it, over and over again, in every country of the world, since the beginning of Time, while God gazed down on his handiwork? And would it hurt?
“It’s just like biting your tongue, but in your kootchie,” she’d heard. “And don’t wear nothin’ white.”
“If you don’t enjoy it, it ain’t even a sin.”
There had been a circle of girls at school, at lunch time, standing at the Throop street fire exit. Smoking cigarettes. A blustery day, wind gusting south. The Principal’s office was safely upwind, and even Terry took a drag or two, which made her lips numb, but she loved it when Doreen Parker passed her a lit one, blowing a blue flower of smoke at Terry’s mouth and adding, “I.H.T.J.W.” And Terry answered in kind as she accepted the cigarette and sucked it, winking, trying for a smoke ring but destroying it with laughter instead.
Doreen, the fastest girl at Morgan Park High School, had drawn a diagram on the sooty bricks beside the fire exit door with a flinty stone from the garden. She accompanied the diagram with a lecture to the tune of “Do it standin’ up and you can’t get pregnant,” and scratched in an arrow pointing down from between the stick-girl’s legs. Marva Fortneaux had taken the stone from Doreen and given the stick-girl some big balloon breasts. She said “If you don’t cry right after, I promise he’ll think you’re a slut.” But Marva Fortneaux was so poor that Terry had seen her eating out of a little box of Argo corn starch, instead of popcorn, at the movies, so what did she know?
“How do they live in that Chalfont house, Terry?” asked Ruth at dinner, passing Terry a dish that was gravid with caramelized sweet potatoes. Because she kept herself apart from the neighborhood women, Ruth relied on her daughters for info. “I mean, honestly, can you imagine?” She took the dish back. “It’s 1943, and people are living like that! Like Hottentots!”
Terry told them all about it, between forkfuls. One cheek, and then the other, bulged while she talked. She told them about the filth and sloth and bad language, and the way Buck Chalfont just sat on the porch all morning noon and night, eyes shut, rocking in that chair, a dusty-necked bottle in hand, singing off-key hymns with fearless sarcasm. Either that, or he was always busy typing out strange prophesies, and tacking them up around the house for Terry and Ethel to read.
Mama said “Go on,” and “Jesus wept,” while her bosomy daughter described it with theatrical shudders. Mama nodded from Terry’s sister Roo, to sister Bee, and back again, to impress them with the force of the moral. The cautionary tale of Chalfont life. She sipped her bitter iced tea and pursed her lips and nodded.
Roo, the oldest at eighteen, just rolled her eyes, and Bee, the youngest (at twelve), stared down at her plate and stifled guffaws. Terry kicked Bee twice, the last time hard, under the table. Pop was bent over his plate, busy chewin, and what they could see was the top of his sun-burnt skull; the wisp of white hairs; the fork-hand shoveling.
Then Terry slid back from the table. She ran to her room, and reappeared in the kitchen with a grease-spotted grocery bag. She kissed Pop’s forehead while he chewed, listened to last minute instructions from her mother, and ran out of the house heading west, as if she was running to catch the Sun as it fell the last few feet from the sky.
“Slow down there!” shouted a chorus of black boys as she ran. But they were just boys. She was on her way to meet a man. And the woman he would make her into. Terry ran under the banner in that oak tree, waving at the boy perched in it.
‘I.H.T.J.W!’ he hollered, grinning.
The Chalfont place was five blocks away, but it might as well have been in Kentucky. As Terry loped the long blocks approaching it, the houses got patchier, the yards got scrubbier, and chickens appeared here and there. The houses on the block with the Chalfont house were small and shack-like, making the Chalfont house seem a shantyville palace. It was a splintery three-story structure, sulking far back from the sidewalk, on a weedy, balding lot.
She stepped on the front porch without knocking. Buck Chalfont was sitting right in the middle of the porch, on an old stool, frowning over a brand new (where’d they get the money?) Remington Portable #9. It was on a side-turned apple crate and he was hunting and pecking, ignoring her as she padded by him.
The house gave off the smell of burnt basil and other incantory herbs that could be sickening depending on the time of day you might smell them. The screen door that opened into the front room was ajar, and she walked across a floor with tussling curly-haired boys, and inverted pot-lids (as spinning tops), strewn all over it. She ascended a flight of rickety stair steps that would never confidently bear the weight of Madame Chalfont’s descent again.
Madame Chalfont was reading Pearl Buck in bed, and asked the girl, without looking up to greet her, to switch on the lamp on the night table. Her hair flowed out for what seemed like yards around her, yards of wavy black hair like Terry’s, flowing out over her lacy pillows, and her satin sheets. As fat as the woman was, she still looked beautiful to Terry. The book she was reading appeared so tiny on her broad satin bosom.
Terry had almost said “I.H.T.J.W.” to greet her, but remembered, in time, that Ethel Chalfont had already lectured her about that. “Dear heart,” she’d said, “You most sho’ly do NOT hope the Japanese win. They despise us as much as white folks do. Maybe more, if that’s possible.”
Terry put a liberty dollar on the table by the base of the lamp and slipped into the adjoining room, where taffy-haired Jacques Chalfont, the ten year old, was wincing over his homework. Terry was as golden and smooth as a new bar of soap, and Jacques put down his pencil and watched with lip-biting reverence as she stripped down to her threadbare bloomers, and she shook a fist at Jacques with mock violence and he closed his eyes, and then even the bloomers came off, and she crossed the room naked while Jacques peeked. She wiggled into a green satin dress that had hung on a hook on Jacques’ wall all week.
The dress had belonged to Madame Chalfont twenty years ago, when she was as softly edible as Terry herself was now. Terry was renting it from her, along with Chalfont complicity, for one silver dollar per escapade. The dress, by degrees each night of that week, had lost its smell of mothballs, and had taken on the smell of the humanized leather of a car’s interior, plus the tang of Bay Rum, and the nuts-and-sweat odor of male. The man involved, meanwhile, paid considerably more than a silver dollar each time to Mrs. Chalfont for the service, a service that he was more than satisfied with and often said so.
Terry pulled her hair straight out into a shiny rope and twisted it, stooping forward, and folded it back into a licorice-black chignon, and pinned it, patting it into place as she pulled bobby pins from her pursed lips and slipped them into her hair with thoughtless precision. She fished her dancing shoes out of the grease-stained grocery bag she’d carried them in, and held them up to the light. She set them on the floor and stepped into them, with her black-soled feet, holding herself, and navigated the stair steps with uncertainty, until at the bottom step she stood absolutely still, thinking. Thinking back on things; little things; like the way Pop used to pinch a firefly in half with his thumbnail and stick the glowing belly on Terry’s finger and say it was Mister Moon’s tear drop. Or the way bacon and coffee smelled up the house together on Saturday morning.
Out the screen door she finally marched, and down the dirt walkway, just as his car rounded the corner at Aberdeen and 110th, a coupe with running boards that she was proud to be seen in. The passenger-side door had a fancy sign lettered across it, “Henry ‘Honeybee’ Wilson”, and a painting of a bee-hive, dripping honey, with musical notes bubbling out the top.
You didn’t have to drive far south on Aberdeen, then west on 105th Street, before the neighborhood seemed to regress, thin out, into a pre-city condition. It didn’t quite look like the country, but the plots of land got broader and more desolate, the buildings more shed-like, or ramshackle. Little corn fields, and even a sway-backed horse or two, appeared on the roadside, behind wire fences, whisked by the Buick’s headlights. The lonely traffic lights they came to after long intervals seemed to be anticipating the far distant future, or another place entirely, for all the purpose they fulfilled. Sitting at a long red light, with no traffic or even signs of life for miles in any direction, built a comical tension in the car that once or twice caused the two of them to bust out laughing.
He was chewing a toothpick, and a hat that matched his three-piece suit tilted back on his wavy head of hair. He only managed to wink at Terry, from time to time, as they happened to drive past some stoic old lamppost at the edge of somebody’s property, lighting his black face for a second. He made driving look like serious business, and seemed to be navigating by the silver-dollar-sized moon that had stuck to the upper right hand corner of the windshield, glancing at it at regular intervals.
He hadn’t spoken a dozen words to her since she climbed in the car, but she didn’t mind: his silences were a blessing. She loved night-driving, with a temperate breeze grazing her arm, and even liked the dark green odor of mulch, and ditch puddle, that threatened to overcome her perfume. All she wanted to do was be driven further. All she wanted was for him to know where they were going, so she herself could be lost.
“You ever talk to them stars up there, gal?”
His voice was such a low, gravelly thing. She didn’t notice that he’d spoken until afterwards, when she suddenly recalled it, hearing it as a voice in her head. She shook her head to answer.
“Mm-mm.”
“Never told them stars nothin’ sweet?”
He killed the headlights before stopping the car, a habit he’d picked up in Mississippi. It was always good to be one place when people thought you were another. The car rolled on another hundred yards until he brought it to rest on the wrong side of the road, on the shoulder, which sloping down, along a carious length of picket fence with a sign that said Cider Apples. There was a v-shaped formation of trees to the left, two old oaks, far enough away to run to for a whole minute, and a long, low building on the other side of the road, brown as tobacco, with truck tires leaning against it. If there were crickets singing when they arrived, they now stopped, and the field was so quiet that she could hear him breathing. Fireflies drifted all over the field, as green and luminous drops of absinthe.
“I have big hands, “he said, “from playing the guitar.” He held them up for her to see.
He lifted the car door handle and the door swung open over the asphalt, and the damp odor of night rose from it. He stuck a leg out, braced against the slight tilt of the car on the high shoulder, and unbuttoned his fly. He dug a fleur-de-lis handkerchief from his breast pocket, and spread it over the lap of his pants, and he shifted his hips, and he told Terry to undo her hair. She laid her bobby pins in a row on the dashboard.
She couldn’t see it as he brought it out for her, because it was so black, and the dashboard cast a moon-shadow over his lower half, but she could smell it. It was pungent and real. And then she detected, as she spread her own legs, and the air blew cool on her, something equal rising from herself, but she wasn’t ashamed. It was a strong but not unpleasant odor. It was another country smell.
-April 1995
