way. There’s a buzzing like a thousand hornets in my ears.
“Dr. Pendleton touched Mrs. Vaughan last night when she fell. Well, folks who burn crosses don’t care for that sort of mixing.” Mavereen’s delivery is hollow but matter-of-fact, and even as I watch the white sparks of fury dance in her eyes, I recognize a voice that knows the inevitability of atrocity. “Somebody done wrote a false note calling for help from a colored doctor—he went, and the neighbors told us three masked men packed him into a car. Nobody knows who. Ain’t nobody going to find out neither. Just hush it, and hush it, and bury it deep. They stripped him bare, and cut off his balls, and they hanged him from a tree by the river. And nobody is going to pay for it but us. ‘Keep me, O Lord, from the hands of the wicked; preserve me from the violent man; who has purposed to overthrow my goings.’”
Mavereen resumes her path toward the door. When she reaches it, she turns back to say brokenly, “Don’t think I won’t miss my friend Blossom. I’ll always recollect her fondly, for all she weren’t never real. I got sad work to be about, Miss James. Mister.”
We sit there, motionless. Her footfalls fade away. Then Blossom snatches up the empty ice bucket just in time to be sick in it. I rush to her side.
“Are you all right? Here, let me—”
“Waste of time.” Blossom’s skin glows slick. “You’re nursing a dead woman. Man. It doesn’t matter any longer.”
“Of course it does, and you’re nothing of the kind. What—”
“The Klan just managed to kill two niggers with one stone. How wonderfully efficient of them. Oh, poor Doddridge, I can’t bear to think on it, but though I’ll go slower, they’ve ended me just the same.”
“What in the name of—”
“We weren’t nearly finished with the treatments.” Delicately, she sets the bucket on the floor. “Now we never will be. You had better go, honey.”
“I won’t leave you like this!”
“We both need to pack.”
“But—”
“Please leave, Alice.” She hugs herself in a familiar gesture, turns to the window. “If Officer Overton was shouting that bit of gossip through a megaphone, and Mavereen warns the rest like I suppose she intends, then it’s really just as well.”
“What is?”
“That I’ll be dead soon enough,” she answers, “and won’t have to pretend to be Henry for very long.”
◆ Twenty-Six ◆
A moratorium on race prejudice would mean that 13 millions of colored people in America would become politically free from disenfranchisement; physically free from lynching; mentally free from ignorance and socially free from assault.
—BEATRICE MORROW CANNADY, The Advocate, Portland, Oregon, October 3, 1931
The Paragon Hotel on the morning I leave it feels like a living creature. The dear old kid hums with awakening guests stretching their arms and smacking their lips in anticipation of coffee. An awfully lucky few will know nothing; most will wonder as they yawn why they feel heavier inside. And a few will recall instantly that a colored war veteran was mutilated and hanged, and will blink for long seconds at the ceiling before rising. Wondering when their own time comes, whether they’ll drift up to heaven from their warm beds or from the cool rustling of strange tree branches.
Rap, rap, rap.
“Come in,” I hear, and I turn the knob.
Entering, I survey Jenny Kiona’s room. My bags are packed, but I’ve business to settle first, on several fronts. The chamber is girlish and dreadfully brainy at the same time. A pink throw lazes at the end of the bed, a row of simply darling miniature porcelain animals from a Chinese apothecary shop grace her mantel, and a bunch of wild daisies beam at me from a cheap vase. But there are also shelves aplenty here, and the amount of books wedged into them would knock a librarian for a loop. I remember her brother telling me that Jenny started life as one of Mavereen’s silent, stalking maids and hand it to the girl with due gusto: Wednesday Joe might be the sort to avoid walking under ladders, but Jenny is the type to climb them.
“What are you doing here?” she rasps.
“I’m sorry. You must feel awfully unwell, everyone does, but I need to speak with you before I hoist skirts and vamoose.”
Jenny sits at a secondhand desk that’s wide enough for a Wall Street tycoon and scratched enough it could have gone ten rounds with Medea. Papers are strewn over it in a way that’s