down there?” Blossom demands. She’s been pacing for ten minutes, skinny arms ferociously akimbo.
“Language, child!” Mavereen chides.
“I don’t give a single flying fuck about my language, and I certainly have no intention of tempering it—there are circumstances requiring heightened speech and I’m not so very keen on putting this one into blank verse, so kindly answer the goddamned question!” she cries.
“You watch yourself, miss,” Mavereen breathes.
“Aw, hey, calm down there, crackerjack,” Max says soothingly to Blossom. “Davy’s fine. He was down there on account of he was delivering more peanuts. Rooster was on guard duty, warned Mavereen, she came running like a Kentucky Derby favorite, we cleared out the joint with Doc, and when we turned around Davy was still there, like. It was an accident.”
“An accident is misspelling psychology or nicking yourself shaving,” the singer growls.
“And just what did y’all think you were doing parading Miss James here over every inch of God’s creation?” Mavereen counters icily.
“Showing our guest a bit of Southern hospitality. I’d be ever so consternated to learn you’ve never heard of the practice.”
“Again, we don’t need your sarcasm, Blossom,” Jenny Kiona objects. She sits with her pretty chestnut face framed by her fingertips, staring down at a jumble of notes.
“No, we need another one of your delightfully effective lectures or sermons or mixed-race ice-cream socials, or articles for The Advocate.”
“I am not the enemy here!” Jenny cries, slamming her fists on either side of her paperwork.
“Jenny’s right,” says Rooster. He turns out to be an enormous charcoal-colored fellow, with a bald head and a rhino’s posture and a voice that makes you think God just dropped by for a stern word. His button-down is scarlet, his expensive suit black. He speaks slowly but with tremendous authority. “Who’s the enemy, Blossom?”
Blossom’s remarkable face corkscrews into an expression of profound disgust.
“The Ku Klux Klan.”
She sinks into an armchair in the corner.
“Enough said,” Rooster pronounces.
“The Ku Klux Klan?” I marvel from my uncertain position hovering before the fireplace.
The silence roars. Dr. Pendleton snips off the thread holding Max’s brow together, and Max claps him on the shoulder.
“Come and sit, sugar. You’re turning green.”
Mavereen pulls out a chair and I take it. Head full of flaming crosses and the silhouettes of lynching trees.
“I’ll tell you a story, Miss James.” She lights a cigarette. “I was born Mavereen Johnson in Moultrie, Georgia. Them’s some of the biggest former slaveholders in Colquitt County—the Johnsons, I mean. Plenty of their livestock took the name, just like Ezekiel Johnson, my daddy. Now, some Negroes back then could have told you tales about bondage that would nigh about peel your mind clean. Time as a house slave was horsewhipped for not noticing the hall clock had stopped running. Time as a buck was told if he didn’t pick himself a ‘wife,’ they’d sell his frail old mamma, and the only girl available was all of twelve. Not my daddy, though. The Johnson slaves worked up a sweat, but they were kept in ham and fresh butter, clothed like quality, and after the war, there’s many a one stayed and toiled for good wages. Like my pa.”
“Give me a crust with my freedom instead of a feast with shackles,” Jenny murmurs.
“It’s Mavereen’s life,” Rooster intones. “Let her tell it.”
“I was born free in eighteen sixty-seven, married lucky in eighteen eighty-five to a good man name of Richard Meader what supplied a fair amount of the local produce.” Mavereen studies a smoke wisp. “I knew every soul in that town and every Christmas, I sang carols up at the Johnson estate and they treated me like family, and still I wasn’t content. Time came when the itch got too strong—Richard and me, we sold the farm and headed for a land where we’d never been slaves. Richard applied for fifty-six jobs in Portland, finally ended up cleaning toilets at the courthouse. Accidentally crossed shadows with a white man and got slapped in the face for it once. He died of pneumonia in a fever sweat after two years here, dreaming of sunshine.”
Blossom bites her fist. Dr. Pendleton polishes his glasses. Rooster regards the ceiling, while Jenny Kiona chews the end of her pen and Max takes long pulls on a cigarette. I wonder at the practice of abusing anybody different from you, Italians so strongly preferring to abuse each other.
“They were well used to coloreds in Georgia,” Mavereen continues. “But I thought there was someplace different. Someplace pure.”
“What could be purer than the virgin West?” Blossom