Africa. Ethel thought that if they were cursed, they required Christian guidance all the more.
On her eighth birthday, Ethel’s father forbid her to play with Jasmine so as not to pervert the natural state of relations between the races. Ethel did not make friends easily, even then. She sobbed and stomped for days; Jasmine was more adaptable. Jasmine assumed simple duties around the household and took over her mother’s position when Felice’s heart seized and she fell mute and paralyzed. Felice lingered for months, her mouth open and pink, eyes foggy, until Ethel’s father had her removed. Ethel observed no disturbance in her old playmate’s face when they loaded her mother into the cart. By then the two did not speak outside of household matters.
The house had been built fifty years before and the stairs creaked. A whisper in one room carried into the next two. Most nights after supper and prayers, Ethel heard her father going up the crooked stairs, guided by the bobbing light of the candle. Sometimes she sneaked to her bedroom door and caught a glimpse of his white bedclothes disappearing around the corner.
“Where are you going, Father?” she asked one night. Felice had been gone two years. Jasmine was fourteen.
“Going upstairs,” he said, and both experienced a strange relief now that they had a term for his nocturnal visits. He was going upstairs—where else did the stairs lead? Her father had given one explanation for the separation of the races in fratricidal punishment. His nighttime trips elaborated on the arrangement. Whites lived downstairs and blacks lived upstairs, and to bridge that separation was to heal a biblical wound.
Her mother held a low opinion about her husband going upstairs but was not without resources. When their family sold Jasmine to the coppersmith on the other side of town, Ethel knew it was her mother’s doing. There was no more going upstairs when the new slave took residence. Nancy was a grandmother, slow in her steps and half blind. Now it was her wheezing that penetrated the walls, not footsteps and squeals. The house had not been so clean and orderly since Felice; Jasmine had been efficient but distracted. Jasmine’s new home was across the way in colored town. Everyone whispered that the child had his father’s eyes.
One day over lunch Ethel announced that when she was old enough, she intended to spread the Christian word to African primitives. Her parents scoffed. It was not something that good young women from Virginia did. If you want to help savages, her father said, teach school. The brain of a five-year-old is more savage and unruly than the oldest jungle darky, he said. Her course was set. Ethel filled in for the regular teacher when she was under the weather. Little white children were primitive in their own way, chirping and undeveloped, but it wasn’t the same. Her thoughts of the jungle and a ring of dark admirers remained in her private preserve.
Resentment was the hinge of her personality. The young women in her circle comported themselves in a foreign ritual, undecipherable. She had little use for boys and, later, men. When Martin appeared, introduced by one of her cousins who worked at the shipping company, she had tired of the gossip and long relinquished an interest in happiness. A panting badger, Martin wore her down. The game of husband and wife was even less fun than she supposed. Jane, at least, turned out to be an unexpected mercy, a tidy bouquet in her arms, even if conception proved yet another humiliation. Over the years life on Orchard Street passed with a tedium that eventually congealed into comfort. She pretended not to see Jasmine when they passed on the street, especially when her former playmate was in the company of her son. His face was a dark mirror.
Then Martin was summoned to North Carolina. He arranged Donald’s funeral on the hottest day of the year; they thought she fainted from sadness when it was just the barbaric humidity. Once they got a taker for the feed shop, they were done, he assured her. The place was backward. If it wasn’t the heat, it was the flies; if not the mice, then the people. At least in Virginia, lynch mobs maintained a pretext of spontaneity. They didn’t string up people practically on your front lawn, the same time every week, like church. North Carolina was to be a brief interlude, or so she thought until she came across the nigger