Morning Is a Long Time Coming by Bette Greene
It had something to do with giving something to somebody else. From experiencing the pleasure and the pain of giving something to somebody else that nobody since Ruth had ever given to me.
Ruth! How long had I been lost in old memories? I looked at my watch. Already eight o’clock. The train may already be on this side of Earle. And I still haven’t cleared all the emotional debris from my brain.
What I don’t understand is why I can so easily accept Charlene’s weakness, but not my own. Never my own. I searched myself for long forgotten (however fleeting) feelings of revulsion upon first seeing Charlene cry, but I didn’t find any. Actually, I think the opposite may have been true. Because, more than anything else, it was her tears that made her real to me.
Then if it’s a lie that vulnerability is contemptible, I will also have to learn to accept that for myself. If it’s okay for Charlene, then it will have to be okay for me too. Now I know something else. Ruth would have never withdrawn ten years of love because of two minutes worth of hysterics at the Bolton reformatory. She would, though, have withdrawn her love for a far more valid reason. I have treated her badly.
More than anyone, it was Ruth who stood by me, and yet for all these six years, I have tried to avoid her. Avoid Ruth. Avoid the only one who saw me weak. Avoid reviving old memories. At all costs—avoid! AVOID!
And for all this time, I’ve had to keep open a very wary eye. If she was on one side of the street, I would nonchalantly stroll to the other. Only once, at the post office a couple of years ago, did we come unavoidably face-to-face. And so we both said hello. Hello. Nothing more than hello.
It’s not just that she rekindles the pain, although God knows, she sure does do that! I guess I’m afraid that people will see us together and remember that for so many years Ruth had been our housekeeper. Right up until the time the emotional volcano erupted which the local people came to refer to as “Patty Bergen’s Nazi.” And some people even then suspected that nobody was ever able to prove: “That that uppity nigra, Ruth, knew all about Patty’s hiding of that Nazi. Maybe, more than a few people speculated, that it was even Ruth putting Patty up to her treason.”
I remember Ruth’s telling me once that all it takes to get a Negro man strung up from a tree is a little suspicion. Thank God, it takes something a little more than that for a Negro woman.
Even my Memphis lawyer in a moment of intense frustration once blurted out that in all his years of experience nobody before me had ever managed to incorporate three such hated elements—a Nazi, a Negro, and a Jew—into a single case.
Anyway, I can’t stand any more talking, any more rehashing! All I want is for people to forget me ... to forget what happened.
Five minutes after eight. I rose from my suitcase perch while sighing as though I had successfully dealt with all those issues abutting the heart without once touching the heart.
And the heart? It wasn’t complicated. Not a bit. Because in all ways that really matter, that old Negro woman waiting up there by the side of the tracks is my mother.
I remember once she was so mad at me she could hardly see straight and still she showed how much she cared. Ruth had just gotten through saying, “The living room is no kinda room to be bouncing balls.” Well, looking right at her, I decided to give it one final bounce just to prove that I wasn’t easily intimidated. It was that “final” bounce that broke my father’s reading lamp.
“If I ever catch you telling yore daddy that it was you what broke his lamp,” she said, “then I ain’t never going to speak to you again. You hear me a-talking to you, girl?”
Later when my parents came home from the store, I overheard Ruth telling them, “I’m real sorry, folks, but I reckon I just wasn’t paying no attention to where I was heading.”
But even before that, one of my earliest memories involved rubbing Kiwi shoe polish all over my body because I wanted to be like Ruth. I thought that if I were her color, then she’d somehow be my real mother and she’d love me ... love me even more.
When that didn’t work, I tried scraping the brown off her skin with a butter knife. Ruth told me how she laughed until her stomach muscles ached when I told her, “Mommies ought to be white like their children.”
Well, maybe this will only go to prove that I haven’t progressed an awful lot since I made that statement a dozen or so years ago, ’cause the color thing still bothers me. I’m simply unable or unwilling to cross the color line to claim the only mother I’ve ever known. Funny thing is, I don’t think that anybody in this town would ever believe that it’s even remotely possible for somebody white to love somebody who isn’t.
And as big a problem as that is, there are still other things which separate us which may be just as big as the color barrier. Things like religion, education, economics, and my ever-present shame that at eighteen, I still haven’t outgrown my need for a mother.
Sometimes I wonder if I would have so desperately missed not having a mother if I hadn’t once had Ruth. I know I don’t actively miss not having a father. Maybe that’s because I know at least two girls with pretty nice mothers, but I’m not sure that I know anybody hereabouts who has a father worth bragging about.
Well, so what if I still want a mother! So did Lottie McEntee right up until her dying days. Nobody knew for sure just how old old Mrs. McEntee was, but everybody figured that she had to be pressing on a hundred. I know for a fact that at least one of her twelve children, Elvira, has been retired from the post office for better than ten years.
Well, a couple of summers ago, I was in the drug store eating a hot fudge sundae when the pharmacist, Mr. Martin Clapp, asked me if I would mind dropping off a prescription for Mrs. McEntee.
Miss Elvira was real appreciative of the favor that I had done her mother and so she practically insisted that I stay long enough for a visit. Well, Miss Elvira talked on and on about the burden (not that she minded it!) of taking care of a very old and sick lady. But it wasn’t any of Elvira’s words that I found half so memorable as the single word that the almost century-old Lottie McEntee chanted insistently from her sick bed. “Momma ... momma ... please help me, momma. ...”
I looked at my watch again. Almost eight minutes after eight. The train will be coming along in seven minutes and I still have a ticket to buy. I can always buy it from the conductor. Why am I thinking about tickets or conductors? I’m still scrambled, still don’t know what to do!
Patty Bergen, you amaze me. You really do! You with your dictionaries and your memberships in the Book-of-the-Month Club AND the Literary Guild. With all that you are nothing, more or less, than a scared rabbit. For Christ’s sake, go on and say hello to Ruth. I seriously doubt that she’ll bite you.
This time I grabbed my valise and started up that grade as though I had an unalterable destination in mind. And this time she was looking in my direction. “Hi, Ruth,” I said, shocked at the ease with which it was spoken. “How you been?” I asked, while coming still closer.
“I’ve been doing right well, Miss Patty, I thank you kindly. Euuu-whee ... you done growed into a pretty woman. Always did have the softest, most-seeing eyes in all of Rice County. You been doing okay?”
“I think so. Last week I graduated.”
“I knowed that. Saw your name in the Rice County Gazette, sure did. But they is wrong when they say that Miss Edna Louise Jackson is the Most Likely to Succeed ’cause she ain’t, but you is! Think she could have written up the fire over in Earle for the Commercial Appeal? Well, one day one of your stories gonna win a prize. Ruth knows.”
I laughed at Ruth’s enthusiasm, but primarily I laughed at myself, for only a minute ago I had been so frightened. “You know, Ruth, I sometimes think that we are the only people in this entire town who don’t believe that Edna Louise has achieved heavenly perfection.”
This time it was Ruth who laughed. “Reckon you and me always did have an eye for that which was real and that which wasn’t.”
Ruth. Wonderful Ruth. My loving you hasn??
She had changed, grown gently older since I had last fully looked at her. Before, her hair didn’t have those patches of gray, and the series of fine horizontal lines that I remembered are now tracked by deeper vertical lines which crisscross with regularity.
“Hey, are you going into Memphis too?” I asked. “We could sit together. Kind of catch up.”
“Oh, no, Miss Patty, I ain’t a-going nowhere. My little grandsons are coming visiting from Wynne City. Did you know my son Robert’s a preacher now?”
“Oh, that’s wonderful, Ruth. That’s what you wanted more than anything. You always said that Robert had enough natural devilment in him to put the fear of the Lord into the devil himself.”
She looked enormously pleased. “All these years done come and all these years done gone, and you still remember what it is that old Ruth done said?”
“I guess so,” I said, experiencing something of her wonderment.
Then Ruth spoke again, but the insistent screech of the old 8:15 blotted it out. I asked, “What?”
“Nothing more than a passing thought, Miss Patty. I was recollecting that among all them mess of things that I done told you, you done found stuff worth remembering.”
As the train was screeching, hissing, and blowing steam while trying with obvious agony to come to a stop, I just nodded because some noise can’t be competed with. Then after waiting long enough for the volume of train noises to subside, I grabbed her in a hug that was as unexpected for her as it was for me. “I found things that I just might never forget.”
5
AT EXACTLY 9:55, the train from Jenkinsville pulled into the multitracked Union Station. And since the combination passenger and freight train was twenty minutes late and Grandmother wasn’t, I spotted her right off in her ripened-cranberry-colored linen suit.
“Patricia darling,” she called, before throwing her arms around me in prelude to a kiss, “your grandfather made me promise. First thing, I have to bring you by the office. Oy, does he want to show you off.”
She noticed my suitcase, which I had begun to half lug, half drag along. “I’ll get a porter,” she offered.
“No, thanks. No use wasting money, I’m very used to it.”
She pointed down the track as though she didn’t hear me. “There’s one!”
I lifted the suitcase as high off the station platform as I could while straining to capacity muscles that I didn’t even know I possessed. “See, it’s not the least bit heavy.”
Grandmother looked at me as if to say, if you plan to make this a test of wills, then be prepared to lose. But what she actually said was, “It’s too heavy for you. You might break something. Maybe an arm.”
At Grandmother’s beckoning, a Negro redcap came to take the heavy case from my hand. I sighed, partly out of physical relief and partly out of anger. When we reached the car, we waged another battle over just whose quarter the porter should take, and again I lost.
“Grandmother likes to pay for you,” she said, starting up the Buick.
I sat next to her, saying nothing, but feeling small, ineffectual, and cheated. Cheated? Well, maybe in a way because for a lousy quarter she had begun moving in on something that didn’t belong to her. My life.
I know that sometimes little things bother me that my sister or even my mother wouldn’t bother to think twice about. My mother, for example, wouldn’t dream of ever picking up anything heavy, especially not a chech cause every time she’s in Memphis she takes it for granted that Grandmother will pay.
Part of it is that I never like putting people to trouble on my account. Never like having money spent on me. I don’t think—I’m not sure I’m worth it.
A few blocks down on North Main, Grandmother found a metered space catercorner from my grandfather’s office. The carefully lettered sign on the street-level window read:
S. FRIED & SONS
Commercial * Industrial
Sales Leases * Management
Appraisals * Mortgages
* Insurance *
As I pushed open the glass and brass door, Grandmother pressed the back of my hand. “We’re so happy you’re here.”
I believe she meant it. “And I’m so glad you invited me here,” I answered, beginning to believe that I meant it.
Walking past a dozen or so scarred flat-top desks made untidy by somewhat official-looking forms which overflowed from wire baskets, Grandma greeted everyone by name.
My grandpa’s corner office had a cluttered, no-nonsense look about it with the single possible exception of a gallery of family pictures that he displayed beneath the clear plate glass that covered the top of his mahogany desk. When we came in, he was on the phone, but he threw us a long-distance kiss while motioning us toward two moderately comfortable-looking green chairs.
He went on talking into the receiver. “Julius, Julius, my friend, listen to me. ... Will you listen! If you paid a penny less for that site, your own children will call you a ganef. What? I’m not going to listen to you, Julius, tell me one more time that the Union Avenue location is too far out. You’re about to make an old man brech. For your information, this is already nineteen-fifty and downtown Memphis is in gonzeh tseuris.”
Apparently Julius didn’t want to make my grandfather throw up or else Julius became a victim of his persuasion, because only a minute later Grandfather was congratulating him on his foresight. As the conversation began to wind down, Grandpa suddenly asked, “Julius, did I ever tell you about my granddaughter? Only eighteen years old and already a writer. ... Sure, she gets paid for it! The Commercial Appeal ... She’s one of their most regular Arkansas correspondents!”
I beamed inside where it doesn’t show. Even though “correspondent” sounded too close to “foreign correspondent” (Marguerite Higgins, Ernie Pyle, et al.) for me to be entirely comfortable with the word. Anyway, outside of my Earle fire story, most of what I send in are only local or county-wide events and those stories run only in the newspaper’s Arkansas edition.
Besides, most people think that when you get a byline (which I did only once—yep, the Earle fire story) that the newspaper gives you a lot of money. Well, they don’t! For “stringers” like me the pay is a consistent fifteen cents per column inch and a byline doesn’t count for anything. At least not monetarily.
As soon as Grandpa hung up, he began introducing me around the office just as if I had won the Pulitzer Prize. I felt vaguely embarrassed. Was Grandpa making a fool of himself ... of us both? Were they thinking that he should stick with singing the praises of Union Avenue sites because every person in this office had already heard all about their boss’s black sheep granddaughter?
When Grandma and I reseated ourselves inside the Buick, she asked me where I would like to go for lunch. I thought about The Krystal, where you can get coffee in a large white mug for a nickel and an exceedingly small round hamburger on a square bun for only twelve cents.
After I thought about The Krystal, I thought about Grandma with her genuine diamond-in-the-ear earrings and the pearls at her neck which are simulated nothing. They are real pearls from real irritated oysters. And when I thought about all of that, I knew I shouldn’t think about The Krystal.
It’s not that I especially love eating in hamburger joints, it’s just that I don’t feel quite right about her spending a wad of money on some expensive lunch for me.
Once though when I tried to save her money, she laughed, called me, “cheapskate.” And then she asked me why I was forever trying to save her money. My answer was one of those surprise answers—I mean, surprising to me. “I’m not trying to save you money, Grandmother,” I told her. “I’m only trying to prevent you from spending it on me.”
Thi
As the tuxedo-suited maître d’ showed us to our table, Bobby Lawrence and his music men were playing “I’ll Get By.” The maître d’ seated us next to what The Skyway is famous for—a circular wall of glass and if you can’t quite see the whole world from here, you can, at the very least, see our part of the world. Front Street, Mud Island, the Mississippi River, and, on the opposite bank—tah-dah—Arkansas, “Land of Opportunity,” or so it says on our license plates.
After the waiter had taken our orders, Grandmother settled back into her seat and looked me over carefully before announcing, “Now, Patricia darling, we can talk.”
“I guess we can,” I answered, thinking how I never fail to give awkward-sounding answers to what I perceive as tension-provoking statements.
“Well,” she said, still smiling.
But because I couldn’t think of a single thing to add to her smile except, perhaps, one of my own, I settled for returning it.
“Well ...” she repeated, “so, my darling, you decided yet on a college for the fall?”
I wanted to avoid saying anything that Grandma might later look back on as a lie. “I haven’t ... haven’t as yet chosen one,” I said, while staring down at the incredible whiteness of The Skyway’s linens.
“Remember September isn’t far away, darling. But don’t worry, ’cause you have plenty of time.”
I laughed at her inconsistency, but I think Grandma, who began laughing too, was only responding to my pleasure. Her laughter, like her inconsistencies, made her seem young. I began to wonder if it might not be possible to tell her something about my plans, after all. Maybe she really could understand. And I needed somebody in this world to understand. And if I did find somebody who could, I’d ask them please ... please explain it to me.