Elnora Harden had just sat down on her back step to sort through a mess of mustard greens when the pounding started on her front door. Everybody in Boone Alley knew she kept the front bolted shut except for emergencies or business. Even then, she rarely answered it. With heavy, dark clouds rolling in, she wanted the greens cleaned, in the pot, and on the stove before the storm hit. This disturbance already had her on edge because it was interference. Dammit, Elnora hated interferences.
“All right, shit,” she muttered under her breath.
She dropped a dishtowel over the sorted pot of greens and put both it and the dirty, unpicked batch on the back porch out of the way of the potential downfall. The noise at her door hadn’t stopped by the time she reached it and her temper was beginning to match the tempo. She wiped her hands clean on her apron and yanked the door open. Curses waited on the tip of her tongue. They had to wait longer still because the front porch was empty.
Elnora stepped outside. The slamming of the screen door echoed, but she paid it no mind. A lone figure walked down the alley toward Lake Street. In the waning sunlight, she made out a womanly shape with long hair pulled back into a single braid. Bits of white flapped at her waist while the rest of her outfit was dark green, similar to what the maids who worked at the big-time hotel on Main Street wore. The smart figure, shapely legs, and long braid — it didn’t take more than a second or two for Elnora to put those pieces together.
“Cissy!” She cupped her hand to her mouth to give the shout extra power. “Cissy Shaw, get back here!”
“Cousin El?” The younger woman spun on her low-heel shoes and hurried up the gravel-covered road to meet Elnora halfway. Tears stained her cheeks. She reached for Elnora’s hands. “I was so scared you weren’t home!”
“You know better than anyone to come to the back.” She would have pulled free, but Cissy’s hold was strong. “Come on. They’re all at the window now. Let’s get inside ’fore it starts to pour and everybody gets wet trying to hear your business.”
The trembling young woman let go once they were inside. Elnora claimed the rocking chair near the wood-burning stove. Cissy perched on the edge of the wrought-iron four-poster bed. The smell of dust and rain blew in through the open windows. Lace hand-me-down curtains fluttered, reminding Elnora that she was overdue for spring cleaning. She sighed. Yet another thing to break up her peace and quiet. Just like the quivering, sniffling mass on her bed.
“All right there, Cissy.” Elnora took an unused handkerchief from her apron pocket and patted it into the other woman’s hands. “Banging on my door like that, you must want something more than to cry like a baby—”
“That’s it!” Cissy cried out suddenly amid hiccups. “The baby! Cousin El, you got to help me. I ain’t got nobody else!”
“What about the baby?” Elnora’s chest drew tight just putting the question to words. Cissy’s baby was the prettiest the colored folk of Grenada had seen in a good number of years. Skin as smooth as caramel, eyes dove gray like her foolish pappy’s, and chubby cheeks that made a body smile on their darkest day. At just a toddler, she was already everybody’s darling.
“She gone!”
When fresh tears threatened to halt the conversation, Elnora snatched the handkerchief and grabbed Cissy’s shoulders. “Dammit, girl! Stop this foolishness! Where is she?”
“I don’t know where Hattie is.” She started to squirm. “Ow, that hurts.”
Elnora took her time letting go. “What you mean you don’t know? You going to work or coming off shift?”
“Coming off—”
“Then you know where she is. Shit, Cissy.” Elnora rose from the chair and began to pace. She muttered a few more curses to set her breathing back to normal. “Clara has that baby—”
“No, she ain’t! That’s what I’m telling—”
“You ain’t tole me shit.”
Cissy’s hands balled into fists, but she didn’t strike out. She moved to the open window and her fingers dug into the sill. “Aunty met me at the back steps of the Baldwin right after I clocked out. She and Hattie laid down for a nap. When she woke up, my baby was gone!”
“Lord Jesus.” Elnora’s pacing came to a standstill. “Well, did she check Lee Ella’s? That woman can’t keep her hands off babies—”
“Yes!”
“What about the rest of the alley? And over on Cherry? What about down on Union? Hattie ain’t one for wanderin’, but babies get curious. It wouldn’t be her fault.”
“They checked. Ain’t nobody seen her. You got to help—”
“I got to?” Elnora met Cissy’s pleading eyes with a hard stare. “Girl, what you really over here for?”
“My baby gone.”
“I know that. What else?” Elnora asked. She followed with a truth that her instincts confirmed: “You know who got her.”
Silence hung there for a moment. In the distance, thunder tumbled. The old saying of God moving his furniture made Elnora wonder if He was angry about the remodeling project. Although the sound was distant, only a fool would dismiss the power behind those rumbles. The rain would hit hard. She was sure the storm was coming from the east. For sure, Grenada was in its path. Maybe the Delta too.
“Cissy.” Elnora’s patience was near worn out.
“I know,” the younger woman mumbled. Her gaze locked on the crooked pattern of the linoleum nailed to the floor. She began to trace the outlines of magnolia petals and leaves with her shoe until Elnora cleared her throat. This time, she spoke louder: “Yes’m, I know.”
“Well, go get her back.”
“I can’t.”
Elnora sought comfort in her rocking chair. She hoped for additional relief from a pinch of snuff then remembered she’d thrown out the last tin a month ago. It was making her teeth yellow and her breath stink. At thirty-six, she still had a few good years left. She wasn’t about to let some damn tobacco age her and keep her from having fun.
“What you come over here for?”
“Help—”
“Stop,” Elnora said, her willingness to listen to bullshit completely gone. “Truth, Cissy, or you can see yourself out the way you come in.”
Cissy wasted no time returning to the wrought-iron bed where she’d spent a few nights in her youth. She looked ready to grab Elnora’s hands again, but hesitated. In that hesitation, her hands hung there in the space between them. Then she began to use her slender, work-roughened hands to plead her case, waving them around and molding shapes, ghostly images that reminded Elnora of a past she couldn’t escape.
“You good at fixin’ things.”
“Ain’t nothin’ I’m good at but fixin’ hair and a mess of greens. I have a pot waitin’ for me out back.”
“Please, Cousin Elnora. Can’t nobody else help me with this.”
It was the pleading that got to her. That and the look of desperation in brown eyes that were so much like hers.
“Fine,” Elnora said. “Why did that white boy take your baby this time?”
II
The story hadn’t changed. At least not to Elnora’s estimation. Cissy and Graham Lee Donner had thought theirs was the big secret romance that no one knew about, but this was not actually the case. The boy was sprung the minute he’d set eyes on her. He’d come in place of his uncle to collect the rent, and Cissy, fifteen and just starting to smell herself, had handed over the money with a coy smile. Halfway down Newsome Alley, Graham Lee kept looking back. Elnora had been there, so she knew it for fact. Cissy, being young and incorrigible or maybe too much like her mama, had been unable to resist. Having released the right to voice disapproval or otherwise, Elnora had no choice but to watch some elements of history repeat itself.