For five years, the two did the dance of push and pull. During that time, the baby came and Graham Lee wanted them under his roof, but he wasn’t man enough to stand up to his family. In Grenada, where the hell would they go anyway? But that didn’t stop the fool from snatching little Hattie every now and again, making sure his little gray-eyed twin knew her daddy and hoping Cissy would find a way to stay too. In the beginning, she’d stay a week or two, but since she started working at the Baldwin Hotel, Cissy didn’t want to take the risk. Besides, her aunt’s husband promised to put her and Hattie out if she missed paying her monthly share.
The telling sickened Elnora. Twenty years ago, she made a hasty decision based on fear and shame. She saw no cause for either child to pay another day for that mistake.
“You know you got a bed here,” she said quietly. They now stood in the kitchen. Elnora had finished with the greens while Cissy told her tale and prepared a ham for the oven. “Ain’t nobody here but me,” Elnora continued. “We get Hattie back and y’all move in here. Leave Clara and Josiah to themselves.”
“What about Ed?” Cissy set the ham inside the oven and wiped her hands on a dishtowel.
Ed Jenkins was a Pullman porter for the Illinois Central Railroad. He was seven years younger than Elnora and fine as a shiny copper penny, but—
“Ed don’t pay for nothing here. I do. You can stay if you want. Plenty of room.”
“If you sure—”
“Wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t.” Elnora stirred the greens around the cast-iron pot with a wooden spoon. The salt pork would season them real good. Later, she’d make a batch of hot water corn bread. “Tell me why you can’t get the baby from Graham Lee. Why you want me to do it?”
“He said next time I come for her I ain’t coming back.”
Elnora tapped the spoon hard against the side of the pot. A bit more force would have snapped the spoon in two. “That white boy threaten you?”
“No’m,” Cissy said. “Well... truth is, I don’t know. He don’t make it easy for me to come back and you know Hattie and me can’t stay with him. It ain’t gon’ ever work out like that.”
“He needs to stop acting a fool.”
“I was hoping you could talk some sense into him. Maybe get his uncle to go with you.”
Oh, Elnora thought. So now they’d come to the gist of it. Rayford Drew had installed indoor plumbing in her little three-room shotgun house and everybody had an idea how that had come about. Well, they were wrong. She’d spread her legs once for a white man, and despite his best attempts, that man wasn’t Rayford Drew Donner.
“I don’t know about that.”
“He’s scared of his uncle,” she said quickly, “and Mr. Donner is just as tired of this going back and forth too.”
“You shoulda gone to him then.”
Cissy bowed her head. “I’m scared of him too.”
“Lord Jesus.”
Elnora stood at the back door and looked out. Her yard wasn’t much. She had a small garden and a few chickens in a pen. The addition of the bathroom had rendered the outhouse unnecessary so it had been boarded up. When Ed came back through, she planned to ask him to take it down, lime up the hole, and sell the wood for parts. Her neighbors’ yards didn’t fare with fancier trimmings either. Outhouse, garden, a few scraps of this and that. That’s how it was in the colored section of town.
When she had worked as a cook for the Tennant family over on Line Street, well, that had been a different story. Fancy linens, fancy furniture, fancy food. Fancy everything. Elnora shook off the unevenness of it with a toss of her head. It was 1936 and some progress had been made. She earned a living doing hair right there in the living room that would soon belong to her, and she only cooked for white folks when the pay was good, not because it was her daily job. Times were changing. People just had to have their eyes open to see it.
“Will you ask him?” Cissy had taken rest at the square wooden table in the center of the stuffy kitchen. “Please?”
“You ain’t got to beg. I’ll get your baby back.” Elnora turned from the door to look Cissy square in the eye. “But you got to promise me something.”
“What? Anything.”
“You got to leave that white boy alone.”
Cissy nodded. “I’m done with Graham Lee. That ain’t a promise. It’s a fact.”
The sincerity and conviction couldn’t be denied. Elnora had no choice but to believe her. So she had one question left.
“You sure Hattie’s with her daddy?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” The question seemed to stun her. “Wouldn’t nobody else want her.”
III
Romano’s was a few doors down from Grenada Hardware on the corner of 1st and Green, right off the square. The Italian family had owned a grocery store there for as long as Elnora remembered. Unlike many, their treatment of coloreds didn’t set her teeth on edge. She knew better than to call the owner by his birth name in mixed company, but if they were conducting business one-on-one, the talk was between “Elnora” and “Salvatore” and not “Aunty” and “Mr. Sal” as dictated by society.
With the greens and ham still needing a few more hours, Elnora left Cissy in charge of supper and checked the first place she knew to look for Rayford Drew — in his upstairs office above the grocery. The ringing bell announced her entry and Sal waved.
“You’re lucky. I was about to lock up.”
“I’m not here to shop,” she said. “Is he upstairs?”
Sal frowned. His whole body managed to tighten with the act, from his slick dark cap of hair through his stocky build down to his scuffed work shoes. Red darkened his forehead. “He’s up there. I don’t want any funny business.”
She bit back a smile at the very idea. “No funny business. Is he drinking?”
“Maybe,” Sal said. He locked the front doors and flipped the Open sign over to Closed. “I’ll go up too.”
“I can handle him.”
“He could be drinking.” Sal untied his white apron, tugged it free, and tossed it onto the counter. The fabric landed in a heap beside the register. “If he’s sober, I’ll leave. Come on.”
Elnora and Sal had practically grown up as siblings. Their mothers had taken in wash together. With two strong-willed mothers, the children had no choice but to either get along or pretend. They never had a reason to pretend.
Since he’d locked the front door, taking the outside steps was not an option. He led her to the back storeroom where another staircase hid among canned goods and fresh produce waiting to be stocked for tomorrow’s shoppers. Sal pulled a string. Light from a single bulb filled the space and the tight staircase. She followed him up.
To her surprise, Sal didn’t bother knocking. He simply marched in. Rayford Drew sat behind a desk. The top three buttons of his shirt were undone and revealed a damp undershirt. Tendrils of silver curled along the edges of his hairline, disappearing into the sandy brown hair that framed his boyish face. At forty-five, only the wisps of gray and the wisdom in his eyes offered any hint of his age. A ledger was spread before him. An unopened bottle of shine was not too far from his right hand. A glass waited beside it. The whir of a metal fan stirred the air and lifted the pages of the ledger. Overall, the fan was no match against Mississippi humidity in April.
“See?” she said.
“Not yet,” Sal muttered, then turned to Rayford. “Elnora is here for you.”
Rayford Drew made a show of looking around Sal and taking in Elnora from head to toe. She was mindful not to be self-conscious of the pair of sensible black shoes on her feet or the lightweight blue cotton dress that failed to hide the curves of her hips, backside, and bosom. She was thankful that she’d kept her hair pulled up in a bun and hoped that would contain whatever wayward thoughts entered his mind. But judging by how his hazel eyes lit up and the faint smirk that rested on his mouth, she knew the matronly bun had failed her.