Red
by Sarah Clemens
Red came to a dead stop at the edge of the garden. “I don’t know who you think you are,” she said, her voice firm. “But those are Miss Lydia’s strawberries.”
“I’m Virginia,” said the colored girl, getting up and brushing off her dress. “Matilda is my mama, and Miss Lydia said I could pick ’em anytime I wanted.”
They stood facing each other in the pounding August heat, and Red’s temper wilted as she wiped her freckled face with her sleeve and pulled off her hat to use as a fan. “Well, I guess that’s okay.” She shoved the straw hat back onto her head and sat between rows, picking a particularly juicy berry and plopping it into her mouth. The strawberry patch at the back of the property was shut out from the rest of the world, hemmed in by stately hedges.
“Are you Yvette?” asked Virginia. She was a gravely pretty girl with dark brown skin and braids all over her head, clipped with colorful barrettes.
Red grimaced theatrically. “I hate that name. Call me Red.”
“It fits. You here for long?”
“Through the end of this month and into the first week of September,” said Red, getting up and joining Virginia on her row.
“You’ll be here for Miss Portia’s next spell,” said Virginia matter-of-factly. “Her last one was something! The lions over at the zoo roared all night and the wolves howled.”
“They did?”
“Yeah, and Miss Lydia and my mama were with her all night.”
Red picked a berry and cautiously handed it to Virginia. “How old are you?”
For the second time they sized each other up.
“Twelve.”
“Ten,” said Red. They ate strawberries for a while, a few making it into a bucket Red had brought with her. “I’ve never talked to anyone colored my own age,” she said finally.
Virginia grinned. “Me either. No white girl, I mean. But my teacher says this is 1963 and things are going to change.”
“You mean like going to school together and stuff?”
“Yeah. Last year a black man tried to get into a college in Mississippi. Someday—” she broke off and lifted a finger. “Listen. You hear that?”
It was a deep Aaaaauh… Aaaaauh, filling the heavy air between them and the Memphis zoo. The lions roaring, bringing the outside world into Lydia’s isolated garden.
“Feeding time,” whispered Virginia.
“Yvette! Yvette? Where are you!”
Red squinched up her face. “It’s my grandmother. I’ll talk to you later. G’bye.”
She ran to the house with her few strawberries and Lydia, her grandmother, closed the screen door behind her.
“How can you run in this heat, child? Put your bucket down and let’s sit in the dining room.”
That meant it was serious.
“Do you know why you’re here?” asked Lydia, her hands reflected in the rich depths of the mahogany table. Red could see heavyset Matilda pass by the door, listening. Matilda, Virginia’s mother, who smelled of Clorox and sweat, whose dark, round face was framed with wisps of gray hair that flew loose from her tight bun. She seemed aloof to Red, as if she owned the house, rather than cleaned it. Lydia didn’t seem to know she was there.
Red put both elbows on the table. “Uh—because my parents are moving us to New York and this summer’ll be my last chance to learn any manners, because God knows they don’t have any up there.”
Lydia cocked an eyebrow. “If I didn’t know better,” she said in her refined drawl, “I’d say you were repeating something you heard.”
Red shrugged.
“Well,” said Lydia, “we’ve never been all that close, you and I, and that’s why I told your mother I’d keep you here in Memphis while they move. I am your—grandmother. And you haven’t seen much of your Great-grandmother Portia. She’ll be down with one of her spells while you’re here, at the end of your visit, but that shouldn’t be a problem. As to manners… I’ll start by calling you by your Christian name, Yvette. Red sounds like a cowboy.”
“I hate Yvette.”
Lydia just looked at her from beautiful, drooping eyes, her fine lips curving up on one side. “Well, you’ll just have to get used to hearing it, because I won’t call you Red. I was educated at a good school where they taught you manners.”
Red’s face brightened. “Daddy says that back before the Punic Wars you went to Randolph-Macon.”
Lydia’s eyes narrowed. “How kind of him to fill you in.”
Through the screened windows, covered with drifts of white curtain, Red could hear the lions.
“Do they roar very often?” she asked.
Lydia frowned. “They’re lions. They roar when they roar.” She looked elegant in the gardening workshirt and khaki pants in a way Red feared she never would.
“Great-grandmother Portia wants to see you tomorrow, Yvette. She’s very happy you’ve come.”
Red smiled, but it came out more a wince.
She slept on a narrow twin bed that night, listening to the fan huff hot air, and to the leaves outside her window, caressing each other in the faint breeze. A tear fell, hot against her skin and the starched pillowcase. This room was so different from her own, and she missed having her mother tuck her in and her father read to her. They had just gotten into Howard Carter’s The Tomb of Tutankhamon and she longed for the sound of his voice, the way he turned the book around so they could share the pictures.
Then, the night held its breath, and so faintly, so faintly, she heard a new sound—the wolves howling at the zoo.
“Did you wash your face and comb your hair?”
“Uh-huh.” Red never washed her face if no one was watching, and her shock of red hair didn’t take much maintenance.
“Say yes, not uh-huh,” smiled Lydia.
They breakfasted and went out back, into the dappled light of dogwood trees and beyond to the irises, nodding in ruffled and multi-hued splendor.
“When your mother was little,” said Lydia, “she would always pick out a blue iris. I started breeding them to get the bluest ones I could for her.” She cut one and, carefully, Red took it from her.
“Now, we’ll go see Great-grandmother Portia.” She led her into a tunnel of trees and hedges to the house next door. Lydia didn’t have a lot of money, compared to what the Tucker family had had when she was young. When she had married Grandfather Earl, they had purchased two shotgun houses, side by side on Crump Circle, the other one for Great-grandmother Portia. Grandfather Earl died years before Red was bom. What was left of the Tucker estate brought in just enough to go without working, which suited Lydia fine, because her life was devoted to horticulture. She combined both backyards to create a seamless melding of formal garden and English herb garden, to plots of irises and vegetables, to the cool tunnel of trees that led from Lydia’s house to the back door of Portia’s house, because no one ever went in the front door. Red had been here several times, but she couldn’t help gaping at the denseness of the foliage in the tunnel. It was as if she had entered Sherwood Forest itself, thick and primeval. They emerged at the back of the house and Greatgrandmother Portia stood behind the screen door, a still gray shape. Red would have given anything to bolt from these old people and their remote, decorous lives.
“Why, you’ve brought me an iris.” Portia swung the squinching door open and ushered them in. Portia Tucker was dressed like a picture out of a book, in a blue skirt that went all the way to the ground and a white, high-necked blouse with full sleeves. Her face was gaunt and very wrinkled and her thin hair lay piled in a braid on her head, the pink from her scalp showing through.