Toni Morrison - Paradise

Billie Delia left the next day in her very own car and never said a word to her about the wedding, the reception, the Convent girl or anything. Pat tried to remember how that pressing iron got into her hand, what had been said that had her running up the stairs with a 1950s GE electric iron called Royal Ease clutched in her fingers to slam against her daughter's head. She, the gentlest of souls, missed killing her own daughter by inches. She who loved children and protected them not only from each other but from too stern parents lunged after her own daughter. She who had trained herself to reasoning and soft manners and discretion and dignity, falling down the stairs and bruising herself so badly she had to cancel two days of class. Educated but self-taught also to make sure that everybody knew that the bastard-born daughter of the woman with sunlight skin and no last name was not only lovely but of great worth and inestimable value. Trying to understand how she could have picked up that pressing iron, Pat realized that ever since Billie Delia was an infant, she thought of her as a liability somehow.

Vulnerable to the possibility of not being quite as much of a lady as Patricia Cato would like. Was it that business of pulling down her panties in the street? Billie Delia was only three then. Pat knew that had her daughter been an 8-rock, they would not have held it against her. They would have seen it for what it was-only an innocent child would have done that, surely. Have I missed something? Was there something else? But the question for her now in the silence of this here night was whether she had defended Billie Delia or sacrificed her. And was she sacrificing her still? The Royal Ease in her hand as she ran up the stairs was there to smash the young girl that lived in the minds of the 8-rocks, not the girl her daughter was.

Pat licked her bottom lip, tasted salt and wondered who exactly the tears were for.

Nathan DuPres, believed to be the oldest male in Ruby, welcomed the audience. He disputed the claim of seniority every year, pointing to his cousin Moss, then saying Reverend Simon Cary was a more suitable choice. But he let the town persuade him in the end because Reverend Cary talked too long, besides which he was not among the first families, so his arrival was associated not with World War II but with Korea. A stalwart man of such loving-kindness even Steward Morgan admired him, Nathan had married Elder Morgan's daughter, Mirth. Because they had no surviving children, he deeply cherished other people's: hosting the annual Children's Day picnic, fine-tuning the rehearsals, keeping cough drops and fireballs in his pockets to pass out. Now, smelling slightly of the horse he'd just dismounted, he climbed the platform and surveyed the audience. Nathan cleared his throat and surprised himself. Whatever he'd prepared to say had left him and the words he did say seemed appropriate to some other event. "I was five," he said, "when we left Louisiana and sixty-five when I hopped in the truck leaving Haven behind for this here new place. I know I wouldn't have done it if Mirth was alive or any of our children was still aboveground. You all know my babies-all of them-was took by a tornado in 1922. Me and Mirth found them in a stranger's wheat field. But I never regretted coming here. Never. There is honey in this land sweeter than any I know of, and I have cut cane in places where the dirt itself tasted like sugar, so that's saying a heap. No, I never had a gnat-minute's worth of regret. But there's a sadness in me now. Maybe in this season of my Lord's birth I'll learn what it is. This parch in my throat. The water that stays in my eyes. I know I've seen more years than God usually allows a man, but this dryness is new. The eye water too. When I run my mind over it, all I can come up with is a dream I had a while back."

In the next-to-last row, Lone DuPres sat next to Richard Misner, Anna on his other side. She leaned forward to glance at Anna and learn whether she, too, was losing her mind. Anna smiled but did not return her look, so she sat back to endure another one of old Nathan's incoherent dreams.

Nathan ran his fingers over his head, closed his eyes as if to get the details straight.

"Was an Indian come up to me in a bean row. Cheyenne, I believe. The vines were green, tender. The blossoms coming out all over. He looked at the row and shook his head, sorrowful-like. Then he told me too bad the water was bad; said there was plenty of it but it was foul. I said, But look here, look at all the flowers. Looks like a top crop to me. He said, The tallest cotton don't yield the best crop; besides, those flowers the wrong color. They's red. And I looked and sure enough they was turning pink, then red. Like blood drops. Scared me some. But when I looked back he was gone. And the petals was white again. I reckon that sighting is like this here story we going to tell again this evening. It shows the strength of our crop if we understand it. But it can break us if we don't. And bloody us too. May God bless the pure and holy and may nothing keep us apart from each other nor from the One who does the blessing. Amen."

When Nathan left the platform, amidst murmurs of kindness if not gratitude, Richard Misner took advantage of the pause to whisper something to Anna and leave his seat. He was hoping to relieve nascent waves of the claustrophobia that had not plagued him since he was jailed with thirty-eight others in a tiny cell in Alabama. He had embarrassed himself then, because the sweat and nausea signaled fear to his companions. And it was a hard lesson knowing that whatever risks he took, however eager he was for the dangerous confrontation, a crowded cell could humiliate him before teenagers without pity. Now, feeling the onslaught of suffocation in this tightly packed schoolhouse, he joined Pat Best, standing in the hall watching the play and the audience through the door. A long table of cakes, cookies and punch lined the wall behind her.

"Hello, Reverend." Pat did not look at him but adjusted her body to accommodate him in the doorway.

"Evening, Pat," he said, blotting moisture from his neck with his handkerchief. "Out here is better for me."

"Me too. See everything from here without stretching or peeping between two hats."

They looked over the heads of the audience as the curtains, made of percale sheets-laundered and carefully ironed-wavered. Children in white surplices filed through the parting, the perfection of their serious faces and flawless hair undone occasionally by a knee sock sliding down to an ankle or a bow tie twisted to the right. After a glance at Kate Golightly they took a uniform breath for O holy night, the stars are brightly shining…

At the second verse Richard Misner leaned over to Pat. "Mind if I ask you something?"

"No. Go ahead." She thought he was going to ask for a donation, because he had been having difficulty raising money (in the quantities he hoped for) to aid the legal defense of four teenagers arrested in Norman and charged with possession, resisting, arson, disorderly, inciting and whatever else the prosecution could ferret out of its statutes to level against black boys who said No or thought about it. They had been in jail, Richard Misner told his congregation, for almost two years. When arraigned, they'd been behind bars for twenty months.

The trial date was about to be set, and lawyers needed to be paid for services already rendered and more to come. So far Richard had collected only what the women had given. Women who thought more about the pain felt by the boys' mothers than of the injustice of their sons' situation. The men, however, Fleetwoods, Pulliam, Sargeant Person and the Morgans, had been adamant in their refusal. Clearly Richard had not carefully enough shaped his plea. He should have built a prodigal sons foundation rather than a political one. Then, as he stood outside Calvary, continuing his requests, he would not have had to listen to "I don't hold with violence," from men who had handled guns all their lives. Or "Little illegal niggers with guns and no home training need to be in jail." This from Steward, of course. However much Richard insisted they had no guns, that demonstrations were not illegal, the men kept their wallets closed. Pat decided, if asked directly, to donate as much as she could. It was pleasant to think of his needing her generosity, so she was annoyed to learn that that was not at all what was on Richard Misner's mind.