Padgett Powell - A Woman Named Drown

Mr. Taylor had been shot in a hunting accident and Mrs. Taylor could not be too careful of her daughter and only child. They went round and round over gentlemen callers, with Mrs. Taylor becoming gradually more mannish and violent in her protection of Jasmine Ranelle. Mrs. Taylor could even swing an ax handle!

Mary, I imagine, played a grand Mrs. Taylor. Late in the second act she cracks a suitor over the head while he's kissing Jasmine-with the flat side of a butcher knife. The audience sees her creep up on them through a scrim, the knife is shadowed hugely behind them, and Mrs. Taylor shrieks into the parlor and slaps the caller with the knife. Suitor flees stage.

JASMINE: You ruin everything, Mother.

MRS. TAYLOR: I used the back side of it, honey.

JASMINE: That's what you always say.

I had notions of Mary surprising me with versions of her characters-say, the knife trick sometime, but she never did, of course, and was generally not in favor of my associating her with her roles, as our introduction on the lawn had suggested. She was not in favor of anyone mistaking her for a play character.

I had a role to consider myself. Guy, young guy, stops by, moves in, shoots pool, and drinks gin wearing widow's husband's pastel golf outfits.

MRS. TAYLOR:: You don't know a thing about a one of those young men.

JASMINE: That's the point , Mother. I'm getting to know them.

MRS. TAYLOR: You're getting nowhere!

JASMINE: And you're seeing to it!

[Runs, crying, to her room]

Mary has trundled by with a wheelbarrow blocked from sight by a bank of azalea. When she slides into view, I see the straining tendons in her neck. Sweat is on her like rain. She is not far from the gin flash point.

She'll come in, and all the gentle care of plants outside will translate into a ruthless hammering of ice in the kitchen. She uses a chrome gizmo which serves, screwed into respective configurations, as a jigger, a corkscrew, and a hammer. On her way to shower, she will deliver a drink and a hard kiss, holding my neck with the back of her cold hand, leaving me to contemplate the scene. The drink sits tall, emerald lime refracting through sparkling soda, on a queer blond split-level end table with splayed conical legs and rusting brass feet.

Yesterday I suffered the momentary illusion that I was progressing at pool, but I am finally only mastering a more manly look of indifference to the trouncing. You would think her cruel in this if you did not see how absorbed she is, oblivious to even Ray Conniff and Perry Como when she gets a challenging run. She would be mean, I think, only if she were capable of pulling back in my behalf.

After pool Mary asked if I was any good with figures and I said fair and she handed me a desk-style book of checks, which she explained was "a bit behind."

It hadn't been balanced in eighteen months, there were checks missing, there was a statement showing automatic deposits from two sources which I was told were regular. I made the bold presumption that they were Stump's pensions of some sort and determined monthly cash flow, within a tolerance of three hundred dollars, and figured the account to be breaking even or gaining slightly.

Mary came out in a waxy wig that frightened me.

"Want anything from the grocery?" she asked.

"What is that?"

"My disguise."

"For what?"

"Theatergoers."

"Come on."

"You've read the play. Give me a check."

"Give me a list, I'll go. You look like a wick."

She shrugged and I went shopping. I had indeed read the play. If she was telling the truth about people recognizing her and mistaking her for the character she played, I could believe that they would harass her. They could hardly not.

The woman named Drown was charged with manslaughter (forty-three counts) because she had failed to relocate her shanty town away from the river. A large flood swept her plantation into the Mississippi and to the Gulf.

DROWN: Negligence! Was I negligent standing on the second floor of my house in a nightgown Fighting water moccasins? Was I negligent when I saw my cash box float out the window?

PROSECUTOR: You were negligent when you did not inform your colored workers of the imminent danger.

DROWN: What was there to tell? They could see it was raining. They knew damned well how high the water was-they were at the river day and night salvaging bateaus and wagons and whatever else came down. They were getting rich in trees over the water with gang hooks, hooting and laughing. You don't know a damned thing about poor niggers if you think they would have listened to a rich white woman telling them to abandon a rolling mint like that river.

[Jury whispers among itself; judge calls for order]

PROSECUTOR: No further questions at this time.

This speech turned the tide in Drown's favor. She was let off on the manslaughter business, which, it seems, had been only a thin pretext for exposing the real issue: she had two mulatto children drowned in the flood, who were allegedly hers by a black worker named Carlisle. What implicated her was having taken two other children-fully black ones-into her home the night of the flood. This survival of only two of the four children on her place gave credence to the town talk which for years had rumored her to have had twins, no less, by Carlisle, a big handsome man who sometimes worked as her chauffeur.

PROSECUTOR: Were you not in St. Louis for a period of five months seven years ago-seven years before two seven-year-old children were allowed to drown on your property while two others were saved?

DEFENSE: Objection.

COURT: Sustained.

PROSECUTOR: And was not your place run at that time by-

DEFENSE: This line of questioning is irrelevant.

COURT: Can the prosecution prove this questioning related to the specific charges?

PROSECUTOR: We can.

And so Carlisle, otherwise uneducated and ill equipped, had run the Drown place for five months. (The name Drown is the character's real name, and the playwright seems to have been either ignorant of or delighted by this heavy-handedness.) Apparently his overseerage was competent, for a large crop of high-quality tobacco was harvested, and Carlisle, in his pride, was seen in town smoking self-rolled cigars so large he was dubbed Havana Carlisle. Retrospectively, it was argued that the cigar-parading was evidence that he knew of his mistress's birthing business in St. Louis.

Drown beat the rap, but Mary Constance Baker had more trouble with it. She was convinced that a part of the audience-the mall ladies who recognized her, for instance-believed she slept with blacks. Thus I have come to do the banking and the marketing, as she calls it.

I got back from shopping and it occurred to me for no reason that we had taken another invisible step toward our undeclared trip to Florida, where I swear we are somehow bound to go, whether vexed by Hoop to do so or not. I've had my drunk-driving skills checked, can count money, and now have demonstrated some kind of real-world dexterity in fetching three bags of groceries five blocks-these are the talents of secular dependability required of a companion on the road, it would seem, at least in my imagined itinerary of our imagined traveling together.

We had a steak on the garden patio last night and we got on the oilcloth-covered chaise together, Mary sitting in my arms, and upon a casual remark of mine about the flowers, she said, "It's too cold for them in winter here." In my no-bio disadvantage, a remark like that indeed suggests Florida, and I think I suggest Stump, whose clothes fit me to a t, and I think, all together, we're in small maneuvers for leaving for Florida, but there'll be no song and dance about that either.