Whiter Than Snow Read online

  “Hell done broke loose.” The voice was not Ted’s but her father’s, Lucy realized. He had not been to Denver since the day more than three years earlier when he had brought her down from Swandyke to start college.

  “Papa!” Lucy said, dropping her coat on the floor on her way into the front room. “What’s happened?” Someone in the family must be sick—awful sick, if her father had come to tell her about it. Or maybe one of them had died. Not Dolly, she prayed. Then she thought of Ted and put her hand to her mouth. The dredge boat was a brutal place to work. Men got mangled in the machinery or fell into the water and drowned, although by now, the Swan ought to have been frozen and the boat shut down. For a second, she wondered if Ted had written her about that, but then she realized she hadn’t had a letter for a long time.

  Gus turned and stared at his daughter. He worked his teeth on his lip, agitated, then blurted out, “The ways of a woman and the ways of a snake are deeper than the sea. She captivated him.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lucy asked. She could not imagine.

  “I’ll say it slow so’s you can catch it,” he said, not talking slow, but loud. “They had a rambling time, him and she. I’m not easy in the heart about it. But like I say, she captivated him, primping like she did, stripping her shoulders and baring her legs so she could catch him. I told her he was yours, but did she mind? She was my favorite, but she shamed me.” He shook his head and slumped down into a chair.

  Lucy stared at him, shaking her head a little as if to shake away the thought that had come to her. The old woman, standing, put her arm around the girl. “Tell it to her, Gus,” she said.

  But Gus was still caught up in fury and shook his head. So Aunt Alice said, “Your father came here to tell you that Ted and Dolly went over to Middle Swan and got married day before yesterday. Dolly’s his lawful wife now.” The old woman gripped the girl, propelling her to the sofa.

  Lucy would have fallen if her aunt had not held her, and she let herself be dragged. She was numb, all the way down to her feet, and fell against the cushions. “No,” she whispered as if talking to herself. “He said I was the pretty one.”

  “She said love cried out to them,” Gus said. “I believe he smothered her down. Dolly wouldn’t have gone after him.”

  “Well, it’s disgraceful,” Aunt Alice said. “I won’t give them even a good wish.”

  Lucy’s mind began to work a little, not much, but enough to know a thing. “No, it was Dolly,” Lucy said. “It wasn’t Ted; it was Dolly.”

  Gus ranted, and her aunt clucked, but Lucy paid no attention to them. She lay against the sofa for an hour while they talked in tones that were both angry and soothing. She did not say a word, but only hugged herself to keep from freezing. She was as cold as if she were outside in the blizzard. After a while, the aunt took a crocheted afghan from the back of a chair and put it over Lucy’s knees, but it fell off, and Lucy left it on the floor. Then she stood up, and the two older people stopped talking, and the room was quiet. The girl announced she was going to bed.

  “Ain’t you going to have supper?” her father asked. Nothing had ever upset him enough to miss a meal.

  Lucy did not answer, only went into her room and closed the door, then lay down on the bed with her clothes on. After a time, her aunt came in with a tray containing Lucy’s dinner, setting it on the table beside the bed. And later, she came back and removed the untouched tray and spread a blanket over Lucy. The girl didn’t respond, only stared at the ceiling.

  The house grew quiet, and Lucy lay there, listening to the wind batter the walls and send cold seeping through the boards, because the little cottage was poorly built. But the cold did not numb her thoughts. She did not sleep, and when morning came and she heard the sounds of her father and aunt in the kitchen, she threw aside the blanket and went out to face them.

  “I’ve thought about it,” she announced. “I’ll have my teaching certificate in May, and I’ll get a job here in Denver and live with you, Aunt Alice, if you’ll let me. I will pay you room and board, and I’ll send Papa half of my paycheck each month.”

  “Of course you can live with me,” the aunt said quickly. “It’s the best plan all around. Isn’t it, Gus?”

  Lucy’s father sat gobbling his food, reminding Lucy of how the ducks in Washington Park had snatched up the stale buns that she and Ted had thrown to them, and she felt a stab of pain as she realized how many times each day something would remind her of Ted.

  Gus stopped eating, his fork over his plate, and told Aunt Alice, “Lucy’s promised to go back to Swandyke. It was our agreement if she went to college.”

  “God my deliverer, Gus! You can’t expect her to go back. Not now,” the aunt said.

  “A promise’s a promise.”

  Lucy gasped. “How could I face them? How could I face anybody?”

  Gus took a bite of his eggs. He must have two or three scrambled on his plate, Lucy thought. She and Aunt Alice were frugal and ate eggs only on Sunday. “You made the promise to me. It’s not my fault what’s happened. It taken place without my knowing.”

  “But I couldn’t go back,” Lucy said.

  Gus shrugged and repeated, “It ain’t my fault.”

  “No, Papa, please,” Lucy begged.

  “The family needs your help more than ever, now that Doll’s wages’ll go to her husband. I never made her promise nothing. I can’t spare you, too.”

  “Well, you’ll have to spare her,” Aunt Alice said. “You’re asking her to let the devil take a mortgage on her. What does Margaret say about it?”

  “Oh, she don’t hold with me. She thinks I ought to let the girl go, but she’s not the one Lucy’s made the promise to.” He paused to swallow his food. “You won’t go back on your word will you, Lucy?”

  The two older people looked at the girl, who thought for a long time and finally assented, for giving your word was a solemn commitment.

  After breakfast, the women walked Gus to the trolley, and when it pulled away, Aunt Alice said, “At least he came to tell you. You have to give him that. He didn’t write. He took two days off work to tell you in person. That has to mean something.” She paused and added, “Or maybe Margaret made him do it. She couldn’t come herself, what with all the children to look after, and she didn’t want to tell you in a letter. So maybe she made him come. Whatever it was, he did come.”

  Lucy nodded, but in her heart, she knew her father had not made the trip to Denver because he was sensitive of her feelings. No, he’d come to bully her into returning to Swandyke.

  Lucy had a few suitors after she returned to Swandyke, but none to compare with Ted Turpin. She eventually married Henry Bibb, the second-level boss at the Fourth of July Mine, a man who’d once courted Dolly. He was a little older, a good person, clean in his ways, solid, as Dolly had once said about him. He had had an education, and he loved Lucy. And what did it matter if she did not care as much for him as he did her? She was not happy, but neither was she caught up in sadness. When the children came—Lucy quit her job, no longer earning a paycheck to turn over to her father—she had a good life, as good as could be expected in Swandyke, at any rate, and in time, she could go for a day without thinking about Ted. She missed him dreadfully at first, but later it was Dolly she missed, because the two never spoke now except when it couldn’t be helped. And when that happened or when it was necessary to refer to her sister, Lucy called her Helen—Dolly’s real name.

  But Lucy’s marriage came later, after she had been back in Swandyke for a while. Lucy went home the day after she graduated from college, to a job in the office of the Fourth of July Mine. She had planned to teach, but her father wanted her at the mine, and it didn’t seem to matter what job she took. Ted and Dolly had not been at the depot with the family to meet her, and she did not see them for several days. Dolly came by the house one evening after supper to loan their mother a pan—her pan, Lucy thought, one that she had bought from her aunt’s neighbor, but what use di
d she have for it now? Lucy went outside and sat on a rock to keep from facing her sister. After a time, Dolly came out and called softly in the dark, “Lucia?”

  Lucy didn’t reply, but Dolly found her and sat down beside her. Lucy moved as far away from her sister as she could and turned to look at the mountains.

  “I’m sorry, Lucia. I love him, honest to God I do. I didn’t marry him just to have a husband. I know you think I did, because I was desperate. But I love him. I wish you’d understand.” When Lucy didn’t reply, Dolly continued. “There wasn’t anybody else. There wasn’t going to be. You have your education, but I wasn’t going to have anything.”

  Lucy stood and walked a little ways off, glad that in the darkness Dolly couldn’t see the tears running down her cheeks. “Couldn’t we be friends? I miss you so much,” Dolly pleaded.

  Lucy’s throat closed up. How could she be friends with the woman who had robbed her of her happiness? She didn’t reply, and Dolly went home. Later that year, Dolly’s first child was born, a boy, whom they named Jack. Dolly told her mother that Ted had picked the name.

  Ted never sought out Lucy, and they never said more than hello if they passed on the street or happened to meet each other when Ted and Dolly visited the family. It was nearly two years before they had a real conversation. Lucy avoided the street where Ted and Dolly lived, but that particular evening, she wasn’t thinking and found herself in front of the little house Ted had rented after he moved to Swandyke, the house he had meant for her. The walls of the front room were painted blue, Lucy noticed as she looked through the curtains—curtains that she had made.

  She hurried on, but not soon enough, because Ted came out of the house then. She shrank back into the trees, but he spotted her and said, “Luce?”

  She didn’t answer, but neither could she run. She was rooted to the spot and let him come up to her. He smelled of whiskey, and Lucy knew he drank too much, knew because Dolly had complained to their mother about it. “It’s you. I knew it was,” Ted said. He didn’t sound drunk, only sad.

  He took her hands, but Lucy pulled them away. “How dare you!” she said.

  “Do you hate me?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucy told him.

  “I did a terrible thing, and I’m paying for it. I knew six months after we were married that it was a mistake. I don’t know why I did it. We’re both unhappy, Dolly and me. We never talk, not the way you and I did. I might as well talk to a turnip.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.” Lucy turned to go.

  “Wait. I wronged you. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for yourself, or sorry for me—and Dolly?”

  “Sorry for all of us. Sorry for the mess I made. If I could go back—”

  “Well, you can’t. You did this to us, and now you have to live it. We all do.” She said it mean and ugly, and it broke her heart to talk to him like that.

  “Could I see you sometime, maybe just to talk?”

  “No.”

  Ted bowed his head, wounded. Then he said softly, “I still love you.”

  Lucy turned abruptly, running a little until she was away from the house. She did not turn back to see that Ted watched her, although she knew he did. He loves me yet, she thought, but that did not make her happy, only bitter, for what good did it do either one of them, or Dolly, either?

  It was not long after that that Lucy married Henry Bibb, married him in part because what else was there for her in Swandyke? They had two children. Rosemary, seven, was a sweet girl, blond, like Dolly, and Charlie, eight, was like his father—serious, thin-haired, and straddly-legged, but as smart as Lucy. The children brought joy, but somewhere in her heart, Lucy still carried the ache that had come on her the night she learned that Dolly and Ted were married.

  Dolly had three children. Besides Jack, who was ten and looked mostly like Gus, there were Carrie, nine, a pretty child, thin and lanky, like Ted, and Lucia, only six.

  As she stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes and listening for the school bell that fateful day of April 20, Lucy thought once again about Dolly’s sad attempt to win her over by giving her daughter Lucy’s pet name. She thought it something of an irony that her daughter, Rosemary, looked like Dolly, while Dolly’s daughter Lucia was the spit of Lucy.

  Chapter Three

  On his eighth birthday, Joe Cobb saw them lynch the schoolteacher. That was in Alabama, in 1896, more than thirty years after the end of the war that had freed the slaves, and Joe knew then that Negroes would never be free, that the world would always be a brutal place for black people.

  The men forced the children to watch. Without warning, they entered the tobacco barn that served as a schoolhouse and grabbed the teacher, blocking the door so the students could not run away. The men marched the children outside, behind the teacher, and the little ones stood silently, twitching, shifting from one foot to the other as the men put the noose around the teacher’s neck. Joe looked away. It didn’t seem fitting to watch, but a man prodded him, and he turned his head back. Still, he did not look directly at the teacher, but made his eyes blur and looked over the condemned man’s head.

  “You little negras pay attention,” one of the white men said, pronouncing Negro in the southern way, with as much loathing as if he had used the other word, the uglier one. The men hadn’t bothered to put white hoods over their heads, so the students were aware of who they were. But it hadn’t been necessary for them to disguise themselves, because the men knew the children would never tell. Their parents wouldn’t ask, and the children wouldn’t say. And who would they tell if they did? One of the six men was the sheriff. Another owned the sawmill that employed several of the students’ fathers, and a third ran the store where the colored families shopped. That one was also the town mayor. The other members of the mob were farmers, mean men who would as soon chop off the foot of a Negro child who failed to step off the sidewalk while they passed as they would squash a toad that got in their way. Lynching a Negro in that small Southern town was sport, and the men wouldn’t be punished even if their names were printed in the newspaper. There was one law for white people and “Negro law” for black ones.

  The teacher pleaded, promised he’d leave the small backwoods town and return north and never come back. He asked what he’d done wrong and apologized for it, even though he didn’t understand how seriously he had off ended them. Joe reached out a hand as if to help his teacher, then stopped, for what could one little black boy do? He would likely get a whipping for making that small gesture.

  “He teached them Latin,” one of the farmers said with disgust.

  Then Joe understood what had set off the men. And he understood, too, that he and his friend Little Willie were responsible. They had talked Latin in the store, feeling smug, a little proud of themselves, although it was only three words, and enraging the owner, the mayor. “What you little niggers think you’re doing sassing me?” He brought a broom handle down hard on Joe’s head, and the two boys ran out into the dusty street. But they’d giggled after they got away. Imagine, they told each other, they knew something a white man didn’t.

  Joe’s hands began to shake, and he put them into his pockets, feeling the mouth harp he had received just that morning for his birthday. He did not have to be a man grown to understand how much the white people hated the schoolteacher. He understood now, although his mother, Ada, had warned him, told him what the whites said.

  The colored people had been delighted when the teacher showed up, a man who had been to college and whose father was a doctor. But the whites hadn’t liked it. “You take your boy out of school, Ada, before he forgets who he is,” said the white woman who employed Joe’s mother to sweep and clean, wash and iron, and cook for a dollar a week. “The Negroes were put on this earth to be of the servant class, and it’s not right, them learning to talk and think like white people. It unfits them. You elevate a darky, and next thing your young bucks’ll think they’re as good as we are, and we can’t have that. It will upset
the natural order of things.”

  When Joe overheard his mother tell his father of the conversation, he knew she’d said “Yes’m” to the woman and maybe repeated it, “Yes’m.”

  “Now, Ada, if you could read and write, you wouldn’t be content to work for me,” the woman had continued. “Then where’d you and me be?”

  “Yes’m.”

  He’d heard other whites in town put it less delicately. “It’s as foolish to teach a negra to read as to learn a monkey to shoot a gun,” a farmer had said, learning against the feed store, looking at the boy and laughing.

  “You can’t teach ’em not to be black,” his friend had replied. Even at that age, Joe knew that most whites believed learning was the ruination of a good Negro and that an educated darky was more likely to be discontented and lust after white women.

  There’d been incidents in town before the lynching, so the teacher should have known better. Someone had thrown a rock through the schoolhouse window, and the teacher himself had been splattered with mud and told he was to wear overalls like any other black man. Suits were for white men. They had broken the teacher’s spectacles, saying he wouldn’t need them if he kept his eyes to the ground. Then two white boys had grabbed the teacher’s books and tossed them into a hog pen.

  The treatment brought a bad feeling to the black people who had been so hopeful when the teacher arrived from the North, full of stories about how Negroes had been kings in the Bible and how the black race had produced men like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, who were superior to most white men. The teacher dressed and spoke like a white man. He walked like one, too, his head high, his step sure, instead of using the shuffling gait of slavery days. The parents warned him to be deferential to whites, to tug at his cap when he passed one and not to look him in the eye. They told him there might be trouble with that Latin motto he gave the school. The students were proud of it, but the older folks, they knew it meant trouble.