Читать книгу The Last Queen of the Gypsies - William Cobb - Страница 9

3

Central Florida

November 1932

At a crossroads, Minnie sat against a sandy bank, across a shallow ditch, waiting for the sun to chase away the chill of the morning. She shivered in the thin dress, but she had not wanted to stay in the woods a minute longer. She had found ample downed wood—pine branches and a couple of wind-destroyed oaks from some old hurricane or tornado—and she had kept a good fire going all night, for the warmth and to keep the alligators and snakes away. And the panthers and black bears, too, for all she knew. The linings of her nose still held the stench of burning coal oil and kerosene so that the smoke from her own fire smelled that way, too, a constant reminder of the old man’s body being consumed by the fire, her fire. She had slept very little, dozing off only to be jarred awake by a vision of the old man’s face, grinning at her and then bursting into flames. The woods were haunted; she heard owls and frogs and scurrying creatures all night long.

The land was flat as a griddle, and she could see at least a mile down the roads in two directions, where the woods thinned and marsh grass took over. She did not know which road her family had taken, and she amused herself for a little while playing eenie, meenie, miney, moe. She wondered if they were already in Tallahassee. She didn’t know how far away it was, nor how long it would take to get there. A lot longer walking than in the ramshackle car, she knew that.

Once the sun was over the tops of the live oaks it warmed her through. She felt her eyelids begin to droop over her scratchy eyes. She forced them open; she didn’t want to fall asleep in the daytime out here in the middle of God knows where. The sky was cloudless, so vast a blue that it made her feel even more diminutive and insignificant, since to a hawk in the sky searching for rabbits, much less to God, she would appear as little more than a tiny speck sitting in the center of a huge wheel, the roads the wheel’s spokes. She sat in the sun for a long time, not knowing which road to take, knowing that as long as she stayed right there she didn’t have to make a decision. She didn’t really think it would be very important, anyway, which road she finally took.

As she reclined against the sandy bank, very gradually she began to hear a metallic jingling that grew louder as it got closer to her and she knew someone was coming along the road that crossed the one she had come up, traveling west she knew, away from the sun, toward the Gulf of Mexico (though she did not know this fact, since her young life had been defined so thoroughly by travel, constant movement from place to place, that she was always unaware of where she was in relation to anywhere else, only that she was where she was, her understanding of the geography of the state of Florida, and even of the United States, nonexistent). Her instinctive reaction to the sound was to tense in fear, her immediate consternation that it was the old man himself who had somehow come back to life, or perhaps even escaped the flames, who was coming along in the wagon (she could now hear the hooves, and knew the jangling to be harness) but even with her lack of knowledge of geography, her sense of direction was good enough to know that the wagon was not coming from the old man’s direction but perpendicular to it.

The mule came into view first, a pale gray bony creature, its ears flopped forward, its harness whose noise had preceded it and announced its coming pieced together from ancient leather and cotton rope in an elaborate rig that seemed ready, at any moment, to fall apart. On the seat, the cotton rope bridle draped across his lap, was an old Negro man, sound asleep. He had on a worn denim coat and wore a brown felt hat; the hat was too big for his head and fell to the tops of his ears and bent them downward. His head lolled on his chest and bumped up and down with the movement of the wagon over the ruts. The wagon’s wheels had been repaired with planks nailed on in an X, and they wobbled and left squiggly trails in the sand. A brown coon hound trotted underneath the wagon. When the mule reached the crossroads it stopped and the old man’s head jerked up and he said, “Hey up, Maylu!” The hound dropped into the dust of the road immediately and seemed to go right to sleep. Then the old man spied Minnie and he jerked on the reins—even though the mule had not moved at all—and said, “Whoa, there, Maylu, hold on there, gal.”

He sat there peering curiously at Minnie. She sat on the bank hugging her knees. She just stared back. Finally, the old man said,

“Who you?” He shifted on the seat and it creaked. Then there was only silence. She didn’t know whether to tell him her name or not. She was cautious, especially after her experience with the old man yesterday. “I don’t reckon she heered me, Maylu,” he said, “I done axed her who she is and she don’t answer, so I reckon she deef and dumb.”

“I heard you,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” the old man said. After a minute, he asked, “Where you headin?”

“I ain’t headin nowhere,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” he said, “you done took up residence in a ditch?”

“No,” she said, “I’m restin.”

“Restin,” he said, “uh-huh.”

“Where are you headed?” Minnie asked.

“Rosewood, honey,” he said, grinning widely, “I’se headed home!”

“I didn’t figure you were goin to Tallahassee,” she said.

“No, ma’am, I ain’t goin to no Tallahassee. I reckon that’s where you goin, when you get through restin?”

“I might be,” she said.

“Thass a long way to walk, honey,” he said.

“I ain’t got much choice, do I?”

He shook his head. He rolled his tongue around in his mouth. “How’d you get off out here by yourself?” he asked.

“My familia put me out,” she said.

“Yore what put you out?”

“My familia . . . my family.”

“Lord Jesus,” the old man said. “They just put you out longside the road? What they do that for?” She didn’t answer him. “When?” he asked.

“Yesterday,” she said.

“And you just slept out here in the cold last night?”

“I ain’t slept none, I don’t reckon,” she said.

He shook his head again and clucked his tongue. “Well, come on here, then,” he said, “ride on into Rosewood with me. Ruby fix us somethin to eat.”

“Who’s Ruby?” she asked. She made no move to stand up and leave the ditch.

“My wife. She ain’t gonna hurt you. Lord, you like a little wild thing, ain’t you? Skitterish as a doe.”

She did not want to be as trusting and gullible as she’d been yesterday with old Alexander Mossback Frill. But she felt herself giving in. The man was old, harmless-looking. He seemed gentle. She realized in retrospect that Frill had not seemed innocent and harmless at all. She had been a fool, and she didn’t want to be one again. But she wanted to trust this man. She had to trust someone. “What’s your name?” she asked, still not moving toward the wagon.

“My name Silas,” the old man said. He removed the hat from his head, put it over his chest and bowed toward her. His smile was as wide as his face. “Silas Frost.”

She stood up and brushed the back of her dress off with both hands. She had been wearing the dress over a week and it smelled bad; it was covered with dirt and it still reeked of smoke, whether her fire last night or old Frill’s house. She skipped down through the dry ditch and crossed the road to the wagon. She climbed up onto the seat, and it wobbled and she almost fell.

“Look out, now,” he said. When she was settled he looked curiously into her face. “What ails your eyes?” he asked. She just stared back at him, levelly, her eyes narrowed to slits. Finally he looked away and said, “All right, now you better ride back in the back there, on that pile of sacks.” She did not hesitate nor question, just climbed over the seat into the back and settled against the tailgate. He shook the cotton reins over the mule’s rump. “Hey up, mule, hey up, Maylu!” he said. The old wagon creaked ahead, squeaking like a nest of mice, and the coon hound stood and shook himself and began to amble along underneath them.

Ruby Frost was a light-skinned woman; she was as old as her husband but looked much younger, her skin as smooth and unwrinkled as a baby’s. She was tiny, with a hint of a stoop, just a little taller than Minnie, and her black hair was limply wavy and oily. She was the daughter of a Seminole Indian and an ex-slave woman, and she and her husband Silas had lived in Rosewood—an all-Negro town in the west of central Florida—for many years. They had lived through the notorious race riot, the massacre and burning of 1923, in which they lost their home and their son Carl, but they had eventually returned and continued to make Rosewood their home, rebuilding. Silas replanted his kitchen garden in which he grew corn, watermelons, tomatoes, peas, and turnip greens—and in the fall pumpkins—for their own larder and to be sold. Indeed, Silas had been returning from carrying a wagon load of pumpkins to a farmers’ market in Gainesville when he had come upon Minnie resting on the bank that morning.

They had a milk cow, several hogs and a chicken yard, so they were self-sufficient, and they felt relatively safe, existing as they did on high ground—or what passed for high ground in that part of Florida—surrounded on three sides by salt marshes, and they no longer feared the white people. “They always doin somethin,” Ruby would say, “but maybe they done got their devilment at us out they system.”

When the wagon pulled into the yard that morning Ruby was on the porch churning. The dogs under the porch heard them first and came boiling out, barking and yapping. When she looked up she saw Silas guiding their old mule Maylu around the house, a little white girl sitting in the very back of the wagon, as far away from Silas as he could get her and her still be in the wagon with him. “Sweet Jesus above,” Ruby muttered, keeping the pumping rhythm of the churn going. Though it was twelve years ago she couldn’t help flashing back to that New Year’s day in 1923 when that white girl Fanny Taylor claimed she’d been raped by a colored man, a man whose name she did not know, a man she couldn’t even describe, even as to how old he was, how tall, anything, just that he was colored, and Ruby supposed that it really didn’t matter finally if she was telling the truth because it set off the massacre anyhow, two hundred killed and almost every house in Rosewood burned to the ground, the rampage going on for seven days. She and Silas had escaped on the train to Gainesville that the governor finally sent on January fourth, but their son Carl had already died by then, shot down in the street and then hung from a tree, doused with gasoline and burned. Ruby and Silas had finally returned to Rosewood because they had no place else to go, and, besides, as Ruby would say, it was their home. And their history, too, like it or not.

And now here comes Silas with a white girl propped up in the back of his wagon big as you please. “Sweet Jesus above,” said Ruby again. At least Silas had sense enough not to let her ride up there on the seat with him, but he probably would have done better to let her drive the wagon and him sit back there on that pile of croker sacks, in case they met some white folks on the road and she could say, “I’m givin this poor ol colored man a ride.” Ruby kept the churn going, feeling the thickening under the plunger, smelling the clean butter smell of the clotting milk. Where in the world Silas had found a little white girl out here she could not imagine. Maybe he had brought her all the way from Gainesville, in which case he was dumber than Ruby had thought or he had lost his mind, one of the two. Of course, Silas would have an explanation. There would be some logical reason, but Ruby, for the life of herself, could not imagine what it might be. She kept churning, not missing a beat, her wiry arms like steel cables.

The girl’s complexion was not all that much lighter than Ruby’s. Her hair was so black it reflected dark blue in the sunlight coming in the window, but it was straight, not a kink nor a curl in it. She sat at the table with Silas, both of them shoveling in the grits and chewing away on biscuits. When Silas finished and brought his plate to the sink and pumped water to rinse it, Ruby whispered to him, “She dusky, but she ain’t colored.”

“She say she a Gypsy,” Silas said. “Say her people put her out on the side of the road.”

“Put her out? Lord Jesus.”

“What you make of them eyes?” Silas said.

“They ain’t right,” Ruby said. “I never seen that before.”

“Me neither,” Silas said.

“Well, I do know this,” said Ruby, “a Gypsy is a lot more white than colored. That’s a fact. What we gonna do with her?”

“I don’t know,” Silas said. “I couldn’t just go on off and leave her out there.”

“No, you couldn’t do that.” Ruby touched his hand gently then walked over to the table and sat down across from the girl. The girl looked up and put her fork down quickly, almost guiltily. “You know where you are?” Ruby asked her.

“No, ma’am,” the girl said.

“You in Rosewood. It’s an all-colored town.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said.

Ruby glanced over at Silas, who was still holding the dish towel he had dried his hands with. “Don’t no white peoples live here,” Ruby said.

“Gaje,” the girl said. “I’m gonna be gettin on towards Tallahassee soon as I rest up a little bit. I thank you for the food.”

“What’s ‘gaje’?”

“Folks that ain’t Gypsies.”

“What you say your name was again?”

“Minnie Francis,” Minnie said.

“I reckon we gaje, then,” Ruby said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Dark gaje,” Silas said, and he and Ruby laughed, so the girl laughed, too.

“My gypsy name is Anna Maria Spirosko,” Minnie said.

“You got two names?” Ruby asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How come you’re not Anna Maria Francis?” Silas asked.

“My mama let me pick it out,” Minnie said.

Ruby could see that the girl’s dress was filthy, ground-in dirt and brown pine needles clinging to the back of it. She would have to heat some water and get Silas to bring in the wash tub from the backyard. The girl’s hair was matted and sticky, greasy looking, and there was a smear of red dirt down her left cheek. She was a pretty girl, except for those eyes, which were startling and kept you from looking anywhere else. They were wide, too, and staring, which made the contrasting colors even more shocking. For the rest of her life, they would be the first thing anybody would look at when they faced her, and Ruby figured okay, it wasn’t so bad, sure enough better than a harelip or something like that. But you would wonder how come they were like that, you couldn’t help it.

“You can stay here with us for a while,” Ruby said, and she didn’t even know she was about to say it, and when she blurted it out she thought surely the girl would protest, but she just nodded and sat there as though she was where she had been expecting to be at that very minute in her life and was not at all surprised to find herself there.