“Don’t.”
“Let’s get your things.”
Tessie stared at her husband in horror. “She’s where?”
“I put her in the guest room.”
“But we have guests coming.”
“It’s June. Nobody needs a coat bed. She’s not doing well, Tess. I’m going to have Dr. Vickery come give her a look on Monday. Or would you rather have your Dr. Crowley check her out when he gets here?”
“You’re too funny. Besides, Dr. Crowley wouldn’t be right for her. He’s a pediatrician. With the new children’s hospital. I thought you knew that. What do you think is wrong with her?”
“I think your aunt is starving to death.”
“What?”
“That’s my diagnosis.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“She has no money, Tessie. On Wednesday, I came upon her right as she was about to put a can of dog food into her cart. I wasn’t going to tell you.”
“I wish you hadn’t.”
Tessie sat down in one of the patio chairs. She and Regina had been putting decorative paper tablecloths over several borrowed card tables. Regina was in the kitchen at that moment cutting cucumber and tomato slices.
“She’s our responsibility, Tessie. She’s family.”
“I knew the day would come when I’d be saddled with her. I cannot believe this is happening to me. What if she comes out of that guest bedroom and has one of her episodes?”
“You act like she’s Olivia de Havilland in Snake Pit. She has nervous spells, Tessie. She wrings her hands and bites her lips and then eventually she gets hold of herself and everything’s okay. If you can’t live with that…”
“What do you mean, ‘live with that’? Are we taking her in?”
“If she’s no longer able to take care of herself, we may have to.”
“Over my dead body. I’m not going to have her here. People come here. People who shouldn’t have to see her; people who wouldn’t want to see her. You don’t put someone like Aunt Irma on display, for crying out loud! What are you trying to do to me?”
Regina was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She’d heard everything that her mother had just said.
“Regina,” said Rory calmly, “make your Great-aunt Irma a sandwich. There should still be some of that chicken salad in the fridge. Put the sandwich back in the fridge for when she wakes up. She’ll probably be okay for a while. I got her some soup at the diner on the way home.”
Tessie turned to her husband. She scowled. “Is that what took you so long? We have people coming over in less than half an hour and you’re stopping off at a diner with my batty aunt?”
“Go on,” said Rory to his daughter. Regina was still standing in the kitchen doorway.
“Hurry up, Regina,” said Tessie. “We’ve got a hundred things to do before our guests arrive.”
Regina opened the door to the kitchen. She turned and said, “When I’m done, I want to go and sit with Aunt Irma. She always likes it when I sit and talk to her.”
Rory smiled. “You do that, honey.”
Tessie sprang to her feet. “The Crowleys haven’t even met you yet. What am I supposed to say if they ask where you are?”
“I’m sure you can think of something, Mom.” Regina went into the kitchen.
“She takes after you,” muttered Tessie, glaring at her husband, who had begun to busy himself at the grill.
“And I thank God for that every day,” replied Rory, flipping over a large sirloin steak in the basting tray and splattering the grill with sweet vermouth basting sauce.
1955 AGITATED IN ALABAMA
The bus was empty.
The two middle-aged white women took their seats on the starboard side of the first row of forward-facing seats. Patty set her shopping bag down on the seat in front of her and nested her purse in her lap. Harriet put each of her two shopping bags down on the floor near her feet.
Harriet had a car and often drove her friend Patty when the two went shopping together or had themselves a lunch out. Patty had never learned to drive. Patty had a colored man who took her where she needed to go when he wasn’t deadheading her flowers or raking leaves or doing any of the many repair jobs that Patty and her husband Roland’s antebellum mansion required. There was less for Lucius to do in the winter, but Roland Sprinkle kept him on at full salary. Patty’s husband Roland was a lawyer. But he was also half-owner of two launderettes, each in a colored neighborhood. Though Roland Sprinkle was a founding member of Montgomery’s White Citizens’ Council, it was important for him to show the Negroes of this very segregated southern city that he wasn’t a racist. He simply believed that black people and white people got along best when they kept their interaction to a minimum.
It was Roland who suggested to his wife that perhaps she and Harriet should take the Cleveland Avenue bus to the Montgomery Fair department store downtown. Harriet had wanted to go to Loveman’s at the new Normandale Shopping City. Harriet had been there the week before and had set her eyes on an absolutely divine Lassie Maid wool and cashmere camel-colored balmacaan coat that she now wanted to buy; she was also looking forward to trying Francis Cafeteria’s new veal sauté. On the other hand, Patty’s husband Roland felt that it was important, given the fact that the Negro leaders of Montgomery had decided to prolong what was originally supposed to be only a one-day boycott, for the city’s white citizens to patronize the bus line as much as possible to keep its drivers — most of them good, hard-working family men (all of them white) — from losing their jobs.
A full week had passed since a seamstress by the name of Rosa Parks (who coincidentally worked at Montgomery Fair) refused to give up her seat to a white man. Mrs. Parks had been sitting dutifully behind the “Colored Section” sign, but when the bus began to fill up with white passengers, the driver had gotten up and moved the sign to the row behind her and then asked that she give up her now white-designated seat. When Mrs. Parks defied him by staying put, the driver called the police and had Mrs. Parks arrested for failing to abide by a city ordinance that gave city bus drivers the authority to maintain segregation upon their vehicles through whatever means they saw fit. She was also charged with disorderly conduct.
Up until now, Harriet Jacobs and her friend Patty Sprinkle had avoided discussing the boycott. It troubled Patty to think that law and order was breaking down in the city of her birth. That the peace and security of this quiet and stately southern capital was now being disturbed by Northerner-led foment and general unrest. Even the Negro preachers were setting their Bibles aside and preaching hatred of the white man. This is what her husband Roland told her, and it chilled her to the bone.
In spite of all this, Patty had vowed to keep her opinions to herself, even as she stared out the bus window at the hordes of colored folk crowding the downtown sidewalks, deliberately avoiding the buses and hoofing it to wherever it was they needed to be. Because it would be several more days until the newly formed “Montgomery Improvement Association” created carpools and independent taxi services to ferry their black brothers and sisters around town.
Yet, try as she might, Patty couldn’t keep her thoughts and her fears to herself, and so in that next moment she unleashed a great rant that took her friend Harriet by surprise. “It’s just — I’m sorry, Harriet — it just isn’t right. Roland and I — we’ve gone out of our way to do right by Lucius and his family and our maid Wilma and all of her kids, but it just isn’t enough, is it? Not for them, not for any of these Negroes. You give them an inch and they take a mile. I’m sick to death of it. Just sick.”