Chapter 5

The only seat in the bus left unoccupied was the one beside Mrs. Elizabeth McKay, and in a sense that was occupied too, at least in part, by her spillover. In the space still left free in that seat she had deposited her bag, a bountiful cloth carryall as ample as herself. Now, as the bus pulled into its Baltimore terminal, she replaced the sheaf of pamphlets with which she had whiled away the hours from Norfolk into the top of the bulging satchel.

She waited till the last white-uniformed sailor was off before she attempted the narrow aisle herself. The cleaning man helped her down the steps. Such courtesies were paid her more and more often of late, and it could not be out of respect simply for her bulk, for she had been carrying that around for a good fifteen years already. No, they could see, somehow, that she was dying, that she was as good as dead. Their courtesy was a funereal gesture, like tipping your hat to a hearse.

'Well, you're no spring chicken yourself, honey,' she thought sourly, as she smiled good-bye and thank-you to the cleaning man.

Having wrested the carryall away from a porter, she found herself a taxi outside the terminal, and without really giving it a thought (for her corns and bunions were crying aloud for mercy), she threw open the back door. Too late she saw that the driver was white.

Before she could mumble an apology, the white man had lifted the canvas bag out of her hands and settled it on the front seat. 'Where to, ma'am?' he asked.

Startled, she could not remember, for a moment, where it was she had to be. She entered the cab reluctantly. When she did find her voice, it was scarcely audible, and she had to repeat her destination: The Royalton Hotel.'

Well, this certainly wasn't the Baltimore she remembered! As soon as the shock of it had worn off, she found herself resenting the driver. If he'd been coloured, she could have taken off her shoes.

Reaching the Royalton, she overtipped ridiculously, and the driver, out of appreciation or from that same sense of her decrepitude, carried the bag to the desk of the hotel. Settling it down, the topmost pamphlet tumbled out. It's blurred, four-colour cover represented what seemed to be a rather thickly wooded golf course; above this a jumble of various lettering tried to disguise the advertising throwaway as a magazine: Sunrise, a Magazine for Those Who Care. Special Hot Weather Problems Issue! Then, beneath in a flowery script, the epitaph: There shall be no more death.'

Thank you,' she said tartly, snatching it back, fearful that he would notice the mailing address glued in the lower right hand corner: Green Pastures Funeral Home, North Tidewater Road, Norfolk. Va.

'Hell of an hour,' the sleepy desk clerk commented, as she signed the register. (Elizabeth Brown, with a special curlicue at the end and a circle instead of a dot over the i.) He was a white man too, though the old bellhop who took her bags up the creaking, carpeted stairs was just the colour you'd expect.

'Many white men stay at this hotel?' she asked nervously.

' 'Bout half of 'em's white. You got no cause to worry.'

Seemed as if Baltimore was getting as integrated as that heaven she remembered some preachers used to talk about, with black and white singing the Lord's praises and glory hand in hand. Hah! Wasn't but one place, here or hereafter, ever really got integrated, and that was a cathouse. White and black, they paid their dues and they took their fun.

The two flights of stairs were longer than she was prepared for, and by the time she was in Room 323, she didn't have breath left to thank the man. Within the thick envelope of her bosom, her heart was pounding like an air-hammer. Without troubling to unpin her hat, she sank down on to the thin mattress of the iron bedstead and sat perfectly quiet until the battleship-grey walls of the room had stopped their sideways spinning.

It wasn't, Room 323, anything to write home about, but she wouldn't be needing it beyond eight, nine o'clock that night. Twelve hours, at the most.

It would have been nice now to take a hot shower, but she'd taken a room without bath. Just a sink in the one corner and the can across the hall. She was paying for the room out of her own pocket, and she wasn't about to spend a nickel more than she had to. Let Harry and the others ... (she had her own reasons for not naming, too precisely, those others to herself) ... let them throw away their money on booze and high living. You can't expect the young people to do anything else with it, after all. For her own part, she knew where her money was going. A perpetual plot with a Remembrance Beacon burning day and night. Because it didn't matter a jot nor a tittle if you had yourself the biggest splashiest funeral in town, with a handcarved Italian marble headstone to boot—if you didn't own the plot outright, it was all a vanity. Come ten, twenty years, they'd maybe dig you up again to make room for the next in line, and your last state would be no better than your first. There was a plot, she had seen it many times, at the edge of the coloured Baptist Cemetery in Nansemond County, such a plot...

Sighing—but only from the weariness of her bones; not, today at least, from resignation—she began unpinning her hat and taking out hairpins. The tight bun of her frizzled iron-grey hair loosened, and her whole aching body seemed to ease. Sweet Jesus, yes, that was better. Enough better that she was able to get over to the sink and wash her face and brush her teeth, which were full of the Planter's Peanuts she'd eaten all night on the bus. She lingered a moment before the fly-specked mirror admiringly. It was not her face, of course, for there wasn't much of that left to sing about, but her tooth, a single gold upper incisor, that she regarded. She remembered how, when she'd come home with that tooth, she'd bragged to May-belle that someday she'd have a whole head full of gold teeth. It certainly had seemed like it, in those days.

There are a lot of girls who, when they've got the money, can't think of ways to get rid of it fast enough. Though their boyfriends can, sure enough.

Not Bessy McKay, not her. She'd kept her money in a safe deposit box in the biggest old bank in Norfolk, right on through the war. Then, when the next boom came, in '48, she'd been ready for it. Her own house, McKay's, with a dozen of the prettiest black girls and high-yallers in the Confederate States of America. Clean, too. It was in the classic style, was McKay's, harkening back to the days before Prohibition, when Norfolk had been at its finest. Bessy's girls didn't have to go out hooking in hotel lobbies or honkytonks, no indeedy. And when there were conventions, they'd practically hold them in Bessy's house. Navy officers, college boys, policeman—you name it, they'd all paid their visits. Of course, she had had to move out of the centre of town in '50, everybody'd had to, but her second house, on the tidewater, was every bit as grand if not more so. And modern? Oh, very. And then ... well, it did say that the Lord would destroy the houses of the evil, though when it came to that she could have advised the Lord, if He'd have listened, of many houses eviller than hers...

And where had it all gone to, the money? All the time she'd had to work for it, she'd grudged every nickel, but when it started coming in from every side, she'd just stopped bothering. A little here and a little there: clothes, a treat for the girls, loans to friends who drifted out of sight or vanished into prison (Harry Dorman, that sonofabitch, still owed her five hundred, and be damn she'd get it back this time!). And liquor.

And liquor. She fumbled around in the carryall for the bottle, which was wrapped in the little calico dress, screwed off the cap and let a good, burning swig ride down, smoothing the flutters in her stomach. Then another, for luck. She was going to need it. How had she ever got caught up in this crazy scheme anyhow?

But the whiskey had the answer to that question ready to hand, and it came floating up before her, the image of it, like a bundle of helium balloons sailing past the delighted eyes of a child: the flower-decked cars; the richly crusted bronze casket; her own folded hands and sweetly smiling lips; the marble stone and the angel faces; the inscription, O Lord, I am not worthy!

Miss Godwin was sitting there as stiff as one of those Egyptian statues at the museum, arms and legs composed in neat right-angles, hands clenched about the little yellow handkerchief in her lap. Alice wondered if she knew yet that they were being kidnapped, for her anxious expression could have been just as much for Uncle Jason's sake as for their own. If she didn't know, would it be safe for Alice to tell her?

The best course, she decided, was to say nothing and watch the way they were driving very carefully so she would be able to retrace it, if need be. It was rather careless of her kidnappers, she thought, not to have blindfolded herself and Miss Godwin.

The limousine pulled into a huge municipal parking lot, half empty because of the weekend, and pulled up beside a copper-coloured Buick. The Negro chauffeur (except he probably wasn't really a chauffeur) got out and opened Alice's door.

'Can my governess come with me, please?' she asked of him, for she did feel a teensy bit uneasy.

'C'mon, kid.'

Miss Godwin leaned down and kissed Alice on the forehead.

'You had better do what he says, mademoiselle. Promise me you'll be brave.' Alice promised. While Miss Godwin pretended to wipe away an imaginary tear from the corner of Alice's eye, she handed her, without comment, the book of Just-So Stories that had been in her big canvas carryall. Alice had been intending to impress Miss Braggs with her first edition that morning. 'C'mon, kid.'

Miss Godwin pushed Alice out the door. Then, for the first time really, Alice was frightened. For the man in the driver's seat of the Buick had eyes as green as the pulp of a lime. It was Reverend Roland Scott. He smiled, acknowledging her recognition.

She wanted to scream, as she would have wanted to scream in a scary movie, but because there was nobody else screaming she found she could manage nothing more than a puppyish yelp. The Negro chauffeur lifted her up by her arms and placed her beside the driver of the Buick. She managed to keep hold of the book. He slammed the Buick's door shut, then the back door of the limousine, and, getting in behind the wheel, he drove off into the flat, asphalt distance. Miss Godwin pressed her nose against the back window to wave good-bye.

The Buick followed after a few minutes. When it was turning from the parking lot into the street, not moving fast yet, Alice tried the handle of the door. It had been locked without her noticing, and there seemed to be no way to unlock it. She tried to wind the window down, but that wouldn't work.

The Reverend Roland Scott (except, of course, he probably wasn't any more Reverend than the Negro had been a chauffeur) laughed. Alice began to scream, more from anger than fear, and the Reverend Roland Scott cuffed her.

'That wasn't very nice,' she said.

'Don't scream.'

'You didn't have to hit me.'

'That wan't anything, kid. That was a lovepat. You behave now, or you will get hit.'

She began silently to cry. Tears dripped down on the frayed cover of Just-So Stories. Her kidnapper, as she might have expected, paid no attention. He was a heartless brute. They were leaving the waterfront district and entering an area of slums and cheap hotels, though not the worst slums certainly that Baltimore could offer.

'Am I kidnapped?' she asked, just to make sure.

'Uh-huh. Relax, kid. It ain't going to be as bad as all that.'

Taking his own advice, her kidnapper drew out a package of filter cigarettes from his shirt pocket (Alice noted the brand carefully), punched the car lighter, and, in a moment, lit up. 'Now,' he said, exhaling two thin jets of smoke from his nostrils. 'A little kidnapping doesn't have to be bad at all. If you behave. In no time at all you'll be back home again.'

'Oh, I'll behave,' Alice promised, crossing her fingers. 'Will I get back home today? You see, I have to meet a friend at the beach this afternoon.'

He chuckled. 'Not today exactly. But soon.'

Catching herself chewing on a hangnail, she slapped her own hand so that it stung. It was a ritual she'd almost forgot ten, from years and years ago, when her father had cured her of thumb-sucking the same way.

She regarded the pale flesh of her arms regretfully. Good heavens, at this rate she'd be all summer getting a tan, for her kidnappers probably would keep her indoors all the time. She wondered how long it would take and how much money they were asking for her. It didn't seem the right moment yet to ask.

She worked loose a page of Just-So Stories and stuffed it behind the seat cushions. It would be, she hoped, a valuable clue. And good enough for stinky old Reverend Scott if he were caught with it!

The Buick pulled down a narrow, garbage-strewn alley and stopped by the doorway of a wornout-looking brick building. A crudely-lettered sign above the door said: Royalton Hotel Service Entrance.

The kidnapper glared down at Alice with his green eyes and whispered (though there was nobody nearby to have overheard) : 'Now are you going to come along without a peep—or will I have to use this?' He showed her the pistol.

She shrank back into the corner of the seat and promised, this time, really to behave. All four nail-bitten fingers were in her mouth up to the second knuckle.

He nodded and touched a button on his door. 'Get out,' he commanded.

Reaching for the handle without seeing it, Alice opened the door and slid out of the car. She stood statue-still until he'd come around and taken her hand. 'If anyone inside sees us, you call me Daddy, understand?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Yes, what?'

'Yes, Daddy.'

But the lobby of the Royalton, once they were inside, was as empty as a St. Adnobian classroom at five o'clock. He smiled, and flicked the butt of his filtertip into a metal ashtray, where it disappeared through a hole in the top. Alice bit her lip fretfully. She had hoped to get the cigarette butt for herself, as a clue.

'Just like I hoped.' he said. 'Saturday morning. Ain't it beautiful?' 

'Yes, Daddy.'

Hand in hand, kidnapper and kidnapped climbed the narrow service stairs. Patches of paint of some indecipherable colour clung to the grey wood along the untrodden edges. Then, down the third-floor corridor, tiptoe on the faded carpet, beneath which the floorboards rose and fell, creaking, so that Alice got the disquieting impression that the Royalton was put together as haphazardly as the tree house she had climbed up into last summer, right over Gwynn River Falls. How had she ever dared to do that!

They stopped outside Room 323. He knocked and said, 'It's me—Harry.'

Therefore, she reasoned, Roland Scott was an alias. Or, at least, Roland was.

Heavy footsteps padded to the door, making the wooden floor groan. A key grated in the lock. The door opened.

'Here. Good-bye. Nobody saw us.' Harry pushed Alice into the room. The door slammed behind her and was locked. Turning around, she found herself before simply the biggest woman she had ever seen (with the possible exception of Mrs. Buckler) who, with a rather flirtatious gesture, dropped the room key into the hollow between her monumental breasts.

'Hello there, honey,' she said. 'I'm Bessy.'

'Really?' Alice asked. 'Or is that your alias?'

'Now ain't that a silly question? Because if I say it's my name, you'll just have to believe it is. But as a matter of fact, honey, it is my name, and no foolin'.'

Bessy smiled, almost bashfully, and went to rummage in the canvas carryall on the chair beside the dismal double bed. Alice had a chance to look around the room. The dim overhead bulb revealed nothing but greyness overlaid with dirt: grey walls, grey floors, grey curtains over grey windows that looked across an airshaft at grey bricks. Aside from the bed, the only furniture was ricketty sticks and slabs of pine, which formed, in

different combinations, chairs, a table, and a dresser, all painted grey. Above a sagging sink in one corner a mirror reflected greyness. Everything looked too dirty to touch, so Alice stayed where she was, in the middle of the room.

Bessy returned and thrust her hand, pink palm up, under Alice's nose. 'Here honey, you swallow these.' Two pills, the smaller white and innocent-seeming, the larger, an ominous red lump of what looked to be solid plastic. Poison?

'If you please, I'm forbidden to eat things that strangers give me,' Alice said in a flat voice.

The woman laughed, and her golden incisor flashed. 'If I please! O sweet Jesus—if I please!' She sat back on the bed, holding her left hand over her jiggly breast.

'All right now, you listen to me, honey, and listen close— you're going to be staying with me three days, maybe longer. If your ever-lovin' daddy don't come up with the ransom money right away, we may be stuck with each other I don't know how long. Now you're a bright little girl. You tell me how you're going to eat and drink if I don't give it to you. Huh?'

Alice saw the logic of it. She was utterly, helplessly, hopelessly in the black woman's power. If they meant to kill her—if it were poison, Alice could do very little to prevent it. And if it weren't, why then there was no need to make a fuss.

She swallowed the two ghastly pills. She would have liked a glass of water, but she mistrusted the murky glass on the ledge by the sink.

And Harry had told her that kidnapping didn't have to be bad! Bad? It was worse than being vaccinated, almost.

'Were they poison?' she asked. She could feel the larger pill still stuck halfway down her throat.

'Just medicine, honey. To calm the nerves. Now, you just lay down there on that bed, while I get about my work.' She began emptying out her carryall. Alice's head hurt. She wished the hotel didn't exist. She wished that nothing was real but her and Dinah. Not the dirty grey room. Not the big black woman. Not anything. But that wasn't healthy, wishing things not to be real. She had to remember to live with her environment, the way Miss Godwin said.

The black woman was still taking things out of her satchel. A steel thing. Shoes. A red thing. Clues...

Then the greyness swallowed her whole.

Waking, her stomach hurt awfully, as though it were a kettle full of boiling water, and she had an incredible headache. Was I his what migraine was like? No wonder her mother hated it! 

'Feel bad, Dinah honey?' a voice asked, not unfeelingly.

She remembered the greyness, the room, the woman. But was she Dinah now? Dinah, who didn't exist?

A great black hand, surprisingly firm, took hold of her arm and pulled her into a sitting position. The bed was all covered with newspapers. How queer! 'Come on, honey, sit up. That's it. We gonna do your hair.'

The woman was holding scissors. Alice watched her groggily. The scissors snipped, and curls fell to the newspapers on the bed, and snipped ...

'No!' Alice shrieked, pulling away. Her hands felt at the back of her head for the ponytail, now irreparably lost. Bessy clapped one hand over Alice's mouth and pulled her back to the bed with the other.

Snip, and another lovely long lock fell to the newspapers. It would take months, years, to grow it back.

The hand eased away from her mouth. 'You gonna keep quiet?'

'Yes. I hate you though.' A tear trickled down her cheek. Snick. A wad of hair fell and stuck to the wetness.

'Now we're gonna curl your hair a little bit, won't that be nice?'

'I'm not going to talk to you,' Alice announced. She watched Bessy plug the cord of a peculiar appliance into the wall socket beside the bed. It was little more than a steel rod with a plastic handle. It smoked! Was Bessy going to torture her? 'What is it?' she asked in a whisper.

'This?' Bessy spit on her forefinger and touched the smoking rod gingerly. The wet sizzled. 'This is just a li'l ol' curling iron, Dinah honey. It won't hurt. All I'm gonna do is give you curly hair, so you'll be pretty. All right?'

Knowing that Bessy was doing this to prevent the police detectives from being able to identify her, Alice nodded. It was all part of being kidnapped, apparently.

'My name is Alice, you know,' she said.

Bessy paid her no heed. The curling iron touched her hair, and there was a sound like Rice Krispies, only louder. Alice flinched. 'It smells awful,' she protested.

'It do, don't it, but it's gonna look real sweet.' Bessy chuckled. 'You wait and see if it don't.'

When her hair was nothing but stiff, wiry curls, Bessy pulled Alice to the sink and told her to close her eyes real tight. A cold, thick liquid was brushed into the resisting curls, and a new and worse stench was added to the old. It seemed to go on for hours, first the cold squish, then hot water, then more cold squish.

At last there was the welcome hum of a hand hair dryer and the balmy rush of hot air across her itching, burning scalp. Bessy gave her a towel for her face. When she was all dry, she peeped open her eyes fearfully to see what her hair would look like in the speckled mirror. She stared, dull-eyed, frozen with shock.

The face in the mirror was not the face of Alice Raleigh. The tight black curls of Bessy's handiwork framed a face of deep, gingerbread brown, from which two pale blue eyes, the sole remnant of the real Alice Raleigh, stared out desolately. The mouth in the mirror opened wide to scream, but Bessy was ready for that. Alice bit at the hand covering her mouth, she clawed and kicked and writhed, all to no purpose. She was so little, and Bessy was so big.

The huge hand that covered her mouth covered her nose as well, so that she couldn't breathe, the other hand held two more pills, a white and a red, in readiness. When the hand came away Alice had to gasp for air. The pills popped into her opened mouth, and the hand came down again so that she could not spit them out. In defeat, Alice swallowed.

In a few minutes all her resistance was gone. She wanted nothing but sleep, but Bessy would not let her lie down.

'Come on, Dinah, we got to get you changed out of that dress.'

'I'm not Dinah.'

Bessy, heedless, handed her a short red dress with piping on it, a dress that was not only fearfully shoddy and faded, but years too young for Alice. Or for Dinah?

If only she could think, but her head was reeling so that she had all she could do to keep balanced while Bessy changed her out of the turquoise dress and into the red check.

To think: why, for instance, was she black? Had Bessy painted her while she was asleep? Was that possible? She dawdled, pondered, dozed.

'Upsy-daisy, Dinah darlin'. We going to leave this fair city now.*

The sunlight coming in through the window was the last muddy dregs of the summer afternoon. Alice could barely make out the individual bricks on the other side of the airshaft.

Bessy plopped her on to the bed and pulled off her shoes and long white stockings and gave her, instead, a pair of scuffed-up saddle shoes, with no socks at all.

While Bessy busied herself carrying the newspapers and shorn hair into the toilet across the hall, Alice regarded herself sleepily in the mirror. Was it herself, that figure in red, its kinky hair awry, chewing a brown thumb, blinking improbable, drowsy blue eyes?

'What's this?' Bessy asked, holding up Just-So Stories.

'It's my book! Don't throw that away!'

Bessy carefully pushed the nondescript book into the bottom of the carryall.

As in a dream, Alice was led out of the door, down a different staircase, out into the dusky streets. They walked forever till they came to the Greyhound Bus Station, where, at the candy and souvenirs counter Bessy bought a twenty-nine-cent pair of sunglasses. Alice was glad to have them, for the terminal was painfully bright. You could sleep while you waited on the orange plastic benches, and in the bus you could sleep even better in the soft snuggly seat next to the window, with Bessy's overlapping middle serving almost as a sort of blanket.

With something like surprise, Alice realised that the whining noise she'd been hearing ever since they'd left the hotel was her own voice. She hadn't meant to whine, but rather to scream, to tell the people about her who she was.

The light in the bus went on. A man came down the aisle, crying, for some reason, the single word 'Pillows!'

It was enough. She wakened and struggled to her feet, pushing away the imprisoning fat of her abductress. 'I'm white!' she screamed. 'Look at me! I'm white! I'm white!'

Bessy pushed her back into the soft seat. The lights went off. Alice tried to say more, but her voice was only a pathetic squeak.

'Look at my eyes,' she whispered. 'My eyes are blue.'

'I'm sorry,' Bessy announced to the bus at large. 'I'm awful sorry, folks. My little Dinah here ain't never been away from her home before, has you, Dinah honey? And this trip up north has got her all upset. You've got to excuse her, folks.'

But no one appeared to be listening to the apology. No one appeared to have heard Alice's outburst. None of the whole embarrassing incident had, as far as they were concerned, even happened.