The Two Lives of Sara by Catherine Adel West

It’s the heat you never get used to. The way it bullies you at night. I wait for the creak of the bedroom door, the dull thud of footsteps, the pulling back of covers and the heavy sink of his body next to mine on a mattress, but none of it comes. It’ll never come again. A friend saw to that. And I got on a bus, and I came to Memphis. I birthed you.

Mama Sugar and I tell people your father died in a car accident. But that’s not true is it, child? People tell me they’re sorry for my loss, but I’m not sorry.

You squirm when you suckle. You can never be still. You’re always hungry or crying or cooing or laughing. Never sleeping or giving me peace. And everyone says you’re handsome. They talk about those pretty green eyes of yours. Everyone says you’re a blessing, but they don’t know, do they? I know. Everything. You still suckle and lightly pull on the meat of my nipple though I’m almost dry and have barely anything left to give, but you don’t care.

Mama Sugar knocks on my door, like she does every morning before the sun is up, when little strips of gold lay themselves below the deep blue of night. “Look at ’em. Growing like a weed.” She scratches her left palm. Her green apron with yellow daisies is covered in patches of flour. “Bring Lebanon downstairs. He gone fall asleep in a little bit anyway. You need to get him on a steady schedule soon though. He’s almost five months now.”

“You know him better than I do.”

“Naw Sara-girl, you his momma. You know him.” She scratches her left palm again. “Damn. I must got some money comin’ in.” Mama Sugar and her superstitions. Her good fortune somehow lurking beneath her wrinkled skin.

I stare at your face. You stop suckling and smile, as big as Mama Sugar. And all I want, all I yearn to do, is disappear. Instead, I will take you downstairs with me into a kitchen even hotter than this small room with its bed and the dresser and the turquoise suitcase with a doll inside. I’ll lose myself in flour and sugar and eggs and extracts of vanilla and lemon and almond. I’ll try to find a piece of me still lush and thriving in smells from the stove baking biscuits Mama Sugar made or in the skillet frying bacon and eggs.

I’ll try to forget though I have you to remind me. Little bastard.

“Be down in a few minutes,” I say.

There’s a crash from the hallway. “Dammit, Amos! Where’s my grandbaby? You leave Will alone again? I told you don’t come up in here drunk! Should be at home with yo son and leave that nonsense on out in them streets!” Mama Sugar slams my door. Voices, muffled and not so muffled, bicker then apologize. There is again stillness and suffocation. And your eyes, like his, flutter open and shut, fighting against rest, but finally you fall asleep. I tie a clean scarf, light pink, on my head. It will catch the sweat on my brow as I work in the kitchen. It won’t catch tears though, but I lie and say they’re sweat. I wrap you in a blue blanket and have the same thought I always do: How long would it take for you to die if I place a pillow over that nose like mine but those eyes like his?

I won’t though. I’m not a monster and I have enough to answer for, my friends have enough to answer for on my behalf, and so I’ll take you downstairs and let people fuss over you and treat you like a little king. I’ll try to ignore you and this constant rolling in my stomach and dampness on my flesh I can never seem to keep cool and dry.

The hallway is dim. Amos’ door is closed as he snores and sleeps off whatever mischief he discovered during the night.

“Sara! Sara-girl! Come on down here and go get me four green tomatoes from the garden!”

The stairs are steep and winding. There are seventeen of them, which I count in my head. I watch them and your face because any jostle will wake you and I’ll have to try and get you back to sleep. Please don’t wake up. And you don’t.

Maybe there is a God.

Mama Sugar’s husband sits quietly, patiently at the table. “Hey little man!” Mr. Vanellys whispers as his tall, slender, dark frame lumbers up from the too-small chair at the kitchen table next to Mama Sugar. “Can I hold him for a little while, Sara? He seems to wake up when you put him in that crib.”

“Sure. Thank you.” Me not having you in my arms is fine. I can use them for better things like picking perfectly ripe green tomatoes from the garden.

“Stick to the vines nearest to the shed,” Mama Sugar orders. “Those ready to be picked. The other ones gonna need another week. Probably more.”

“Jesus, Lennie Mae! She smart. She know how you like things. You worse than a drill sergeant ever was. Let the poor girl be,” Mr. Vanellys whispers, but his voice is still deep and commanding. He rocks you gently to and fro as he sits down again, the bottom of his pants briefly revealing a flash of steel covered by a black sock and a shoe beneath that on his right leg.

I turn away and go into the garden. It is quiet there. The air doesn’t cling so much to me. My fingers squeeze the tomatoes, making sure they don’t sink too far into the skin.

The alabaster three-story house with the bright red trim stands clustered together on Hubert Avenue with smaller houses on its right and left. A black hand-painted sign with THE SCARLET POPLAR lazily swings in a slight eastern breeze. Creaky wood stairs serenade my ears as I make my way back into the house.

Mama Sugar nods in approval when I bring back the four tomatoes. I take the biscuits from the oven. Soft thuds on the floor above knock some dust from the ceiling, but I’ve already covered the food and Mr. Vanellys is satisfied you’re sleeping deeply enough to place you in the crib with the faded flowers and peeling paint, the one that held Mama Sugar’s daughter before she died of pneumonia at four years old. Her name was Bonnie Lee.

“Well, Memphis ain’t gone wait for me to get these cars back on the road, least my customers ain’t,” Mr. Vanellys declares.

“Least you could do is grab your son. Make sure he get an honest day’s work. Amos like bein’ with you and only he get those engines runnin’ the way they need to be.”

“Lennie Mae, he your son too and that boy ain’t gone be no good at the shop in that shape. He can come by when he ready. I might have somethin’ for him to do, keep him busy, out of trouble, least for a little bit.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Best get ready ’fore the rest of them boarders come down lookin’ for some of your good cookin’.”

“You tryin’ to flatter me, Vanellys?”

“Nah, you been too smart for that since I married you.”

Mr. Vanellys wraps his long arms around her ample waist and kisses Mama Sugar on the cheek.

“Sara-girl, now I’m leavin’ you with the understanding—” Mr. Vanellys begins.

“—that my wife is a difficult woman to deal with but master of this humble domain. And I must do whatever I can to help her maintain order over her realm,” I finish his sentence, the one he’s repeatedly recited to me since I stepped through the doors of this place a year ago.

Mr. Vanellys laughs. “And I ain’t gone trust no one else but you to do it.”

He rests his hand on my shoulder. He knows for some reason affection, a hug or a kiss, no matter how innocent, wouldn’t be welcomed, so he lightly pats my shoulder, a gesture kind and warm, but I still don’t want him to touch me.

“Y’all have a good day.” He turns back to Lennie Mae. “Send Amos over when he ready.”

The door behind me squeaks closed, and Mama Sugar and I are alone again before the other boarders come down for breakfast and shovel food in their mouths without thought for the care it took to make it.

“You comin’ to church tonight? Supposed to have a travelin’ minister all the way from Philadelphia.”

I open the refrigerator, placing the unused eggs back on the second shelf. “No. I’ve said before church isn’t…it isn’t something I do. Not anymore.”

“I know what you said. Don’t mean I’ma stop askin’.”

“We need more grits.” The box in my hands is barely half full. “I’ll grab some this afternoon.”

“Oh! Make sure you get some more bacon and sausage. You know my brand. I want—”

“King Cotton. I know.” I hate saying that name as it rolls from my lips. But that’s the only bacon and sausage Mama Sugar says is quality enough for the boarders and fits her budget. I’m not arguing with Mama Sugar about the merits of a name or its likely hooks in rusted chains and once fertile soil across the north and south.

“And please get me some apples. I’m fixin’ to make me a couple pies for dessert. Them men upstairs lackin’ manners and cut out big ole pieces.”

“Mmm-hmm.” A shiver runs down my spine. Apples. My father loved to eat them. Gingerly flaying the skin with a small sharp knife.

William walks through the back door. Without greeting or manners. With a hole in his blue shirt and two holes in his black pants. He slumps in the chair like half-kneaded dough and mumbles, “He here?”

“Amos came in a little bit ago. Sleepin’ upstairs,” Mama Sugar answers.

“Figured he was gonna come to you since you’re closer.”

Mama Sugar walks over to the table with a plate loaded with bacon, eggs and two biscuits.

“I can’t eat all this.”

“William Larkin Blanchette, I didn’t ask what you could eat. You too skinny ’cause your daddy would rather gamble and drink than take care of you. You need somethin’ in your belly and I wanna see my face on that plate by the time you done.”

William stares at the food.

“You think I’m gonna repeat myself, Grandson?”

He grabs the fork. Mama Sugar bends down and kisses his bush of nappy brown-black hair. “Good boy. Got some fresh clothes you can wear ’fore school starts.” William eats slowly at first and then faster and faster until the plate has little but crumbs and small spots of grease.

“I need you to take him to school, Sara-girl.”

“Where is his school?”

“It’s uh…Hyde Park Elementary. Up on Tunica Street.”

My fingers are soggy. Caked in flour and cornmeal and buttermilk, salt and pepper. Mama Sugar takes each battered tomato slice from me, placing them in the hot grease. “The Scarlet’s gonna be busy without me.”

“And I been doin’ this longer than you been on this earth. I can handle the people under my roof. He been skippin’ and think I don’t know. But I know all. I see all.”

William slumps farther in his chair. Mama Sugar looks at his face. William won’t meet her eyes. “You too smart to be doing that,” she scolds.

At the stove, Mama Sugar finishes the last of the fried green tomatoes, laying them on napkins to collect the remaining oil. “Your clothes are on my bed.”

William shuffles up the stairs and without turning around mumbles, “Thank you.”

I wash my hands, picking the batter from underneath my fingernails. “We got six guests. William can get himself to school and I—”

Mama Sugar turns off the faucet, my hands only half-washed. “Do what I ask and take him.” There’s no give in Mama Sugar’s voice.

Turning the water back on, I finish rinsing my hands and then dry them. I walk past the crib up the stairs to Mama Sugar’s room. Small sounds of rising bodies, groans and squeaks from beds echo in the halls. There are four small rooms and a bathroom on the second floor. Three larger rooms and a bathroom on the third floor. One large room and a bathroom in the attic that Mr. Vanellys finished converting a month ago for him and Mama Sugar.

It’s there William is hunched over on the edge of the bed, wrinkling the sheets and reading a book, Georges, by Alexandre Dumas. “School starts soon. You haven’t washed up or changed yet.”

“Won’t take me that long. I’m getting to a good part, and I’ll get a lecture from Mr. Coulter if I can’t tell him what chapters five and six are about.”

“It has a happy ending from what I remember.” The truth is I know every line of that book. My momma read it to me when I was a little younger than William, before I could see the bones in her wrists and circles under her eyes. “It’s for a test?”

“Nah. Mr. Coulter gives me extra reading assignments and we talk about ’em after school.”

“He must think you’re somebody. That you’re special.”

“He thinks everybody is somebody special,” William replies.

“I’m going downstairs. Be ready in ten minutes. Mama Sugar isn’t gonna get on me because you got lost in daydreaming.”

His eyes don’t move from the book’s pages. “Mmm-hmm.”

I dodge the small, puckered cracks in the concrete of the sidewalk. Maple trees and oak, large houses and small, a corner church and rumbling cars; kids running and moms yelling; neighbors greeting each other and horns blaring. Happiness is here in this heat-embedded city on a bluff near a mighty river. There is a glimmer of joy as I take in these sights, and I don’t know why. There are bad things here and bad people who don’t want us to rise, to be. But on we move from our homes to our jobs like nothing malevolent hovers, like there aren’t two water fountains or two entrances to a theater or two worlds in this city, in this nation, split between black and white skin.

William’s head is still bowed, his nose so close to the pages of the book, it’s a wonder he hasn’t fallen on his face. But he takes this path every day to school. He’s aware of everything around him, but tunes it out, words on a page the only reason to keep moving and breathing. I remember feeling like that, like a book was salvation.

“How much farther? I need to get back to The Scarlet.”

“You can go. I’ll be fine making it by myself,” he answers.

“I gave my word I’d see you to school so that’s what I’m doing. You’ll be rid of me soon enough, but I tell you what, if you skip class today and Mama Sugar hears about it, finishing that book will be the least of your worries.”

William’s eyes never leave the pages of his book. “Take the next right on Hunter Avenue.”

“I know.”

Looking up, William smirks. “Okay, Sara.”

“So do you go to school with…other kinds of kids?”

Will stops, again looking up from the book at me. “It’s school. I’m not the only one there.”

“I mean—”

“Oh. Nah. White kids go where they go. We go where we go for the most part. But Mr. Coulter said that’s why we gotta study hard. He said it won’t be like that forever.”

“You believe him?”

William shrugs. “Don’t know why grown folk think it means that much. Like we’re not studying for a test. It’s like we’re studying for a war or something.”

The boy isn’t that far off. I know he already sees it. The edges of what other people think his humanity to be, how he’s to be treated because of his race, something over which he has no control but somehow has to fight to find some kind of control over. But at least he’s got a few people in his corner like Mama Sugar and this Mr. Coulter. Some part of me is relieved he doesn’t have to be the first child or adult to walk through the doors of somewhere he’s not welcome. To hear shouts or curses; feel the blast of a water cannon or the heat of a fire or the teeth of a dog. To be the first doesn’t mean glory or applause or fame. Most times, it means fear and sacrifice. Sometimes being first means death.

“You study for Mr. Andersen’s arithmetic test?” asks a young girl in an emerald dress three steps behind us. Matching bows adorn two thick black braids touching her shoulders and a third one down to her midback. She strolls up on my other side looking at William, waiting for his answer. “So?”

Rolling his eyes, William drops his arms down to his sides, the book dangling to his right. “Yeah Diane, I studied enough. Why do you care anyway?”

She coughs, hard and phlegmy. Sweat dots her forehead. “Well…it might be nice to have some competition.”

I pat Diane’s back. “Are you okay?”

“Yes ma’am. It’s the heat. That’s what Daddy says. Memphis heat can heal you or kill you.”

Diane laughs or wheezes. The sounds are the same in my ears. She looks at William. “I’ve had the highest grade in arithmetic class three weeks…in a row.”

“Won’t be four,” counters Will.

“We’ll see.” The girl in the emerald dress walks ahead of us. Slowly. Grabbing on to each fence post as she makes her way down the street.

William puts the book back up to his face. “Diane thinks she’s so smart. She doesn’t know everything.”

Children run to a red brick building almost a block wide with four snow-white pillars, two flanking each side of the main entrance. The American flag and a small bell tower are perched atop the roof. Sunlight illuminates large open spaces, distilling the air with the smell of grass and wilting flowers.

“Okay, you can tell Granny you saw me here.”

“I’ll be back around when school’s over.”

“I got studies with Mr. Coulter, remember? Can you let Granny know it was tutoring?”

A simple explanation like tutoring is good enough for Mama Sugar to trust someone else with William? But I’m the cynical type. The mean type. The unforgiving type. My left hand dully throbs as my nails dig into my palm.

“Sara!” William waves his hand in front of my face. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” I scan past William to the doors of the school. “I should probably meet this Mr. Coulter.”

William shakes his head. “School is barely three blocks away from the house. I’m practically grown. Can’t have you and Granny fussin’ over me.”

I flex my hand, my nails leaving a light imprint in my flesh. “Three blocks you’re not making lately. Besides, I don’t like you enough to fuss over you, but Mama Sugar said to make sure you’re good so that’s what I’m doing.”

“I’m expecting you to have some thoughts for me on Georges, William,” a voice says from behind.

It’s his smile that strikes me first, seemingly genuine and ear to ear, a subtle charm behind it. In that upward bright arc, there’s an invitation beckoning me to return it. I don’t.

He extends his hand to me. “Jonas Coulter. Pleased to meet you.”

I turn to William. “When are you gonna be done? I wanna let Mama Sugar know when to expect you back.”

“An hour or two before dinner. Mr. Coulter doesn’t keep me too long after class.”

Jonas clears his throat and lowers his hand. He fidgets with his black tie. His indigo suit mirrors a dusky sky before the moon emerges from the clouds.

“This is Sara,” William answers for me. “She works with my granny as a cook.”

“Ah, The Scarlet Poplar. Nice place. Ms. Lennie has always taken good care of our people. And Sara, do you have a last name?” He smiles again.

“King,” I reply.

“I see.”

A boy William’s age shouts, “Hey Willie Boy, that yo momma with Mr. Coulter? You tryin’ to be teacher’s pet already?” He laughs.

“Caleb! Principal’s office,” booms Jonas Coulter. The boy’s face scrunches up, and he plods inside.

Jonas turns back to William. “Head over to my room. Door’s open. Finish up those chapters in peace.”

William trudges to the door of the school. His shoulders lowered. The book he so earnestly read on the way to school now hangs loosely in his hand.

“William is thirsty for knowledge, a bright boy,” says Mr. Coulter.

“How do you know?”

Jonas Coulter cocks his head to the left as if he’s shaking water out of his ear to make sure he heard what I said, to make sure he didn’t mistake what I asked; that ready smile fades from his dark brown face. “I’ve been a teacher for a while. I know students like William. I was him. Smart but restless. Easily distracted because he needs more stimulation than a classroom can sometimes provide.”

There’s a measured way in which he uses his words that I don’t like. He savors the three-syllable ones. Like he’s so smart, so above any and every person he encounters. Maybe he’d like to give me a book to read. Maybe he thinks I’m ignorant. I could talk to Jonas Coulter about Georges. How he had to leave because of a terrible fight. How, in the end, his brother helped save him. But Mr. Coulter wouldn’t want to hear from someone the likes of me because he believes himself superior.

“You think you make a difference with William if you give him some books? Tell him he’s special like you wanted someone to do for you?”

“He is special, Ms. King.” His emphasis on “Ms.” no doubt a dig at someone with a child and no husband. Does he even know that about me? Maybe he’s stressing the fact I’m alone.

“William has a brilliant mind. There’s a reason I give him extra reading assignments. Hungry minds need food. William’s mind is especially ravenous.”

“So, you’re his savior, then?” I ask.

Mr. Coulter steps back. “No. I’m only a teacher. William can save himself if he has the tools to do so, if he sees what I see.”

“Which is?”

“His potential. We all have it Ms. King. You do too.”

“Why thank you for telling me how special I am,” I say, rolling my eyes.

“I meant no disrespect. I merely meant—”

“Save the speeches for those kids in there who don’t know any better.”

Jonas Coulter scoffs. “Good day, Ms. King.” His tall frame quickly strides back into the building. Whatever it is, whoever he is, I don’t like this man. Some people think they know everything. But as aggravating as he is, Jonas Coulter doesn’t seem to mean William harm. Truly wants to teach him, help him. Which is more than what Amos does.

Three girls rush past me, laughing big and bright. “I won,” the one in front yells. “Naw you didn’t,” the middle girl argues. “Come on, we gonna be late,” the third one says, and pulls the first one by her arm. And there’s a pain deep in my belly, a heat in my chest because I remember some version of those three girls. A time long ago and in a city far north of Memphis.