Then a boy came by, just an ordinary knotted-headed, knobby-kneed boy. He looked at her and laughed, because to him a girl carrying on so crazy cut a funny figure. She wanted to kill him. He made her feel silly. She climbed down, and she knew he was watching her, watching the split in her drawers.
When she reached the ground, she whirled to face him, and found his feet waving in front of her. He was walking on his hands. And her sisters were squealing with delight. They had seen her walk on her hands a thousand times. What was there so wonderful about watching a boy?
She flung herself upon him, and they fought like dogs, the coppers lost irrecoverably. Her sisters circled them, crying and wringing their hands. She had to win, no matter how. She bent her head and butted him in the groin, where the weakness of boys was — the contradictory delicacy.
The fight was knocked out of him. He lay very still, his hands shielding his innocent maleness from further assault, and the blood on his lips where his anguished teeth had sunk in.
Her sisters fluttered around him. They felt no pride for her victory. Instead they pitied him. She watched them with wonder. What was there to being a boy? What was there to being a man? Men just worked. That was easier than what women did. It was women who did the lying awake, the planning, the sorrowing, the scheming to stretch a dollar. That was the hard part, the head part. A woman had to think all the time. A woman had to be smart.
Her sisters weren’t smart. They thought Pa was the head of the house. They didn’t know the house was run by the beat of Mama’s heart. There was an awful lonesomeness in Cleo when Mama went across the river to Grandma’s. She did not want to be bad then. She wanted to be good so God would send Mama back safe. But she was wildly bad again the moment Mama returned. She could not bear the way she felt inside, like laughing and crying and kissing Mama’s face.
She never kissed Mama. Kisses were silly. Pa kissed Mama when he came home from work. There was sweat on him from his labor, but Mama lifted her mouth to his. His mustache prickled against her lips, but Mama did not pull away.
Looking at her sisters, standing above the suffering boy, she saw in each some likeness of Mama — in Charity the softness and roundness, the flush just under the thin skin, the silver laughter; in Lily the doe eyes, liquid and vulnerable, the plaited hair that kept escaping in curls; in small Serena the cherry-red mouth, the dimpled cheeks. She knew that she looked like Pa. Everyone said so. Everyone said she was a beauty. What was wrong with their seeing? How could looking like Pa, with his sweat and his stained mustache, make anybody a beauty? Sometimes she would stare at herself in Mama’s mirror and stick out her tongue.
Now, seeing her sisters, with their tender faces turned toward the boy, a terrible sorrow assailed her. Some day they would all grow up. They would all get married and go away. They would never live together again, nor share the long bright busy days. Mama, too, would go. Mama would die. Didn’t she always say that her side of the family were not long livers? They were dead before they were fifty. Dead with their loveliness alive in their still, smooth faces. When Mama was gone in a last luminous moment, there would be the look of her and the silver laughter in the children she had blessed with her resemblance.
So long as her sisters were within sight and sound, they were the mirrors in which she would see Mama. They would be her remembering of her happy, happy childhood.
She flung herself down on the ground, and her torture was worse than the boy’s. For hers was spiritual suffering and immeasurable frustration. All her terror of the future, all her despair at knowing that nothing lasts — that sisters turn into wives, that men take their women and ride away, that childhood is no longer than a summer day — were in her great dry sobs.
The boy staggered to his feet in complete alarm. He thought he had hurt her in some dreadful way mysterious to girls, her breast, her belly where the babies grew. Her father would skin him alive. He made a limping dash across the road and the trees closed in.
Then her sisters knelt beside her, letting their soothing fingers caress her face. Her sobbing quieted. She jumped up and began to turn cartwheels. A wildness was in her. She was going to turn cartwheels all the way home, heretofore an impossible feat.
Mama was in the doorway, watching her hurtle down a dusty road, seeing a girl eleven years old turning upside down, showing her drawers. Mama got the strap again and laid it on hard and heavy. Cleo just grinned, and wouldn’t wipe the grin off, even with the whole of her on fire and hurting. Mama couldn’t bear such impudence from her own flesh and blood. She let the strap fall and sat down and cried.
Mama didn’t know what made Cleo so wild. Cleo got more of her attention than all of her other children put together. God help her when she grew up. God help the man who married her. God help her sisters not to follow in her footsteps. Better for her sisters if Cleo had never been born.
Somewhere in Springfield, Massachusetts, at that moment, Bart Judson, a grown man, a businessman, too interested in the Almighty Dollar to give any thought to a wife, was certainly giving no thought to an eleven-year-old hell-raiser way down South. But for Bart, whose inescapable destiny this unknown hoyden was to be, it might have been better if her sisters had never been born.
CLEO ARRIVED in Springfield three years later. She and Josie reached their teens within a month of each other. Cleo became the Kennedy kitchen help and caught her hair up in a bright bandana to keep it out of the cooking. Josie caught her hair up, too, but with pins and combs in the fashion. She put on a long dress and learned to pour tea in the parlor. Cleo learned to call her Miss Josephine, and never said anything that was harder.
Providence appeared as an elderly spinster, a northern lady seeking sun for her sciatica. Cleo’s way home lay past her boarding place. She was entranced by Cleo’s beauty as she returned from work, her hair flying free, the color still staining her cheeks from the heat of the cookstove and the fire in her heart, and her eyes sea-green from her sullen anger at working in the white folks’ kitchen.
Miss Peterson, hating to see this sultry loveliness ripen in the amoral atmosphere of the South, urged Mama to let her take Cleo North. Mama considered it an answer to prayer. With Cleo getting so grown, Mama’s heart stayed in her mouth. She didn’t know what minute Cleo might disgrace herself. The wildness in the child might turn to wantonness in the girl. And that would kill Pa. Better for him if she sent Cleo North with this strict-looking spinster.
Cleo considered going North an adventure. Miss Josephine, who had never been outside of Carolina, would turn green with envy. In her secret sessions with her heartsick sisters, Cleo promised to send for them as soon as she got rich. She did not know how she was going to do it, but this boastful promise was more important than the performance.
She had thought she was going to night school when she reached the North. But her conscientious custodian, seeing that Cleo looked just as vividly alive in Springfield as she had looked in South Carolina, decided against permitting her to walk down darkened streets alone. There were too many temptations along the way in the guise of coachmen and butlers and porters.
Cleo’s time, between her easy chores, was spent in training her tongue to a northern twist, in learning to laugh with a minimum show of teeth, and in memorizing a new word in the dictionary every day.
The things that Cleo never had to be taught were how to hold her head high, how to scorn sin with men, and how to keep her left hand from knowing what her right hand was doing.
She saw Bart Judson six months after her arrival, on one of the few occasions that she was let out of her cloister. This brief encounter, with a plate-glass window between them, made no impression on either participant. The wheels of their inseparable destiny were revolving slowly. For shortly thereafter Bart was to be on his way to Boston. And not for five years more was Cleo to follow, and then with no knowledge that Bart Judson had preceded her.
As they stared disinterestedly at each other, he seeing only a pretty, half-grown, countrified girl, she seeing only a shirt-sleeved man