High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney Read Free Book Online

cremation was, if not illegal in Alabama, not done. Aunt Clara was pleased with the idea; with another something that no one else had. It was newfangled, like an item in a catalogue she was the first in town to receive. She said my mother could put her ashes in one of Nida Lee’s hollowed-out flamingos or discreetly scatter them in the aisles at Rich’s Department Store. What she wasn’t sure about was what Uncle Eugene would think. She wanted to be with him, but he was buried on the wrong side of town.
    G.C. rolled us in the direction of the segregated cemetery. My mother and sisters got out to go to Uncle Eugene through the brambles. Aunt Clara and I were to have a friendly talk about the unmanliness of being afraid of graves. Her tears were so refined they were abstract. She wished I had known Uncle Eugene. “He was sharp.”
    G.C., facing the wheel, said that what he was was the sun that shone in many a back door. “Turned them every which way but loose.”
    Aunt Clara couldn’t hear him. Nobody here but us coloreds in a Biedermeier mood, her smile said.
     
    The hours were as confining as chapel must have been in Aunt Clara’s schooldays, beginning with breakfast, which owed something
to the threat of roll call. The legendary lazy South, if it had ever existed, was gone, preserved in the movies Aunt Clara claimed never to have heard of. We knew nothing about the failed march in Albany, Georgia, that summer and the celebrations on the other side of town of what they were calling Martin Luther King’s Waterloo. The NAACP was an underground organization in Alabama, but we didn’t know that. All we knew was that we were stuck. My sisters referred to Opelika as Alcatraz.
    My sisters could stand it. They read. They tried on clothes, raided trunks of brittle silk, damaged satin, inspected the paper dolls from my mother’s girlhood, poured their afternoons into past and future recital pieces. I had not yet recovered from the shame of having failed to perform “Turkey in the Straw” in public after thirteen attempts and hated the sight of Aunt Clara’s sheet music strewn across loo tables and ottomans. Carrie Jacobs Bond, Japanese Love Songs by Clayton Thomas, At Dawning by Charles Wakefield Cadman, Kate Smith’s Folio of Heart Songs . My mother said the organ was not a toy.
    Music helped to seal up Aunt Clara’s house. For some reason, she wouldn’t play the love songs she really liked. In front of company, even family, she limited herself to halting performances of classical music. With her rheumatic complaints, she pedaled away the days—“ … qua … re … sur … get … ex … fa … vil … la.” Her chin went rigid and her amused eyes crossed behind misty glasses as she faced down the truculent notes. My grandmother used to say her sister sounded like a dying cat in a thunderstorm.
    From a back room came the rhythmic chorus of answering motors: the Wilcox & Gibbs for chain stitching, one machine for straight, slant, and swing-needle, another for quilting. The room smelled of cloves and mint, old-fashioned weapons against moths.
Muriel traced and stitched her way through continents of velvet, flowered orlon, checkered nylon, lowly cotton, and raised to a high level the iron she used to spare herself the trouble of basting.
    She thought of herself as saved, tucked away in the same room as Aunt Clara’s garage of sewing-machine classics, among them a Pfaff and Necchi no longer in working order. Muriel kept it by the window and stroked the machine’s intricate parts with a rag from time to time. It was a shrine in the middle of door pouches of thread, bolts of rayon, broadcloth, linen faded in spots from having been left so long on a window seat, and a dressing dummy I was not sure Muriel didn’t talk to.
     
    I was forbidden to play king-emperor on the balcony. My mother did not trust my balance. Not only would Aunt Clara not allow ball playing on the closed-in sun porch, she appealed to my mother to