Hollow, and: Dear Everyone

HOLLOW / Susan Wood I never knew, then, why it was named that, The Hollow, where the Negroes lived—Coloreds, we called them—where the road from town crested the hill and wound down past Miller's Gin for a mile or so, though it seemed like more, open fields on either side and beyond the field on the left the town cemetery, Rosemound Cemetery, past their school with its broken windows, and then the houses began, shabby and needing paint, the kind of house Jeanne Crain might have left to pass for white in Pinky if this were the black-and-white past of the movies and not Commerce, Texas, in 1955. We said even the poorest had a tv antenna and a Cadillac out front and laughed, making ourselves feel better, blameless, an adult's bland dismissal of a foolish child. I don't know how they lived, the maids and cooks, the yardmen, who got their whiskey and fruitcakes, their ten-dollar bills at Christmas, who had their own plates and cups and silverware in the houses where they worked for years. Even their names weren't ours: Ruby and Opal and Pearl rolling like jewels off the tongue, or the ludicrous nicknames, Butter and Sambo—Sambo, who always had a smile and a kind word, who, proud of his position, dressed in a white coat to open doors at parties. Their lives were an infinite mystery to me, the way anything Other is mysterious, a subject of curiousity, even a little feared. It's all confused with smells: the musky odor of bodies, the char of bacon grease and greens, water standing too long in a ditch, even the clean scent of sprinkled clothes and starch when Bessie came to iron Thursdays. I rode 294 · The Missouri Review with my mother to take her home, thrilled and scared to be going there, doors locked and windows shut, and once, when I started to climb in the backseat, taught that's where children sat, she almost pushed me down insisting I get up front with my mother. Today a woman in a shop where the rich sell their cast-off clothes for charity told me her cat had disappeared, stolen, she was sure, by Mexicans. They drive through the neighborhood, she said, and when they see a beautiful cat they come back at night and take it. And I remembered the telephone jokes we played as children, how we liked especially to call those names that seemed so funny to us and say something silly— "Is your refrigerator running? Well, stop it before it gets away"—and how we once called Bessie at the number in my mother's book. A neighbor went next door to get her. I think she must have hurried from her house, surprised and expectant, her tiny, bird-like legs moving as fast as seventy years allowed. I don't remember what we said, but I'm sure we laughed, afterwards, at her confusion, at the way she talked "like she has a mouthful of marbles." I didn't know anything, really, about her life, nor would I, if I could, have willingly entered it, and so my pity, after all this time, for what she suffered, my shame for all our ignorance seem somehow like that name, hollow. Susan Wood The Missouri Review · 295 DEAR EVERYONE / Susan Wood How easy it is to sentimentalize suffering, to love it, as the rabbi said, more than God does. I don't know why I remembered this today, what I didn't know Td forgotten, thirty years in the past: In the city with my mother to shop Tm walking along, oblivious with anticipation, imagining the Childhoods of Famous Americans arrayed in their orange bindings on Cokesbury's shelves and Christmas money in my pocket. I love these stories in which there is often poverty, and even death, though children grow up, despite it all, to do great things and happiness is reward for virtue. And then I see the girl—woman, really, but young—walking toward me down the street. She's dressed in white, a waitress's uniform maybe, but I don't...