In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Callaloo 24.2 (2001) 524-530



[Access article in PDF]

from Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring 1990)

Silences

Helen Elaine Lee


From the beginning, they were consigned to narrowed space. To cubicles with proportions that seemed just right to those safely distanced by the refuge of their personal judgments. For others, these were the spaces where she and Zella had lived, squeezed and folded in by the theories that explained her fall.

Some said curiosity was her undoing. Others said the hunter had found its prey. Some said she had met with shrunken choice. And just about everyone said it was a terrible shame.

She stood at the casket, slightly bent, leaning on solid arms. Her ceremonial wig hugged her forehead where the elastic gripped too tight, and the toe of one foot rested, poised to pivot, on the polished floor. She stared, struggling with an impulse to peel back the expression of arranged peace, searching for the woman she had known. She looked for the dark eyes that could flash caustic or tender. For the warm flush of vibrant copper skin. She looked for Zella in the face before her.

The mouth once carved and full was pinched shut. Hair that was worn loose had been set into waves and dips of unsettling symmetry. All of her features looked insistent, exaggerated by the funereal makeup that, seeking desperately to recapture life, only makes more real the passing on. As she stood staring, groping for the past, she opened and closed her hands over the worn rungs of her crutches, gathering close the fragments of their forty-seven years.

The summer of 1924, the summer they had met, she had always privately called her "swan song." She had swung her corset-cinched body along the streets of St. Louis with long steady strides, smiling but never meeting the eyes of those who paused from whatever they were doing to partake of her radiance. The world would come to prefer the starved look, and her grand niece would exclaim in horror at the rounded bodies in the crumbling snapshots taken in long thigh-length bathing bloomers. But in those days, she had the ideal form, "ample and forgiving," in Zella's words. She carried herself with a sense that something wonderful might happen to her. And just freed from the weakness incarnate she had married out of carnal guilt, her step was invigorated by a newfound liberation. The final act of extrication had been to tell her father, who was puzzled by the union from the first, that she was coming home.

Since her mother's death when she was barely twelve, her father had been confused to find himself alone and raising girls. They focused on the practical demands of each day, never speaking of the void her death had left, never remembering her out loud. Her father had offered a titular guidance, had offered what he knew, from the Pullman cars that were his mobile home. She could still see him standing on the platform, his [End Page 524] brow a map of furrowed ground. He had fumbled, with the help of his dead wife's sister, Rose, to raise them right. And when she announced her intention to return home, he stood there mutely, nodding and frowning, sticking to his policy of never asking those questions whose answers he might not want to hear.

That summer had been hers, and in her memory it inhabited a soft violet space. As with all treasured time, the lens had gradually softened, rendering indistinct the sharp edges of growth, polishing smooth the glory of her freed beauty. From the vantage point of her manicurist's table at the Marquis Barber Shop, she had surveyed the range of the possible, and for the first time in her life, she felt she owned the choice. From the spin of options, she made assessments. And she did some choosing.

She chose the dark barber who, passing by throughout the day, tormented and drew her with the economy of his attention. She chose the white patron who brought fine linens and embossed leather as barter for the pulse...

pdf

Share