Stocks & Blondes
8
Black Friday
I’M PROUD OF BEING a pretty sophisticated little bitch. So why does one episode make me feel like I’m a fresh-faced farmgirl in the city for the first time? It makes me realize just how culturally isolated Seattle really is. Except in music.
Just coffee
I got up at eight this morning and it still felt like five. I checked my hair and makeup and dressed carefully. Nothing was amiss. Mrs. Teasley had breakfast ready when I went downstairs. Southern hospitality is delicious—strips of crisply fried bacon that weren’t burnt, basted eggs that had perfectly solid whites and runny yolks, grits with a big pat of butter melting in the middle. Mrs. Teasley suggested that I try them with a little salt and pepper or break my egg yolk and sop it up with the grits. Maybe the best thing was the fresh-baked bread that was still so hot it was hard for her to cut. And the real butter was a treat. I usually content myself with a smear of omega 3 margarine. I could almost feel my arteries harden and five pounds attach themselves to my butt. Yum! If the coffee was a little weak, so what. I could last another two days.
I spent some time after I got in bed last night, and a little more after breakfast this morning, going over a few journals and photo albums I found in Georgia’s room. I stuck them in my bag thinking that I’d slip out with them and only show them to Grover if they were significant to him. Mostly they had little meaning other than tracking a course through the woman’s pretty mundane life. I was looking for pictures of people who were close to Georgia. I found two things.
First, one of the journals was filled with bad poetry, apparently the work of Georgia herself. They might have been from any age. The wide loopy handwriting at the beginning of the journal—“I love Bob and I’ll be his girl; he’s the hottest redneck in the whole damn world”—definitely spoke of a teenager. But some of the later entries in the journal were a tighter, more reserved version of the same handwriting, schooled by age and experience. One poem stuck out from all the rest—just a few lines that read, “I’m coming back to live on Duffy Lane. I’ll cry my tears and face my shame, and outlive everyone who remembers me, and be the one who tells all she sees.” The rhymes were a little weak but what struck me was the determination to return to Duffy Lane and outlive everyone she knew. That didn’t sound like the writing of a potential suicide. Of course, things change and I didn’t know how long ago this was written. I wondered if she really did plan to move back here like her father said. The area is beautiful and I’ve got a feeling that if you lived here very long, you’d never really want to leave.
The other thing was a picture of two girls in prom dresses. It was labeled in neat printing, “Clarice and me—best friends. Waiting for our dates for our Christmas Cotillion.” I wasn’t sure which girl was which. I’d seen several pictures of Georgia but it’s difficult to match the adult woman with the teenager—especially with her hair done up like that. I called Grover and asked if he knew who Clarice was and he said she’d married Jim O’Henry but Jim was killed in Afghanistan. He didn’t know if she’d remarried after that. Yes, and she and Georgia had been friends for years. It was Clarice who had the séance in the attic.
I did a quick internet search to see if I could find a name and address. Sure enough, a Clarice O’Henry came up, still living in Savannah. Her place wasn’t that far away according to Google maps. By that time, my Uber arrived and I jumped in and gave him the address. He dropped me off in front of a strip mall next to a pretty busy street. I cross-checked my addresses and realized he’d dropped me on the opposite side of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. I was about to head toward the intersection when I saw a little slice of heaven: Black Coffee. It was a little drive-through coffee stand in the parking lot of the strip mall. Savannah had espresso! Who knew?
I walked up to the drive-through window but I didn’t see anyone there. “Hello?” I said.
“Mornin’ sista,” a voice said. Oh my. I wasn’t looking into the black void of the inside of the shop. I was looking at the black chest of the very, very big barista. He was at least six-ten. I thought at first, he was wearing a black tank top, but it proved to be a black dress shirt from which he’d torn the sleeves. His arms were as big around as my head! Seattle simply does not prepare you for this. The last black man I’d seen in Seattle was on the basketball court Friday night. Of course, I’d already registered the vastly more homogenized culture of Savannah, but this was the first time I’d had a direct interaction with a man of this stature in longer than I could remember.
“Hi,” I said at last. “I’d like a double short Americano, please.”
“What’s that?” Well, I do know that not every place in the world speaks Seattle coffee. No problem.
“Two shots of espresso in an eight-ounce cup filled with hot water,” I explained.
“No espresso, sista,” he said. “You want something uptown, like The Bean. I jus’ got coffee.”
“Oh.” Did I want another cup of weak coffee? It seemed a little rude to walk away without buying. “Just a cup of coffee, then, thanks.” He set a Styrofoam cup on the counter and opened a jar. He pulled out a tablespoon and dipped a heaping spoonful of crystals into the cup. Then another.
“You like it black, sista?” he said.
“Yes, thank you,” I answered. He scooped a third tablespoon of coffee crystals into the cup, then poured water from a kettle boiling on a hotplate beside him.
“We get along jus’ fine then,” he said as he used the same spoon to stir the coffee. “I like it white.” I reached for the cup and then looked up at him. He had a grin on his face a mile wide. White?
“I… um… meant the coffee,” I stammered. “Like the sign says—Black Coffee.”
“Huh?” he said as if he didn’t know the name of his own coffee shop. He leaned out the window and twisted around to look at the sign above his window, then twisted back to look at my feet. “Ah, fu’ Hand me that, would ya?” I looked down at my feet and realized I was standing on a plywood ‘S’ that had apparently fallen from his sign. I handed it to him and he held it up above the window. I saw he had a nail and hammer he’d pulled from behind the counter. The nail was about three inches long and he pounded it through the letter into the sign. In the process, the ‘o’ fell out of the ‘Coffee.’ I handed that to him and he produced another long nail. By the time he was finished, he’d rehung three letters. I looked up and could see it clearly said ‘Black’s Coffee.’
“Tha’s more like it,” he said. “My name on my store. Took me ten mon’s ta git this permit. Ain’ nobody gonna take it away.”
“Your name is Black?”
“Black Friday,” he answered. “My mama say it was a black day when she gave birth to me.” He laughed and against my better judgment, I took a sip of the coffee. It wasn’t that bad. Maybe the problem with instant coffee is they serve it in little packets and think it will make a whole cup. There had to be the equivalent of six to ten packets in this cup.
“This is the best coffee I’ve had since I got to Savannah,” I said, looking at him. He grinned broadly again.
“Secret is you gotta stip it. Can’ jus’ mix it and drink it. We fixt the sign while your coffee stipped. Now it jus’ right.” I sipped a little more. “You not from aroun’ here, are you?”
“No…” I almost said I was from Seattle. “I’m from Cleveland.”
“Yeah, might know. You wanna be over on that side of MLK. It get pretty rough pretty fast over here. Nice white ladies, they don’ come here unless they slummin’.”
“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “But I wouldn’t have missed this cup of coffee for the world.” He grinned again.
“You like that, you come to my place and I’ll fix you right fine. Coffee ain’ all Black’s got.” I know he intended a double entendre.
“Just the coffee for me, Mr. Friday,” I said. “But I might come back for another cup before I leave Savannah. How much?”
“Two dollah fifty cents.” I gave him a five.
“Keep the change, Mr. Friday. You made my day.”
“Mmm-mmm. Gotta say the same, Miz Cleveland. You come back, y’hear?”
The necklace
I made it across the crosswalk without getting killed on the MLK and wandered up the block to the number I had for Clarice O’Henry. I rang the bell and heard a small dog being shushed as the bolt was being drawn. A woman with skin so fair I would have sworn she’d lived indoors all her life answered the door. I was sure she was my—Peg’s—age, but there was scarcely a wrinkle on her face. She looked at me a little curiously at first.
“You aren’t the woman from The Maids, are you?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” I answered. I put on my very friendliest demeanor and set out to charm this southern charmer. “I’m… Well, I don’t suppose you remember—I scarcely remember myself, it was so long ago. We met when we were maybe eight or ten years old. I’m Georgia McFearin’s cousin, Peg Chester.”
“Peg Chester? No, I don’t recall,” she said. I thought for a moment she was going to close the door on me. Then she said, “No, wait. That was the summer I got so sick I couldn’t go outside and Georgia brought her little cousin over but we had to stay on opposite sides of the screen door while we played with Barbie dolls.”
Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! You have to watch for a play like this. If I enthusiastically remembered all she was telling me, she could turn right around and say something like, “I never had a Barbie doll.” Even if she was reciting a genuine event, if I played into it, someplace along the line she’d trip me up.
“I’m sorry, but I really don’t remember much about that summer. I’m two years younger than Georgia and most of my memories are things my mother repeated to me. She and Alice, Georgia’s mom, had a falling out after my parents divorced and we never came back to Savannah. Georgia and I connected again after college and I always exchanged cards with Grover over the years. I guess that’s why he called me to help settle her estate.”
“Her estate?” Clarice asked. Genuine surprise showed on her face.
“Oh no! You didn’t know!” I said. “I know Uncle Grover posted a notice in the Morning News. I just assumed you’d heard. Georgia passed away on Christmas Day.”
“I thought she’d gone to Seattle,” Clarice said as if the two events were mutually exclusive.
“She did,” I said. “I came here to help Grover with her things and am headed to Seattle in the next couple of days. I was going through some of Georgia’s belongings and came across this picture of the two of you at the Cotillion. I thought you might want to have it.” I reached in my bag, recovered the photo, and held it out to Clarice. She took it and backed into the house, motioning me to follow her. A picture will open a door faster than a thousand words.
Before long, Clarice and I were sitting at her kitchen table with cups of tea. The tea here is much better than the coffee. She was retelling story after story as I produced more photos.
“I couldn’t believe Georgia never married,” I said confidentially. “I thought I was going to be the only old maid in the family.”
“Oh, you know,” Clarice whispered back. “Her reputation didn’t help.”
“Really? Don’t tell me Georgia wasn’t as stellar as Grover always made her out to be!”
“Sweetheart, none of us were as stellar as Grover wants to believe. He got the ‘see no evil’ part of the saying down pat.”
“Tell me.” I was beginning to realize older women gossip with even more fervor than young women do. The telltale signs were in the way Clarice held her cup in both hands and leaned forward over it. Exactly what I’d expect my friends to do in Seattle when they were about to dish dirt.
“We were all a little wild in those days,” Clarice said. “Even I had to try marijuana. And as to boys, well… You know the old adage: Don’t buy a pair of shoes before you try them on? When I thought I had the right man, I tried him on for size and we got married just a few weeks after I found out I was pregnant. But Georgia… Well, no one wants to buy a pair of shoes everyone in town has tried on.”
“No!” I said, genuinely shocked. She was telling me Georgia was a tramp.
“Every girl I know asked her fiancé if he had slept with Georgia. You know, they say when you sleep with a man, you sleep with everyone he’s ever slept with. By that account, most of the women I know slept with each other, and so did their husbands. We were all up in arms about discrimination back then and Georgia was the most non-discriminating person I ever met.” Clarice stopped long enough to take a sip of tea and recollect herself. “It’s not fitting to speak ill of the dead. I haven’t spoken to Georgia in a long time. Not since she left town. But I’m still sad she’s dead.”
“I just wanted to know if you’d like the photo as a bit of a keepsake,” I said. “It’s so hard to decide what to do with some of her things.”
“Thank you, Peg,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I would like should you come across it.” She pushed the cotillion photo back across the table to me. “See that necklace Georgia is wearing? I loaned it to her. It’s an amethyst, square-cut, and set in a gold filigree. My mother had a fit when she found out I’d loaned it to Georgia. It isn’t particularly valuable, but it was my grandmother’s. Georgia never got around to returning it after the dance and made up an excuse about having misplaced it. But I saw her wear it years later and just couldn’t face confronting her. She probably forgot where she got it. I’d still like to have it back if you should come across it.”
“Oh, certainly,” I said. “I haven’t seen it in her things here, but perhaps I’ll find it in Seattle.”
With that, our teatime was over. I excused myself and stepped around the corner to call Uber. My driver was there in five minutes.
It appears there are layers to Georgia I haven’t uncovered yet. I was lost in thought and looked up when I was getting into the car. Black Friday was standing outside his coffee hut across the street, smoking a cigarette and watching me. I waved and got in the car.
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