The cat didn’t answer, which was a good thing. When he started talking back in full sentences, I’d know I’d been in this house too long.
A sense of relief slid over me as I pressed the now-disorganized batch of letters between my hands and tried to maneuver the trash bag with one elbow and one pinkie finger. “You wouldn’t want to . . . help open this. Would you?”
Something slipped from the papers, snaked over my skin cool and slick, then fell. It landed on Iola’s single black shoe and slid to the floor, the sound a metallic tap, then a series of tiny taps —tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
I leaned over, looked down.
A small silver cross was lying on the floor, its surface dark with tarnish, a string of black glass beads slowly slipping from the toe of the shoe onto the floor. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap . . .
“What in the world . . . ?”
Setting the letters atop the trash bag, I reached for the piece of jewelry, avoiding Iola’s shoe, as if a single touch might somehow conjure up an unwanted ghost.
A rosary. One so tiny it fit easily in the palm of my hand. It must have been tucked inside the papers, shaken loose when the cat scattered them around or when I scraped them back together.
Turning it over in my hands, I studied the image, the outline of a man barely pressed into the thin metal. I ran my finger over it, felt the arms and legs. The tiny bump of the nails, the ribbon of the crown of thorns, the banner above the head.
My fist closed around it, and I swiveled toward the closet, toward the boxes. Other things might be hiding among the letters. Things that shouldn’t be thrown away . . .
“No,” I whispered, bringing my hand to my face, breathing the words over silver and tarnish and glass. “All those boxes . . .”
Each would have to be checked, sorted, taken care of one by one.
“Okay. Okay, I see.”
Disposing of a person’s history wasn’t so simple, not as easy as gathering it up and packing it into bags. Valuable things hid among the scraps of a life. They could be anywhere. This job would take time, care.
Whether I liked it or not, I’d been chosen to do the work.
Lowering myself slowly to the edge of the bed, I reached for one of the letters, opened it, took in the uneven print, and turned my attention to the words, to the life of Iola Anne Poole.
Nearby, the cat began to purr.
CHAPTER 10
I WAS DEEP IN THE FOURTH BOX on the bottom row, the letters from 1936 painting a world I’d never known existed. Iola was thirteen, still living in the mission school in downtown New Orleans, where nuns cared for and educated children of color. That was Iola’s crime, I’d figured out. She was a mixed-race child in a society that only wanted black and white.
Iola was better off than many of the charges at the orphanage, however, as her board and education there were paid for, unlike those of the orphans found on the streets or dropped off by desperate families who couldn’t feed them as the Depression raged on. Children with families to sponsor them received packages and letters in the mail, were given lessons in music and foreign languages, and were sent home to visit on holidays if their families could transport them.
At thirteen, Iola had come to realize that her prayers of waking up to look like Aurelia, another girl at the school, would never be answered. She had adjusted to life with the nuns and the other children. But she still missed home, where her mother and grandmother managed a large house near the French Quarter for Monsieur, whose daughter, Isabelle, had grown up alongside Iola. Iola went home once each year when Monsieur and Madame, Isabelle’s stepmother, were away vacationing in Charleston. Iola hadn’t seen Isabelle in the years she’d been at school, and she still missed her friend. In her prayer letters, Iola repeatedly pleaded with God to persuade Monsieur and Madame to allow her to come home, particularly when life was difficult in the school, when the other children were cruel or the nuns were harsh.
I understood Iola’s feelings, her yearning, her fear. Life with strangers isn’t easy when you’re just a child yourself. You can try your best to be good, to be perfect, to look at those people with eyes that say, Love me, please. I need it. But love doesn’t always come your way. Eventually you learn to stop taking the risk. By the time I’d finally ended up with a foster family who really wanted me, at sixteen, I couldn’t open myself up to them the way they needed me to.
The Lathrops were empty nesters with their daughters’ show horses standing in the pasture, and they loved the fact that I was a good rider. They taught me everything I needed to know about riding show jumpers and helped me get a scholarship at a little college with an equestrian team. I repaid them by believing my freshman English professor when he told me I was special, talented, and that he’d never met anyone like me. I didn’t even go home to the Lathrops again after I got pregnant. I knew how disappointed in me they would be. Instead, I tracked down my sister and moved in with her. Like most things with Gina, it didn’t last very long.
Reading Iola’s letters, I wondered if she’d ever had the chance to go home again or if she eventually traveled off into the world on her own, as I had.
Iola enjoyed learning at the orphan school. Her writing had changed from uneven print to artful cursive, her thoughts slowly transforming from those of a child to those of an adolescent. The nuns had discovered that she was exceptionally bright, talented both in music and language. In the four years she’d been there, she had learned to speak proper French, begun instruction in Latin, and studied music. She’d been selected for a choral group that performed at various events around town, where ladies’ societies and audiences at all-white churches were delighted with the angelic singing of colored children who had been lifted from their lowly stations by the compassion of nuns and generosity of benefactors.
During her snatches of contact with the outside world, Iola had learned two things about herself. She revealed them through the final letter in the box, written just before Christmas, 1936.
. . . hear them whispering, the ladies behind their hands. I catch bits and pieces as we file past after our singing. I see them watching me, craning beneath their broad-brimmed hats, fanning their sweating chins. Their voices buzz by my ear like the hum of a dragonfly, whirling along a riverside among the cattails. “. . . at that one, how pale she is. No surprise that she’s been sent away. . . . Someone’s bastard . . . will be quite a beauty . . . Wouldn’t want her around my home, either. Too much temptation there . . . an anathema, really . . .”
Anathema. When we are back in school, I find Sister Marguerite so that I might ask her, what does this word mean? Her baby-leaf-green eyes twinkle as she looks up from scrubbing the floors in the bathroom. She sings, even as she cleans the mess from too many children in so small a space. I ask, why does she sing when the work is hard? “All labor is joy,” she tells me. “It is not washing dirty floors, but the feet of Jesus, Iola. All we do for others, we do for the One Most High.”
I think of this for a moment. Is it possible that all service is worship?
I do not ask her this but instead I ask about the word I have heard today, anathema.
“My, my, Iola Anne, but you do come to me with the most interesting questions,” Sister Marguerite says. “You’ve the intelligence of a girl much older than thirteen. Where did you hear that word?”
“At the Women’s Aid Society. A lady looked at me and said it,” I tell her.
Sister Marguerite’s smile fades. When she pauses to turn my way, moisture clings along the bottoms of her eyes, like dew in a trumpet vine. “It is a complicated word,” she answers. “Not one our heavenly Father would be pleased to have us dignify with thought or conversation. We are his children, each knit together as we should be. We must go by the name our Father has given us —Beloved —not by the names which others might seek to place upon us.” She brushes a wrist across her cheeks as she returns to her work. She sniffles softly. I see that I have hurt her, and I should not ask about this again. I would never wound Sister Marguerite. She is kind to me.