“Now where in the heck you think they going? Miss Fannie ain’t driven that car in years. Think they gone be okay?” Queenie fretted.
Doll put her arm around her mother’s shoulders. “How I know? Besides, it wouldn’t do no good to try and stop her on account she never listens to what two wily niggers have to say.”
Queenie swatted Doll’s arm. “I ain’t laughing. Had enough of that joke for one day.”
Queenie went over to the counter and turned the radio to the gospel station. She swung her head from side to side as she washed some dishes. After a while, Doll reached over and turned the dial to a different station.
Queenie looked at her. “Now why you go and do that? You know I like to listen to my gospel music while I do the dishes.”
A deep voice resonated from the radio. “This is WBOK, the one and only rhythm and blues station in New Orleans, and I’m Chubby Buddy, bringing you the sound of our very own queen of soul, Irma Thomas. Her new song, ‘Wish Someone Would Care,’ is making it up the charts. And the rest, they say, is history. Come on down to La Ray’s Village Room on Dryades Street to hear Miss Irma tonight.”
Doll turned up the volume just as Irma Thomas let out a soulful cry.
Queenie reached over and turned the volume back down. “Don’t know why all you young folks think you got to turn the music up so loud. Give me a headache.”
Doll ignored her mother’s comment and began dancing around, waving her arms in the air and swinging her hips to the beat of the music. “Be all right if I leave a little early?”
“Now listen here. You got plenty a time to go hear Irma later. What you got up your sleeve?”
Doll went over to the counter near the back window, picked up a fork, and started singing into it as if it were a microphone. She paused to answer her mother. “Oh, nothing.”
“Don’t you ‘oh nothing’ me.” Queenie switched the radio back to the gospel station. “What you not telling me?”
Doll leaned against the counter. “Me and some folks, we might head on down to the five-and-dime on Canal Street in a little while.”
“Who? What folks you talking about?”
“You know, Doretha, Slim, maybe Lola Mae . . .”
“What for?” Queenie crossed her arms and gave Doll her oh-no-you’re-not-doing-that look.
“Just, you know, to hang out.” Doll cast her eyes out the back window. She wished she hadn’t said anything. She wasn’t a very good liar and her mother could always see right through her.
“You not trying that lunch counter stuff again, is you?” Queenie picked up a knife from the sink and pointed it at her. “Last time your friends tried sitting at the counter down at the Woolworth’s, they got arrested. Remember? Every one of them lost they jobs or got kicked out a school. Earline Murray had to make her son move out of their house ’cause they started getting bomb threats. And Jerome Smith? He almost got beat to death.”
“That’s ’cause Jerome went on one of them freedom rides, Mama, not ’cause he sat at the Woolworth counter.”
Doll knew her mother was about to start in on the plight of all the poor folks who had gotten the short end of the stick, which according to her mother was just about everybody in the St. Roch neighborhood, where they lived. She slumped down on the stool, pretending to listen to her mother’s little speech that she’d already heard a hundred times before.
“Why, just yesterday, Virgie Mae Jefferson’s son was beaten up real bad, just for sitting at the counter at the state capitol cafeteria up in Baton Rouge. And who they haul off to jail? Not the white men that do the beating. What you think gone happen if you go down to the Woolworth’s today?”
“Calm down, Mama.”
Queenie came over and pounded her fist on the table. “Why can’t you leave well enough alone?”
There was nothing Doll could do but let her mother ramble. Queenie was a strong believer in the status quo. Separate but equal was just fine with her as long as nobody gave her any trouble. But Doll had other ideas. Her daughter, Birdelia, wasn’t much older than Ruby Bridges, the little colored girl who’d been escorted by armed guards to the Frantz Elementary School for Whites in the Ninth Ward in 1960 in an effort to integrate the school. It made national headlines, started white flight from the city, and riled up the Ku Klux Klan. Here it was four years later, and what good did it do? As far as Doll was concerned, nothing much had changed. She wanted something better for her daughter. She wanted Birdelia to be able to decide what she wanted out of life, not have it dictated to her, the way her own life had been. And she was willing to fight for it. She just wasn’t sure how.
“That’s the problem,” Queenie muttered. “Most people living in fool’s garden don’t even know it.”
“I heard that,” Doll said.
“Well, it’s true, baby. You a seeker.”